[HN Gopher] Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth
___________________________________________________________________
Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth
Author : MaysonL
Score : 83 points
Date : 2024-02-02 19:46 UTC (3 hours ago)
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| golemotron wrote:
| > The answer to so many of the problems posed by neoliberal
| capitalism - and the opportunity for a vastly better world - lies
| in placing a hard limit on the wealth that any one person can
| accumulate. Because nobody deserves to be a millionaire. Not even
| you.
|
| It won't cure envy.
|
| Nearly everyone alive today is a "millionaire" compared to people
| living a few generations ago in terms of standard of living.
| Absolute standard of living continues to grow but that is
| invisible if you compare yourself to your peers.
| dbingham wrote:
| It doesn't have to. The point isn't a perfect society, the
| point is to prevent resource hoarding and the accumulation of
| totalitarian power. When we allow wealth to accumulate we are
| also allowing power to accumulate.
| FredPret wrote:
| When we allow the state to dictate wealth ceilings, we hand
| it absolute power.
| dbingham wrote:
| The state is democratic, not absolute. When the state
| implements policies like this it is acting as a democratic
| expression of the community's will. We as a community are
| saying "We're not going to allow individuals within our
| community to accumulate undo influence over it."
| golemotron wrote:
| The power of that community is absolute.
| jdiff wrote:
| As it should always be. Not that it is currently, not
| with these pesky billionaires.
| golemotron wrote:
| Look up the history of democracy in 20th Century Europe.
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| The majority community clearly doesn't will this. This
| sort of thing only happens via violent revolution. Good
| luck with that.
| FredPret wrote:
| > The state is democratic, not absolute.
|
| Laughable - the state has been growing on a one-way
| trajectory: ever larger, ever more powerful. It is run by
| bureaucrats who look after their own interests first, and
| who have no feedback loop between their own performance
| and reality.
|
| Think about this next time you go to the DMV or have to
| wait in line to see a doctor or deal with some kafkaesque
| snarl of paperwork. Your democratic will counts for
| nothing in the face of limitless state power.
| Exoristos wrote:
| Polls and studies for years have shown that what elected
| officials legislate and what voters want rarely line up.
| Modern democracy has long outgrown representing mere
| constituents.
| lostlogin wrote:
| It's not that black and white.
|
| What if those in power are elected? What if it wasn't an
| absolute limit but harsh taxation?
| thereisnospork wrote:
| It's just preventing the accumulation of _a specific kind of
| power_.
|
| Relatively speaking this would increase the power of military
| generals, presidents, and criminals, for a start. Is that a
| good thing? maybe, but restricting power from a group needs
| to be assessed in terms of holistic power balance not naive
| platitudes like 'No one should be a millionaire/billionaire'.
| thinkski wrote:
| And the answer to that is totalitarian control on wealth
| accumulation?
| anon291 wrote:
| > When we allow wealth to accumulate we are also allowing
| power to accumulate.
|
| Like the power of JD Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, which
| was much greater than any rich man today.... oh wait.. those
| went defunct too.
|
| Honestly, the fact that their heirs, despite having untold
| wealth were unable to keep the business going actually shows
| that individuals sometimes do have merits on their own,
| independent of the amount of money they were able to collect.
| Exoristos wrote:
| It would be more accurate to look at the foundations they
| left behind.
| dmonitor wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if society one day sees uber wealth
| similar to how we see hereditary monarchies. The idea that the
| uber wealthy "earned" their position has already begun to
| wither.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > Nearly everyone alive today is a "millionaire" compared to
| people living a few generations ago in terms of standard of
| living.
|
| Ah so both literal millionaires and common people should be
| happy with a median wealth life. I agree.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > millionaire
|
| Part the problem is that the word isn't inflation adjusted.
|
| 'Billionaire' is probably a closer comparison to the railroad
| tycoon, millionaire of ye-olden-times.
| kuratkull wrote:
| I'm wondering if people understand that almost all the
| pleasures/comforts in modern life were created by people who
| wouldn't exist in this system.
| jdiff wrote:
| This system doesn't eliminate people. It eliminates the
| pointless and harmful hoarding of wealth.
| eej71 wrote:
| Your usage of the word "hoarding" implies a Scrooge McDuck
| view of wealth where its just stashed away in some vault -
| never put to use. Yet nothing could be further from the
| truth.
| jdiff wrote:
| My mental image is one of unelected, untouchable oligarchs
| taking actions that they're accountable to nobody for.
| That's far worse than Scrooge McDuck.
| dingnuts wrote:
| So you're imagining President Xi and the House of Saud, I
| take it? As long as you aren't imagining someone like
| Elon Musk who is certainly accountable to his debtors and
| shareholders and Boards, then this can be viewed as a
| realistic take.
|
| If you're talking about people like Elon Musk and Bill
| Gates who have giant wealth because of their investments
| in businesses, then arguing that they should have that
| wealth taken away would literally take money out of the
| coffers of businesses that are currently using that money
| for things like payroll.
|
| The GP is correct -- these people are not sitting around
| on a vault of gold like McDuck. Their money is in the
| economy, doing stuff. That's what investments are. That's
| why investors exist, and why they get a cut of the profit
| for taking a risk and lending their money to industry.
| missedthecue wrote:
| That's not the same thing as hoarding. It's always the
| case that the wealth of even unelected untouchable
| oligarchs is comprised of productive assets, not hoarded
| in a secret pile.
| imtringued wrote:
| It's put to use by making the other person go in debt.
| Happy?
| Tokkemon wrote:
| This is the same mistake Lawrence Van Dough makes in Richie
| Rich. He assumes the massive vault must be full of gold bars
| and diamonds, the wealth of the family. But it's not. It's
| invested in banks and stocks etc. The money is not just
| sitting there, it's producing other activity in the economy.
| anon291 wrote:
| The good news is banks continuously print money to make sure
| that there's more than enough cash to go around.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Those things were created by working people, most of whom are
| not wealthy.
| thinkski wrote:
| Organized by an employer, capital, and management. The
| orchestration, decision making, done well, is the difference
| between a highly valuable well functioning company, and
| dysfunctional paralysis. There are now multiple examples in
| history (pre-1989 Poland, Soviet Union, DPRK, etc.) that show
| the communal ownership of industry by labor does not create a
| high standard of living, enabled by plentiful goods,
| services, and innovation.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| I mean the value leeches are also present.
| FredPret wrote:
| East Germany, North Korea, and the USSR are wonderful
| examples of how this idiotic idea fares in real life.
|
| Unless people there somehow have much lower IQs than their
| neighbours, who do vastly better, the difference in outcome
| must lie in the system that co-ordinates their work.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| At what point was labor communally owning industry in the
| Soviet Union or DPRK? Did Stalin or Kim ever ask a laborer
| for their opinion on how a factory should be run? Or give
| them a penny of the work they were doing?
|
| The Soviet block and DPRK was exactly as close to socialism
| as it was to democracy: 100% in their propaganda, 0% in
| reality. Or would you say democracy doesn't work because
| the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a shit show
| country despite being "democratic"?
| kuratkull wrote:
| Look at each valuable item that you use often, now look up
| the salary of the leader of the company that made it.
|
| Edit: You wouldn't have that item without that compensation.
| This should be more traumatic than people make it out to be.
| You wouldn't have your iphones, twitters, facebooks, vr
| goggles, steams, ikea tables, etc.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| People of my opinion/disposition already know that CEOs
| make too much. You don't have to indirectly tell me.
| kuratkull wrote:
| You wouldn't have those items without that compensation.
| This should be more traumatic than people make it out to
| be. You wouldn't have your iphones, twitters, facebooks,
| vr goggles, steams, ikea tables, etc.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Traumatic? What are you talking about?
|
| And it's easy to argue (EDIT: more like assert without
| evidence) that cherry-picked aspects of the status quo
| for the last forty years is the linchpin of everything.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > You wouldn't have those items without that
| compensation.
|
| Asserted without evidence.
| devbent wrote:
| CEO pay in America was forced to be made transparent by
| Congressional law.
|
| Shortly thereafter CEO pay started to skyrocket. There's
| no evidence CEOs started doing a 10x better job running
| companies but their pay sure as heck increased, 10x then
| 100x!
|
| Countless studies have shown that workers are not
| motivated by money beyond around low six figures.
|
| There is no reason to suspect a CEO earning $100 million
| is 100 times more dedicated to the job than one earning
| $1 million dollars.
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| > You wouldn't have your iphones, twitters, facebooks, vr
| googles, steams, ikea tables, etc.
|
| God, don't threaten me with a good time.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| And yet, all of those examples are critically dependent on
| huge pieces of infrastructure created and distributed for
| free by people motivated simply by craftsmanship - Linux,
| the BSD kernels and many other similar things.
| blackbear_ wrote:
| > You wouldn't have that item without that compensation.
|
| You are swapping cause and effect. First comes the item,
| then the compensation.
| ryandrake wrote:
| You're giving a preposterous amount of credit to executives
| for the value that is mostly being created by the lower
| level workers. So, if every CxO-level leader in the world
| disappeared tomorrow (or if their compensations simply got
| capped arbitrarily), nothing would get built ever again?
