No, it doesn't. For example, if I'm super rich and take out a loan using unrealized assets as collateral, then I could be taxed on the loan amount received. There are several such strategies that either force the sale of unrealized assets or tax other portions of the transactions when those unrealized assets are used as collateral.

What is bizarre is that somehow people making less than $200,000 a year can be heavily taxed while if you're a multi-millionaire or billionaire, suddenly things become so drastically difficult that you couldn't possibly be taxed on anything you do with your monopoly money.

The example you gave is, quite frankly, pointless in the context of discussing billionaires. Discussing real estate assets far less than $2 million is completely irrelevant to a discussion about people with net worth exceeding hundreds of millions of dollars, if not tens of billions of dollars.

> It is not wealth until you have it.

If that's true, then stop allowing people to turn it into wealth, which they do all the time.

With some good estate planning there is probably no tax to pay ever.

I don't get that tax back if I end up selling my house for half what it was taxed for last year. But I can appeal the evaluation for this year.

If my house is worth $1M in 2022, I pay tax on that $1M of value. If it goes down in value to $500K in 2023 (and is reassessed), I'd pay tax on $500K value in 2023.

If I own $1B of AMZN in 2022, I'd pay wealth tax on my $1B holdings in 2022, if the market tanks and AMZN is worth $50M in 2023, then I'd pay the wealth tax on $50M in 2023.

Just as with property taxes, a wealth tax is generally annual based on current assets.

speak for yourself! a property tax makes sense in theory: you're contributing to the entity that ensures your land is safe in the first place, but basing it on valuations instead of something like flat rates based on sqft is preposterous.

I'd go so far as to say that the degree to which the knowledge of such a tax affects your decisions relating to the property is enough to constitute a violation of natural property rights.

But let’s take your premise. The more valuable the land, the more an entity will spend to procure it (bigger army etc), and the more you thus have to spend to defend it, thus the more it costs.

Not quite. I can see what I’m getting back from the city for the property taxes on my home (or on my office).

It’s less clear to me what the city or government contributes to my company. I’m more inclined to say that its existence is a public service.

When the equivalent power of millions of people can become concentrated into a single person, you get all sorts of weird consequences! Most of them not good for the public as a whole, and often with a corrupting influence on liberal democracy. It is indeed fitting then, that a solution targeted at this very rare and specific problem would look a little weird; even though it's extremely similar to the existing property tax that every home owner pays.

I think that’s more being paid for having given someone a whole bunch of money up front, that they can now use to more quickly earn enough money to pay you (loan in a different name).

In San Francisco there is a 2.5 month window to appeal your property tax assessment. I did that for 2020, and was successful (the hearing was like a year+ later) and they gave me a refund.

I failed to do it for 2021, because I was under the mistaken assumption that they'd they'd also adjust my 2021 assessment after my appeal. They didn't. I guess that's on me?

I just sold that property for a loss and 15% less than my tax assessment, and I'm well past the appeal period for 2021/2022 sales tax year. So I think I'm out of luck. I just over-paid by 15%.

The places cost the same per month. But in SF, almost all of that was going to the premium/interest.

In Chicago, a massive amount was going to taxes and HOAs.

But I'd recommend selling enough of your BTC to pay taxes so you're not underwater if it goes down in value.

why do we need to keep growing gov't and adding more and more rules/programs/etc.? Certainly we don't need to keep spending more and more, cut it off and some point and stop growing it for some period..

Here's one good reason -- decades of underinvestment in infrastructure. The top tax bracket in the 1950's when the Interstate highway system was funded was 90% - now it's 37% and even that is mostly avoided by the most wealthy.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/state-us-infrastructure

Another reason is the impending climate disaster -- former arable land will become unfarmable, many coastal areas will become uninhabitable or need expensive flood control, etc. This is going to cause huge costs and will almost certainly require government assistance.

And carbon reduction will also be expensive.

Perhaps too we can stop irrigating desert and grow things like almonds (and actual food) in places like Iowa (with the most class 1 farm land in the US), instead of Iowa growing animal fodder and ethanol.

Most of these "crises" are self-inflicted crises in management.

A really interesting read on the rust and cost is the book "Rust: the longest war." It outlines how quickly costs escalate over time when something as simple as Rust is not dealt with and it left to build up.

Also, 90% top marginal tax wasn't really paid. Look at our historic tax revenue vs GPD. it's remarkably consistent, around ~17-20% no matter what policies we have floating around.

I am certain that we could reduce billions in spending to find money for actually important things. we do not need to keep increasing spending/revenue. we need to decrease spending and keep the same revenue. that's the easiest path.

We tax real estate because it can’t be moved out of the jurisdiction.

Of course size is not the only factor, which makes it complicated. Land or property value is probably a good proxy. If you house is >$1M it probably means you are wealthy.

Now you get one of two things in each individual case: Either people downsizing (good, frees up property for other people) or people paying tax (good for society).

The other side of every "family was forced to sell" is "another family was very happy to move in".

There is a point where I think it's okay to factor an unexpected large housing market increase into the equation. To raise a community's property tax unrealistically because a mass influx of buyers are willing to overextend their credit doesn't make much sense to me.

Also, I think this applies even more to our current situation and the fact that a lot of these communities had nothing to do with the politically charged economic decisions our politicians made with close to zero debate, and ultimately, the economic fallout it has created.

In my home state in the Midwest I have always thought a better way to go about it in the future would be to factor median salary and wages into the mix. That, along with an unrealistic housing market increase. I'm not sure what unrealistic would be defined as, but median value increasing 2x in five years is definitely unrealistic. At the very least things like this should be debated.

And being forced to sell to some degree is by design. One elderly lady hogging the land that could house 100 apartment dwellings in the middle of a city for example.

“Owning Land” is a human construct.

And it would be no worse than compulsory purchases by government for infrastructure.

Or someone leasing where the landlord wants more rent so they get kicked out.

I know six million American households who lost their homes to foreclosure in 2008 that might disagree with that one.

The S&P is down 20% in the last 3 months.

Massive wealth doesn't operate in income or even in typical capital gains advantages you're referring to. It operates at a scale where the value of the assets are so great, banks compete to give loans to them, which are not taxed like income.

It's totally absurd to argue that loans from assets isn't income. It's used to purchase more assets, to purchase tax favorable legislation, to buy media to keep us thinking this issue is about paying capital gains on your retirement portfolio.

If Bezos will "never get that money unless he sells stock" was a true statement, then where do all the yachts and houses and other assets come from? How does he buy them? If the IRS suddenly recognized loans taken against asset wealth or any exchange of assets as income, the tax rates of the super wealthy compared to the average American would suddenly look sane.

That seems kinda whack to me. If I get a $500k mortgage, it's not like I received $500k of income that year-- the house belongs to the bank, and I'll be making payments for 30 years. If I stop paying my mortgage, I'll lose "my" house and have nothing to show for it except an insane tax bill (just like Elon would have to give up some of his Tesla stock if he gets margin called)

The collateralized loans trick was really only semi-viable because of historically low interest rates. SOFR will climb up to the more standard rate of 5-15% APR, which we saw with LIBOR back in the day. At that point, the one-off 23.8% capital gains tax on selling stock becomes more competitive.

I don't think the loan and tax rates are particularly preferential.

Thanks to his twitter deal, he's had to publicize some info about how he gets his money. The interest rates on his loans range from SOFR+3% to SOFR+10%. Those rates aren't that low— even as a non-millionaire I could get similar ones from my bank (https://www.schwab.com/pledged-asset-line).

I pay 2.75% interest on my mortgage. So even Elon's best loan has an interest rate well above my mortgage. By the end of the year, his interest rate is on track to be around 3x higher than my mortgage! And like my mortgage, his loan has a large upfront payment and a minimum amount that must be repaid every year, it's not free money forever.

My effective federal tax rate is 20%. That's lower than the rate that a typical billionaire would pay on capital gains (23.8%).

Constant borrowing isn’t a free money machine, eventually you have to earn more to service the debt (income tax) or sell assets to pay it back (capital gains).

Have you ever taken a loan?

Ignoring the hyperpreferential tax treatment of capital gains, I assume? (LTCG are taxed far less than generic income, which in turn is taxed less than labor income.)

> You never got the income

It's not an income tax, so who cares?

Assets deliver utility while held; income isn't the only utility they deliver.

That's literally the point of wealth taxes.

If you own a $1 million house with an $800k mortgage, you pay tax on $1 million of property, but you only have $200k of wealth.

Billionaires are the world's biggest whiners. Even a tax burden that's proportional to what normal middle-class people pay is the end of the world.

The point of wealth taxes (see Texas real estate prices) is to disincentivize rapid asset appreciation.

Texas and California are different in many ways and this is the main one (California income tax vs Texas real estate tax).

California showed (shows) that income taxes only sort of disincentivize inequality, whereas Texas shows wealth taxes very much disincentivize inequality, so much so that the government has to actively lobby to get truly high paying jobs there.

It's the only realistic option to provide a UBI: in a world where human capital is quickly depreciating, provide people with financial capital so that they can still be a part of the resource distribution and consumption game.

If you need to unlock the equity you can get a HELOC. More generally, if you own an asset with a well-known pricing model you can use it as collateral for a loan.

To your second point I believe you do carry over tax losses for some time.

The other question I have has to do with feudalism. If we let "our" billionaires exist, does that mean that we keep feudalistic pressures at bay? Or do we enhance those pressures? Is that even the right question?

The fact that you're even asking that is a reason we shouldn't have billionaires -- world power relationships shouldn't be based on the wealth of individual citizens.

For example, what did Musk really talk about when he met with the president of Brazil? Did he represent American interests, Amazon Inc's interests, or Elon Musk's interests?

This is a very idealistic and impossible to ever implement take

I get that "wealth gets power" is not ideal, but the alternatives we can see around don't seem to be much better. Somebody will have the power, and we as a society would need some proxy to use so that it won't lead to a disaster. Being able to create and run successful businesses (yes, I know not all rich people are self-made, etc. - it's an imperfect proxy, but to a large measure a working one) doesn't look that bad, compared to "being born with right last name" or "being born with the correct facial features"...

FWIW, most wealthy people are wealthy because of inherited holdings and 60% of all wealth in the US is inherited.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/opinion/sunday/from-rags-...

The median dollar of wealth is inherited by the wealthiest top 5% of families, not earned as income - which your statistic doesn't even address.

Banging your drum even more loudly doesn't change the fact that you are off beat.

Source? This fails the sniff test, as the amount of wealth has grown at such a rapid rate this seems almost impossible.

What do you mean? It counts ownership stakes & stocks as well.

> I imagine we could arrive at 60%. But it doesn't mean what you think it means.

It means exactly what I think it means - if you get bequeathed $1 million dollars and get 8% returns from investing this, it doesn't mean you "self-made" $3.66 million more 20 years later.

