RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/115871427381296594

"Tax is redistributive and getting money back from American companies after they steal it from [everyone] is much harder than simply arranging the system so it's much harder for American companies to steal from [everyone] in the first place..." - @pluralistic

(sidebar: I for one am glad you enabled quote-tooting, Cory 😁)

#resist #BigTech #predistribution #tech #business #intpol

"When it comes to economic issues, here’s actually a coalitional story that’s really positive potentially for Democrats. Which is that working-class people are quite progressive on many, many, many economic issues, particularly, like I said, the so-called predistributive issues around things like union rights —
(...)
So predistribution is things that affect your bargaining power or your place in the labor market. That’s things like your wage structure, things like your capacity to get benefits or better working conditions, things like pensions, and it’s things that provide jobs for people of different kinds.

And then, redistribution is like: OK, well, after the labor market process has occurred, we’re going to take some money from those who are doing really well and we’re going to give it to other people in the form of health care benefits, education, welfare or social insurance.
(...)
And working-class people tend to like those predistributive policies a lot because they tap into values of respect and dignity and status.

It’s like: I actually care about having a job. You can say that if I lose my job to A.I. or to automation or whatever, then I’m going to get a universal basic income, even a high one. And then many people would say: That’s OK, but like, what am I going to do? I’ve lost my status in society. I don’t have a job. That’s where I found my respect, and that’s where I found my sense of meaning — or at least an important part of meaning in my life.

Predistribution taps into that: maintaining your social status, maintaining your means of providing for your family. Whereas redistribution is often perceived as something that is like a handout. It’s putting people in a vulnerable position in which they feel like they’re the victim of something rather than the agent of their own futures."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-jared-abbott.html

#USA #Politics #WorkingClass #Predistribution #Redistribution #Democrats #DemocraticParty

I think I agree with almost every proposal stated in this text:

"With regards to information, the challenge is to design intellectual property laws that restrict the right of private parties with proprietary knowledge to extort the rest of society and stifle innovation in the process. This means shortening the life of patents and increasing the requirements for awarding one. At least in certain critical fields of knowledge production, such as life-saving medicine, a strong case can even be made for scrapping patents altogether in favor of a fixed number of payments to inventors of new drugs and treatments. Financing open-source platforms, coding languages, and hardware is another avenue for democratizing control over information.

Under the umbrella of predistribution, we can also place policies that significantly affect the broader economic environment. Antitrust laws are one example. By aggressively curtailing anticompetitive practices, regulators prevent the dominant firms in any given sector from calcifying their power on the market over sellers and buyers alike.

Another example of a predistributive policy is the much-debated national job guarantee. Such a policy would force the private sector to contract on terms that are at least as desirable as those found outside of it — or face a drying up of applicants.

Now, it is not my intent to offer a full-throated defense of these policies, some of which recommend themselves better than others. My aim is rather to draw attention to the thread that is common to all of them. By recognizing that the market rewards relative scarcity, predistribution acts to shift the power that accrues to asset holders in societies characterized by highly unequal ownership."

https://jacobin.com/2025/10/left-inequality-predistribution-economic-policy

#Predistribution #LaborLaw #JobGuarantee #Redistribution #PoliticalEonomy #Inequality

Provocative, thoughtful read—
"Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality" — "... like... De Tocqueville's... 'Democracy in America,' but with more numbers, ... economics, and ... vitriol."

Angus Deaton: "The United States has become a darker society since I arrived in 1983.
...
We need to abandon our sole fixation on #money as a measure of human #wellbeing."
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2023/09/26/1199422599/a-nobel-prize-winning-immigrants-view-on-american-inequality #bookstodon @bookstodon #econodon @economics #EconomicAngst #predistribution