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| What are you talking about? Let's have every worker stop
| doing their jobs. I'm sure those company leaders will
| continue to produce great products on their own.
| FredPret wrote:
| No, people don't know this. The degree of economic and
| historical naivete has really skyrocketed in recent decades.
|
| "Let's just try a planned society _one more time_ , THIS time
| will be different, look how nice and kind we are!" is a
| perfectly reasonable statement to many educated people today.
|
| It's really an indictment of the education system.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| The reality is, we _are_ planning our current society. It 's
| just wrapped up in "markets are the natural order" rhetoric
| to obfuscate the fact that our current outcomes are intended.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Which outcomes in particular are you referring to? Wealth
| inequality? Because I don't think that's what the parent
| comment meant.
| marttt wrote:
| In my Former Soviet Country, this is a fairly common thing
| that (sensible) older generation intellectuals remind to Gen
| Y/Gen Z lefties. There was a short period of "dude, communism
| is quite hip" in some circles roughly a decade ago, but this
| seemed more like an overblown, cynical nostalgic game,
| because we still have Soviet era artifacts lying around
| everywhere.
|
| As of today, I think Russia's idiotic invasion to Ukraine has
| destroyed those mind-games of a functioning society with very
| strong central planning. Even if it might truly include
| thoughtful, interesting ideas in countries that by now have a
| long, unbroken tradition with democracy, I guess people of
| the former Soviet Bloc are extra careful these days. YMMV, of
| course.
| satellite2 wrote:
| You are mocking people using a false dichotomy. Complaining
| that some individuals shouldn't be able to control trillion
| in wealth don't imply a push for centrally planned economies.
| jayd16 wrote:
| How do you figure? Its not like Edison was born hyper rich.
| smeeth wrote:
| Are you suggesting Edison would have invented everything he
| did if he wasn't allowed to get rich? You chose an extremely
| funny example if that's what you're trying to say.
|
| Edison was famous for caring about money more than other
| inventors. One of his most famous quotes was "Anything that
| won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of
| utility, and utility is success." The guy helped found some
| of the largest companies of his era and died as one of the
| richest men in the world.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > Are you suggesting Edison would have invented everything
| he did if he wasn't allowed to get rich?
|
| Who said anything about not being allowed to get rich? 10s
| of millions of dollars is rich by any measure.
| jayd16 wrote:
| And even so his net worth was not near billions in today's
| dollars. Seems like being uber rich isn't necessary to
| achieve those things.
| alkonaut wrote:
| As I understand it, very few entrepreneurs ever said "this is
| interesting but if I can't be a billionaire what's the point?".
|
| Which are the examples driven by extreme wealth (note: not just
| regular 1%er wealth and not people who _became_ extremely
| wealthy - I mean people who expressed that the reason they
| created something was _because_ they knew it would make them
| extremely top-0.01% wealthy)?
| kuratkull wrote:
| People start out to create something awesome. People continue
| when they have the motivation. When you hard cap them in any
| measurable way, they stop.
| alkonaut wrote:
| This sounds like guesswork around peoples motivation. Not
| saying you are wrong, but I'm making the argument that this
| is a pretty big claim (people being motivated not by wealth
| or status or curiosity but by extreme wealth). I just don't
| buy this claim. I don't think it's been a motivation of
| _anyone_ who has made (say) a billion dollars, to only make
| another billion. Perhaps be the biggest company or invent
| the greatest product or have more money than the other
| billionaire who is an asshat, but just the money itself.
| Never heard of that. Every billionaire since the dawn of
| time has written memoirs. They might be lying, but I doubt
| any of them said "After 150M I just felt I had to make
| another 500M". They all say "after making successful
| product A and being set for life, I really wanted to make
| thing B". I have not read all the billionaire memoirs, and
| I'm sure memoirs usually claim you were in it for the
| thrill or the curiosity. But still.
| devbent wrote:
| > When you hard cap them in any measurable way, they stop.
|
| No they don't.
|
| Satya has a much lower cap earning money at Microsoft then
| Bill or Balmer did.
|
| Does that make him a worse CEO? Does it mean he is less
| dedicated?
|
| Very few people who are competitive are competitive because
| of money.
|
| They want to be known as the best, have the most power, the
| most influence, run the largest company, their name the
| most number of history books.
|
| Money is a rough proxy for power, but, to give an example,
| pharmaceutical companies have an outsized influence in
| American politics versus how much their CEOs are worth.
|
| Heck for the vast majority of companies their leadership
| has 0% chance of becoming billionaires. Most industries are
| too low margin. That doesn't mean the leaders of those
| companies still don't want to win in their chosen market.
| manithree wrote:
| Of course they don't know it. They actually believe that the
| state is better at managing money than the people creating
| products and jobs.
| yellowapple wrote:
| They're actively destroying jobs at this very moment, not
| creating them. If I had a nickel for every "we're making
| record profits, oh and we're also laying off 10% of our
| employees" announcement, _I 'd_ be a billionaire.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| Unemployment has never been lower, with jobs growing every
| month of the past year. January 2024 saw the most growth
| followed closely by December 2023.
| https://www.axios.com/2024/02/02/us-jobs-report-
| january-2024
| drkevorkian wrote:
| I agree with the premise that "nobody deserves to be a
| millionaire" (although maybe with inflation we should say deca-
| millionaire), but a hard cap seems like a crude tool with many
| potential downsides. A UBI would be a better tool for raising
| living standards, and a progressive wealth tax would be a better
| guard against hereditary fortunes, without removing the
| incentives for high earners to continue working.
| dbingham wrote:
| You don't need incentives for high earners to continue working.
|
| 1) We can afford for them to stop working. Really, it's okay.
| People can just chill. We're more than efficient enough for it.
| 2) People don't need monetary incentives to work. Most of us
| get bored just chilling. We want to feel useful. We need
| community. We need something to engage our brains. The vast
| majority of people, left to their own devices, will find some
| sort of work to do.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| Do you really think people will go to medical school for 4
| years because they are "bored of chilling?"
| lostlogin wrote:
| Do you think people go just for the money?
|
| There are a lot of healthcare systems where the wages
| aren't that impressive and the hours are very long. There
| are benefits beyond money.
|
| Job satisfaction, societal standing, caring about people,
| etc etc.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| I think most people go for the money. If you were to walk
| into any undergrad bio 101 class and announce: "sorry
| guys, but you can only make 80k a year," 95% of the
| students would leave immediately.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I'm not a doctor, but work with lots. I'm extrapolating
| what I see and that's always dangerous, but there isn't a
| single colleague whose primary motivation is money. Maybe
| someone did come in and state an earnings cap, and I've
| been left with the 5%?
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| It's possible that once people start, they gain
| satisfaction from the job by helping people. But that
| doesn't mean that they began that profession because of
| that. Also consider that many doctors were pushed by
| their parents into become so. I don't think students
| spend their childhood chasing "A"s and extra circulars in
| order to help people.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I don't think children chase high grades for money.
|
| I've been hunting around but can't find any decent
| journal article with new students polled on motivations -
| it would be interesting to see.
|
| The things I'm readying are broadly around a want to help
| people, often after a health scare of their own or a
| close family member/friend. I'd prefer something a bit
| more objective than the puff pieces I'm finding.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Those 95% would leave later anyway once the realized
| being a doctor wasn't just an easy paycheck.
|
| There are far easier ways to make a ton of money than
| being a doctor.
| jdiff wrote:
| Yes. They do now. Not because of boredom but for
| ideological reasons. The pay and working conditions at the
| end of the road certainly aren't worth the debt and stress
| required to get there. Not everyone's a specialist surgeon
| catering to the elite.
| dbingham wrote:
| Adding this to my reading list. I've thought for years that we
| should place at hard cap on wealth somewhere around $10 or $15
| million. Because that's the point at which you have enough wealth
| to live a comfortably middle class lifestyle for the rest of your
| life, still pass down a substantial chunk to your children, and
| never have to earn another cent.
|
| I've argued we should combine this with a move towards a worker
| owned economy - in which businesses are democratic institutions
| governed by the people who do the work involved.
|
| But either of these changes on their own would do _substantial_
| good. Going to make a note to read this book!
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Adding this to my reading list. I've thought for years that
| we should place at hard cap on wealth somewhere around $10 or
| $15 million.
|
| Wouldn't a tax system that steeply ramps up, includes property
| and tends to it's loopholes (family trusts, property etc)
| achieve most of this?
| yellowapple wrote:
| A land value tax alone would address the vast majority of
| this, considering that virtually all wealth derives from land
| access/ownership.
| poncho_romero wrote:
| Yes I think so. I'm not the original commenter, but I've also
| landed on the idea of limiting wealth to the ballpark of
| $10-15 million, primarily using progressive taxation. The
| point is to prevent any one person or small group of people
| from accruing too much power within our democratic society or
| reaching levels where they stop using their wealth to
| contribute to the economy (by e.g. offshoring money).
| ch4s3 wrote:
| So what is your proposal if you own a company, or if some
| minerals are discovered on your heretofore low value land?
|
| It's not really all that uncommon for a company with a sole
| owner or a partnership to be worth in excess of $15 Million.
| thunfischbrot wrote:
| Pay your employees more, or be taxed near 100% on the excess
| gains?
| poncho_romero wrote:
| Exactly. Tax the profits, thereby encouraging the company
| to invest internally in higher salaries, R&D, new
| equipment, etc.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| But why? If someone is creating millions of dollars worth
| of goods or services what moral justification is there for
| it to be confiscated, particularly at your arbitrary level?
| naasking wrote:
| > If someone is creating millions of dollars worth of
| goods or services what moral justification is there for
| it to be confiscated, particularly at your arbitrary
| level?
|
| I think there are good "system stability" arguments to
| set limits. Roughly, states are dynamic multivariate
| systems whose objective function should ideally track
| citizen well being and state security, and taxes are one
| of the feedback loops that prevent individual actors from
| dominating or otherwise destabilizing the system.
|
| The mistake is thinking that the fictions we created to
| establish this system are fundamental moral imperatives
| in and of themselves.
| thefaux wrote:
| Personally I find private land ownership a kind of ridiculous
| concept. Our current system provides the convenient and
| necessary fiction of land ownership but ultimately to the
| extent there is an owner, it is always the state.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Are you alluding to real estate taxes, or something else? I
| know that you have to pay property tax to keep your land,
| but you have to pay property tax to keep your car, and I
| don't see how that means that the state owns your car.
|
| I think the current system, and specifically the Supreme
| Court under Roberts has done an excellent job protecting
| individual property rights from the state. The Roberts
| court gets criticized for protecting those rights too much.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Why is a nation-state any less farcical to you than private
| land ownership? Its even more abstract and far removed from
| material reality.