What pointless designation.

Are you sure? Please tell me the top 10 names on the Epstein client list. I'll wait.

> most wealthy people are wealthy because of inherited holdings and 60% of all wealth in the US is inherited.

I'd like to see your sources. They probably counts by dollars, which is pointless, since one hyper-rich individual completely skews the picture - you can have a million self-made millionaires and one Elon Musk's son - and claim that the majority of millionaires is created by being Elon Musk's son. That's an obvious nonsense. It's like calculating average income of a people in a bar where Bill Gates just walked in, and making conclusions that everybody is rich. You need to count people, not raw dollars.

Mine say:

One measure of the percentage of the wealthy who are self-made is Forbes' own Forbes 400 list. In 1984, less than half the people on The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans were self-made. By 2018, in stark contrast, this same figure had risen to 67%.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzitelmann/2019/06/24/amaz...

Around 41.4 percent of the wealthiest one percent say they have inherited some money.

https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2017/10/10/the-wealthie...

The market research firm analyzed the state of the world’s ultra-wealthy population — or those with a net worth of $30 million or more. The report, which is based on 2018 data, “showed muted growth” in the number of ultra-wealthy people that year, “rising by 0.8% to 265,490 individuals,” says Wealth-X. Of those folks, 67.7% were self-made, while 23.7% had a combination of inherited and self-created wealth. Only 8.5% of global high-net-worth individuals were categorized as having completely inherited their wealth.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/26/majority-of-the-worlds-riche...

Counting people is not the important bit because I am concerned about the distributional equity of wealth not wealthy people.

> I am concerned about the distributional equity of wealth not wealthy people

If you exclude people, I am not sure I understand what you're talking about at all.

I'd reverse the skill and luck relationship. Success at that magnitude is almost entirely luck (and probably a little skill).

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/nntaleb/status/153417277358051328...

What the tweet is saying, and it seems right, is that looking at a probability graph the only way to get the billionaire-like outcome/outlier is to dramatically increase volatility, i.e. bet on long odds. If everyone went to work, maxed out their 401k, bought blue-chip stocks, and called it a day, basically nobody would have outlier net worth. But some people choose to increase the volatility of their money (buying crypto, starting a company, options trading, whatever) and as you'd expect 99.9999% of them don't get rich and the rest of them get uber-rich.

I think these activities are quite different however. Saying starting a company is the same nature of activity as betting on an extremely volatile asset ignores all the work that goes into successfully creating a working company. Surely, there's no guarantee this work will bring result - but it's still not the same as just betting on random high-volatility assets. Even options trading is not (always) just betting, and for more successful traders probably involves certain amount of knowledge in addition to luck. But I don't think describing creating a company as completely probabilistic activity makes any sense.

The tweet is saying that founders becoming massively rich is a natural outcome of probability distribution -- huge payoffs require either huge bets at a smaller win multiplier (less "risky") or comparatively smaller bets at a huge win multiplier (more "risky").

Someone like Elon Musk having political influence is a bad thing because he's raging capitalist that can, will, and does exploit those below him. It's why he has such a love for his Chinese labour force. They have less rights and they will work 16 hour days in his factory making the cars that make him money.

Elon Musk is great as a wealthy private businessman, that's where capitalism firmly belongs. But he has no place in any sort of politics. Countries aren't run like businesses.

You are indoctrinated into believing that democracy cannot work and good government is impossible.

At the scale of continental countries like US (or any BRIC country), it is. The decision makers are simply too far removed from the people who get to live with the policies.

Optimal decisions for themselves, not for the country.

In theoretically egalitarian systems like communism, a committee makes decisions about how to allocate resources. Then whoever holds most sway over the committee holds sway over resource allocation. If you do it by direct democracy, then whoever owns the news media & ad platforms (or has money to do massive PR campaigns and ad buys) holds sway over resource allocation. You can't escape this: somebody is going to make the decisions, unless you just run the world by computers and have humans slot in for menial tasks.

1) The fact that it's necessary to "hold sway" is a result of the power not actually being held by that person, but being loaned to that person by the rest of the committee in a way that can be withdrawn at any time.

2) The committee members are all subject to the process that chooses them. That's the power center, and the character of that process defines the legitimacy of what the committee does. If a billionaire chooses them, the committee is a mask. If the people being governed choose them, that's the basis of popular sovereignty, and the justification for post-Enlightenment government in general.

> whoever owns the news media & ad platforms (or has money to do massive PR campaigns and ad buys) holds sway over resource allocation.

You're talking about other billionaires. The conversation is about not having billionaire.

So this boils down to if billionaires choose a committee, billionaires will run things, and if people vote for a committee and billionaires control all of the information that those people get, billionaires will run things. You can escape this if you don't have billionaires.

The rest of your post is largely true, but also applies to billionaires. They derive their power from people being willing to trade money for the goods and services produced by the assets they own. When people cease to make that trade, their money and their power evaporate. Just look what's happened to the shareholders of Kodak, Xerox, Pan-Am, GM, Sun Microsystems, Lehman Bros, etc.

Note also that systems without billionaires have existed, and have often been worse in terms of distributing power to many people. See eg. Soviet Communism, where power rests in the Politburo, and the local party apparatchik holds outsize sway over everything regardless of competence. Or even post-WW2 U.S, when the top marginal tax rate was 90% and executive compensation was far lower because there was no point in paying a lot when the government got 90% of it. Corporations instead compensated their top execs in-kind: usage of private jets, corner offices, ability to influence what every American thought through advertising and mass culture, influence on policy makers. Orwell's 1984 and Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent were about the 1945-1980 period, not the post-Internet era. Power was significantly more centralized during that time period than it is now.

BOFH: I've upped my priority, so up yours.

This is a really good question.

I believe the answer is that the USA will be better able to outcompete those countries that do have them. History has shown time and again that massive inequality is a huge barrier to maximizing the productivity of all of a society's members.

It leads to cynism and corruption and breaks down cooperation. It forces a society to spend valuable resources on policing in order to keep the poor taking from the rich. It's just economically incredibly inefficient. You need some level of inequality to incentivize people but once you go beyond that, it's a net harm.

Based on what? The US already outcompetes these other countries in business success and average citizen income. What countries don’t have billionaires that are competitive?

> History has shown time and again that massive inequality is a huge barrier to maximizing the productivity of all of a society's members.

History has literally never shown this. This is the first time we’ve had massive inequality while still having a solid middle class. The jury is still out on whether the instability of the past was just because of excessive poverty and no upward mobility or because wealthy people were there.

Empirically, this is actually beyond doubt by now. Piketty et al. were in the news 10 years ago with this very topic, showing that inequality is detrimental to growth, for many countries and over very large periods of time. And there has been a bunch of additional studies after that publication that support these findings.

There is no evidence about it stifling growth in the US in his work nor any follow-up work.

There are countless examples of rich or powerful and connected people buying officer posts, for example, and meritocracies (= equality of chances) stomping all over these corruped systems.

There's little reason to believe rich people willingly or not, do not distort every market they're in. That's why they become rich, to be powerful.

Has it? Restricting what opportunities individual people are permitted to follow would I assume both reduce productivity and increase inequality, but that doesn't have the inequality being the cause of the lower than theoretically possible productivity.

Now, the money could sit in the bank, sure. But even then, the vast majority of the money "in the bank" is actually being lent out to other people, who spend it.

So unless the money is literally sitting in a vault, it's not "parked" anywhere.

I'm very open to being corrected here, so feel free to do so. My understanding of economics is decidedly limited.

This is a YC-affiliated/run discussion forum. I think I speak for many entrepreneurs (former or current) that: investing is really, really important.

Investments from VCs (and form their wealthy LPs) makes entrepreneurship something that normal people can do (as opposed to only something rich people can afford to do.)

Either directly as VC capital or indirectly via public ownership. If billionaires suddenly couldn't own public companies, stock prices would drop and we'd likely see layoffs.

Let's macrosize the perspective: why do you think Unity moved HQ from DK to the USA? Could it be the crushing taxes here?

This is the issue. You really can't have it both ways. Yet many Americans love to fetishize a hatred for few very specific individuals without thinking through the whole causal chain that girds their economy.

Denmark consistently ranks in the top 5 of countries with the best quality of life. A year of parental leave, great social welfare, universal healthcare and retirement benefits, etc.

Including federal/state/local taxes, healthcare premiums, retirement contributions, disability insurance, etc, I pay close to 50% of my salary in the USA

And I'd still worry about how I'll pay the bills if I lost my job.

why do I want to pay half of my salary until I am enfeebled and the state lets me enjoy my enfeeblement?

Because that's how the state pays for the enfeebled today? Are you really suggesting you want to leave Denmark to go somewhere with lower tax rates, then when you need social healthcare, you'll move back to Denmark and take advantage of the healthcare system that you didn't pay for?

Isn’t that the point of their healthcare/retirement system? It’s socialist, not user pays. That it covers everyone irrespective of their tax contributions. Otherwise it would exclude the unemployed, students, disabled, low income (untaxed) people (esp housewife/househusbands) etc.

I don't think "Encourage people to move out of the country during the working years and move back to the country when they are old and need expensive healthcare coverage" is the point.

It may be the result of their system, but it's not the point. But if it became a problem, they could require that you buy back into the system after an extended absence out of the country.

And if you can’t buy back in? Won and lost your fortune overseas (or never won at all and remained poor all your life) and returned “home” destitute? What then?

There are two common ripostes to this. One is that these are wasteful vanity projects, which just proves the point that there is value to this sort of decentralized system of capital allocation where some small percentage of total available capital is in the hands of quixotic individuals who can pursue aims that a majority of the population doesn’t (yet) see the value of. The second objection is that these things should all be handled by the state. It’s fine for people to want space exploration to be entirely handled by NASA for instance, but the record is pretty clear that US (and by extension humanity’s) pace of space exploration has been absolutely transformed by the ability for private actors with substantial resources to make moves outside of an existing bureaucracy.

The US government spends upwards of $4T dollars a year, and the media class has a much larger influence on politics than and group of billionaires could buy. Because most billionaires are entrepreneurs they also typically look at ways they can deploy capital that are underserved and where the state would be an inappropriate actor in terms of required risk and innovation. A group of talented weirdos that have the resources to move the needle on neglected projects is a feature not a bug.

Since the charity is run by a board and bound to abide by its charter, it's not the same thing as the person controlling the wealth himself. The Gates Foundation is not going to buy Bill Gates a private island with a $100M super yacht to get there.

I would expect this to be a "distinction without a difference" if the billionaire is careful/competent about how he staffs the board and how he writes the charter.

You haven't yet figured out that all institutions and corporations are merely instruments of the monied classes?

Billionaires are the state. They would not exist if the state didn't specifically provide them with the mechanisms to amass such wealth at the expense of the rest of us.

