I like the guy but I disagree with his fatalism. If we managed as human beings to curtail what was considered normal for millennia, to wit slave trade, we can also make things way better.

We need to start by making it illegal to be a billionaire.

> We need to start by making it illegal to be a billionaire.

I’m listening. What does this law look like?

Taxes. I think most human beings can survive with 100 millions of dollars of wealth (it's more than one can spend in multiple lifetimes). Anything over that can just be taxed.

The problem of letting any private entities get that rich is they start to take control of everything.

One such example is The East India Company having at one point a bigger private army than the British Army[0].

As things go we will soon be at that point again.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_armies

So you’re not making it illegal to be a billionaire, you’re just taking it in the form of raising revenue for the government.

Except government revenue serves a purpose: paying for government services and salaries. What do you do with the surplus cash?

What about when someone does not have a billion dollars in cash, but has billions in assets?

Flesh this out for me please.

> Anything over that can just be taxed.

Except the politicians will take that extra tax money and use it to bail out banks and wall street and spend it on shit that no one needs and impose policies that no one cares about and continue the corruption cycle, only now with a lot more money than they had before. We should trust the government a lot less, not more, with our hard earned dollars.

Greed is part of the human nature, and people in the government are no exception.

2% annual wealth tax on wealth over 200M.

70% top marginal tax rate on incoming over $10M in a year.

Then it wouldn't be illegal to be a billionaire, but it would be much harder, and would mean you were constantly contributing a significant amount back to society if you're able to maintain that level of wealth.

How would this work for someone who is a billionaire by means of illiquid assets like stock in the company they founded?

They would have a couple of options:

They could sell stock—maintaining the total size of the company but losing some control over it, in order to pay taxes.

Alternatively, they could reduce the size of the company by having the company issue dividends on the stock to shareholders, in an amount enough to cover taxes.

They will have to sell to pay taxes.

And slowly lose control over their business? What if they aren't publicly traded?

They could also issue dividends from the company to share-holders.

This wouldn't weakened control of their ownership interests, but it would reduce the overall size of the company itself.

You have thought this through more.

1. How would you conduct this assessment? 2. Now that you have figured out the legality of your position, why is this moral to do?

> How would you conduct this assessment?

The same way the IRS conducts income assessments. Some additional forms that you have to fill out declaring your wealth at tax-time.

For the vast majority of people you could add a form on the IRS-1040 that is a single check box.

"Check this box if you have less than $100,000,000 in total assets". If you have more than $100,000,000 in assets, then you have to fill out an additional schedule(s) detailing your assets.

If your assets are over $200,000,000 then you're taxed on your assets that exceed that amount.

> Now that you have figured out the legality of your position

I actually am not 100% convinced of the legality of the wealth tax. I think we've figured out the practicalities of it. I think it may be an open question as to whether a wealth tax is presently constitutional.

I don't think it's obviously unconstitutional, but I also don't think it's obviously constitutional.

> why is this moral to do?

I'll play if you will. First, you explain the moral position of allowing people to starve, and to die of the elements when others have more money than they could ever spend in their lifetime.

Once you explain the morality of a national with the resources such as ours allowing people to die in the elements, then I'll go ahead and take a pass at the morality of the wealth tax.

Which is to say: I think it is immoral not to have such a tax.

> contributing a significant amount back to society

You misspelled “the oligarchs who run the government” as “society”

Someone on /r/latestagecapitalism pointed out if you seized everyone's excess billions above $1B, you could end world hunger for 216 years, end climate change by 2030, etc etc.

Around 7.5 billion people on earth would probably agree to those benefits.

Someone should have pointed out that they were wrongly assuming people could eat paper.

So then the billionaires could easily part from said paper.

Of course they could, but it wouldn’t help people so why bother?

Sounds like something /r/latestagecapitalism would say and this wouldn’t be the first time they were wrong. Show me the work.