| glitchc wrote:
| Any solutions that are in conflict with human nature will never
| be successful. Ambition and envy are basic human traits. At a
| deeper level, we are beings that measure everything (including
| light, sound, smell, touch and taste) by way of comparison.
|
| Communism fails because no one has anything left to aspire to
| and everyone is therefore equally miserable.
| medo-bear wrote:
| Wealth caps of 15M is certainly not communism
|
| > Ambition and envy are basic human traits
|
| No they are not
| MightyBuzzard wrote:
| Yes, they are. If they weren't you wouldn't care if someone
| made more than $15M.
| yellowapple wrote:
| Is watching those around you starve/freeze to death due
| to having $0 (or less!) not a reason to care about
| whether some people make more than $15M? How many people
| could that hoarded wealth have housed and clothed and
| fed?
| nobleach wrote:
| As someone who has worked extremely hard to acquire assets
| great than 15 million, who do you suggest has the authority
| to come and take some of it away from me. And what will
| they do with the resources they confiscate?
| yellowapple wrote:
| By what authority are those assets "yours" in the first
| place? Whence did those assets originate?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| This presupposes there is some way to know what human nature
| is.
|
| The best definition I've ever found is "altruistic and
| cooperative with an in-group, competitive and aggressive
| towards out-groups".
|
| And that doesn't say much at all on this particular point.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| The best one I heard, I am pretty sure was from a Stephen
| Baxter novel, was our tendency to create valuable "caches"
| of resources.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > This presupposes there is some way to know what human
| nature is.
|
| Empirical observation.
|
| Look what happened in all the 20th century communist
| countries.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Empirical observation is only a way to determine what is,
| and not what could be.
|
| Since we know that human behavior ("nature") is
| substantively malleable, we need to know what could be,
| not merely what is.
| jimbokun wrote:
| That's the problem.
|
| It's not ethical to perform experiments on human subjects
| without their explicit consent.
|
| That's why the Institutional Review Board was created:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board
|
| You can't just perform experiments on large groups of
| people to see what will happen.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| So in short, neither you nor I know what human nature is,
| and thus setting up criteria for social organization on
| whether it aligns with "human nature" is impossible, and
| a foolish goal.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Communism fails because it's just a different - and more
| difficult - kind of propaganda for politicians to make off
| with the loot.
| sackfield wrote:
| Whenever people talk about how much wealth is comfortable (or
| ethical) to have, its usually just a notch above their own
| (well within their social class status).
|
| To be fair I don't know your wealth at all but its just an
| observation I've had from talking with others about this. The
| end result of this would be to make these people some of the
| wealthiest in the country by dragging the wealth curve to just
| above their level. It sounds like a moral hazard to me.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| These arguments nearly always come back to the fundamental
| desire (greed) for "Giev moniez pl0x.", as you say the limit
| is above their own wealth as to not be an inconvenience to
| themselves while siphoning monies from those around (and
| presumably above) them.
|
| It would make for better discussion if these social justice
| warriors were at least honest about what they actually want.
| jdiff wrote:
| Most people in this thread aren't making 6-7 figures. The
| boogeyman you're railing against isn't here.
| FredPret wrote:
| Are you kidding? This HN.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| Very few people on HN are making less than 6 figures.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Saying social justice warriors on hacker news is just
| awesome.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| The grandparent comment argues for "businesses [which]
| are democratic institutions" and a "hard cap" on wealth
| which will presumably be taken and distributed to people
| with less wealth, for the goal of "do[ing] substantial
| good".
|
| Ergo, arguing justice (FSVO justice) for society.
|
| As such, I am of the position that this is one of those
| rare situations where the term "social justice warrior"
| is meaningful and accurate.
| NegativeK wrote:
| > its usually just a notch above their own (well within their
| social class status).
|
| I'm a tech worker in the public sector.
|
| To be blunt: tax me more, please.
| JackFr wrote:
| Ok, big talker, step up:
|
| Gifts to the United States
|
| U.S. Department of the Treasury
|
| Reporting and Analysis Branch 2
|
| P.O. Box 1328
|
| Parkersburg, WV 26106-1328
| askafriend wrote:
| Nobody is stopping you from contributing more. In fact,
| contributions to charity are tax exempt.
|
| But if you want to contribute more to the government
| directly, others here have pointed you to some good
| resources.
| hackererror404 wrote:
| Some things cost way more than 10 or 15 million in terms of
| investment.
|
| Why shouldn't a billionaire be capable of starting a genetics
| lab to fund cancer research and pay for it in cash, if they are
| so inclined?
|
| Also almost all of super wealthy people's "wealth" is tied up
| in assets that are funding entire economies. This money is
| creating jobs, allowing for affordable loans, the money is
| working for many other people... It's not as if the money
| wealthy people have is just in physical gold coins in their
| swimming pools.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Why shouldn't a billionaire be capable of starting a
| genetics lab to fund cancer research and pay for it in cash,
| if they are so inclined?
|
| The answer might be "they should be able to"
|
| But are you open to the possibility of the answer being
| "Despite the apparent potential benefits, it isn't beneficial
| overall to society or humanity to have extremely rich
| individuals starting research projects, and perhaps not
| beneficial overall to even have extremely rich individuals at
| all" ?
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Why would it be better to have fewer entities allocating
| large chunks of capital?
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Who said anything about fewer?
| rockemsockem wrote:
| I was taking this last comment
|
| > perhaps not beneficial overall to even have extremely
| rich individuals at all
|
| To mean there would be fewer. I suppose it depends on
| where the "extremely rich" line is drawn, but I feel like
| you must be extremely rich to start a project that
| normally only a government could start.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Why do only the resource allocations of rich people count
| as the decisions about resource allocation? What about
| the decisions made by non-rich people?
|
| As the bumper stick says, it seems easier for most people
| today to imagine the end of the world than to imagine an
| alternative to corporate capitalism.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > Why shouldn't a billionaire be capable of starting a
| genetics lab to fund cancer research and pay for it in cash,
| if they are so inclined?
|
| Well, why should they? What if instead of a genetics lab,
| they want to start a flat earth research center? Or a think
| tank to influence policy in their favor?
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| >Why shouldn't a billionaire be capable of starting a
| genetics lab to fund cancer research and pay for it in cash,
| if they are so inclined?
|
| Starting land to fund cancer research is fine, but I don't
| see why we need billionairs for that? Multiple people can
| fund it. They are going to work alone in that lab either.
|
| >It's not as if the money wealthy people have is just in
| physical gold coins in their swimming pools.
|
| And it's not as if taxing that wealth makes that fact go
| away.
|
| What's different is that when all that wealth is concentrated
| with a few people, they get to decide what research they
| spend it on and which jobs are created. And that's a bad
| thing, it's a threath to democracy.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Needing more people for funding just adds friction to an
| already hard problem and will reduce the number of such
| things that get started.
|
| I fundamentally agree with your arguments, but not your
| conclusion.
|
| IMO we need a greater number of rich folks and fewer ultra
| rich ones. Those with over 100 billion dollars simply
| cannot spend it, which means capital is not being allocated
| at all! Bill Gates has so many employees just dedicated to
| spending his money responsibly, and he still keeps getting
| richer.
| bluescrn wrote:
| It's just not practical to enforce a cap though. Even with a
| very authoritarian world government to stop people moving
| assets elsewhere, there'll be too many ways around it.
|
| So you can only have $15mil of assets? But your partner can
| have $15mil too, as can your kids, and parents. And if that's
| not enough, you can still try to hoard extra wealth in easier-
| to-hide forms - whether it's physical gold, bitcoin, art, fine
| wines, etc.
|
| Or worse still, the super-rich will realise that they can spend
| many times the wealth cap per year consumable/disposable items
| (so long as they stay under the cap, or get back there by year-
| end), and become more wasteful. "Might as well spend a few
| million on a private jet, if I don't, I'll hit the wealth
| cap!".
| jszymborski wrote:
| But even in your family hypothetical, the overall inequality
| is still much less than between billionaires and the middle-
| class (nothing said of the truly destitute).
|
| > Or worse still, the super-rich will realise that they can
| spend many times the wealth cap per year
| consumable/disposable items (so long as they stay under the
| cap, or get back there by year-end), and become more
| wasteful. "Might as well spend a few million on a private
| jet, if I don't, I'll hit the wealth cap!".
|
| This is a very interesting point! I'd worry less about rich
| folks spending to be below the cap (that money re-enters the
| economy), but rather evasion by sending money back and forth
| between a small set. Clearly evasion would need to be
| monitored.
| FredPret wrote:
| Ah yes, here come the arguments for "monitoring".
|
| Next come regulations about having to "cooperate".
|
| Then the question will be raised as to what happens to
| those rich people who don't cooperate, or middle class /
| poor people who, god forbid, don't agree with this plan for
| society. Pretty soon, you've got your jackboots and your
| re-education camps.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I don't know how this is different from filing income
| taxes.
|
| When you are convicted of committing tax fraud, you may
| get incarcerated in a prison. Most often, you pay a fine.
|
| Call the prisons re-education camps or the tax people
| jackboots, if you like.
| NegativeK wrote:
| You made quite a few significant leaps there.
| yellowapple wrote:
| "The slippery slope is a fallacy!" quoth those actively
| greasing the slope.
| FredPret wrote:
| So did the NKVD!
|
| Started as regular police, ended up doing purges 13 crazy
| years later.
| medo-bear wrote:
| I agree with this except just to point out
|
| > Because that's the point at which you have enough wealth to
| live a comfortably middle class lifestyle for the rest of your
| life
|
| 15M is far from middle class by any measure. 15M affords you a
| big city place, a place for winter holidays, and a place for
| summer holidays. With still left to have spoiled little kids
| (and possibly spoiled grand children).
