Either the one from the Robot and Monk series (psalm for the wild built by Becky Chambers) or the Culture series.

But only for good things. That rare medical condition, complication during surgery, traffic accident etc, nah, won’t happen to me.

I think they also need to come up with a better term than ‘western countries’, to something that does not include the US but is open to include others. ‘Countries that try to not be complete asshats’? Idk, the bar is in hell. But there are quite a few non-western countries that could fit the bill if it weren’t for US fuckery.

oh, definitely, and I’m not saying that they’re doing good or anything like that. I mean, the profits for investments have to come out of someone pockets. I’m just saying it’s a bit like having a parasite where removal might kill the host if not done carefully, not a free lunch where you just tax them and everyone lived happily ever after. They had a long time to embed themselves in all kinds of systems, and them not paying taxes is kinda built into the expectations of those systems.

yes, though to be fair, it’s not like this is just sitting in their bank account doing nothing. It’s mostly invested somewhere doing stuff to make them richer. So if they were taxed at a fair rate, idk, 90% or so, that would mean less investment, which in turn does help companies grow and pay salaries, R&D etc. They don’t send a trillion to a scrooge mcduck bunker on the cayman islands, they create shell companies there that own their stock etc. for them. They could not pay this tax since they just wouldn’t have the cash to pay x% of 3.5T. Which would either force them to sell stock to pay tax, potentially tanking the stocks value, or pay the tax directly in stock, making their holdings more government owned over time.

As a socialist, I’m fine with either tbh. just saying this is not cash floating around that can just be spent to tackle humanities problems, if only it was just taxed properly.