fatvegan

Let's just say you're someone who loves equitable land redistribution, but I doesn't like wars and death squads. Having read a little history you assume the situation is hopeless. You conclude that you can't have it both ways. You don't really like the fact that only rich people are educated, but you probably believe that educated people are sort of useful, even if they're rich. So even if you could you probably wouldn't choose to send them off to seek refugee status in Tuscany or even just to kill them all. This makes you sad and despondent and you feel almost ready to give up on any sort of social justice altogether and become one of those people who laughs loudly whenever anyone else mentions peace, or justice or happiness.

But then suddenly one day it hits you. Tax credits! American economists use them all the time, so why can't poor revolutionary governments who've just overthrown their oligarchic oppressors after centuries of torment and misery. You can tax businesses, which is entirely reasonable. You can appropriate land from large estate-holders, which is entirely reasonable assuming you pay them a fair price for it. And if you can buy this land surely you can pay for it with tax credits, since you're a stable government and they are (of course) fine upstanding, tax-paying business-owners who aren't going to flee the country as soon as you eliminate all the corruption and government subsidisation of inefficient businesses.

To make it all even more reasonable you'll only buy the least efficient and profitable estates, and you'll know which estates these are because they are the ones paying the least tax. Any wealthy person who is making no profit on their estate would surely leap at the opportunity to sell their unprofitable land at fair prices. In most of the cases where very wealthy people are stuck holding large estates of land they make no money on, they probably couldn't sell their land even if they wanted to, so you're really doing them a huge favour.

At the end of it all you'll have a whole lot of very happy wealthy people looking forward to using their tax credits in their future businesses. You'll have a very happy bunch of poor people who now mysteriously have a lot of land to grow stuff to eat. You'll have a very happy government who is happy because its only debt is in the form of tax credits and is stable since everyone wants to keep their freshly minted tax credits and not have them forgotten by the next military dictatorship. And to boot, you'll even have a whole lot of very happy American bomber pilots and CIA agents who are over the moon about your perfectly reasonable capitalist new system. After all, what could be more American and capitalist than tax credits.