|
| Also, 15M is not static money. If you have that much money you
| will certainly gain an income from just having that much money.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| I don't have a problem with someone being a billionaire per se.
| Assuming, of course, the wealth was earned without worker
| exploitation.
|
| However, I do take strong offense to politico-economic systems
| where the billionaire has more political power than a poor
| person. In the current system in almost every country, both
| individual super rich people and collectively the top 1-5% have
| enormously more political power than the remaining people. The
| system much be changed.
| 303uru wrote:
| I agree wholeheartedly with this concept. I wonder if the most
| realistic way to do it is to hardcap inheritance. As much as
| I'm uncomfortable with the power hoarding with the Bezo, Gates,
| Musks of the worlds, I'm much more uncomfortable with their
| hundred great grandchildren still being the most powerful group
| on the planet. An honest meritocracy type should even be able
| to get behind that. Bezos built something, his kids were just
| born into it. Cap their total inheritance at $15M and call it a
| day.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > I've thought for years that we should place at hard cap on
| wealth somewhere around $10 or $15 million.
|
| Where's the empirical evidence that such a cutoff benefits
| society as a whole?
|
| > I've argued we should combine this with a move towards a
| worker owned economy - in which businesses are democratic
| institutions governed by the people who do the work involved.
|
| I like the German system of giving labor a board seat. We
| should try that first before burning our entire economic model
| to the ground and starting over, based on a gut feeling with no
| hard evidence to support it.
| yulker wrote:
| Not to be snarky, but how could there be empirical evidence
| for anything that hasn't been done before?
| educaysean wrote:
| That's true. Although when embarking on a brand new
| frontier without any empirical evidence available, one
| would assume there's ample theoretical evidence to make up
| for it. In this case both appear to be lacking.
| naasking wrote:
| > I've argued we should combine this with a move towards a
| worker owned economy
|
| While I'm sympathetic to this ideal, I don't think it works.
| All you'd do is add all the inefficiencies of politics into
| business-level decision making. Democratic processes should be
| reserved for governing shared resources, like water and air,
| where independent decision making has pathologies, and
| independent hierarchical systems are good for optimizing
| efficiency and value for all other goods and services. We just
| have to ensure there's competition and fairness for good
| outcomes.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> I've thought for years that we should place at hard cap on
| wealth somewhere around $10 or $15 million
|
| Do you think your standard of living under such a system would
| be lower, the same, or higher than it is now?
|
| I think it would be much lower. I think most people will stop
| working when they stop getting paid. Some I guess would spend
| money as fast as they make it on experiences and services and
| other things that don't increase wealth. But I think many
| people who would in the current system have gone on to create
| billions in wealth would stop at $10 million and say, "OK I hit
| the number, moving on to the next challenge".
| tehjoker wrote:
| What about having a rationally planned democratic society instead
| of people chasing dollars at the expense of everything? No rich
| people, just democratic processes accessible to all incl. in
| production.
| eej71 wrote:
| I think you'd have to be very clear about how this is different
| than the previous attempts at such "rationally planned
| democratic societies".
| lostlogin wrote:
| The 'central planning committee' and 'the 5 year plan'
| certainly have some baggage attached.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Yup. Years of propaganda convinced most people that these
| are exclusive features of Communist dictatorship, when they
| actually existed in post war capitalist societies as well.
|
| Fun historical fact: the father of the European Union, Jean
| Monnet, was the head of the "central planning committee" in
| France in 1950 (and he really wasn't a commie).
| MeImCounting wrote:
| I am not in favor of a planned economy, but I do believe our
| society faces a significant issue with certain individuals
| hoarding money and resources. If we are to employ a group
| that uses violence to enforce the will of the majority under
| the threat of violence, then we should at least utilize this
| forceful approach to prevent some individuals from becoming
| entrenched in power and wealth. As they exist now, mechanisms
| of state violence exist primarily to suppress the uneducated
| and poor of our society. We should not allow people to hoard
| wealth. I dont know where that cutoff is or how it should be
| decided. Maybe increasingly aggressive taxes with no
| loopholes? It does need to happen
| eej71 wrote:
| You have provided, perhaps unintentionally, a wonderful
| concretization on the difference between political power
| and economic power. In even simpler terms, its the
| difference between the gun and the dollar.
| MeImCounting wrote:
| That is indeed the comparison I was trying to make. The
| average citizen _should_ (if our democratic system worked
| correctly) wield just as much political power as the
| oligarch through his vote and so _should_ be able to
| wield that power, collectively with the rest of society,
| to limit the economic power of the oligarch.
|
| Unfortunately as our system works now the oligarch wields
| both substantially more political power through lobbying
| and general corruption in the government and courts _as
| well as_ clearly wielding more economic power. What I am
| saying is that we as a society should endeavor to reduce
| the misbalance in economic power between the oligarch and
| the average citizen.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Well, the examples you have mind are likely not "democratic
| societies" (even though they often put a "Democratic" in
| their name for good measure).
|
| But then, if you look at the US from the new deal to Reagan
| or most of Western Europe from WWII to the 80s, you have an
| idea of what a planned[1] democratic society looks like. And
| then the scarecrow is less powerful as an argument, isn't it?
|
| Also, Communism hasn't been defeated by the power of the Free
| Market. It has been defeated by the appeal of democratic
| societies living under a welfare state system.
|
| When all a democracy has to offer is a free market but no
| shared well-being, dictatorship is around the corner. (You
| can already see it with the rise of populists leaders all
| around the western world).
|
| [1] there used to be so much more planning compared to what
| goes now that from today's perspective I feel it's fair to
| call that "planned societies".
| epistasis wrote:
| This general vague concept could be implemented in details in
| thousands upon thousands of ways, and has not resulted in
| better or more fair outcomes.
|
| For example, my California city has "democratic" control of how
| many homes are allowed to be built, and therefore some control
| over the number of people allowed into the city. The city has
| decided not to build enough to meet the needs of the general
| population, but instead pays attention to a tiny minority of
| city constituents that profit from housing scarcity. They may
| profit in financial terms from their home valuations, but for
| some it's not about the money, it's just about keeping people
| out. It is an intensely unfair system, yet touted as
| "democratic" control of the means of production of housing.
|
| So color me skeptical that democratic control won't result in
| even worse outcomes. If we had market control of the amount of
| housing, at least housing would be cheaper and we wouldn't be
| kicking people onto the streets continuously due to housing
| scarcity.
| lavelganzu wrote:
| We've seen enough attempts at planned societies that ended
| badly, so most folk are justifiably wary of further attempts,
| even putatively democratic ones. Make it easily opt-in, easily
| opted-out, and successful, and then people will be interested
| again.
| tehjoker wrote:
| This one is ending badly too. Uncontrolled pandemic with over
| a million dead, openly supporting a genocide in Palestine,
| endless war, near zero democratic input from people less rich
| than wealthy suburbanites, climate crisis, the ending of U.S.
| hegemony causing a hyperfixation on military control of the
| world. It goes on and on, and can all be traced back to a
| fundamentally undemocratic governance structure and economic
| structure.
|
| It didn't help that prior attempts, while making their own
| mistakes, were facing an implacable powerful enemy that
| constantly set out to destroy them. Security threats generate
| centralization and reduced democracy in all societies.
| quirkot wrote:
| Hell yeah. You accumulate $100m (or whatever the limit is) and we
| throw a parade for you. You get an award and your name on a
| plaque. You won capitalism! and you're not allowed to make
| another cent
| megaman821 wrote:
| To what end? Innovative companies are literally creating money
| that did not exist before. Do you think there is a fixed pie of
| money?
| FredPret wrote:
| Real, per capita economic growth only really started with the
| Industrial Revolution - when companies started literally
| _making_ money.
|
| But the mindset of many is still caught up in the uber-
| conservative (from an economic point of view) mindset dating
| to the middle ages that wealth is like land: it's just always
| there, and if you want more, you have to get it from someone
| else buy buying or seizing.
| imtringued wrote:
| If you mean the net worth of money, which is zero, yes it is
| fixed. For one person to have a dollar, another needs to be
| in debt.
|
| Also, for one person to make profit, they need to spend more
| than they earn, which inherently means the rest of the
| economy is in debt. Now you might say the profit will be
| spent, but then it isn't profit anymore.
|
| Oh and if you want to talk about the real economy, entropy
| always rises, so no free lunch there either. When the economy
| grows, all that happens is that the human domain expands and
| humanity exerts more authority over the processes that occur
| within its domain. This by definition results in a loss of
| agency of the non human domain.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| The Federal Reserve creates money. This is Econ 101. There is
| a fixed pie of money it's called the M2. Again, Econ 101.
|
| Perhaps you meant "value"? Be careful though, if you start
| differentiating between money and value, you arrive at
| communism. This is literally the first and last chapters of
| Capital vol 1.
| megaman821 wrote:
| Obviously the monetary policy is important. The innovation
| part is deflationary and the money creation part is
| inflationary, if they cancel each other out you end up with
| more money supply and the same price of goods.
| missedthecue wrote:
| There are usually two reasons people advocate for a cap on
| earnings. Either they think that every dollar earned makes
| another person a dollar poorer, therefore a cap limits
| poverty, or they have some deep seated burning fire of envy.
| I saw it in university, activists enraged for the sake of
| being enraged that someone else had done well for themselves.
|
| Bizarre isn't it? If I were to commit one of the seven deadly
| sins, I'd choose a funner one than envy.
| FredPret wrote:
| We should place a hard cap on political ambitions like these.
| These utopians will be the end of us with their ridiculous
| schemes involving always what other people should do.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Is political ambition measured in pages published?
| jdiff wrote:
| But the billionaire utopians and their ridiculous schemes,
| those are totally cool and will save humanity.
| FredPret wrote:
| When you say "billionaire utopian" a couple of people spring
| to mind:
|
| - Bezos
|
| - Musk
|
| - et al
|
| These can be removed by market power, even during their own
| lifetimes. I bet you anything that in a generation or two,
| their fortune will be mostly dissipated.