Lobbying is a thing. In the US those people can pretty much legally buy any politician they want.

Wait... That didn't actually work.

source: https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=RUB

"if you look at the long-run evolution, we’ve seen less concentration of wealth. So the top 10 percent of the wealth distribution today would have 60 percent in Europe, 70 percent in the U.S., as compared to 90 percent before World War I in Europe. This did not destroy the economy. If anything, this decline in the share of total wealth going to top 10 percent and the corresponding increase in the share going to the next 40 percent has contributed to a much faster economic growth in the 20th century than in previous centuries.

"I think partly because it allowed more people to participate, to the economy. And also partly because it came also with the rise of education. And this was the true source of productivity in the long run, rather than the enormous level of inequality that we had before World War I. This theoretical discourse that more inequality, more concentration of wealth is always better for economic growth was made, of course, throughout history by people who had large concentration of wealth, certainly in Europe before World War I.

"And this is a discourse that, in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan tried to tell Americans, basically tried to tell them, look we’ve gone too far with the New Deal, with Roosevelt, in terms of progressive taxation or wealth redistribution. We are going to cut top tax rate by two, where they’re going to go down to 28 percent or 30 percent, as compared to the 80 percent, 90 percent top tax rate under Roosevelt. So the promise that was made by Reagan during the 1980s was that cutting top tax rate might lead to more inequality, but will also lead to so much more innovation, more economic growth. And the incomes of average Americans are going to grow much faster than they used to grow.

"Except that this is not what we’ve seen at all. So if you look at the three decades after Reagan, 1990 to 2020, the growth rate of national income per capita in the U.S. was only 1.1 — 1.2 percent as compared to 2 percent, 2.5 percent in the period of 1950 to 1980, or 1950 to 1990, which itself was not particularly exceptional. It was the same — 1910 to 1950, it was about 2 —2.5 percent. 1870 to 1910, around 2 percent. So in fact, the post-Reagan period, 1990-2020 has been particularly bad in terms of growth rate of national income per capita, which at the end of the day is the best economic measure we have of the increase in productivity and this should reflect innovation, et cetera."

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/07/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...

The most productive decades in the US also correspond with a period when the US was essentially the only industrial power not absolutely shattered by World War 2. In global economic terms, the post-war period was a huge anomaly, and I would be hesitant to tie too many conclusions/correlative effects to something as singular as domestic tax policy.

Does someone earning more than you hurt you?

Also… do billionaires employ people? Do you want their employees to have their jobs seized from them when the johny555 tax goes into effect?

This is an absurd slippery slope, and a bizarre appeal to "plenty of people" to boot. There is a significant and categorical difference between $500/mo and $1 billion. You undermine your own point by not addressing it.

In fact, if there were a wealth cap of $500/mo as you posit, it would take over 150000 years to accumulate $1 billion, which frankly only reinforces how excessive that amount of money is.

It's the same problem when it comes to tax increases - everyone thinks raises taxes on everyone else is a great idea, themselves? Oh, not me, I'm not rich.

This even happens on HN which is a pretty well off crowd. When the SALT deduction was capped everyone complained - even the same ones that claimed "I'm fine paying higher taxes".

The same way most of them do now -- through venture capital firms. Or maybe if they had more tax revenue, the US government could sponsor more speculative research and companies.

I'm not talking about "Let's start a social media app for Aardvarks!" kind of ideas, but actual scientific research. We used to have pure research orgs like Bell Labs, but companies aren't funding pure research any more, so we need more investment from government. Not every idea should have a path to monetization before it's funded.

I don't equate "skunkworks" with high risk. To me, that's not "risk" as much as "I don't care about monetization in the first place", like you're saying. I agree that research without promise of a payout is sorely missing these days.

When I say "maybe we should have less high risk", I'm thinking of fly-by-night companies that do make a social media app for aardvarks, spend a bunch of money on slick marketing so they can pump their IPO, and then pull the rug with them when they bail.

But billionaires don't become billionaires by doing skunkworks projects. They often do the latter.

So there is the possibility the market can be made to care again.

And sure, you could just say "well, let's just not do bailouts then", but then that leads to things like bank closures, airline collapses, imploding automobile industries [0], etc. Basically, we can argue about specific cases, but there are some things that become too important to fail.

Ultimately, there are things that benefit society that taxes should be used to pay for. Some of those things should be done regardless of what any potential payout might be. Note that billionaires don't help solve these problems. If anything, they make them worse because they often pay a far lower percentage tax than anybody else.

[0]: Of which the US at least is highly dependent on. I want this to change, but it won't be an overnight thing by any means.

This is rhetoric that tries to confuse two totally different scenarios in order to convince the majority to oppose something that only hurts a tiny minority. Saying "one person should not have 5 generations worth of wealth" is not the same thing as saying "people should not make a middle class salary". They aren't even similar. If there was any place on earth where $1,000,000,000 was comparable to $500/month in any way, you might have a point.

> Does someone earning more than you hurt you?

Yes. Without a doubt. Wealth is freely convertible to and from political power, so outsized wealth translates into outsized political/lawmaking power, which affects us all.

Let's make an extreme example if you don't believe me: Should sextillionaires exist? Do you think that maybe, just maybe, someone having $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 might have a negative effect on other people's lives?

> Also… do billionaires employ people?

Some do, some don't. Some non-billionaires employ people, some don't. Employment was around long before billionaires. It's not a requirement.

To me, wealth should be like the speed of light. There should be a limit, and it should be increasingly harder and harder to approach (but never achieve) that limit as you get wealthier. Not sure how you'd actually implement such a Lorentzian economic speed limit, but it seems fair to me. Make the limit high enough where at 99% of it, you can have your needs and your family's needs fully met in the most expensive neighborhood on earth, or whatever.

Any cap you put on the top could have the effect of reducing the value of a currency meaning the buying power doesn't change. A billion cap would make your million dollar house worth $100. However you slice it you are poor and someone else is rich.

The problem with billionaires though is they typically make and hold their money through assets, so what we really need is a bunch of reforms on how we tax assets. Namely, it should be such that if you have more than $1B in assets, taxes eat away at it pretty swiftly until it is back down to something reasonable. I think that's something we all can get behind.

Disclaimer: I live in a 3rd world country and my salary is 1/3 of what the standard US salary is.

YES, I do believe that everybody's compensation (including mine) who are in the top 10% of the population should be decreased/limited. Provided that their living costs are adjusted so that the $500/month get you similar standard of living to other nice places (say, Chile, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, etc).

The top 10% of the population hold 70% of the total wealth. That's just crazy and unsustainable. How the 90% of the population haven't turned on us is just sheer luck and a political, security system that is rigged in our favor.

I would be happy to be part of a "pay cut initiative" for all the top 10% earners, if it meant equalizing opportunities for everybody. I had the opportunity to grow up and be friends with poor people who just did not have the chance to succeed, so I don't believe the "poor people are just lazy" narrative. There's good hard working people that just never had a chance. Similarly how there is bad rich people that just want to leech from others.

Been sustained so far throughout all of human history.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highes...

Don't confuse monetary inequality with wealth inequality. Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units.

What are the actual differences between the life of the average American worker and Jeff Bezos? It's not that big. Jeff Bezos has the ability to buy luxuries most of us could never dream of, sure, but what about the essentials?

Nearly everyone can get fresh, nutritious meat, as well as fruits and vegetables. High quality milk and dairy products. Frozen goods. Bacterial epidemics are unheard of. Our recent viral pandemic increased annual deaths by about 10-15% over baseline — compare this to epidemics which used to wipe out entire populations. Life expectancy for all people, regardless of class, ranges between 2-3x human life expectancy in a state of nature (roughly 30 years). You can travel hundreds of miles in a day for only a few hours of labor worth of money. You can cross continents or oceans with a few day's of labor worth of money.

Sure, Bezos can have a fancier car with someone driving or his own jet with a pilot flying, but at the end of the day, you can both take off from LAX and land at JFK 6 hours later. You're both going to eat 2,000 calories of nutritious food. You both have running water. And, you're sitting here, both able to communicate with everyone in the world instantly.

Let's not buy into the political propaganda about inequality, the reality of the situation is right in front of our eyes.

Here are just a few massive differences between the life of the average American worker and Jeff Bezos that have nothing to do with buying luxury goods:

1. Jeff Bezos can get an audience with any Congressperson, any State governor, most countries's heads of state and probably the President of the US, with a telephone call and likely with less than 24 hours notice. That person will listen to and likely be influenced by what he says.

2. Jeff Bezos's public statements can move global financial markets.

3. Jeff Bezos can (and does) own and control mass media companies which can amplify and downplay political issues and shape the outcomes of elections.

4. Through philanthropy, Jeff Bezos can, if he wants, simply decide what counts as a "public good" to be funded and supported, as opposed to the public deciding through the democratic process. Bezos is capable of offering an amount of support for his causes that dwarfs government-funding. We are merely lucky that billionaire philanthropists have so far focused on good things like curing malaria and not on evil.

Basically, when you remove money, something else becomes the currency you're describing. Taking away billionaires wealth might actually make it harder to identify the people who have this influence. Rather than news outlets writing articles every other day about Jeff, you'd have some shady person high up in some unelected bureaucracy getting to wield this power. How is that better?

Can he?

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/debgordon/2021/10/13/50-of-amer...

Americans are the people who complain when the wifi goes down or someone says the wrong word.

Well, then, surely it doesn't matter if we tax away 90% of Bezo's wealth, right? His living standard will be same.

Beyond that, though, you can only tax away 90% of billionaires' wealth once. That whole game depends on them continuing to produce the same amount of wealth, even though they won't receive any of the returns. (Remember also that most of these people reinvest the majority of this money into their ventures, meaning that taking these dollars will have a compounding negative effect on future productivity.) Look at history. Your superficially benevolent idea has been tried, it always results in mass hunger and death.

Why would they keep taking on so much responsibility? To raise your standard of living? Why should they care about you?

Any of those guys are capable of becoming a surf bum, living on $30k a year, but instead, they build massive companies that deliver incredible value to the rest of us — they get their money because we pay them for that value. Would you rather incentivize Elon Musk to keep working on Tesla or would you prefer him to retire?

So you are advocating 0% taxes?

That argument (of type Econ 101/Ayn Rand) is misguided, because the world is not as envisaged by Econ 101 (or Ayn Rand, who famously enjoyed Social Security and Medicare).

Counter arguments:

1. Society has made available the gift of the limited liability company, to encourage risk taking and entrepreneurship.

2. Society has made available streets, canalisation, schools, defence, police, fire fighters, certain forms of insurance, etc., for a simple reason: market failures. Those goods would be provided in insufficient (suboptimal) number by the free market due to: strong positive externalities, non-excludability, adverse selection, and many other reasons.

