How can you have a wealth cap?

State you can't have more than X dollars in the bank. Okay, can I use my money to buy things (e.g. property)? Should you value my property at the market value as "dollars in the bank"? What if I buy my property and it appreciates, would it get confiscated? Would police come to my home and forcibly move me to a home below the cap?

Can I own or invest in a business? Do we mark that at "market value"? Who sets this market value? What happens if my business does well, too well in fact and now my market value is more than the allotted amount.

It's impractical and its not entirely clear what "million dollars in the bank" really is. The fact is that very few wealthy people just have money sitting around in a bank. And when you try confiscating other types of wealth you realize how impractical it is. Income cap becomes equally complicated when you count income as money a business you own made and reinvested in itself

Very succinct summary of why that's a wild and untenable idea.

Because every idea that suggests change from the status quo is wild and untenable, yet legislation that benefits the corporations and billionaires can happen extremely swiftly, almost without friction, nor even legislative discussion.

It’s not succinct to suggest that the wealth hoarding cannot be taxed. It’s not wild. It’s not untenable.

The onus of taxation being thrust upon the individual has been following a characteristic curve since the Great Depression. It was happening prior to that, with only WWII levelling it out.

Wild and untenable ideas are only wild and untenable because of the suffocating ideology that instructs you as such.

Please don't do ideological or nationalistic flamewar on Hacker News.

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This is a horrible idea, because it removes any reason for a billionaire to keep working, or to work harder. Spend nights and weekends at work for an extra million, or spend it with your family because you won't spend the money anyways?

People, in general, do not work for free.

I'd rather have a thousand competent people working toward their first million than a competent billionaire working toward his second billion.

Also I have a huge doubt that billionaires keep working for the money incentive. Once you get that rich, it is not about money anymore.

Why is it so bad for billionaires to stop working? Presumably, with the wealth cap or very progressive tax, the resources they would currently use to make the next million dollars would be spread out over a million people and those million people might make that next million dollars. If not, then you are saying that the billionaire would make the next million dollars more efficiently, right? Given that concentration of wealth is bad, isn't it better for the million people to make the next million dollars than the billionaire?

Why do you assume that all work done by a billionaire can be substituted with work done by someone else? This isn't always true further down the spectrum - for instance, if you take away enough surgeons, some surgeries just won't be performed.

You are saying that society needs certain people to have enormous sums of money to be better (however you define it, apparently you are saying that only these people can do certain things because they have individual control of large amounts of money; but I don't see how it's better than organizations, governmental or otherwise, having control of large sums of money) than a society where certain people are not enormously wealthy?

Surgeons are not billionaires. Surgeons are trained.

Billionaires are not magical unicorns, and in fact are byproducts of nothing more than birthright, chance, and a culture that cultivates them.

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. Those discussions are repetitive and therefore tedious and therefore off topic here. They also tend to get nasty.

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No, I will never be a billionaire. But I am an incredibly rich man in other ways on account of my labors. Family, career, etc. And I shudder to think that someone might take away all the non-monetary wealth that I have accumulated by convincing others that they can never be as happy as I am.

Socialism left millions dead, with those remaining knowing freedom only as an abstract concept.

Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. It's boring, other than to the most zealous of the long tails on either side.

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The same applies to religion if you consider our history.

Every concept can be applied in a harmful way which profits the few and oppresses society.

Socialism cannot not do that due to the abolition of the pricing mechanism in favour of political power

> > Every concept can be applied in a harmful way which profits the few and oppresses society.

> Socialism cannot not do that due to the abolition of the pricing mechanism in favour of political power

I hope you're not serious, but in case you are... How can socialism not be used to oppress the many while enriching the few? You even included the mechanism - political power!

You could argue that it doesn't have to, and I'd say that history does not give great odds on oppression not happening... But to say it can't do such a thing? That's insulting.

Capitalism is working really hard to leave all of us -- and everything else on the planet -- dead, all in the pursuit of making the richest 10% richer.

Market liberalisation has caused poverty to collapse around the world over the last 30 years

HN is not for ideological flamewar, so please don't do that here.

Personal attacks will get your account banned, so please especially don't do that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: it looks like you've been breaking the site guidelines rather badly and quite repeatedly. Continuing in that vein will get your account banned. I don't want to ban you, so would you please stop doing that? Reviewing the guidelines and taking the spirit of this site to heart would be much appreciated.

> Socialized health care works //better// than what is in the USA.

> Socialized news production works //better// than what is in the USA.

> Socialized education works //better// than what is in the USA.

Citations and definitions very fucking needed for all of these. In order:

> Socialized health care works //better// than what is in the USA.

The best health care in the world is in the US, if you're wealthy enough. For some, that's working better. Even going by total population access, the US isn't exactly bad, though it may not be perfect. And we have socialized health care for large fractions of the population - does that not count? (the old, the poor, the military)

> Socialized news production works //better// than what is in the USA.

Are you sure about that? Are you really sure that handing production of the news over to the government can ever really be '//better//'? I'd say that such actions enable mass propaganda, among other things. Even if you get a better experience in the short term, IMO what you're doing is taking on some massive risks or offloading your news media to foreign countries.

What country even has a socialized news system that you'd like to hold up as an example of working '//better//' than that of the US?

> Socialized education works //better// than what is in the USA.

Because the USA certainly doesn't ALREADY have socialized education? Pretty sure that we do, for K-12 at least. Which means you're talking about college, and the USA has a pretty damn good university system. The top schools are affordable for essentially everyone (look at the financial aid packages the Ivies advertise, for example) and generally regarded as some of the best schools in the world. So what are you looking for there? Mid tier and lower schools? That means mid tier and lower STUDENTS, and in a lot of the socialized education systems you'd probably hold up as examples they wouldn't be getting free college either.

Please don't post tedious ideological flamewar comments to HN. It's not what we want here.

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