|
| The vast majority of rich people are much less rich than
| these two; their money will dissipate even quicker. Most of
| them made their fortunes in their own lifetimes; many will
| lose it in the same timeframe. They have to keep performing
| economically (work + investment) to keep their money.
|
| But: I will also bet you anything that in a generation or
| two, the state will be larger than it is today, and will have
| assigned to itself more rights and prerogatives, and will
| somehow have inserted itself into our daily lives in an even
| more intimate way, whether anybody likes it or not.
| tehjoker wrote:
| I don't understand why we celebrate the (false) utopian
| ambitions of the rich who very much make decisions for other
| people - coercively too bc we need to eat (and they also use
| lawsuits, media, govt, and assassinations if you cross them).
| lostlogin wrote:
| What other ideas should we ban?
| FredPret wrote:
| I didn't say "ban the idea". I said "ban the ambition to
| control the lives of others".
|
| The best counter to these jumped-up mini-Mao's is to spread
| the power far and wide; to have lots of little decision-
| makers rather than a few grand ones; to have those little
| decision-makers make tons of small but important decisions
| every day, rather than trusting everything to one election
| every few years.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I think that the description 'mini-Mao' fits both the
| ambition to blocking others from excess wealth and the
| behaviour we are seeing from some billionaires. Extremes
| promote extremes.
|
| Getting lots of people to make lots of small decisions is
| not easy and the masses are not necessarily that sensible.
| Delegating decision making to a chosen representative is
| the least bad system seen so far, but has a way to go.
| FredPret wrote:
| I want to believe you are well-intentioned, but
|
| > the masses are not necessarily that sensible
|
| is an absolutely toxic sentiment. "We, the smart ones,
| will decide for them" has led to disaster every time.
| lostlogin wrote:
| That's not quite what I meant but is exactly what I said.
| I include myself in the masses. I want smart people to
| decide things for me. I don't know how to negotiate trade
| deals, infrastructure projects and a fleet of other
| things. Short term leaders and changed objectives mess
| with progress.
|
| I want someone to who understands to make good decisions,
| and the ability to remove them if they start failing. How
| that's best done from my perspective is with an electoral
| cycle that's fine tuned such that results can be
| achieved, but that incumbents can't rest.
| FredPret wrote:
| A lot of these collective decisions aren't even needed
| but are simply the consequence of runaway states having
| to make all sorts calls on behalf of regular people
| because they've inserted themselves into everyday life in
| a million different ways.
|
| For the few collective decisions that really do have to
| be made, regular elections are the only way to keep the
| decision-makers on their toes.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > Getting lots of people to make lots of small decisions
| is not easy and the masses are not necessarily that
| sensible. Delegating decision making to a chosen
| representative is the least bad system seen so far, but
| has a way to go.
|
| I'm with William F. Buckley on this one:
|
| > "I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people
| in the telephone directory," he said, "than by the
| Harvard University faculty."
|
| https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/10/31/telegovern/#goog
| le_...
| csa wrote:
| > What other ideas should we ban?
|
| Doubleplusungood crimethink?
| pizzafeelsright wrote:
| You'll always have the poor (by system, choice, situation,
| intention) among you.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Because however much overall conditions improve, the people at
| the bottom of the new system will still be considered poor.
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| Nobody should even be a millionaire it says. A small house in
| California is a million dollars ffs.
|
| The irony of charging 20 pounds for this is palpable.
| macintux wrote:
| If no one was a millionaire, a small house in California
| _wouldn 't_ cost that much.
|
| (I'm not defending the thesis, but it needs a stronger argument
| against than that.)
| anon291 wrote:
| > If no one was a millionaire, a small house in California
| wouldn't cost that much.
|
| It depends how this is structured. If the limit is you can't
| save, this actually puts pressure on housing prices as people
| are looking at ways to 'productively' spend the money.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| Yeah, the blurb does literally say, "No-one deserves to be a
| millionaire." That threshold is the wrong choice, at least with
| prices where they are today.
|
| If you do the math, millionaire is just about where your assets
| start to balance your liabilities. By liabilities, I mean the
| cost of a modest and frugal life. In that fuller accounting,
| the millionaire is merely the freedman, the person who has
| climbed out of the debt-hole into which almost all of us are
| born.
|
| Let's do the math.
|
| 1. A millennial can get a decent Gold PPO plan on the health
| insurance marketplace, including basic dental and vision, for
| about $500/month. Anything below Gold merely coinsures ER
| visits and does not actually protect against catastrophic loss.
|
| 2. If you move to a cheap city and shop around, you can rent a
| decent one-bedroom apartment for $1,300/month. Even in a
| cheaper city, it will not be new and it will not be downtown.
|
| 3. Now consider utilities. Say $30 for a cheap cell phone plan,
| $50 for Internet, $100 for electricity (if you have electric
| heat), $20 for water. That's $200/month total
|
| 4. Allow another $80/week for groceries and $100/month very-
| occasional minor luxuries (get lunch out, get Starbucks).
|
| 5. Finally, let's say you really hit the jackpot with apartment
| and job location and are able to get by with a monthly bus pass
| costing $50/month.
|
| We're at $2,230/month, or $26,760/yr.
|
| Now assume you can get a 3% real yield. To finance your $26,760
| annual costs, you need $892k invested -- nearly $900k.
|
| This analysis has assumed unusually cheap rent and lifestyle.
| Add in car payments for a Corolla, or a less optimistic rent,
| and you're quickly at $1M needed. Yet I'm still talking about
| living frugally. I'm also assuming no childcare expenses.
|
| So, for those reasons, and because $1M is a nice round number,
| I simply summarize that $1M is actually zero.
|
| And it's only zero in a cheap place. If you're in California
| with only $1M you're still in the hole.
|
| ...
|
| Yes, there is a problem. The natural world was expropriated
| from us before we were born, we were born into a system we
| didn't choose, and we must work off an indenture we never
| signed up for. So I agree with much of the spirit of what the
| author says.
|
| But, quantitatively, if everything else about the current
| system remains as it is and we are only talking about where the
| cap is, then $1M is too low. Because $1M is merely where assets
| begin to balance a single person's liabilities.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| ACA subsidies or, in most states, expanded Medicaid would be
| available for health insurance for someone living off $1
| million in assets.
|
| You can get an apartment in a cheap city for under $800 a
| month. In a cheaper city it will most likely be downtown, and
| that will be a bad thing.
| clircle wrote:
| So, what's the best argument in the book?
| boppo1 wrote:
| How about we just don't empower a central planning body to make
| monetary decisions that devalue wages & salaries while inflating
| asset prices? QE & LIRP have literally been "rich get richer,
| poor get poorer: the policy". People educated enough in finance
| to follow the effect tend to be in the asset-holding camp so
| there is less complaint.
|
| I'm not advocating high rates as good for the poor; I'm
| championing shaping the yield curve with a market mechanism. It
| might be too late for that to be anything other than disastrous
| though, after years of addiction to funny money.
| MR4D wrote:
| > How about we just don't empower a central planning body to
| make monetary decisions...
|
| For people that might argue with this statement, I'd highly
| suggest reading the book _The Panic of 1907_.
|
| And if you're wondering I'm bringing up a book about 1907
| instead of 1929, then that should lead you to go read the book.
| newzisforsukas wrote:
| Ah yes, 1907 a time of great monetary equity
| dools wrote:
| The best interest rate policy is zero, which is the natural
| rate of interested in a floating exchange rate economy.
|
| Fiscal policy is the only tool through which equity can be
| managed. Monetary policy is pointless.
| JackFr wrote:
| Zero is the natural interest rate? That's ludicrous.
|
| A dollar today is always going to be worth more than a dollar
| tomorrow.
| newzisforsukas wrote:
| Educated in finance enough to want to eliminate monetary
| policy? Maybe not educated in economics then?
| germandiago wrote:
| Well, depends on who you ask... there are well-structured
| ways of thinking on intervention or non-intervention on both
| sides.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| A US politician said no one deserved to be a millionaire until he
| sold a book and became a multimillionaire. Now, he says no one
| deserves to be a billionaire.
|
| We should also say no one should be devastatingly handsome or
| pretty, outstandingly intelligent, excessively lucky, or
| extraordinarily persuasive. Or tall. Or athletic. Or motivated.
| Or powerful (which is rather more related to limiting someone
| else's money).
| FredPret wrote:
| What's the deal with Michael Phelps hogging all those medals?
|
| Or with Taylor Swift hogging the charts? I sing in the shower -
| I want a record deal too!
|
| On a smaller scale, these damn farmers are making too much
| money. I'm sure I can grow an orange just as well - they should
| be made to hand over part of their farms to me.
|
| Same goes for all the software startups and those coders
| hogging the SaaS startups!
| frabjoused wrote:
| No NBA player may score more than 100 points per season. After
| reaching this cap they may only pass the ball.
| jdiff wrote:
| You score points. No one has ever earned a billion dollars.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| Only if you lie about the meaning of "earn"
| missedthecue wrote:
| Who did JK Rowling steal her billion from?
| leothecool wrote:
| We should make a wealth shot clock. Nobody is allowed to hold
| an asset for more than a few seconds.
| patrickmay wrote:
| Just make money radioactive. Problem solved.
| theragra wrote:
| I wonder if this book have a solution how to motivate people
| working more and creating companies if it does not make you rich.
|
| Certainly a lot of people among most driven would work less or
| emigrate. If I can't earn more, I would work that's most joyful
| and relaxed. So, no banking or any other demanding job where
| there are a lot of rules.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I think most Americans would be plenty motivated by the
| prospect of home ownership, let alone being a multi-
| millionaire.
|
| I don't spend much time worrying about what we'll do without
| billionaires working towards their next billion.
| lostlogin wrote:
| What happened here?