For those (and many other reasons) government does have the right to taxation. The question then is the optimal level.

> Your superficially benevolent idea has been tried, it always results in mass hunger and death.

Yeah, the poor Northern Europeans, starving to death... Somewhat higher income, capital gains, estate, and maybe even wealth taxes won't result in mass starvation.

> they get their money because we pay them for that value.

Again, a neat Econ 101 idea that fails to take into account reality. "salary = marginal product" is only true under entirely idealised assumptions of perfect competition [1], in particular no economies of scale and no network effects. That is most definitely not the case for today's tech companies, which quite obviously have monopolistic tendencies, thus extraction of monopoly profit (rent) which accrues, guess to whom, the boss.

And, for what it's worth, if Elon becomes a surf bum, or twitters full time, we'll still get great electric vehicles, maybe a tad later.

[1] Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing...

> Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units.

From the paper below:

"This reflects considerably stronger global convergence in quality of life than in income"

https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/technology-and-dev...

When we get 3days work week and 4 days of „time for my stuff” we can go back to discussing that.

The ruling class will happily soak up all spare productive capacity - and as the amount of work necessary to keep someone clothed, sheltered, and fed went down, that spare productive capacity grows, and more of it flows upwards.

Landlord was lending land to peasents - rich peasents, because bottom cast did not even have a chance to talk to landlord.

For the land peasents got, they had to work for the landlord specific number of days in a week. For some time it was 1-2-3-4-5 days per week. Most common was 3 days.

Thing is - the peasent was not obligated to do that work himself. He could have sent a son, family member or even hire someone.

That way it was super easy to keep his agreement with the landlord while mostly focus on his own farm.

Who had it terrible were bottom, poor peasents that worked for other peasents.

They did not have their own land and were at mercy of their “master peasents”.

They most likely had to work whole week or 5-6 days.

They were more of a slave than a peasent tbh, but its a hard disregarded truth.

Current middle class in our times could be translated to “master peasents” back in time. Slave peasents would be the slave-wage ppl.

When I discuss or compare medival peasents to current corporation workers I always compare master peasents to corposlaves.

And master peasents had it super better than corposlaves do now.

To claim that an impoverished serf working land "had 4 days off a week" is nonsense. They worked hard af for all sunlight hours for some seasons, and had plenty of leisure in times like the winter. On average, maybe that's 4 days off, but let's not pretend that working the land is not back breaking work. It's not leisure. If you really think some 40 hour wfh coding job is harder work than farming for your life, then there's no law saying you can't buy some land and go off grid. You're welcome to subsist. Hell you could land a few million subs on youtube airing the experience, that category is all the rage these days

Well.. noone said that. If you mind reading the comment again.

But its true that peasents had a lot more time to work on their own stuff than on what master told them to do.

Either way most peasents worked for higher tier peasent because landlord often has hubdreds of hectars of land.

But in the past 4 decades, I'll remind you that around 800,000,000 Chinese (that's eight hundred million people) were lifted above the global poverty line and were able to stop subsistence farming. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...

So to say that global inequality is getting worse, when billion+ have been lifted out of abject poverty in that time, it's not correct to me. Things were worse 40 years ago when billion+ more humans were below the global poverty line, even if today billionaires are even richer than the middle class.

Imagine you live in a neighbourhood of 50 people. Everyone starts earning more, that's absolute income increase. Then imagine your richer neighbours income has increased 100x faster than anyone else, that's income inequality.

Exactly. Didn't really change which broad group of families were in control (some were lowered a peg through taxes for supporting the wrong side.)

>Other than that top families basically unchanged 1000 years.

So we've shifted the goalposts from "all of human history" to "in my country" and only for the past "1000 years".

No... why do you think that?

> The top 10% of the population hold 70% of the total wealth.

That's basically been the case everywhere, all the time. In other countries the 'top 10%' has changed hands through revolution, war, etc, but it's still 10% controlling 70% (or whatever) - because they take the last 10%'s 70% and carry on! No goal posts moved there.

Someone asked a separate question about revolution, and I said even that's not successfully happened where I live. I wasn't making a broader point with that answer to that question.

> "all of human history" to "in my country" and only for the past "1000 years"

I mean... are you under some sort of misapprehension that before 1000 and outside of the UK there was some kind of democratic socialist consensus? Fraid not.

Well, according to your first assertion we're not supposed to cover only your country for the past 1,000 years. We're supposed to cover all of human history - every nation, as far back as at least 10,000BCE.

> Someone came back and pointed out that it hasn't always remained that way and there have certainly been blips

The blips didn't change the ratios though. Ratios have stayed the same.

> You then responded by saying "not in my country" for the past "1000 years".

Yeah - my country hasn't really had those blips. And the blips in other countries didn't change the ratios anyway, just transferred who owned them, so it was a separate point.

> Well, according to your first assertion we're not supposed to cover only your country for the past 1,000 years.

No it was a separate comment and point!

I'm not trying to be pedantic, but this comment contributes to pernicious myths about the human condition. If you're interested in this subject I would recommend the book "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

It doesn't though. Taxing the rich, limiting the existence of billionaires is not going to do anything for equalizing opportunities.

If you think so, then please tell me the name of one efficiently-run government organization?

> If you think so, then please tell me the name of one efficiently-run government organization?

How are these two passages connected? If there's one efficiently-run government organization (there are, even in the US—benefits programs tend to be quite efficient, contrary to "common knowledge") then that proves... what? That taxing the rich would equalize opportunities? The two things have practically nothing to do with one another.

Why is government judged on efficiency rather than service?

If there's a government agency with money to give to vision impaired people, and they set up a website (graphics heavy, non-ADA compliant of course) as the only way to sign up for the payments, that department would be extremely efficient - they might only be able to reach a fraction of their target market, but they'd do so very efficiently with little overhead and they'd even have money left over since they had so few applicants, so they could cut the budget next year!

In contrast, if that same agency took $100M of their fund to set up offices across the country, and hire outreach staff to drive to the homes of qualified applicants to help them apply, that wouldn't be very efficient, but it would provide better service.

Government is not a business and shouldn't be run like one.

Please let this trope die. The US government is generally, and especially when it comes to welfare programs, efficient.

"It currently stands at about 25 percent, as did in the 1970s. This means the ability of the poor to sustain a higher level of income independently of transfers has not changed over time."

[1] https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/economic_b...

But these are not the "capitalist class". They don't own significant portions of a company unless they started a small business (a lawyer or doctor running their own practice). They also generally had to go through an enormous burden to get there. A doctor for example might be nearly 40 years old with $500,000+ in debt before they're making $300k, and many doctors will never make that much, period.

The funny part of "limiting income" is that it only affects the working rich, not the capitalist class. Steve Job's salary was $1 and many CEO's famously have basically no salary and compensation in stock.

So what do you do? Tax their stock sales? We do and should do more. Force them to sell their stock for the benefit of the taxpayer? Ban them from even owning large amounts of the company? Have the government automatically own part of the company? All of these sound yikes to me.

Basically, you're saying that the current distribution is crazy/unsustainable (and maybe it is) but the distribution is actually not totally out of whack with the 80/20 rule (or Pareto principle).

Just wondering where your confidence comes from that a functioning society doesn't actually depend somewhat on that distribution? i.e. that the general populace's sense of "fair" isn't actually correctly calibrated at this distribution?

I would argue that it's not going to collapse to 1 artist or 1 song for a similar reason that all wealth will never be in the hands of 1 person. If the rate of change (or just raw distribution) in wealth is unhealthy, that will present itself in the form of a less healthy economy.

That will likely cause a bit of a churn and redistribution to sort of self correct. There's also the fact that wealth typically doesn't survive through generations all that well. If this didn't happen, the Rockafeller's/ Vanderbilt's/ Carnagie's from the past would still have the top wealth holdings - sure they are still incredibly well off and have a huge advantage from family name, but per a Forbes list none of them are in the top 2500 wealthiest.

You're not making a serious point if you're looking at world income to guide policy in the USA, or any other first world country, you're just making up a strawman.

do billionaires employ people

I'm sure they have a small household staff, maybe security, yacht staff, private pilots, so maybe in the small hundreds.

But Tesla employees a 100,000 people, SpaceX employes 10,000 - both of those companies would exist regardless of Elon Musk's personal wealth. In fact, having so much wealth in one person is a liability to the company -- Musk can singlehandedly tank Tesla's stock.

You're making bizarre nonsensical arguments here--slippery slope, strawman, etc.

So how do you decide who's scale to use?

Like the way all other murky subjects are settled, you just decide on one. We don't legalize murder just because some slayings are justified. The existence of grays areas does not preclude the black and white.

There has to be a better solution.

Sure, over successive generations, the family might lose control of their original fortune/company, but that is compatible with the intention of the tax.

edit: Just noticed that you are talking about estate taxes and I'm talking about wealth taxes...

But what you propose is probably better than the alternative at least.

He who owns then capital is king, so tax the capital.

But in reality it would as you say force all sorts of unwanted liquidation and monetisation of assets just to pay the tax.

You don't see your error?

What we're talking about here is when people like Jeff Bezos have billions of dollars of income--direct income from gains realized in asset sales, income generated from property, stock sales, salaries, etc.--we shave a significant portion of those gains off in a wealth tax.

The economy is not a zero sum game. But billionaires are getting all the growth while middle class and the poor see their share of the economy shrink.

This is not about my neighbour earning more than me, it's about corporations that take over big chunks of the economy.

In your own sentence you had to use specific words "their share of the economy shrinks" can be true, while their wealth increases. The economy is not a zero sum game. The middle class could see their share of the economy increase while also having standard of living, total wealth, etc. all decreasing.

Yes. Because they can afford private schooling, legal and medical care that the bottom 90% cannot because those services are privatized and only available to the very wealthy. If the ruling class/wealthy who controlled the system could not depend on their vast wealth for great schools for their children, health and legal protection - then all of a sudden the social system would be spectacular, and everyone would benefit.

Inequality is poisonous because it creates massive disincentives to create a working socialized health, education, legal system....

Game theory says there are no easy answers. Child outcome data suggest that strong family structures seem to have the most impact.

There doesn't really seem to be much of a tragedy of the commons when it comes to healthcare - nobody is really that excited about getting an unneeded biopsy, or hip replacement, or colonoscopy....

Agreed that full-throated capitalism seems to be the best system when it comes to allocating most resources (I absolutely do not begrudge Billionaires their Yachts, big houses, islands, private jets - have at it!) - but it's pretty sad when someone who works hard their entire life has to die 10 years early because they can't afford a decent doctor.

Nobody makes billions by "earning more than you", they make it my owning companies, or funds, so this has nothing to do with salaries.

