The more you tax, the closer you get to banning or stopping activity. If a government sets a tax rate of 100% at say a certain threshold, it would be a poor planner that would be earning anything in that category no?
If someone gives you a cake, and I take the whole cake it's clearly confiscation no? You got no cake at the end.
If someone gives you a cake and I take a slice (say 25%), then it is clearly not confiscation, since you got cake correct? Not only that, you got most of it.
Do you think groups of people spontaneously collect in ways that produce more value than they cost to exist? Even if there is no way to benefit from it individually at scale?
If you do, I can understand where you are coming from - it doesn't line up at all with my experience or extensive datasets I have, but I'd understand it.
If that can't just happen, then how did he not earn it?
Something else very similar would probably exist. And in that universe, people would probably go "Do you think DeNile would just exist if Ben Jeffries didn't do what he did?".
And since discussion about compensation on this site usually centers around the ubiquity of potential fillers of roles -- "Amazon warehouse workers are paid shit because anyone can be an Amazon warehouse worker!" -- it also shows that Bezos' humongous windfall for more or less at random fulfilling this not so much more unique role is monumentally inequitable.
Hopefully that was what you set out to highlight?
How much would be appropriate for the person who had the vision (back before Amazon existed) to build it, pulled the right folks together, hired and fired who it took to make it work, and structured them and the work they were doing to produce that over a decade - including all the reviews and direction through good times and bad? 1%? 5%? 25%? Even 1% is 16 billion dollars. Most people would argue it should be a lot more than 5% if you stripped out the dollar amounts and the names.
> How much would be appropriate... 1%? 5%? 25%?
I would argue that a flat percentage isn't the appropriate way to apportion. It should be something like 100% (spread amongst shareholders) of the first $1 million, then progressively less as you jump up in orders of magnitude such that by the time you're looking at 100's of billions it's less than 1%.
This models two things:
- The greater the value of the company, the more likely it is that this is attributable to a market flaw rather the providing of genuine societal value.
- There is a societal cost to wealth disparity (aside from political issues, it actually undermines the market mechanism). Thus as your wealth level becomes more extreme, you should have to provide more to society in order to earn the same marginal wealth gain to compensate for this cost.
> Most people would argue
That isn't an argument.
Let me rationalize that for you. In order to keep yourself at a functioning level you have to see some good in yourself, to be able to respect yourself, and in that line of thinking - to trust that your physical base has enough value to be preserved long term in the genetic pool. You also have to see the same kind of value in the person you associated yourself with (i.e. your wife), and consequently - in the resulting lineage. Anything less is just prone to higher risk in the natural selection game.
"I don’t believe in utopias nor do I commit myself to what other people consider «worthy» goals, this is not a popularity contest for me, it’s about survival."
Not believing in utopia is one thing but, unless you're a nihilist or think we're at the end of times, you surely have to believe that the world can be made better and maybe do something about it. That's part of caring for the same descendants that will have to live in the world you'll leave them to. In consequence, the fact that you say you don't commit to other people's goals could mean that (A) it's because you don't share any views with other people out there on what would make the world better, which is very unlikely, or (B) you care and can afford to contribute but you just rely on the fact that others' effort will be enough and you can focus on more personal gains (which attracts contempt, and rightly so), or (C) you share the concerns and maybe even the goals for common problems but can not afford to do anything due to some limits in your life, like if you're in a war zone and can care only for physiological (Maslow scale) needs. It's hard to believe that you'd be in condition C, but then you actually say that it's about survival...
I’m not entirely sure about the three options you presented. I reject the premise that the world needs to be made better. It seems roughly good enough to me. I’m free to work on whatever I want. I’m free to have as many children as I want. I’m not sure how it could be made better outside of the government taking less of the fruits of my labor. If that makes me a nihilist, so be it, just leave me free to build my life how I want it. I can manage the rest, don’t need anyone to “fix” the “world” for me.
Pandemics will inevitably occur, however rarely, as long as humans exist. Similarly computers will be exploited, no matter how secure they are. That’s just the reality of complex systems. Natural market forces have already deployed people toward decreasing the probability of future pandemics, which were already rare. Seems good enough to me, if not ideal. What else can be done?
Again, this seems pretty self-centred. The world is good enough to for you. you have the freedom to work on whatever you want. Don't you care that most people don't have that freedom?
Everyone in my country has the same freedoms to work whatever job they want and to have as many kids as they want. The freedoms people have in other countries is out of my control. How is that self-centered?