Forum Post: Might it make more sense to say what wealthy people CAN do with their (excess) money instead of what you can't?

Material goods, look you can have all the BMWs and personal submarines and overpriced wine and houses you want.

Give to charity or start your own. Start a business if you want.

Services within certain defined industry sectors, all the massages and home service cooks you want. Everything you could want for a nice and fulfilling life. But votes, no.

The thing is we also want to get it out of the legal arena, propaganda and public debate, freedom of speech, our own lives in terms of the debt slavery and profiteering and excessive influence of employers over our lives, many other areas too, but there are just so many ways you can bias things in your favor when it comes to these things.

The problem is that we have to figure out a way to do without without affecting everyone else undesirably, otherwise it is not truly curbing only the power of the wealthy and the wealthy only, which is our goal.

We could have a system that defines categories that are easy to enforce and include everything that fair minded people want and then say that here you can spend as much as you want, but the total of all other spending is limited to X.

Right now we are running around trying to patch a sieve. We say where money should not matter, we put limits there. But there are so many places they always find a way around.

Suppose we go like this: you can spend as much as you want on any material goods and most land that is already on the market, starting new companies, and personal services withing defined sectors. And all the stuff I mentioned above. What else? They can suggest new ones even, and we will see how they do and if they abuse it then we will ditch that one.

Then the REST of the money that they can spend is capped at a certain amount which goes down as they get richer, say $10,000 to begin with. The capping should vary continuously, so technically it would affect everyone, not kick in at a threshold because that produces bizarre behavior in the area of the threshold and might disincentivize people or something, but in order to set up a system that does not in fact affect everyone else, we can just look at the spending habits of everyone else and adjust the limit such that it does not affect anything we would dream of doing.

You can also get an exemption easily if you are not rich so that the real oddballs who make $50k per year but want to spend $15k on politics can do that if they want. Anyone who is not super rich will not be ever be bothered by this, and it will have no effect on the honest and decent rich people who recognize that there are some things money should not be able to buy or at least not much.