But the fact is that the existence of billionaires hurts everyone, especially in poor countries, but also definitely in the US. Now I'm not talking about the ethics of some people wallowing in wealth why others are starving, the biggest problem is that when you reach a certain level of wealth you can start influencing, or even controlling, public policy. This obviously has the effect that public funds are diverted away from the public into their pockets. In the third world this process is quite direct, in the rich world it's more about enacting policies that benefit these oligarchs, at the expense of everyone else.

This is a huge problem.

Someone taking the wealth that other people have produced with their labor is not earning, though. And a lot of us do think that earning 300x what the average worker does is a physical impossibility.

Never mind that a billionaire could live anywhere and literally couldn’t spend all of their money if they tried.

Rich people spending their money isn’t really the problem. It helped put me through college.

Because those yachts were bought with money skimmed off our labor.

If that was the case, it should work both ways: when Bezos "lost" $20 billions of May 1st, how many skimmed labourers suddenly were able to afford $1 million houses ?

What matters is 1) how much wealth any given employee generates, and 2) how much of that generated wealth they retain. Anything that doesn't end up in their pockets, and is not a business expense otherwise, is economic rent collected by their employer.

Why would it? The notion that "it should work both ways" assumes that "both ways" are equally viable.

The average joe in america and many other places has more money in a month than many have a year, the average american or european has access to luxuries other people dream off.

We are rich by proxy of simply living in the states or in europe. Furthermore we also have more opportunities and the ability to become a millionaire too.

We are envied by many places worldwide, we need to stop being angry at what others have and be better.

I hate the anti-rich people talk because we could do far more productive things.

besides, to many people we are included in that rich category we talk own about.

Corporations have a net positive effect on society, so we should sit by and watch the dragons add to their hoard? They don't need a billion dollars, it's just a video game to these people. They want to increase their high scores so they can be top of the leaderboard.

Also, millionaires include people who saved a million dollars over their lifespan in order to retire. Retirees need that money if they want to live a modest lifestyle, pay for unexpected (or really expected at that age) health care costs, and support their grandchildren. It's a luxury we'd all be lucky to have and tragically many people weren't able to achieve. Add in an order of magnitude and what more do you get? What value does a person add to the world when they have a billion dollars instead of a million?

So it comes down to: is a handful of pseudo-randomly selected[0] people having wealth on the scale of billions a good outcome or a bad one? Personally I think it's pretty obviously the latter, and if you agree then I struggle to see why a wealth tax isn't the obvious solution.

0: "It isn't random, they worked harder than everyone else!" Where would Microsoft be if Gates' mom wasn't friends with IBM's John Opel? Where would Amazon be if Bezos had been born 5 years earlier, or later? Etc.

Citation needed.

Maybe we shouldn't speak of companies as being "net positive" or "net negative", but rather speak of what could be improved if there was more competition, more companies, more market. Less monopolies.

If you think Amazon is unfairly using their monopoly to keep others out and capture the market, state your claim. If you think competitors could do better, prove it with consumer choice.

Walmart or Shopify or eBay or wherever you want to shop are just a click away. If consumers think they can do better, then they will. I have already ditched Amazon for all those reasons. But you cannot speak for others.

The competitors you list also aren't head-on in competition with Amazon. Aliexpress predominantly serves non-American markets. eBay, like it, is an auction site. Shopify does not have one central market, it's completely decentralized. Walmart is the most similar to Amazon, and perhaps with its acquisition of Jet.com and its growing investments in ecommerce, it may yet prove to be a lasting competitor. Stay tuned.

Greater reach and resources is part & parcel of being the top consumer choice. If they blanket the airwaves, if there is some asymmetry, still who cares? You're going to have to show how consumers do not have a choice or how it doesn't help consumers.

Because regardless of how intense Amazon's marketing and reach get, their competitors are still one click away. Finding out about competitors is one search query away, one media article away, or one advertisement away. Frankly, if a consumer is unable to expend the minimal effort to find & choose an Amazon competitor to buy a product, they're basically not trying at all. And not trying is their choice.

As far as anti-competitive behavior, I will defer to luminaries more informed than I

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...

https://www.natlawreview.com/article/amazon-wins-ruling-resu...

It doesn't matter if there isn't a direct Amazon competitor. All large companies compete on multiple fronts. It does not mean there is no competition in shopping.

I don't respond to essay dumps like this. If you want to say something, you're going to have to say it or quote it.

If you refuse to engage further in this conversation, that is your prerogative and it is noted. We can consider this matter closed.

Essay dumping is not conversation. Although it is also your prerogative to avoid conversation as well.

> If Amazon detected lower prices on other sites, it would bury their products in Amazon search results, where they got most of their sales. Some of the merchants were eager to grow their sales on other sites, but Amazon’s policies prevented them from offering lower prices elsewhere to draw shoppers away.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-05/amazon-is...

> Amazon constantly scans rivals’ prices to see if they’re lower. When it discovers a product is cheaper on, say, Walmart.com, Amazon alerts the company selling the item and then makes the product harder to find and buy on its own marketplace -- effectively penalizing the merchant. In many cases, the merchant opts to raise the price on the rival site rather than risk losing sales on Amazon.

> Merchants have long complained that Amazon wields outsize influence over their businesses. Besides paying higher fees, many now have to buy advertising to stand out on the increasingly cluttered site. Some report giving Amazon 40% or more of each transaction, up from 20% a few years ago.

> Some merchants are keen to increase their sales on Walmart, which charges less to sell products on its marketplace. But sellers say the price alerts are forcing them to maintain allegiance to Amazon and making it harder to diversify their businesses. Walmart routinely fields requests from merchants to raise prices on its marketplace because they worry a lower price on Walmart will jeopardize their sales on Amazon, says a Walmart manager, who requested anonymity to speak freely about an internal matter.

The fact is that consumers continually choose to entrust Amazon the power to pick on their behalf, making it their consumer choice. If sellers leave, consumers often choose Amazon over the seller. Amazon can only "bury" merchants in their search results because consumers continue to be satisfied with what Amazon finds for them. If consumers found Amazon's search results lacking, they can find the missing sellers on other websites. Practically every consumer knows how to buy things online outside of Amazon, a lot of them do it all the time.

Personally, I choose to buy many better and cheaper things outside Amazon. I do not choose Amazon to find any of my stuff. That choice has always been extremely easily available to any consumer, but they don't choose it. Consumers aren't being denied a choice, they have chosen: they chose Amazon's higher fee marketplace.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/9/22968927/congress-justice-...

It is a separate argument, but 'more competition' isn't a magical fix to everything. This sort of gating mechanism relies on the end user/consumer having good knowledge, sound judgement, etc. Also what is best for the consumer isn't best for the society. A wild example - For me, as the consumer I'm happy to get an iPhone for $200, but that might mean that Apple pays their employees below US minimum wage.

So, I think you need to prove how Amazon is net positive in society?

In the interest of full disclosure I enjoy the occasional cigar.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxycodone

What sort of citation will make you happy?

This is indeed a very controversial statement because the rich are living a lifestyle which is at best unsustainable for the planet. They emit more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere for their own lavish lifestyles. They exploit poor labor conditions and lobby against every minor improvement. They don’t contribute to our shared funds like regular people, decreasing the state’s funds for more infrastructure which would have created more jobs. And they cause stress with their increased wealth disparity. Many research has shown perceived inequality is a significant stress producer. We may very well be bettor off without them.

Yes, there is a nice division of responsibilities. But ultimately, governments are doing the jobs they get paid for. And they're not only wasteful with our money (spending on wars, defense, etc), ironically (in a sad way) they pay government workers poorly - See teachers' salaries.

>Jobs would be created without the rich.

Jobs were created at all stages in history in all kinds of social and economic conditions. Also, plenty of rich people got rich after starting companies and creating jobs. We're incentivizing people who like money to create jobs, among other things.

>See responses sibling post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31743755) about the issue with 401(k) (or pension funds in non-USA countries).

Those are not responses to my comment, so specifically what part of my comment was inaccurate? I can correct any misunderstandings, or improve my comment to fix any errors on my part.

I think that is a correlation. An empty granary attracts no rats. That doesn't mean that having rats is good for farmers.

On top of that our global capitalist situation heavily favor exploitation in cheaper labor markets. So if you are a millionaire CEO in a rich country you are very likely to exploit your workers in poorer countries (or more likely, the workers of your providers and contractors) which overall increases the QOL in your country while decreasing it in your worker’s country. Your correlation might be a cross causation.

Returns on capital flow, unsurprisingly, to those with capital. And the concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands is precisely the issue that people are objecting to.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/13/business/bear-market-time...

> But 401(k) plans can still take a significant hit in market downturns. In 2008, for instance, as the S&P 500 dropped 37 percent, the average 401(k) account balance for those who were in their 50s fell 24 percent.

> People with retirement accounts are keeping more of their assets in stocks now, as opposed to bonds or a mix of other investments. “There has been a growing complacency of people keeping most of their nest eggs in stocks,” said Monique Morrissey, who specializes in retirement at the left-leaning think tank Economic Policy Institute. “There has been a fundamental misunderstanding — returns do not always average out.”

> “It’s not just the loss from January; it’s what happens going forward,” she said. “If you were counting on the amount that you have in your 401(k) to continually grow, well, then you may never get to what you had planned for.”

Tying retirement plans to the market only looks good when there's a continuous bull market, less so when the bottom falls out.

In my experience from having known a couple of mega-rich CEOs, yes. Even those who are not principally driven by the money or three-commas social signaling, they still want to leverage their accumulated assets into changing the world in some way. Take that away from them and they lose motivation, yes.

It was a disaster then, it's a disaster now, and it'll be a disaster in the future.

Trying to control the amount of wealth one "should" have is misguided. We should have ways to limit the amount of power that can be concentrated. If we did that, we would have a better shot at having a more equitable society: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641

Starting by no longer equating giving money to politicians as an exercise in free speech would be as good a place as any to start.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641

How is that supposed to work with any labor intensive process?

E.g. I work on a construction project where there are over 220 field craft workers on day shift alone. Office staff and inspectors are another 100 or so. Night shift adds yet more.

Should each of those be its own business entity?

Third option, we stop working on such large projects, and focus our collective efforts on making our societies and our environments more human-scaled. Again, it is an option that I see as good.

As to the third option, 'human scale' is just cresting 8 billion individuals. We will never escape the need for massive infrastructure projects.

These can be outsourced, automated and/or reduced in scope. Each company would be a lot more specialized in their function, so it wouldn't make sense to keep the same set of regulations and policies that we use for larger corporations.

> We will never escape the need for massive infrastructure projects.

Au contraire, I think that we only push for "massive infrastructure projects" because we are addicted to growth. Governments push for growth as a way to keep financing their debts, corporations push for growth as a way to justify their existence.