|
| > aEUR~The best case I've read for putting an upper limit on the
| accumulation of wealthaEUR(tm) Richard WilkinsonNo-one deserves
| to be a millionaire.
|
| Mobile Safari.
| pphysch wrote:
| Misconfigured MySQL database on site backend, nothing to do
| with your client.
| cosmojg wrote:
| Productive wealth is a good thing. It's what made our current
| society possible. Unproductive wealth is the real devil, the
| hoarding of inelastic goods like land, gold, and oil.
|
| I strongly prefer a society which permits the existence of Jeff
| Bezos over one which does not. Of course, more strongly than
| that, I prefer a society which taxes inelastic goods and negative
| externalities and returns that wealth to the public over one
| which does not.
| Voultapher wrote:
| Wealth, at least the way we measure it, is inextricably tied to
| modernity. The system you say is a "good thing" is literally
| speedrunning the destruction of our biosphere. I think you'd be
| hard pressed to find a system more effective at destroying our
| world. What many see as prosperity, is irreconcilable with
| sustainability. I find that's an uncomfortable thought.
| guhidalg wrote:
| I agree with you, but I think what most people fail at is
| applying higher-order logic. Yes it is nice that private
| citizens have Jeff Bezos levels of wealth instead of
| monarchies or plutocrats, but at what cost? Most people are
| just unwilling to keep thinking about opportunity costs
| beyond the obvious.
| WalterBright wrote:
| What cost is allowing Bezos to exist?
| guhidalg wrote:
| Search for "pee in bottles" in this thread.
| WalterBright wrote:
| People have always peed in bottles when they're on a long
| drive, piloting an airplane long distance, on a sailboat,
| and so on. Some peoples' bladders have a short fuse, and
| carry a bottle.
|
| Do you think Lindberg brought a port-a-potty along with
| his Spirit of St Louis? I remember the opening sequence
| in a Jeff Bridges movie where he pulls over in his car
| and dumps his pee bottle.
|
| P.S. My dad was a B-17 navigator in WW2. I asked him what
| did they do when had to go. He said an empty ammo box was
| used. What was done with the full box? "Extra bombs over
| Germany!"
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Oh good! We should all aspire to have our work conditions
| resemble WWII B-17 crews.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I figgered someone would fixate on that. Well done!
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Wealth, at least the way we measure it, is inextricably
| tied to modernity._
|
| Only in the sense that modernity produces a lot more wealth
| than any other system humans have come up with.
|
| _> What many see as prosperity, is irreconcilable with
| sustainability._
|
| No, it isn't. What might be is allowing people to accumulate
| wealth by playing zero sum games, siphoning wealth out of
| other people's pockets into their own, instead of producing
| more wealth.
| RandomLensman wrote:
| There was massive personal wealth already in antiquity and
| also destruction of ecosystems. Not sure that is specific to
| modernity.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Communist societies tend to be a lot more destructive of
| their environments.
|
| The reason is straightforward - people take care of things
| that they own, they don't take care of things they don't.
|
| For example, which is threatened with extinction - ocean
| fish, or cows?
|
| Are you more careful with your boss's money, or your money?
|
| And so on.
| poncho_romero wrote:
| Who said anything about communism? This is a false
| dichotomy.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The parent did:
|
| "you'd be hard pressed to find a system more effective at
| destroying our world"
| poncho_romero wrote:
| Fair enough. Still, I would disagree. Communism was tried
| and failed, its environmental effects (while bad) were
| therefore limited. Capitalism has endured great
| challenges for much longer, and despite increasing
| discontent with the system in many areas of the world,
| doesn't appear likely to go anywhere. If that's the case,
| the prodigious output of environmental harm capitalism
| generates won't go anywhere either. Green energy and
| green technology won't stop all instances of
| microplastics polluting our rivers or junk toys
| collecting in landfills.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Communism was tried and failed, its environmental
| effects (while bad) were therefore limited
|
| I recall reading after the USSR collapsed that Poland was
| the most polluted country in the world. All due to the
| rush to industrialize and to heck with the environment.
|
| Chernobyl is another case about communism giving short
| shrift to environmental considerations.
| jimbokun wrote:
| It's not a difficult problem to reconcile capitalism and
| sustainability from a technical perspective. Just a question
| of political will.
|
| Carbon taxes. Water prices reflecting scarcity. Compensating
| people living in rain forests to not cut down their trees.
|
| Capitalism is still the best tool we have for setting prices
| and incentivizing efficiency. Just needs to be guided to
| place appropriate prices on externalities.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Productive wealth is a good thing
|
| You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the
| already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some metric)
| than an arbitrary political process. I don't mind if Jeff Bezos
| the person exists, but I have no reason whatsoever to want him
| to have control over the scale of resources and decision-making
| that he does.
| tomoyoirl wrote:
| > You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the
| already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some
| metric) than an arbitrary political process
|
| A key advantage of leaving it to the rich is that when rich
| people fail, they tend to end up losing their wealth and
| power, hurting mostly themselves -- while even a political
| process that isn't being corrupted or gamed by someone
| powerful is badly incentivized to throw buckets and buckets
| of good money after bad, hurting lots of people.
|
| Elon ruining Twitter is at least his own money. The
| California bullet train will be an unprofitable multibillion
| drain on the state for decades to come ...
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| This (conveniently) ignores (as do so many similar
| analyses) the opportunity costs of entering into a labor
| contract.
|
| When an enterprise fails, it is not just the stockholders
| and corporate officers who suffer. The employees do too.
| Worse, only the foolhardy investor puts more than they can
| afford to lose into a risky investment, meaning that while
| they have undoubtedly lost money from the failure, they are
| almost certainly still "whole" in terms of their ability to
| meet their basic needs. By contrast, the employees, who may
| have lost no capital, often face much more dire
| circumstances in the aftermath of a venture failing.
|
| >even a political process that isn't being corrupted or
| gamed by someone powerful is badly incentivized to throw
| good money after bad
|
| It isn't clear to me what you mean by this.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| (I see you edited your post to add the last line).
|
| Elon is not "ruining his own money". He gained control over
| large quantities of economic and financial resources, and
| because of the way our society works, he gets to "ruin"
| those resources by choosing to direct them to the purchase
| of an asset followed by its degradation.
|
| But there's an opportunity cost to all that: what might
| have happened in Elon was not in a position to command the
| utilization of the wealth that purchased Twitter? What else
| might that wealth have been used for? What might it have
| been accomplished?
| Draiken wrote:
| What? You're ignoring all the lives he ruined to play with
| that company. Sure, he lost money, but he has plenty to
| lose.
|
| He wrecked a company and thousands of lives. They pay the
| price, not him.
|
| It's always the workers that pay the price.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the
| already rich to somehow make better decisions_
|
| Not at all. A large fraction of the "already rich" did not
| get their wealth by productive efforts. They got it by
| convincing other people to take the wrong end of zero sum
| trades, thus siphoning wealth out of other people's pockets
| into their own. Even in the case of Jeff Bezos, who has
| certainly created a lot of wealth through Amazon, it's also
| true that his own personal wealth is not entirely due to that
| productive effort; a significant part of it is due to Amazon
| playing zero sum games with its supply chain and its workers.
|
| In other words, the real problem is not wealth accumulation,
| but wealth accumulation through zero sum games, or more
| generally through gaming the system instead of producing.
| (There was a pg essay on this years ago.)
| WalterBright wrote:
| > a significant part of it is due to Amazon playing zero
| sum games with its supply chain and its workers
|
| Why would any worker or supplier do an exchange with Amazon
| where they lose?
| pdonis wrote:
| Because they don't realize it's a zero sum game until
| they're already playing it, and then their exit options
| are limited.
| WalterBright wrote:
| People quit Amazon all the time. Nobody is chained to
| their desk.
|
| Zero-sum games are called "theft", "fraud" and/or "wealth
| redistribution" schemes.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the
| already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some
| metric) than an arbitrary political process.
|
| I have faith that an Olympic athlete is a lot better about
| making diet and exercise decisions than I am.
|
| I have faith that Mick Jagger is far better at crafting a new
| song than I am.
|
| I have faith that Tom Hanks could make a far better movie
| than I can.
| devbent wrote:
| > I have faith that an Olympic athlete is a lot better
| about making diet and exercise decisions than I am.
|
| Smart athletes let technocrats (e.g. scientists and
| doctors) make those decisions for them!
|
| In the case or billionaires, we know Zuckerberg is really
| good at making social media apps. That doesn't mean he's
| good at anything else!
|
| Plenty of talented rich people have demonstrated that given
| the chance they'll lose lots of money on foolish ventures
| outside their area of expertise.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I bet you'll find their track record is a lot better than
| that of non-wealthy people. Most non-wealthy people I
| know do a lousy job of managing their finances.
|
| _Frontline_ ran an episode a few years ago about 401k
| plans. They found that the wealthier the employee was,
| the better returns they had on the company 401k plan,
| despite the fact that the plan was _identical_ for all
| the employees.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| OK, so people who are good at managing their money are
| ... drum roll, please ... better at managing their money.
|
| This is a tautology.
|
| The question is not whether rich people are better at
| running their own finances, it is whether they are the
| best people to be making resource allocation decisions.
|
| In US capitalism, the argument for coupling the two
| normally consists of "well, they want to make money, so
| they will do what people want, and so we get what we want
| and they get rich and that's good".
|
| This is just so absurd that it's really not worth
| deconstructing.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > This is just so absurd that it's really not worth
| deconstructing.
|
| Do you believe Bezos got rich by not giving people what
| they wanted?
