At the point where the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny fraction of members of society becomes detrimental to the functioning of our society it is necessary to redistribute before society stops functioning.
How you feel about isn’t very important.
Your argumentation is incorrect.
By the way, what is equity? If you come spoil me because I make money, what kind of equity is that if you do it to me just because I make money? Equity would be to not spoil anyone. Trying to punish them on the basis that they make money (or that they make little, I do not care) is not equity. It is something else.
There is no other way. You are not going to get anything for free in that chain. Every step in the chain, from employing to get products to work to deliver your stuff are paid in one way or another.
When it is detrimental? Who decides that? I am against monopolies. Telling from offices all the others what to do or not when they are not harming anyone is also a monopoly. Governments are monopolies in many areas.
What makes you think that with fewer regulations there would be even more uneven wealth? I cannot reply to this, since it is just fiction, but fewer regulations means more services, which unfavors monopolies and drops prices for services. Making people more elligible for acces to those services as well.
Wealthy people get to choose which jurisdiction they submit themselves to. That's just how the world is.
We shouldn't have to wait for society to nearly break down in some catastrophic way before we try to make things better.
Some sort of society will continue to "function", but it is likely to be a worse society for everyone, even the ones nearer the top of the wealth curve as they will constantly be worried about being robbed etc.
In fact, I would say there is plenty of evidence that too much redistribution impoverishes societies and, on top of that intervention, there is always a layer of corruption, way more than in more free countries (free as in non-economic intervention to wealth).
I am saying this very naively without reflecting on the effects it would have on the economy, the inflationary forces and the overall corporate productivity. So I realize my view is mostly a romantic utopia, but nobody should be allowed to hoard billions, especially by inheritance.
There's probably a way to work around this by making it non-voting stock or something, but it's still an inherent dampener on growth, because there's no incentive to grow, and on RnD, because there's no concentration of capital. A silicon fab is worth billions; does your system imply that the only way to build one is to either arrange a consortium of 10,000 people or government funding? HN exists because of PayPal; should the PayPal money have been spent entirely on free services? How are you going to stop the black market[0]? What are the alternate routes to power in your society, and are they better than acquiring money?
You can envisage worlds where this does function, but there's a lot of work to put in regarding the specifics, and doing the work makes you realise their might be a lot of downsides.
[0] Around 80% of North Koreans' income was once acquired through the black market: https://web.archive.org/web/20110924095232/http://www.atimes...
That's how most large stuff gets built now. "a consortium of 10,000 people" is a corporation. There are lots of them on the NYSE etc.. Government funding also happens a lot.
Federal Tax rates in the USA when Intel was founded were 70%.
I get the gist od the argument, but to call it ownership is perverse. It’s like insurance companies and their ~$300 salvage fee they charge if you have an accident and the repair cost is greater than the ‘value’ of the vehicle. They argue if they pay you for the full value of your vehicle, they are in effect buying the vehicle from you. If you decide to keep the vehicle, they will attempt to claw ‘salvage value’ or the amount they get from a junk yard. So far I’m 1 for 1, arguing the vehicle has to be for sale for ownership to pass to another.
Another thing I find perverse is the expectation of continual year to year growth—-to infinity.
There won't be too many proceeds because people would simply stop working at that point. I'm far from being taxed at 100% (~50% marginal all in) and my motivation to increase my pay is already very low. I optimize for fewer hours worked at the same pay now.
Do you think that's because you're already making enough money to put you at or near the top tax bracket? Sounds like your lack of motivation is because you're already making enough and don't need more, not that the government might get an extra 8% out of you.
The math is pretty simple. Everyone has 24 hours in a day. I get paid X to work Y hours. My free time Z is 24-Y hours. It's not worth it to trade any more of my remaining Z hours just to have >50% immediately taken away. I don't get any more hours in a day by working more. Instead, I increase my hourly income (the accurate value of my labor) by cutting Y to 1/2 or 1/3 while still making X. I work less, have more free time, and government doesn't make more from my labor than I do. Easy. (Note: If I were to magically find a job that paid twice as much with the same crazy good work-life balance, I would of course take it regardless of marginal taxes. But such magic is hard to come by and not worth the risk at this point.)
Advanced version: on top of the marginal rate being 50%, I live in an expensive place where not only does it get taxed higher as if I'm uber rich, but I get to pay more for all of my expenses. It's like a double fuck you. Even less motivation. This stuff is real and anyone who's in my position has given it some thought even if it's not so formulaic, hence the outflow of people from CA to cheaper, less tax-y places.
There’s a net migration of rich people into CA (and there always has been). It’s the lower income that move out because they simply can’t afford CA. Rich people can afford CA and so they move here.