If we were limited in our ability to grow and established that things needed to be settled organically, cities would be more dispersed but still dense and suburbia would not exist. Global trade would be impacted, but we would be forced to re-learn how to manufacture things locally. Governments would have to figure out ways to sustain the populations with tighter constraints, but we would not get things like the European dependency on Russian gas, etc.

I don't care that there are people richer than me, I care that there are people with too much power on their hands.

That's philosophically, historically and biologically incorrect. Not to mention that it is incredibly naive.

Fights for power happen everywhere in nature. Occasional imbalances are not the problem. The problem is when a certain group or individual manages to concentrate so much power that they get control over groups.

> That means they have their power through some means other than wealth accumulation; popular election or something.

Although I could challenge you on this idea (quick, tell me one "poor" politician who was elected and continued poor after taking office), this is not the type of "power" that we are talking about, is it? In any reasonable democracy, the only "power" from an elected officer is the one vested by the people, for the people. Any elected officer that abuses their position for their own personal gain should be removed from office.

The "power" we are talking about here is the power to do things uncontested, or to get other people to act in ways that are against their own interests and values. This is more visible with rich businessmen like Bezos and Musk, but it also happens via conglomerates like Disney that use their media and news properties to openly mold society in ways that serve them, or the Union leader who puts any of their opponents on a no-work list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman#Financial_situ...

Consider that people have a lot of problems with Amazon's practices. So suddenly, everyone is yelling to tax the hell out of Bezos. But no one has the drive to actually plug the holes that allowed him to make so much money in the first place. All kinds of employee injustices, environmental abuses, and whatever else pops up in the news all the time.

I just don't think that any one person should have the kind of power that comes from amassing a $100B+ fortune.

Why does everyone want to tax the billionaires? What are you going to get out of it? Do you think taxing the billionaires is actually going to help the poor people?

If so, riddle me this: Name one efficiently-run government organization.

Because they take a lot of value out of a shared society and concentrate too much power on their hands.

> What are you going to get out of it?

Reduce the power discrepancies, mostly, and money too.

> Do you think taxing the billionaires is actually going to help the poor people?

Yep.

You are asking about government efficiency, but one of the reasons for the lack of efficiency is that billionaires do not want it.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/S-F-officials-w...

A side effect of a wealth tax is that instead of wealthy people building wealth that's just going to be taxed away, it would incentivize funding charitable foundations like the Gates Foundation. Bill Gates has done a lot of good with his foundation, but that doesn't meant that one person should control that much money.

They are really not better than government because these people are the one who lobbies government to vest their selfish desires.

You should check out the shenanigans that the US government gets away with. Whatever bad things Musk, Gates and crew is small fry compared to the government.

"USPS's operating revenue was $77 billion for the 2021 budget year, an increase of $3.9 billion, or 5.3%. It reported a 2020 net loss of $9.2 billion."

https://www.reuters.com/business/us-postal-service-reports-4....

Metric 1: They provide an efficient service. Posts reach on time (rain or shine), they have systems and process that make the organization not waste effort.

Metric 2: They earn more money that what is spent by them.

By metric 1, postal service, railways and public transport in most places, a large part of governmental services (DMV), medicare in US are efficient. Depending on your neighborhood, even police, fire and ambulance are efficient.

by metric 2, most government services will not be efficient.. however, the government is not a business and I would argue that because people confuse 2 with 1 is why US does not have a better quality of life. The job of government is service using tax dollars.

Take public transport for example. In my mind, it should be mostly subsidized and effectively free. Trying to make it a profit center makes it a "non-public" transport and you end up with limited services which has secondary effect of reducing mobility and restraining the economy.

I can send a letter anywhere in t he country for 58 cents, UPS or Fedex would charge $10?

The military also “runs at a loss”—should we expect it to be profitable?

https://taxdude.substack.com/p/should-we-actually-wealthtax-...

Now if your goal is just to spite them for the illusion of justice, there are other ways of doing that.

(Spot the outlier on the first graph: https://ourworldindata.org/the-link-between-life-expectancy-... )

The fact that there is a gray zone does not mean that no border must be drawn.

We can't vote/sex/drink/gamble because it is assumed that young people sucks. Maybe looking at the statistics government decided 18 years is good? I think if 12 year old can pass driving test then they should be allowed to drive. If 30 years can't pass, they must not be allowed to drive.

So, how about we find objective paramters to determine what should be the best border to determine the elites? May be it is 100x minimum_salary? There are plenty of option I guess.

An amount of wealth that would provide you a top %0.1 lifestyle if you were to retire today based on a standard 60/40 portfolio (to be adjusted every N years to reflect new data) and actuary tables.

It doesn't have to be this exact policy, but this isn't hard to think something like this up.

You need to realize that absolute numbers are meaningless, they are all relative to costs and inflation. Trying to lock down fiat absolutes is a moving target.

What is a realistic wealth limit for BTC, out of 21M?

Should nobody own more than 1/21Mth the Bitcoin? Less? More?

Yes. You would increasingly see founders depart their companies as soon as a heavy wealth tax kicks in. It’s difficult to prove that this would have large net negative impact on overall well-being, but I imagine it would.

“Tax The Rich?” — https://youtu.be/pgW4LWeUyVY

My personal opinion is taxing the rich is good. Wealth tax specifically is problematic.

He'll certainly work a lot less hard after the wealth tax kicks in.

This actually sounds better than what we have now: monopoly as the end goal.

Or set the cutoff at just above the poorest person's net worth. When they make some money they won't be the poorest any more and next year it will be updated to the new poorest person's net worth. That way we make sure everybody has a fair chance at getting rich.

Or is it possible that those who have a demonstrated history of wealth creation are actually better at it, and we're all better off if they continue to do more of it?

Many of those wealth creators you describe would get annhilated in the markets if they were on a level playing field with everyone around the world.

Let's start at a hundreds-of-millions cutoff and see how it goes.

It seems Netflix doesn't have a sustainable business model as they have too many direct competitors in the field, price increases in their own plans and little to no diversification in other sectors. Unlink the others MAGMA companies, Netflix is not in multiple sectors to get in more cash and are stuck in a single niche.

Hence, why out of the FAANG companies, stock compensation at Netflix crashed and they had no choice but to announce layoffs.

I empathize with the quick back-of-the-napkin math ("if we could just take Bezos' money and give it to the poor..."). But I think there's an important nuance here.

You're making it sound like the only group of people that would be affected by this are the folks with $0 in net worth, so that the upside is $100m. In reality, anyone who's ever earned the first $100m (not inherited or won in a lottery), only ended up accelerating their ambition and likelihood of doing a lot more. Case in point - all of the Paypal mafia - they are all working their asses off every single day, and none of them would have had the upside that you're talking about.

In short, your proposal would basically mean that you're going to force into retirement anyone who demonstrates to be a 1000x doer. In the worst case scenario, the opportunities those people would have created would be lost for a long amount of time (eg: creating a domestic automaker that turns the ICE industry upside down). At best, you would be expecting from unproven people who have not yet validated their abilities to execute on those opportunities with the same level of success as the 1000x doers.

So it seems to me that the question is not so much "what could we do with Bezos' money," but more "how much of Bezos' money are we comfortable with not being generated at all to ensure that he never has more than $100m."

Well written!

Recognize that you — and everyone else — are relying on him to work just as hard, to take on just as much responsibility, while sacrificing more and more for every incremental dollar of value he creates.

Your question implies a hope that the CEO will continue to take on massive responsibility and produce massive wealth, even when the main beneficiary of his productiveness will be the government, not him.

If he doesn't choose to work harder, every incremental dollar disappears and the scheme fails. What happens then?

> billionaires should not exist at all

Hell no to

> a heavy wealth tax

The federal government is the last organization on earth that deserves more money.

In other words, hell yes.

https://www.crf-usa.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-11-3-b...

Having to write 10 digit checks to the government makes people behave irrationally. We are just not evolved for it and likely never will be.

Most self-made billionaires in western countries exist because they have made something valuable that the public can’t stop buying or investing in. The public are just as selfish humans trying to do what is best for themselves, just like the billionaires.

Think of J.K. Rowling. She is a billionaire because parents are selfish and want to give their kids the best stories to read and watch.

Bill Gates made his wealth because people and companies wanted to use his software for PCs, and investors want a return on their stock investment.

Society can’t stop giving these modern billionaires money because what they have to offer is such a good deal.

The only way to make Bezos stop accumulating wealth is to have everyone stop using Amazon and sell Amazon stocks, which is impossible at this point.

You are allowed to keep control of a company, (e.g. Elon can keep control of Tesla), but then the stock has to be structured in a way that all financial gains are in a separate vehicle that will be taxed 100% as soon as the stock is sold.

Finally (and most crucially), the money raised by this “tax” will not go to a governments pot but directly be distributed as cash to all Americans to make sure that it can’t be wasted by bureaucrats nor used for partisan purposes.

Basically, if $500B is raised in wealth tax in 2022, by mid 2023 every American gets ~$1500 in cash to spend.

What do you think?

There are several ways to accomplish taxing the mega-rich that don't require rewriting the laws of the universe. It's just that nobody in charge, because they're either the mega-rich themselves or puppets of the mega-rich, wants to address it.

Are you seriously okay with the ultra rich living by completely different rules than everyone else? I think it's probably underestimated how much they get away with not paying.

If there's people with budgets for yacht, then there are a much larger group of people with budgets for fancy houses.

And an even larger group of people whose incentive is to see the price of their homes rise, contrary to the societal goal or providing affordable homes for everyone.

If you implement a nationwide land value tax, I believe the wealth disparity will start to disappears and there may be less billionaires, but everyone will benefit.

The issue is that the minority at the top can easily hinder development of system level incentive to cement their power, once they have achieved such a power imbalance.

So the question really becomes, will the outcomes for the company be as good when no one leading it owns it or benefits directly from its success.

Sounds familiar!

Without doing that it’s pointless, billionaires even today never realize gains and just rotate through loans backed by their shares.

So what you’re proposing is just that a company’s shares are taken away from the founders/execs as the company grows. It’s not just that you’re taking wealth away from them, but you’re fundamentally forcing them to sell off control of the company.

but you’re fundamentally forcing them to sell off control of the company

That part is true. Billionaires can retain control of their company by being good leaders and providing value to the company, not because they started it 20 years ago and retained a huge amount of stock.

There is no other way. I don’t think you understand how shares of a company work. There isn’t some secret treasure chest of cash the owners have to pay that burden. They just have to sell off portions of the company because that’s what has value. This eventually results in a loss of control and dim-witted bureaucrats like the fund managers at black rock start to dictate direction.

The whole stance is antithetical to innovation all for the sake of wanting to take something because it has a high potential value.

Should I be forced to sell my rock, because I'm getting a $500M tax bill from the government because some weird little cult said they would pay $1B for it - regardless of whether I want to sell my rock?

It's somewhat of a game (joke perhaps), usually used in the context of ways to fairly assess land value.