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Much better to have a large number of wealthy actors deciding
| how to allocate capital than just one (the government).
| Certainly we can do with higher taxes for the ultra wealthy
| though. It's hard to imagine what one can do with 100 billion
| dollars that you can't do with 10 billion.....
| devbent wrote:
| Let's just have a _really large_ number of reasonably well
| to do actors deciding how to allocate capital.
|
| After all, wisdom of the crowds and all that!
| rockemsockem wrote:
| I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
|
| It seems impossible to perfectly allocate capital, of
| course there will be stupid and actively harmful
| allocations. But the government does both of those things
| too.
|
| So yes it is legitimately good to have a really large
| number of actors allocating capital, to in ADDITION to
| the government.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| But the government is (in principle) elected
| democratically.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| That doesn't mean it always makes the best decisions. It
| seems valuable to have those who are so inclined with
| enough resources to try things that the government can't
| or won't try. We've gotten so many good things through
| this process. I'm not saying the government shouldn't do
| stuff, it very much should.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| "it doesn't always make the best decisions" isn't the
| standard here.
|
| No human organization always makes the best decision.
|
| The question is: how best to make decisions about
| resource allocation? Do we favor this being the domain of
| (primarily) already rich and powerful people? Can we even
| imagine an alternative?
| satellite2 wrote:
| The issue here is the genericity if money. I think hardly
| anyone would argue that he shouldn't make decisions for
| Amazon. He is probably the best individual for this. The
| issue is that controlling Amazon also comes with the
| possibility of getting out of it and somehow be allowed to
| control vast amount of resources completely independent of it
| and possibly built decades or even centuries before Amazon
| even existed.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| One of Bezos' best attributes was (is? no idea) knowing
| that he was _not_ the best individual to make most of the
| decisions for Amazon. He had strong ideas about how to hire
| people, how to create "meta-strategies" and then let the
| people who he believed actually knew stuff make the
| choices. So actually, even within Amazon, he almost
| certainly was not the best person to make almost any of the
| decisions the company faced.
|
| You final sentence is precisely on point, IMO.
| RGamma wrote:
| "Funny" things will happen, when the labor factor is removed
| from the three factors of production by AGI. ~Jeff can finally
| have the planet all for himself.
| laserlight wrote:
| > I strongly prefer a society which permits the existence of
| Jeff Bezos over one which does not.
|
| Can you expand? What did Bezos contribute to society?
| simonh wrote:
| He built a company employing over a million people, created
| novel goods and services, including services my job depends
| on (AWS).
|
| The wealth of a man like Bezos isn't a pile of gold he
| wallows in like Scrooge McDuck, it exists in his shareholder
| control of a vast set of companies full of employees and
| doing productive work. These companies would not exist
| without his ability to identify new markets, build efficient
| companies, and raise capital and deploy it effectively.
|
| Take away the ability to do that, and who is going to found
| the new companies? Who is going to fund and control them? Who
| is going to identify the new goods and services of the
| future, and make them happen?
|
| There is an alternative, and that's run the economy as a
| bureaucratic extension of government. Run companies as
| extensions of government departments and place economic
| planning under political control. It's been tried over and
| over.
| rsoto2 wrote:
| Workers created all those things not Jeff Bezos. A lot of
| the services and technologies leveraged by AWS are created
| via open source projects for example PostGres.
| poncho_romero wrote:
| And in addition, if we grant the idea that Bezos created
| those things, it was not the super rich Bezos we have
| today who did. The parent commenter is arguing for the
| existence of a Jeff Bezos who is not the Jeff Bezos who
| exists today--rather they want a significantly poorer
| Bezos, because that is the Bezos who accomplished those
| feats
| jimbokun wrote:
| Managing and growing companies is a distinct skill.
|
| Open source software is wonderful and amazing. But it's
| not a replacement for Amazon and other companies.
| laserlight wrote:
| > He built a company employing over a million people,
| created novel goods and services, including services my job
| depends on (AWS).
|
| And if Bezos had not founded Amazon, you and others would
| have been unemployed and poor?
|
| > Take away the ability to do that, and who is going to
| found the new companies?
|
| Other people. There are many people who are driven by their
| non-financial passions that would benefit society. History
| is full of philosophers, mathematicians, scientists,
| doctors who weren't after money, yet managed to contribute
| more than Bezos ever could.
|
| PS: I have no problems with Bezos, to clarify.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > And if Bezos had not founded Amazon, you and others
| would have been unemployed and poor?
|
| If nobody founded companies like Amazon, yes many more
| people would be unemployed and poor.
|
| Bezos is just one example.
|
| > History is full of philosophers, mathematicians,
| scientists, doctors who weren't after money, yet managed
| to contribute more than Bezos ever could.
|
| If all the philosophers, mathematicians and scientists
| and doctors were put in charge of running all the world's
| companies, we'd be in big trouble. Totally different
| skill sets.
| devbent wrote:
| > If all the philosophers, mathematicians and scientists
| and doctors were put in charge of running all the world's
| companies, we'd be in big trouble. Totally different
| skill sets.
|
| Eh, worked well enough for Singapore.
|
| Also it worked well enough for the founding of many great
| companies.
|
| Ford, GE, Intel, Microsoft, Google, companies started by
| people who were experts in their field.
|
| Traditionally that is how things went. Sadly the meme of
| a dedicated management class has taken hold on America
| and we've decided that people who actually understand
| what a business does aren't needed to run the business.
|
| That leads to crap like airplanes falling apart, software
| companies who are just barely able to release software,
| and hospitals that are so misran they are unable to
| afford actually treating patients.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Amazon.
| rsoto2 wrote:
| "permits the existence of Jeff Bezos"
|
| - your mind on capitalism.
|
| What things of importance has Bezos done? End world hunger? Or
| are we celebrating the death of local stores and malls? What
| about a society that prevents kids from starving instead of
| making bombs and satellites for world wars?
| missedthecue wrote:
| Society has collectively voted that Amazon massively improves
| their lives. If they didn't think so, they'd still be
| choosing to shop at Sears and Kmart and hosting their
| software on HP enterprise servers in a musty office basement.
|
| That's all the clear and evident result of the market system
| which is very democratic. People vote with their dollars
| every day. The winners of these billions of daily democratic
| votes rise to the top and losers die out.
| devbent wrote:
| > If they didn't think so, they'd still be choosing to shop
| at Sears and Kmart
|
| Let's be clear: Amazon has been responsible for the
| shutting down of so many in-person businesses that entire
| product categories are can only be purchased on Amazon.
|
| The choice is a false one.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| Bezos' AWS made cloud computing viable, leading to the last
| two decades of economic growth without per capita energy
| consumption (due to datacenter energy efficiency).
|
| Bezos' Amazon lowers the cost and availability of goods of
| all kinds drastically, enriching everyone (and especially the
| poorer among us).
|
| The State makes bombs and drops bombs, not Bezos. Bezos
| deploys capital in ways which have proved to fill market
| needs. Markets are people. His money is meeting the needs of
| the people while taxes build bombs.
| dogman144 wrote:
| If you've got elastic liquid assets, go forth and grow.
|
| If you've got property, as in, the asset most normal folks own
| end to end and drives their wealth - negative externality.
|
| Interesting take.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Unproductive wealth is the real devil, the hoarding of
| inelastic goods like land, gold, and oil._
|
| They're not wealth if they're hoarded. Undeveloped land, or
| gold and oil in the ground, are no use to anybody. They're only
| wealth if they're used. And that requires lots of productive
| effort to develop the land, or to get the gold and oil out of
| the ground and into productive use. I agree that unproductive
| wealth is the real problem, but we need to be careful how we
| define it.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> a society which taxes inelastic goods and negative
| externalities and returns that wealth to the public over one
| which does not._
|
| The problem is that this kind of society, even if we assume for
| the sake of argument that it would be preferable, is not really
| achievable politically. The only way to implement it is to have
| a government that has the power to coercively tax people, and
| all history shows that governments will not use that power to
| redistribute wealth to the public at large; instead they will
| use it to enrich themselves and their preferred special
| interests.
| jimbokun wrote:
| There are countless programs that redistribute wealth.
| Welfare payments. Public education. Public health insurance
| programs. Retirement programs.
|
| Recently there has been a down swing in willingness to fund
| new programs that redistribute wealth. But that could change.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> There are countless programs that redistribute wealth._
|
| They purport to, yes, but for most of them, when you dig
| into the details, you find that what redistribution
| actually occurs is not from richer to poorer, but the
| opposite. And much of the money spent on the programs
| doesn't go to the purported recipients of redistribution at
| all, but to third parties. (For example, you cite public
| schools as redistributing wealth--but government funds for
| public schools only pass through the hands of the families
| whose children need schooling in the case of school
| vouchers, which are fairly rare, and in any case the money
| doesn't stay with those people, it ends up in the hands of
| the schools themselves. Given the current state of
| education in the US, anyone who wants to make a case that
| whatever redistribution of wealth occurs actually benefits
| the children and families has a very tough case to make.)
| api wrote:
| This is basically Georgism: a tax on idle assets like land
| paired with very low or non-existent taxes on income and
| capital gains. Land value taxes would be on the land only and
| not things like buildings on it, so this would heavily
| incentivize maximally efficient use of land.
|
| I'm generally a fan though I would also add pollution taxes and
| short term capital gains (gambling) taxes.
| medo-bear wrote:
| I always wonder, what would happen if all objects of desire that
| come from systematic manufactured want suddenly become borring
| RGamma wrote:
| Nature will throw a party.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| Do you have some examples of what those objects of desire might
| be?
| rfwhyte wrote:
| The problem I have with extreme, gratuitous wealth, and the
| inequality that creates it, is that it is fundamentally anti-
| democratic. It is well known by anyone with a pulse that money =
| political power, which means those with the most money, have the
| most political power, and given how just how much wealth so few
| people in the world have now, an infinitesimally tiny fraction of
| the population of most democratic countries have essentially
| entirely captured the political apparatuses of the countries in
| which they reside. Meaning the interests of the majority of the
| people in most countries are no longer being represented by their
| elected officials, instead the people being elected solely
| represent the interest of wealthy elites who can afford to make
| huge political "Donations" and pay lobbyist's salaries.