This isn’t really a political point. I like living in California (for now) and wouldn’t move to either of the other states just for the savings. Not worth it.
2) Nothing wrong, just stating the facts.
Well, I started by saying that the only jobs were yacht captains and butlers (slight exaggeration) and was told that many of the jobs were things people on this message board had. So, yeah, that's what the topic is.
Amazon SWE: "richest man in the world" Jeff Bezos
Meta SWE: billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg
Netflix SWE: billionaire Reed Hastings
Microsoft SWE: "richest man in the world" Bill Gates
Then we get into the "mere" hundreds of millions.
They created those jobs, and obviously they're very, very wealthy.
Start with your vote, kids: use something else, do not buy from them. It is what I would do, in fact, if I had that thinking.
Very early hires, maybe you can claim were going into a job created by a founder.
I think you are pretty cruel to people that produce useful things for others. You are saying that people who offer something valuable for others should be mercilessly punished.
What you are saying is that people that contribute less than these people to society should be gifted with the effort of people that are useful to the society, making the wealthy (I mean licit wealth, of course, not criminal one) a means for others to live in better conditions.
Also, you are proposing to violate the principle of people being equal under the law. If I earn xyz, they spoil me, if I earn "too much". If I earn nothing and do not contribute in any meaningful way (even to sustain myself), then I am a blessed person that can get things for free.
Not a good arrangement to create wealth for others, if you ask me. Besides being terribly unfair.
-Anatole France
Turn it up to $100 million instead of $10. What you call unfair, is obscene, that outsized level of influence that one person should be able to have on society. The problem is the sheer amount of wealth so far beyond what a single person could use up in one life, while others languish and go hungry. Capitalism is merely a way of organizing society. The cruelty doesn't have to be the point. In order to incentivize the rich, we give them money. To incentivize the poor, we take more away. Who then go hungry. Is that the American dream? That I should be able to afford $1,500 bottles of champagne while my countrymen starve for not working hard enough?
If you are a worker you are exchanging comfortability for risk. You will make less, for sure. I am myself employed. But every month I get the bill. If you do not want that, risk your capital.
I wonder if it is so bad to work so hard for others, why don't more people build a business? There must be something we are not being honest about here, otherwise everyone would build one.
By the way, noone that makes their own wealth are to be blamed of the bad luck of others. I think we should help those people you mention. Those people starving. But voluntarily or offering them the chance to cooperate with the society. Unless they have some handicap, if they do not want to cooperate it is not me who is to be blamed. In that case, it would be them who are the person to look at for trying to live from others. And for that, it does not matter I can afford that champagne or not.
Besides that, the fact that people like that exist does not mean other people are poorer. I could open a website now and get rich and I would not be making anyone poorer, just making myself richer. And probably others, to operate the website itself.
What proceeds?
When I say "you pay for your own schooling through taxes" I'm saying that most countries have tax systems where citizens contribute according to their earnings / net-worth, a share of the costs of running all of the parts of society that aren't privately owned - or some approximation of this idea.
This means that if you're paying your taxes, the implication is that you're paying "your share" of running education for society and someone did that for you when you were a kid. Maybe you're paying for iPads in 2022 for other people's kids where you only had chalk, but some other schmucks also paid the doctors salary (unless you're in the US I guess? not sure how that works there) that delivered your birth and nobody expected you to hand over a dollar bill as a newborn to pay for yourself.
Pay-it-back vs. invest/pay-it-forward have quite different political implications, and the fact that society does and always has been in pay-it-forward mode gives lie to the earlier commenter's claim that subsidies are slow but fatal.
I'll re-write your proposal:
"Once a person reaches something like $10M net worth they start donating huge sums of money to the charities they have created and who has their family members on board. One of them fully restored and is doing the maintenance on an authentic Gulfstream aircraft from the beginning of the century! An other one has created a school for the (still minor so he can’t claim his $10M yet) heir and a fund to send one student (chosen by the family) to Harvard on a full ride should he be accepted".
Once government "takes" all of the capital "for the presumed good of society", government will very rapidly become the enemy. Corruption will grow and grow, and society will be in the position of a corrupt, all powerful government.
It does not work folks. Read history, don't relive it like a bunch of idiotic sheep
IMHO it is not right to try to make people that earn more than us the target to be sacked. I think it is a bad thing. It is not a matter of you have less or you have more . It is a matter of respecting people who make money legally or inherit it by the will of their own relatives or whatever. I do not think anyone should be entitled to put hands into that for any single reason whatsoever unless that money has been stolen or made in illicit ways. That is the only valid reason IMHO.