The rock is mine because my family bought land a few hundred years ago, and the previous owner thought the rock was ugly and let it for us.

> If the rock means little to you, why should you have it rather than the cult that actually values it?

The rock means a lot to me, because it reminds me of my ancestors. I value it, but I just don't have a billion dollars to attach to it as its value.

> What if the cult wants to preserve the rock but you want to destroy it even though that will cause great pain to those who care about it?

I dunno. I think it is my rock and I can do with it what I want. But I don't want to destroy it, I just want to keep it where it has been for the past 200 years, near my family home's fireplace.

> Why should you have permanent ownership of a rock just because your parents had it?

Because that's how ownership works. If anyone can come take anything from you at any point, then I don't think you can ever be considered to own something.

Maybe you can say you don't have to fully abolish property. But it remains especially hard to predict what second order behaviors any particular implementation would bring about, and what steady state would result from them.

Per your example, if the expected ruling of society would be that gp doesn't get to keep the rock because they don't "care" about it... well, maybe people in their position would suddenly find themselves caring about the rock very greatly. Not even cynically -- if the choice presented to you is "value or no value", the limbic system suddenly becomes very persuasive.

If you don't want to sell your rock, then set up a family trust to hold the rock with the provision that it can never be sold, then the rock will have effectively zero taxable value and you can keep it in the family forever.

If you don't want to do that because you might want to sell it some day, then it's not really a family heirloom, it's an investment.

Or, put the rock in a trust, tell the cult that they can take ownership in 100 years and have access to it once a year for ceremonies if they'll pay you $100M today.

Tax deference is not tax avoidance.

I pass the rock on to my children and die 20 years later. The 50 million is now worth 74 million.

Both the rock and 74 million are stepped up to their current value when I pass it on to my children. The children repay the loan with their 50 million and now have 24 million and the 1 billion dollar rock still, tax free.

How is that not tax avoidance?

The tax code, today, in practice, already frowns very much on tax deference, and tries to inhibit it when possible. The AMT-schedule is purposely designed to pull tax forward, and precisely discourage strategies for tax deference e.g. to counter the abuses that would arise by using stock-based (or cult rocks) compensation to avoid income tax.

Property tax (which is a wealth tax) is another way to siphon off tax on unrealized wealth.

Now, from a parable perspective, does the post mirror the principle of how wealth taxes work? Maybe, if you're willing to equate the entire market (or whatever communal entity we're using for the basis of assessment) to a weird little cult.

Not to mention, the calculation for wealth would probably be based on something less temporary than a fleeting moment in the markets.

Finally, the government would not directly take shares, so they would always be owned by you. Presumably with the stock price so much reduced you can simply purchase more at a pittance.

They wouldn't take shares, but I would be forced to sell shares in order to pay the tax bill, because I don't actually have that money just laying around. So I had 10M shares @ $1/share, share prices go up to $100/share. I get hit with a $900M tax bill and sell 9M shares in order to pay it. Price goes back down to $1/share, leaving me with 1M shares. How exactly should I purchase more at a pittance? I spent all the money I didn't even have paying the tax bill, there's nothing left in my bank account to buy any shares.

That sounds like horrible financial advice.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31745780

By this same standard, maybe Amazon is doing an immense service to humanity, and that is why so many people use the site daily, and actually enjoy doing so. So maybe Bezos should get to keep his billions as well.

Currently, gold retails at $1808 an ounce. So it would take over 15.6 metric tons of gold to be even worth a billion dollars. That is substantially more than an "old pile", and probably of historical worth, like contained in a ruined temple or wartime vault or something

The San Jose galleon as I mentioned is estimated to have about $17B of gold on it. I don't think very much is going to change about the world when it is raised.

Whether you're receiving the value of the asset or not, you're locking up the value of the asset and preventing a larger group of people from benefiting from the value of the asset, which is sort of the point of a wealth tax.

In actuality it's not a rock of course. For a founder of a company the situation is more like you've spent most of your life building something you believe in and suddenly you have to sell it because a group of strangers believe that your thing is worth more money than you've ever seen in your life, and the government wants taxes based on that belief. That seems fundamentally unfair and wrong at least to me.

My point is: With a wealth tax, anyone with money can take anything they want from anyone without money, even if the person without money doesn't value something in the same way that the person with money does.

The people that wouldn't sell it for a $1 Billion are the people that would give it a way for free, ie: those that have little value for money.

So where's the strawman? Would the person in this scenario not be affected by a proposed wealth tax?

Also, I don't really get how it is "simping for billionaires" in the slightest. If I said that billionaires shouldn't be pulled from their mansions and lynched, am I simping for them too?

This might mean that motivated found might work less hard to make their businesses as competitive and big as possible, and could slow down the pace of innovation.

Everyone who is worth billions has their worth in shares. so if it goes beyond a billion, you tax it away. What if it falls, will you give it back? so you will keep redistributing and giving it back?

I worked in Asia and had many conversations about where companies are founded and a lot (not all) came down to tax law.

If you have two equal choices and one has high taxes and one low, why would you start you company in a high tax jurisdiction?

The world would get on just fine without coinbase, stripe, meta.

$100m is an insane amount of money. Enough to buy anything you want. If people sell things for over $100m they'll soon bring their prices down.

Billionaire level wealth comes into existence by means of a concept that is alien and bizarre when you think more deeply about it:

"Percentage-based future-facing ownership".

Also known as "shares". Emphasis on the word "percentage". You're the 30% majority shareholder and founder of a startup worth some 1 million USD in total.

10 years later, it's turned into an empire. You're still the 30% shareholder but now of something worth 1 trillion.

Superficially this looks reasonable to people but it is in fact bizarre. You scale up wealth from 300K to 300B just by the societal agreement that there is such a thing as percentage-based ownership of a variable thing. Which is a concept that is entirely made up and does not exist in physical reality. In a way it is future-capitalism. You lay claim on value that doesn't even exist yet nor will it actually be produced by you typically.

This jump from 300K to 300B can't be justified or explained by "hard work", risk or any other personal attribute.

Imagine you go fishing with friends. It's your boat. You paid for it and need to maintain it. So the friends agree to give 50% of fish caught that day to you, to cover costs and as a reward.

The next day you meet your friends again and declare: by the way, actually 50% of all fish in the pacific ocean are mine.

How so?

I got "fish shares".

But you wouldn't do any of the fishing???

Fish shares don't care.

It is astounding how many people naively just think "Too much money = bad". Billionaires don't really have cash sitting in their houses. They created companies, often from scratch, that wouldn't otherwise exist.

https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth

GDP per capita grew because the wealth was created, not stolen. The entire pie got larger. We lifted people out of poverty from 90% in 19th century to what it is today 10% through capitalism and trade.

We need more billionaires to create wealth and propel society forward.

Crony billionaires, politicians, inheritance wealth, etc. need to be condemned and we usually throw the baby with the bath water along with the whole tub.

Billionaire hate is getting out of control because people are convinced naively. I suspect some malaise in economics education.

Or a study that has shown that billionaires ("job creators") are those who are the primary driving force for wealth creation?

Or are the much-bandied Gates/Musk entrepreneur-industrialist types just a minority of billionaires, many of whom are just wealthy heirs or hedge fund owners or whatever

There are some systemic issues that cause wealth inequality. We should focus on fixing those issue to enable more people to enjoy success. Not trying to take from the most successful individuals in the grand game of life.

I assume you mean "relative to people that are less successful". The answer is because the marginal value of wealth decreases the more you have.

If you're poor, $1,000 is the difference between your kid seeing the doctor or not. If you're rich, it's a nice meal out.

> There are some systemic issues that cause wealth inequality. We should focus on fixing those issue to enable more people to enjoy success.

The core systemic issue is that wealth is a positive feedback loop. The more you have, the more you can leverage it without losing it in order to get more.

Treating all levels of wealth the same is directly incompatible with resolving this positive feedback loop. You need a counterbalance that scales with the level of wealth, because the magnitive of the positive feedback loop does.

Fix the problems that exacerbate wealth inequality.

Remove regulations that inhibit competition.

No business is too big to fail. (Most big banks would have been destroyed in 2008)

Stop manipulating the currency to the benefit of the investor class.

I’m honestly not trying to be confrontational but you shouldn’t just impinge on peoples freedom to acquire wealth. Those who do shouldn’t have any. Those who have some level and wealth and try it. Well they are just pulling up the ladder behind them.

What I like about billionaires is they cut through the red tape and often through the inefficiencies. I actually like they don't need consensus to decide what to use their money for. I don't agree that taxing that money away from them is a net positive for society.

They might manage this vision, take on more risk, etc., nothing about that is work enough for them to be rewarded orders of magnitude what they pay others to exploit them. It's a very basic morality issue, better that society wastes the product of exploitation than a single individual.

If you require more than 100M in net worth to be "motivated" to work. There's a larger problem with you. Being a CEO/leader doesn't require some skill set that's given to you from some mythical watery being just because you're special.

It's a topic almost perfectly designed for a useless shouting match.

Meanwhile. In the 1950's, citizens in the US were expected to pay around 50% of the cost of running the government. Corporations paid 25% of the share and the rest were import and other use taxes.

Today, citizens are expected to pay 85%. Corporations pay a mere 7%, and they enjoy reductions in the other tax categories more readily than citizens and consumers do.

The elite business class billionaire CEO is just a symptom of this problem, and a fraction of the overall class anyways. Tiger Woods just joined the three comma club recently.. what was his original sin?

That is definitely the big question. Given that Gates is busy donating most of his cash to charity, there are counterexamples.

But even biting the bullet and accepting the premise, it’s not immediately obvious that losing all of the work from current billionaires would be a bad trade in exchange for substantially reduced inequality.

My counterpoint is that most billionaires don’t seem to be continuing to work hard primarily to get another billion. It’s more for the fun/fulfillment and status. If they can still have fun and status even without controlling as much wealth they will probably still go for it.

A charity of your choice vs being taxed more. If you had a few billion dollars to spare, which option would you choose?

>Why n̶o̶t̶ ̶t̶a̶x̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶m̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ let elected officials representatives decide how best to spend the money?

>Why should so few individuals have outsized social, political and economic power over the whole country?

Regardless of which political party you root for I'd be shocked if your really thought elected representatives do a good job of spending money, especially to the point you think they should be given MUCH MORE money.

You just answered the question. Because they are the elected representatives. If you didn't trust them, why did you elect them in the first place?

In the last few years, elected officials (in the USA) spent over $10 billion on a wall. The previous admin's COVID relief bill included billions towards missiles, warships and other military spending. The current admin's $1T+ infrastructure bill allocates less than half of that amount towards roads, highways, bridges, tunnels, etc.