|
| I've said it before and I'll say it again, but one of the most
| effective changes we could make in the world is to get money out
| of politics, as its the only real way democracy can be put back
| in the hands of the people.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Well said. I'm reminded of Professor Lawrence Lessig (of
| "Creative Commons" fame), whose staunch belief is that in the
| U.S., in order to make progress on any of the big-ticket
| problems we all face, we have to Fix Congress First. See
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_Congress
|
| Reducing the influence of $ in politics is at the heart of the
| matter.
| missedthecue wrote:
| The relationship between money and political power is vastly
| overestimated.
|
| In the US, the mega billionaires are hated in Washington by
| left and right alike. Bloomberg spent a fortune on his own
| campaign and didn't win a single state in the primaries.
|
| Even if you look abroad, the billionaires are not the ones with
| political power. In places like Russia and China, billionaires
| have to suck up to the politicians or they risk getting
| disappeared, disbarred, or thrown from windows.
| yedava wrote:
| Extreme wealth is a symptom of an underlying problem - inhumane
| exploitation. People can get that rich because the economic
| system says that it is perfectly acceptable for a class of people
| to pee in bottles/diapers in order to maximize profits.
|
| The solution for this doesn't have to target the rich explicitly.
| We can strengthen labor laws; update anti-monopoly laws. Make
| human dignity the central argument.
|
| This will circumvent knee jerk reactions like "I work hard, I
| deserve to be rich". The question to ask is how are you, as an
| owner of capital, treating your labor? Like do they get to have a
| life after work? Have dignity at work? Do you use your wealth to
| circumvent democratic will and weaken labor protections? The
| answers to those questions should determine whether you deserve
| your wealth or not.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Very well put thank you for writing it out this way
| missedthecue wrote:
| Wealth isn't zero-sum. Your earnings aren't extracted at a cost
| to someone else.
| patrickmay wrote:
| Exactly. Too many commenters here are ignoring (or unaware
| of) the fact that wealth is created.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| TIL, exploitive labor practices are not a cost to someone
| else.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| You are correct, economic activity under capitalism is
| positive-sum. And that makes the exploitative behavior of
| megacorporations and their leaders that much worse. The
| economic pie is growing rapidly, but ruthless cost-focused
| management that treats employees as "resources" keeps
| unskilled laborers continually on the edge.
|
| The larger the organization, the more the leaders can
| insulate themselves from the human reality on the ground,
| which in turn makes it easier to justify policies that fail
| to treat workers with basic human decency, let alone provide
| them the opportunity to share in the the economic surplus
| they produce.
|
| It takes work and discipline for leaders to avoid this
| without external coercion, and that is in demonstrably short
| supply.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Many of the people working for Bezos, Musk, Jobs, Zuckerberg,
| Larry and Sergey, etc. have made a lot of money and live very
| comfortable life styles.
|
| So I don't accept it as a given that becoming wealthy requires
| inhumane exploitation.
| rockemsockem wrote:
| You know that not every company is Amazon, right? You can't
| just generalize those terrible experiences to every company.
|
| I happen to agree that there needs to be some big legal changes
| to ensure workers at Amazon and other companies are treated
| better, because before Amazon it was Walmart, and in 50 years
| it'll probably be another company. But that doesn't mean you
| can use Amazon as a reason to legislate personal wealth away.
| stevenalowe wrote:
| Interesting how "extra" wealth is always someone else's problem.
|
| "No-one deserves to be a millionaire. Not even you."
|
| Stopped reading right there. Hubris overload.
| anon291 wrote:
| > But if the rich become richer, there is nothing much to see in
| public and, for most of us, daily life doesn't change.
|
| This is exactly why I don't really care how rich Elon, Gates,
| Bezos, Buffett are. If they have money, great... If they don't...
| oh well. Doesn't change my life. It's also the reason why you
| shouldn't care and why this book is likely a load of crock.
| eterevsky wrote:
| The description misleads already in the second paragraph: "We all
| notice when the poor get poorer: when there are more rough
| sleepers and food bank queues start to grow."
|
| This is just not true: the share and absolute number of poor
| people has been decreasing for a long time. See
| https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief.
|
| Socialist/communist countries that tried to limit the ability of
| people to get rich made all of their citizens poor.
| ThomPete wrote:
| The ability to create extreme wealth in a democratic capitalist
| society is an indicator of the economic freedom.
|
| It is the wealth that gives us the freedom to invest in new
| knowledge creation to solve problems.
|
| The more wealth the more opportunities, especially when they are
| in the hands of someone who have proven again and again their
| ability to create value to society. Elon Musk is of course the
| obvious example but not the only one, Jeff Bezos, Larry and
| Sergey and we could go on. These people are excellent capital
| allocators.
|
| The alternative to extreme wealth is extreme poverty and
|
| Almost no one in western society gets to keep their wealth for
| more than 3 generations because other have the freedom to
| outcompete them. Everyone over time gets richer.
|
| The alternative to that is dictatorships where there is no
| economic freedom, capitalist ownership and the way to make money
| is governed by the ruler.
|
| Anyone making a case against extreme wealth in a society that is
| fairly free is spreading extremely bad ideas that if they become
| popular leads to revolutions.
|
| In modern society the issue is not big corporations or extreme
| wealth, it's institutional capture by politicians and that entire
| system.
| Leary wrote:
| How about a hard cap on inheritance instead.
| max_ wrote:
| We should have regulations to limit the price of such books and
| how much royalties the author is receiving to make the books
| accessible and not make his income deviate too far from the rest
| of his fellow authors that don't make any money.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I've always believed that ever higher degrees of wealth come with
| an obligation to manage people in better and better ways.
| Otherwise, wealth should be taxed so that "idle rich" end up
| having to live like the upper-middle-class.
|
| IE: If you get very wealthy because you start a company, and
| manage your company in a way to improve other peoples' lives,
| that's a great thing. (Now, does Elon Musk deserve 50+ billion
| dollars? I'll just handwave and say that I think he could still
| live the same kind of life, and make a better contribution to
| society, with a fraction of that money.)
|
| But, if Elon's kids all inherit many billions each, they either
| have to manage it in a way that improves other peoples' lives, or
| they need to be taxed back to the upper middle class.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > I'll just handwave and say that I think he could still live
| the same kind of life, and make a better contribution to
| society, with a fraction of that money.
|
| Elon's an interesting case because he very passionately and
| sincerely spends his money on what he believes are the most
| pressing problems facing humanity. Almost all of his wealth is
| invested towards those goals.
|
| He's an asshole and treats people terribly. But he is very
| consistent about investing in what he believes to be most
| important.
|
| (source: Isaacson's biography)
| helpcatscary wrote:
| There's a lot of comments in here straw manning a book that I
| would guess very few have actually read. I don't know if it's a
| good argument or not but I'm sure the author is intelligent
| enough to have considered incentives and the case of central
| planning in the USSR and it's not dunking on the author to just
| blindly bring these cases up as if they disqualify their whole
| argument. If this three paragraph summary of a 300 page book is
| so enraging then there's maybe some deep seated biases to
| confront first.
| jongjong wrote:
| This is a blanket solution but I'd probably still support it
| because it will create an environment which will almost certainly
| be better than what we have now.
|
| An alternative solution is that whenever governments issue bonds
| and sell it to the central bank, instead of repayments going back
| to the government, the government should split the money and put
| send to all of its citizens' accounts as UBI.
| crotchfire wrote:
| Will you cap the wealth of corporations too?
|
| Because if not, people with insatiable appetites will simply seek
| control of those corporations rather than direct control of piles
| of money.
|
| Personally I'm an advocate of the exact opposite of what seems to
| be proposed here: controls on corporate size rather than
| individual wealth. Living cells don't grow without bounds; at a
| certain point they get too big and are forced to divide. Simply
| imposing a "tax on corporate size" would accomplish this.
|
| Industries where massive size is simply unavoidable (e.g.
| passenger airplane manufacturing) would simply pay the tax; any
| economic distortions can be nulled out by reducing the industry's
| VAT rate in proportion to _average_ size-tax paid by that
| industry. In all other industries smaller competitors would have
| the persistent advantage of lower tax costs, allowing them to
| eventually undermine the bloated colossuses.
| gmac wrote:
| Yes, I think you could make the case that entities of any sort
| -- corporations or individuals alike -- should be allowed to
| exceed the threshold only if they're under some kind of
| democratic control. And obviously that's not a get-out that
| individuals can use.
| crotchfire wrote:
| _The Commanding Heights_ , eh?
|
| I think this has been tried already, unfortunately.
| tunesmith wrote:
| I think it would be great for someone or some think tank to
| devise a very well thought out publicized plan of how an ultra-
| rich person could efficiently redistribute their wealth to do a
| lot of good. Seems like most of what people recommend now is just
| "give it to charity!" but that's not exactly well-vetted advice.
| Or like the snarky advice downthread to just write a check to the
| Treasury, that's not what I'm talking about. Something
| constructive and efficient.
| fouronnes3 wrote:
| Isn't the thorough, extensive and open-source research that
| GiveWell does exactly what you're asking for? The amount of
| evidence you'd have to give to argue against "give everything
| following GiveWell's recommendation" as the objective and data-
| driven best option is extremely high.
| germandiago wrote:
| I admit I did not read the book but I must say the concept seems
| wrong from the root.
|
| A person with a lot of wealth must invest his wealth in some way
| that it will generate jobs or invest the money in other business.
|
| That is also a benefit for the rest. So that thing about "we
| cannot see" I do not think it is such.
|
| I mean, it is easier to see poverty on poorer people BUT the
| wealth invested is also what makes people have incomes. And you
| need people investing and managing wealth because someone needs
| to pay bills and multi-year investments or risk capital.
|
| It does not need to be a single person, but a group of wealthier
| people are usually more inclined to risk wealth than average.
|
| I think this role is also necessary in societies.
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