That's fucking idiocy. Or more accurately, propaganda from a billionaire with extreme vested interest in this topic.
It's pretty straightforward to say "Go ahead and start Google, and if it succeeds we're going to have some basic rules about worker's rights and compensation you'll have to follow, and we're going to tax a much larger percentage of your personal gains, but you'll still be very, very rich". At which point you're also fighting economic inequality.
There is a stark difference between socialism rooted in the above idea and socialism rooted in jealousy and vindictiveness toward the wealthy just because they're wealthy. We're not trying to punish the wealthy and we can still allow them to be very wealthy. But as the US currently stands, the wealthy could contribute much more while still having far greater quality of life than almost everyone else.
The reality is that people compete for status, success, money, and power, within the framework they are given.
I mean we've actually tried this. If you take a group of incredibly skilled business people and tax them heavily you don't get some dystopia, you get Switzerland.
And what important/useful companies, tech or otherwise, got their start in Switzerland?
But even still: relative wealth distribution getting too extremely unequal has negative ramifications for any society, regardless of the absolute wealth. But again: that is NOT the issue in this case.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/anti... for more perspective, a bunch of discussion about antitrust issues in big tech and NONE, ZERO, NADA of it is about wealth and money in itself.
Like what exactly?
I do not understand why people are upset over extreme wealth. I think Jeff Bezos deserves to be a billionaire and I would not want to live in a society that does not allow people like him succeed and accumulate this sort of money. The quetion is what happens with his wealth in the second and third generation. Historically in fedualism this was passed down to the next generation and the family would keep it until end of the feudalism era. In a capitalistic society it deisappears within 2-3 egenerations, especially with people like Bill Gates. Not sure what is the problem here.
Now, Jeff Bezos is absolutely a remarkable and unique person who worked very hard and intelligently to get to where he is. But on just the pure matter of "deserve" it's so much more complex than the way you are looking at it. We don't live in a fair world. Look up "just world fallacy". In a world that is quite out of alignment from what we'd have if everyone got what they "deserve", it's simplistic to look at select cases like Bezos and judge from there.
But that's not what this is about AT ALL.
The concept of anti-trust and of managing this stuff is about power. The question is whether it's okay for Bezos and the whole company really to not only be wealthy but have monopoly-like power in the market. I have no reason to believe you checked out the link I posted earlier because you went on and repeated arguments about wealth — and this is NOT about that, not philosophically or legally. It's not even about taking away Bezos' wealth! Anti-trust is not about wealth redistribution, it's only about stopping anti-competitive threats to market competition.
> In a capitalistic society it deisappears within 2-3 generations
Well, that's just factually wrong. Capitalism doesn't just automatically do that, and the evidence doesn't support that claim either. And we don't have any sort of "pure" capitalism in existence to even study anyway. You need to get beyond these superficial specious ideas if you want to understand the reality. Start by treating your presumptions as hypotheses and figure out what evidence would be scientifically strong enough to validate or invalidate them and see how they hold up.
>>> Well, that's just factually wrong.
Really?
http://money.com/money/3925308/rich-families-lose-wealth/
https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/the-real-reason-bil...
> Indeed, 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation, and a stunning 90% by the third, according to the Williams Group wealth consultancy.
What is that? Sounds like a marketing claim by a company catering services to the wealthy about how to keep their family wealth. I can't just accept it blindly.
I agree that in the (unusual) case of Gates, he's obviously not just hoarding and passing on his wealth directly, but the upbringing and advantages his kids are getting plus $10 million leaves them still really wealthy compared to nearly anyone else on the planet regardless of the fact that it's a miniscule fraction of Gates' current wealth.
The alternative to what you suggest is not zero growth of wealth. It can be even larger growth of wealth when the markets work better.
The type of anti-markets and pro business approach where big corporations are shielded from the markets and monopoly powers are allowed as long as antitrust felony crimes don't happen is perversion of capitalism. The ideological foundation for this tinking was laid out in Robert Bork's book 'The Antitrust Paradox' (1978) that Reagan administration used as their bible.
I'm good at what I do and I work for a hedge fund because they'll compensate me well for it. I increase the productivity of other people at my company, without them doing anything, by giving them better platforms for their work. Chasing salary is the obvious locally rational action for me, but it's inefficient for the world. I could be making life better for the world if I could be funded to work on, say, Debian instead of our in-house build system. And I probably could be funded at about 1/20 of my current salary to do it, and provide 2x productivity benefits for you personally, but the incentives of a capitalist society mean that isn't the right decision for me.
However - you say "using the power of the state to prevent." I am not in favor of that. I am in favor of ceasing using the power of the state to enable. The government could stop recognizing the right of corporations to property and to the labor of individuals at any time.
Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple innovated at their own in the beginning, but once the cash from network externalities started to pour in, they stared to buy market share and buy into the markets. Google did not invent Gmail (Postini), Android Inc, YouTube, AdSense (Adscape), Google Analytics (Trendalyzer), Google Maps (Endoxon).
There is a place in the world for massive technologically focused organizations.
This used to be less true in CS, but that's changing due to machine learning. Google has a huge leg-up in self-driving-car R&D because of the enormous amount of data it has from Google services. In "hard" R&D, even "startups" are spending the kind of capital that previously used to only be in the province of established conglomerates.
BTW I agree with him in the sense that indices like Gini coefficients etc. are not comprehensive enough, and optimizing for simple numbers leads to distorted outcomes. I also agree with you in the sense that top heavy players in the economy are harmful to the extent that they seek rent and prevent competition.
Sounds like Paul Graham was saying that stopping founders is some unstated but believed goal, and is a poor one.
That some people made a few $100B on it is nothing compared to the value it's given humanity.
> Here's how to explain to people the distinction between fighting poverty and fighting economic inequality. If you're fighting poverty, you might say "Let's have universal health care." If you're fighting economic inequality, you have to say "Let's have universal health care. And Larry, please don't start Google." Otherwise Larry's going to mess up your numbers big time.
Since reading that, I've realized that a major part of my political beliefs is that future Larrys should be unable to start future Googles in their current form, and in particular that I don't believe it's a just use of the powers of government to enable the creation of future Googles.