World's eight richest people have same wealth as poorest 50%

[parochial boy]

Poorer countries suffer from a lack of property rights, protectionism, corruption, and bad leadership. While numbers like this are eye popping, it's also worth noting much of the US falls in the global 5% for wealth.

We know what works: Investment, free trade, building infrastructure, moving past resource extraction, investing in education initiatives, and cutting down on communicable diseases. Slowly, we're seeing a lot of progress.

Yeah, this. When you are talking about genuine low income countries, quibbling about socialism or capitalism isnt really relevant.

What they need is things like institutioal strength and the rule of law, before you start worrying about whether or not they should have a state run electric grid or not.

Athough having said that, by 50% of the World's population, you are in countries that are pretty middle income, and the fact that many people only have the same level of wealth as 8 people does speak to a certain failure of capitalism in the way that it creates extremes of wealth.

[parochial boy]

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Why should they have to pay a global tax? What service did a global government provide them? At least you can say that the state and national government enforced contracts and provides military and police protection, as well as education, but under what logical basis should they pay a global tax? Confiscation?

I reckon that, with globalisation, the nation state is becoming obsolete as a concept - you can't really manage your economy within the confines of one state any more; so you need a global level of enforcement.

That is, at the very least, global standards on tax, business regulation, rule of law etc. Anyone who doesnt want to sign up (let's say the British Virgin Islands) can basically be blacklisted and banned from undertaking any financial transactions with the rest of the world.

Otherwise, you have a situation where businesses are free to travel the world, while governments are confined to the boundaries of their nation state; and that leaves an obvious imbalance of power.