If he wants to sell $10M or so to buy a nice house and a new car, do you think he doesn't deserve to do so? Where do you draw the line?
How do you even picture that claim? Is it Bezos literally building every warehouse with his own two hands? Is it him being at a thousand places at once dealing with paperwork, marketing and packaging all by himself? For every billionaire out there there are thousands of workers that were denied their share of the success. I would say the only way someone could be a honest "self made" billionaire is by mugging an other billionaire in a dark alley.
Besides that, there are some billionaires that did get their wealth honestly in my estimation, like JK Rowling and Markus Persson.
A good point. I wasn't aware that she was a billionaire and she apparently gave most of it away by now, dropping her well bellow a billion again.
> Markus Persson.
I remember that there was a lot of controversy around Minecraft, but I can't accurately recall the details to counter that.
- Significantly higher marginal tax rates further up the income ladder. US high end marginal tax rates are historically and relatively low; at the same time the US runs an incredible deficit. It’s crazy.
- Increasing tax rates on dividend earnings for individuals, so that they converge to the income tax rates based on some income/earnings thresholds. Large share holders like Bezos can make millions via dividends, and get a far better tax rate than you or I. It doesn’t make any sense. For mutual funds and companies, etc., dividend taxation could be treated as now without much negative impact.
- Increasing tax rates on capital gains when realized. If Bezos wants to sell $10M of stock to buy a fancy new house and car, great, but at some level of capital gains it makes sense for the rates to rise as it otherwise becomes another kind of income tax dodge.
- Inheritance taxes increasing steeply with the amount of the estate. Sam Walton worked his ass off; his kids didn’t. It’s perfectly normal to want to leave your kids something, but after a certain point it seems rather a social anti-pattern to have a trust fund class, especially at extreme amounts of wealth (which is what we are talking here).
- Limits on loss depreciation for individuals. Perhaps not quite as important but also subject to a lot of abuse.
Of course, I also think there’s much that needs to be done with campaign finance reform, lowering corporate tax rates, automatic antitrust provisions that come into play when a company becomes relatively too big, and increased penalties for corporate externalities (like privacy violations, pollution, etc.).
Hope this helps. What do you think we should do?
Certainly with someone like Bezos, unless you take it all there is going to be a number that will still net him a billion after all of the taxes. And if you do "take it all", then maybe the next Bezos, Zuckerberg, or Gates starts the next company in another jurisdiction with less of an appetite for taxation, drawing away with it the capital and all of the follow-on effects it provides (jobs, spending in the community, etc.). And given the lengths we know that rich people will go to protect their money, that line has to be drawn at far less than "all" to keep them.
On the other end of the extreme, even if he never sells a share those shares still allow him to wield a tremendous amount of power. So in the short run, all the taxes in the world would change nothing (Amazon does not pay dividends). It would just give him more time to figure out how to evade the taxes in the long run. :)
I am moved by the argument that Walton's kids shouldn't get it all, but I'm not sure that transferring some or all of his property to the government is a good idea. You would then just have a "trust fund class" of politicians and bureacrats! (BTW your Walton comment has got me pumped for season 3 of "Succession")
I like your overall thesis, I just think we should be less punitive with those exceptional people who do indeed add tremendous value to our economy and society.
So yeah. A line can and should be drawn somewhere.
The accumulation of wealth by a single individual is not inherently harmful for society, it all comes down to the intention for which accumulation happens and how is that spent.
Edit: typo.
Present day accumulation of wealth creates a huge power imbalance, billionaires are citizens, just as I am, why should they have more power, as a citizen, than I do?
If you defend that billionaires should exist then, in my opinion, it's required to design a way to protect the rest of society from this class of people amassing more and more power.
The problem isn't money, it is our power structures. Right now, being a billionaire is almost inherently bad, every billionaire is a policy failure.
Besides that, hierarchies of power exist outside of realm of money. And they are a natural occurrence. You will not only find billionaires with more power than you, but also a lot of other citizens that belong to these other hierarchies that have achieved their power via their competence.
Power in itself is not dangerous or undesirable, power that becomes tyrannic is.
What is more dangerous is inequality, specially inequality of opportunities. Certainly some times of inequalities of outcome can also be dangerous in certain situations if not kept at check, basically because they may become a source of violence.
We're all closer to being millionaires than Jeff Bezos.
This is true in terms of orders of magnitude, but gets hilariously true when looking at the absolute numbers.
The difference in wealth of a homeless person and a (barely) millionaire is about a million ($1,000,000).
The difference in wealth of that millionaire and Jeff Bezos is about a Jeff Bezos ($138,999,000,000).
Why is that more important than any other moral axiom?
Are you really going to pick height as a comparison point for being a billionaire? Did tall people take their height from short people? Is height taxed?
It is more complex than you are making out. Cultures that denigrate the great men don’t produce as much or innovate as much as those that revere them.
If anyone, thank Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the World Wide Web, without which none of the aforementioned online shops could exist. And last I checked he didn't become a mega-billionaire from that invention.
Groceries are the last thing I'd buy there, also there are online delivery stores by actual professional supermarkets.
Amazon has exactly zero positive influence on humanity.
What is with the embarrassing Bezos worship? These people organize other people's labor, take their economic surplus and take credit for their ideas.
I agree in general that workers should get a bigger piece of the pie, but if entrepreneurs and executives aren't providing any value, then why aren't groups of workers getting together en masse and forming their own companies? It seems pretty clear that this "organizer" role is essential and can't be done by just anyone.
Let's be real: Bezos is not "organizing" Amazon so much as he organizes a cabinet of Executives who do the same recursively until some worker does the actual work.
> When governments have tried, they have tended to fail miserably
So the federal government, which must coordinate the efforts of over 2 million employees across a more broad spectrum of activities and labor than Amazon does, doesn't count?
And is the job so hard as to mean hundreds of billions? Or is that just want the market will pay to keep Bezos around? I could understand that part, as it means the market believes Bezos current activities are worth that much. But does that mean he deserves it? I should hardly think those arguments are the same.
Organizing a cabinet of executives (who then organize recursively down the hierarchy) is also very difficult and stressful, so I'm not sure what the point is here? Again, it seems clear that this role is necessary and important, otherwise we should see lots of big and successful companies running without CEOs or executives.
"So the federal government, which must coordinate the efforts of over 2 million employees across a more broad spectrum of activities and labor than Amazon does, doesn't count?"
While I don't think anyone would point to the US government as a model of efficiency and innovation, I'll grant that they do organize a lot of labor, but it primarily concerns the responsibilities of governing that we have specifically decided are special cases that the state should take care of (in spite of whatever inefficiencies it may cause). When states have tried to organize labor more generally, in order to do things like extract resources, grow food, build stuff in factories, set prices, etc., it has not gone well in most cases.
"And is the job so hard as to mean hundreds of billions? Or is that just want the market will pay to keep Bezos around? I could understand that part, as it means the market believes Bezos current activities are worth that much. But does that mean he deserves it? I should hardly think those arguments are the same."
What someone "deserves" is subjective. My point is just that it seems we do need to provide entrepreneurs and managers some kind of incentive if we want people to create and manage businesses, since doing so is hard work that requires unique skills. How strong that incentive should be is debatable, but if you have one, there will always be people who put way more energy into pursuing it than others, and so are much wealthier than others.