It includes billions in corporate subsidies and items like over $500M to Alaska including $100M for an airport when no other airport in the country even received $10M (AL senator Shelby is the ranking member of the Appropriations Committee). Middleburg VA gets $2M for a new town hall, and Palo Alto CA gets $3M for their history museum. Giving these people _more_ money is madness.

The question remains open.

Blaming billionaires is failure to see that the money is already available, it's just that the voters refuse to stand up. Why would more money in the government's hands change anything?

If you think 100 million dollar houses are egregious, you could try to make building them illegal. But then they'll just buy one in another country, or a yacht, or something similar.

A lot of this is why capitalism works.

There are people who are not motivated by money, but they’re not billionaires. They’re professors, priests, politicians, etc. Pope Francis has achieved more glory and fame than nearly any billionaire CEO.

Yes, the billions is hugely motivational to those who have them.

They can still own the trillion dollar company for glory and fame; they just can't cash out.

Also I don't think there should be a cap, but the tax rate should go up indefinitely, causing diminishing returns for higher earners. I pay a higher percentage of tax if my employer pays me more, but I still prefer higher paying jobs.

Give them a public museum name for each $B for all I care!

Or more generally, just let them pick which program they want to have their face/logo on. “The Musk EV car subsidy” etc.

Let's not pretend that billionares are working 1.44 million hours a week to earn 18000 times what the janitor earns working two jobs in an 80 hour week. The quality of a billionaires 'work' is different than 'real work' so what you feel intuitevely about work may not be a great touchstone for how billionaires should be taxed.

They are already doing that, so what would be the difference?

Let's say I earn over the threshold, and I can now either choose to continue to try and innovate and add value to society, or retire to a private island and just become a carbon contributor, I mean, why work myself into the ground if I can no longer benefit?

Most people have assets not liquidity too, so it's like saying, if you own too much, you have to stop. Well, what if Elon stopped and we reverted back to dropping rockets into the ocean? What if Bill Gates stopped and never did any of the philanthropy that he does?

I feel like this is used by people as a cheap excuse for a problem they can't solve.

Not sure what your point is here--Bill Gates is not getting paid to do his philanthropy...he is in fact trying to give his money away. Are you arguing that it's a greater benefit to society for him to acquire his billions and then give some portion of it away after the fact?

It's an interesting thought experiment--how might the world be different had Gates's assets been capped at $1B back in 1987 or whenever, and whatever earnings he made been allocated to a social wealth fund?

That's a good question for the current situation -- why does Bezos still go to work? Once you have $100B, what tangible benefit do you get from more? Surely he's not doing it for the money, another $1B, or even $100B isn't going to change his lifestyle.

It’s not like my increasing savings bring me any material benefit.

If a world-class marathon runner is 4 minutes ahead in a race, and can see the finish line, do they start walking? Or do they try to push themselves even harder to see how much more they can win by?

People are competitive, and are always motivated by achieving “more”, even if it doesn’t change the outcome for them. Does society benefit by billionaires pushing for more? I’m not sure, but I don’t think that the answer is clearly “no”.

Does society benefit by billionaires pushing for more? I’m not sure, but I don’t think that the answer is clearly “no”.

I think the correct question is "Is there a net benefit to society", not any benefit at all.

Especially past 100M

Your suggestion is to give it to the government, which will more wisely spend it?

I think not.

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2015/06/basics.ht...

There are a universe of people who earn and have a net worth much less than you who would be very happy with that ceiling figure. But would you?

Western politicians who float this idea are hilarious too - they're all multi-millionaires themselves, but a wealth tax is always proposed at a level that is "slightly more than what I have", never below.

If you set the limit much lower than my net worth, the government is going to have to support me.

But I'd think that someone with "only" $100M of net worth could scrape by on their own.

But most of my net worth came from taxable ordinary income that was invested into retirement accounts that are tax advantaged and untouchable until I retire. If Bezos was drawing a salary of 3 billion dollars for the past 30 years, paying 37% income tax on that income, then we probably wouldn't be talking about a "wealth tax"

Doesn't have to be much lower, just low enough to free you of the wealth you don't _need_.

> But I'd think that someone with "only" $100M of net worth could scrape by on their own.

Certainly. Someone with $10k of net worth and a minimum wage job could scrape by too. Nobody _needs_ more than that, surely?

> But most of my net worth came from taxable ordinary income that was invested into retirement accounts that are tax advantaged and untouchable until I retire.

Sounds very wealthy and privileged, to be honest. Surely you don't _need_ that it could be much better spent now helping less advantaged people who have never worked and don't have any savings or retirement. If, when you retire, you need further assistance after selling your house and other possessions, the government would be glad to step in and provide you a subsistence income and housing thanks to this wonderful redistribution scheme.

I agree though. Cap it at $1B

and usually universities are funded by governments.

private companies ruined internet actually.

you can argue that has been a net negative for the Internet, but it is clearly better for society generally.

If you start a company and that company becomes succesfull you will end up rich.

> Being a CEO/leader doesn't require some skill set that's given to you from some mythical watery being just because you're special.

Controlling a company requires shares, and shares are networth, it is good that companies are controlled by people who most understand them, and those are the people who started/built them.

There seems to be an illogical hate to people who have build companies that ended up being successfull.

If you are a small business ( non mega successfull company ), everyone is with you, "Small businesses are the backbone of our economy ", but then you win.

Voting shares don't have to have monetary value. Rememeber Google's IPO where the founders had stock with 10 votes per share, or Berkshire Hathaway's Class B stock with 1/10000th the voting rights as class A?

So a founder could retain control of a company without becoming personally rich.

I would think the power to control a large company would be worth at least something even if it is decoupled from the right to get part of any money they decide to give to stockholders.

:facepalm:

If you control a company worth $1T, someone is going to be willing to buy your share. If you're implying that voting shares don't have to be transferable, the question becomes how do you pick the next leader? The current owner gets to appoint the next in line? That's basically monarchy. The history I was taught says that only those at the top thrive under monarchy.

Companies are comprised of people and people do not like giving up control they have fought for, whether it is reasonable or not. It is difficult for many to avoid the temptation to use a position of power unethically to retain it. Nobody wants to be RIM/Blackberry, but it's neither okay for a company like Qualcomm to make immensely inequitable deals that are tantamount to extortion because they own patents on essential technology.

If you're the only game in town, you have a responsibility to act reasonably, but many do not and often the founders/execs seem to think they are entitled to keep their success.

Yes, you earned your success, but keeping it is another fight.

Yes, indeed this is how things work in this particular system, so you are kind of making a circular argument.

For instance, I disagree with the whole concept of joint-stock companies.

A lot of people dislike/hate Elon Musk for example, and usually they focus on two things: his tweets, and his wealth. Conveniently forgetting that prior to his work at SpaceX and Tesla (which he's driven) reusable rockets weren't a thing and EVs were restricted to oddities laughed at on Top Gear.

It seems to be the way, people look at the wealth and think "well that shouldn't happen". But it doesn't come from no where, it doesn't just appear.

For anyone who thinks this wealth shouldn't appear, let me ask this: if someone could discover a cure for all cancers — how much should they be allowed to earn for it? I.E. What price would you put on the cure for all cancers?

Whatever you do now, anything, is not just your own genius but its the accumulated genius of society. It would be quite literally impossible for anyone that "cures cancer" to have done it on their own. Not only it is extremely unlikely that they could do all work just by themselves (though possible) but they will have to rely on the work others have put through out the years... Work that in most cases has been funded through tax money!

So why would one person at the end of the line get to benefit so much from the collective work put by all of humanity to that point?

because the possibility of being the one to finally crack would be what motivates every preceding researcher as well.

majority of billion dollar companies are associated with bad behaviour : anticompetitive practices, shady deals, government subsidies etc. amazon got billions in subsidies just for opening second headquarters. amazon is selling ripoffs of big brands. worker rights abuses. microsoft did many things to eliminate competition. list goes on and on. and I’m not even talking about uber’s shady projects to avoid government agencies.

so when success gets achieved by scams and shady behaviour, probably it’s not much to celebrate and reward.

Because it’s going to spend far more there. Nearly all large commercial builds get similar deals in tax deferrals because having employment is still a big net win for the locality.

Say 50 million?

> I.E. What price would you put on the cure for all cancers?

100 billion?

You've asked two separate questions there, but you're implying that the answer to one is the same as the other.

Just because you are capable of extracting a certain amount of wealth in exchange for something, does not mean that you should be able to.

how does that make any sense?

Shoulders and giants - there's no way you actually fully independently discover a cancer-curing pill. And even if you did, its existence would not and should not belong fully to you.

> its existence would not and should not belong fully to you

...if I didn't make it, it doesn't exist, so it fully belongs to me ..................

Besides, you can only buy a okay superyacht for 100M, definitely not the best /s

How do we compensate everyone who was holding that company in their 401k hoping to retire? The government billionaire taxation has actually hurt the middle class (& upper class but non-billionaires) too in this case, by taking away value of their retirement funds and personal investments.

Do we pay the shareholders the money that was taken from the billionaire to make up the difference? Because then you’ve just created dividends, which already exists, but just with more steps and beurocratic overhead

How else are you going to buy a decent airplane? The nice ones start at a few tens of millions.

- Monty Python, Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Screenplay

Does it mean something specific, or is it just a variant of “Jesus Christ!”? Just curious. Tried Google, nothing turned up on the first page. Not even urban dict.

We’re not talking about improving the break rooms for corporate SWEs.

if your friends are fine does not mean that there are no issues there. plenty of news articles were published about inhumane working conditions where people cannot go to toilet even.

Admiration of others leads us to the good path. Envy and pity are tools of the darkness.

TLDR. Elon makes vastly better use of capital than the government does. He turned $180M into SpaceX and Tesla. They turn $180M into some bombs and maybe an unfinished train station if we're lucky.

1. The objective of public policy is to maximize the efficiency of capital allocation.

2. Who is efficient at capital allocation is independent of public policy.

3. Efficiency of capital allocation is measured by stock market capitalization.

1) would assume that building a Lamborghini Veneno Roadster is a better allocation of capital than building 10 homes. Or treating 100,000 cases of malaria.

2) would assume that someone who benefits from government subsidies is intrinsically better at capital allocation than someone who doesn't.

3) would assume that tulips sellers were really, really, good capital allocators for a while, and then suddenly were terrible capital allocators. Or that the number of cars produced isn't really a relevant metric for an auto company.

1. You'd certainly want to remove it before they pass it on to their children -> 60% of all wealth in the US is inherited, mostly by the very wealthy.

2. Those most likely to scoop up redistributed capital are the efficient capital allocators at current time, which is better than calcified structure of efficient capital allocator from 1970 who has just put their money into index funds and passed their wealth on to their children.

3. Diminishing marginal utility of the dollar means strong first-order utility gains from redistribution of wealth which would need very large second-order impact on capital allocation effectiveness (and impact on behavior) to harm net utility.