Just ban them full stop.

Huge amounts of people don't have enough money to participate in the economy at the same time as billionaires show themselves to be useless or worse, ban them and have a decent basic income - let's say current min wage + some %

This is really naive. It's a very arbitrary threshold and since most of that wealth is in equity, you're essentially asking for the government to appropriate and run all large companies.

Maybe you actually think this should happen (I don't) but it's a much more disruptive change than it sounds like on the surface. You're flipping over the entire economic model to a different one, and this affects everyone not just the super rich. And even if hypothetically the government takes most of Musk's and Bezos' money, doesn't mean that you'll get the basic income you're asking for.

What you actually need is progressive taxation on extremely high incomes of any kind, and fewer loopholes to avoid that taxation.

We’re asking for that equity to be a thing owned by the workers rather than the investors.

You know what’s absurd? Money making more money.

And see all billionaires disappear to whichever country doesn't do that? The point of remote work, is that a lot of wealth is now very geographically volatile.

This is just a paraphrasing of that braindead restaurant story conservatives love to quote.

Billionaires can be stopped from taking their money elsewhere. Their bank accounts and corporate assets can be frozen or seized, and America's massive concentration of intellectual talent is unlikely to be moving out any time soon.

15% of US billionaires are foreign born. And a large portion of the top-paid talent hired by billion $ companies are foreigners too.

Going on a billionaire witch hunt would not only push residents out, it’d stop future wealthy residents from coming in.

The US actually doesn’t have much that other places don’t have, especially in the age of remote work. There is excellent education and talent in many parts of the world, often accompanied with a better quality of life too. The freezing of assets and seizures you’re describing would be very hard to enforce. And if such exit taxes were announced, they would likely lead to mass exodus before being enforced.

I’d add that this excessive confidence in American exceptionalism might be what will cause its demise. We already see it happening at the state level. California and NY are so arrogant in thinking they just have the best people, that they’re messing up and losing significant taxable income to Nevada, Texas and Florida right now. At the country level, many Americans are already moving to Portugal, Bahamas, Costa Rica, and others.

Capital does that already. Doesn't matter where the meat person resides now.

As they say, follow (and act on) the money.

That’s what taxes are supposed to be for, except billionaires are the best positioned to not pay them

I agree. Let's start with Bill Gates and Larry Fink.

Your proposal is interesting, though I think you may not have thought it through completely. I have some honest questions about it.

Under your proposal are millionaires okay? Or should society ban millionaires too?

If so why are they okay. If they are not okay, what should the wealth cap be?

Is it okay for anyone to have any private wealth? Your proposal sounds similar to socialism wherein everyone has a certain fixed income close to minimum wage and no one may accumulate wealth.

What are the differences between your suggestion and socialism as practiced historically?

I hope you're suggesting that in jest.

Realistically though, the better way to address the problem is to progressively tax capital, no matter the income. A top bracket of 5% of capital gone per year will pretty much solve all but the most efficient of billionaire problems. And progressively tax inheritance in a similar way too.

I don't think it's a good idea, because of the second order effects. Assuming this tax can't be evaded (which, to be fair, is a pretty big assumption), high net worth individuals will be paying >100% tax rate. This means they will have to quickly sell the stock they own to afford the tax. And who will be able to buy it from them? This guarantees a complete, permanent crash of the stock market.

And this is just one of the problems. What about high-capital-low-margins businesses like retail stores and, especially, farmers?

Also, assessing the net worth of a person is incredibly hard. How much is a private company worth? One might think it's easy because Forbes does that, but they're mostly pulling the numbers out of thin air.

>Billionaires should be banned from speaking on anything other than their areas of expertise.

Perhaps not even at that (since they can have undue influence on that area, just because they have more money, not because their ideas are better).

They should also be banned from owning media companies or contributing to campaigns in any way.

It is weird that you mention Elon Musk, but not Apple and Google, for example. These last two also push their employees to come back to the office, especially Apple. Every two months there is an article about Apple trying to bring everyone back working from an office.

Apple, however, rarely makes alarmist claims about population demographics. Note the two lines in their post.

(I think people give Musk _far_ too much credit by imagining he would have any sort of coherent view on this stuff; he's just parroting stuff he was impressed by in both cases, and doesn't realise the conflict, because that's not how he works.)

It’s the hypocrisy that’s being pointed out

Musk makes it easy to make fun of him. For best example you said Apple and Google instead of Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai - most people don't even know/remember who is the CEO of FANG companies, but Musk makes himself enough of a spectacle often enough that we all know who he is.

I will defend the freedom of speech for literal Nazis, even though I don’t want to hear Nazi speech.

I think it’s fair to estimate that policy is extraordinarily unlikely to be enacted in the US.

That's... not a good idea.

Well, I would argue that a good balance is to hear people out regardless of whether they are "literal Nazis", but reject "Nazi speech" (such as advocating for racial violence) regardless of who is spouting it.

Really? I'd just imprison the @assholes. But you do you.

>Billionaires should be banned from speaking on anything other than their areas of expertise.

Why draw the line at billionaires? BTW is your are of expertise to talk about Musk or what should and should not be banned?

It's obviously said in jest to highlight the hypocrisy of these @ssholes and others of a similar ilk. Your interpretation and the focus of your response says more about you than it does about me.