It's just not practical to enforce a cap though. Even with a very authoritarian world government to stop people moving assets elsewhere, there'll be too many ways around it.

So you can only have $15mil of assets? But your partner can have $15mil too, as can your kids, and parents. And if that's not enough, you can still try to hoard extra wealth in easier-to-hide forms - whether it's physical gold, bitcoin, art, fine wines, etc.

Or worse still, the super-rich will realise that they can spend many times the wealth cap per year consumable/disposable items (so long as they stay under the cap, or get back there by year-end), and become more wasteful. "Might as well spend a few million on a private jet, if I don't, I'll hit the wealth cap!".

But even in your family hypothetical, the overall inequality is still much less than between billionaires and the middle-class (nothing said of the truly destitute).

> Or worse still, the super-rich will realise that they can spend many times the wealth cap per year consumable/disposable items (so long as they stay under the cap, or get back there by year-end), and become more wasteful. "Might as well spend a few million on a private jet, if I don't, I'll hit the wealth cap!".

This is a very interesting point! I'd worry less about rich folks spending to be below the cap (that money re-enters the economy), but rather evasion by sending money back and forth between a small set. Clearly evasion would need to be monitored.

Ah yes, here come the arguments for "monitoring".

Next come regulations about having to "cooperate".

Then the question will be raised as to what happens to those rich people who don't cooperate, or middle class / poor people who, god forbid, don't agree with this plan for society. Pretty soon, you've got your jackboots and your re-education camps.

I don't know how this is different from filing income taxes.

When you are convicted of committing tax fraud, you may get incarcerated in a prison. Most often, you pay a fine.

Call the prisons re-education camps or the tax people jackboots, if you like.

You made quite a few significant leaps there.

"The slippery slope is a fallacy!" quoth those actively greasing the slope.

So did the NKVD!

Started as regular police, ended up doing purges 13 crazy years later.

lol, put the meth pipe down

The US used to tax up to 90% or so at the highest brackets. Rich people survived.

The US also used to have no income tax. Lots of people survived then too.

Many fewer, actually. People lived significantly shorter, harder lives; many more died young.

Of course the economy was much smaller then, especially on a per capita basis, and modern capitalism hadn’t had time to create the safe, abundant, filled-with-medical-marvels lifestyle we enjoy today.

> Of course the economy was much smaller then, especially on a per capita basis

Indeed, and even more on an aggregate basis, the population also being much smaller.

> modern capitalism hadn’t had time to create

You're assuming that was created by modern capitalism, which I think is a major flaw. Capitalism contributed certainly, but so did democracy, freedom, rule of law, government investment, civil society, etc. etc. Just look at most of the education system, courts, security, roads, most of science, soldiers, etc etc etc.

> abundant, filled-with-medical-marvels lifestyle we enjoy today.

A great many, maybe most people in the US don't live in that world.

Now that tax rates are lower again compared to the "90%" rates, is the same saying not true for today compared to that time period?

So, surely, you will agree the people who live the easiest and highest quality lives are people today, and lowering tax is actually fully indicative of increasing life expectancy and quality of life.

Be consistent.

As we've cut taxes beginning in the 1980s, most people in the US have been living worse. Now life expectancy has been dropping, iirc home ownership, access to education, etc.

I don't mean there's a 100% direct correlation, but that investment is needed for returns. If we don't invest in healthcare, we'll have worse health. If we don't invest in education, etc.

> investment is needed for returns

What returns? A very important part of "investing" is ensuring your losing positions are cut early and cut fast, its not continuously putting money into a black hole hoping one day the worst of the worst magically becomes the best of the best.

The rest of your comment is you being quite inconsistent, and frankly, a position that is full of lies.

No it didn't - there were multitudes of loopholes. Nobody paid that much.

The real way to measure the size of the state is % of GDP. This includes shadow taxes such as printing-induced inflation and deficit spending.

And guess what? The size of the state skyrocketed from a historic baseline of 1-2% to 35% in recent decades. Every now and then there's a war or a crisis and spending pops up like crazy, but it always used to go back down. Not anymore.

The only time it's been higher than this year is in WW2 and during Covid.

https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA

I'm trying to parse if this is meant to be an argument against enforcing limits on wealth, and if so, point out the humor that we already reached the road of monitoring through having corporations have uncapped power.

An argument could be made that the big social media companies are also taking care of re-education, although through less overt means.

Its not that its not practical as much as it is actively counterproductive to progress since the minimum effective size in many sectors is larger than that so you would end up force liquidating founders out of companies they start, which is a bad thing in for progress in mlst cases. You want quality founders to ma*ntain control and grow a business up to the point it starts abusing market power rather than innovating and that is often far beyond 15 mm valuation. Tje real problem is the market power and that is when heavy regulation and breakup should set in, not at some arbitrarily low asset limit.

So what is your proposal if you own a company, or if some minerals are discovered on your heretofore low value land?

It's not really all that uncommon for a company with a sole owner or a partnership to be worth in excess of $15 Million.

Pay your employees more, or be taxed near 100% on the excess gains?

Exactly. Tax the profits, thereby encouraging the company to invest internally in higher salaries, R&D, new equipment, etc.

How does that encourage more R&D and higher salaries? Or rather can you show an example of a country with high corporate taxes and higher relative wages and R&D spending? I’m not aware of one.

But why? If someone is creating millions of dollars worth of goods or services what moral justification is there for it to be confiscated, particularly at your arbitrary level?

Explain how to reconcile these two things:

“ if some minerals are discovered on your heretofore low value land”

And

“ creating millions of dollars worth of goods or services”

Where was the act of creation that led to the increase of the value?

How did the land to acquire become yours?

Most likely you didn’t discover the land, or do anything to find the materials (hiring people to do labor) so there’s no reason to think you should receive anything

It incentivizes people to find minerals that are valuable to the public. You can construct a hypothetical where someone gets lucky, and you can construct one where someone has reason to suspect the minerals are there and invests in the land.

> You can construct a hypothetical where someone gets lucky, and you can construct one where someone has reason to suspect the minerals are there and invests in the land.

You don't even need to construct the scenario where someone with enough capital just buys up as much as possible, knowing they will get lucky with some subset of their property. That's both a modern problem and the plot of Blazing Saddles (yes, I'm choosing that example to focus on how widespread of an issue this has been for centuries).

That doesn’t answer any of my questions though on how the assignment of creation happens

Fair enough:

> Where was the act of creation that led to the increase of the value?

I'm not sure what you mean. Finding and extracting the asset adds a valuable, productive good to the economy (ignoring the enormous downside).

Are you debating the word choice, "creating"? I guess I don't see that discussion as valuable. Are you using the word choice to make a point? Make it!

> How did the land to acquire become yours?

You know how; again, please make your point?

> Most likely you didn’t discover the land, or do anything to find the materials (hiring people to do labor) so there’s no reason to think you should receive anything

Is all of this an argument for communism - the only ones who do anything valuable are the workers? I think that's as self-serving and narrow-minded as the ultra-capitalists who think only they matter. Providing and allocating capital is essential and a valuable skill; if it's easy for you, I'm sure you have plenty of it by now.

>the only ones who do anything valuable are the workers?

Correct! Because the act of creation is where value is created.

By definition capital does not create value, otherwise there would be no requirement to have labor to do the “transformation.”

Exactly to your point I have at points had quite a bit of money (not currently true). But it’s not from “capital growth” it’s from aggressively selling my labor and capturing the majority of my labor value. That said, if you were to compare the amount of value, I’ve created to the amount of money I received, It’s not even fucking close I’ve created 1000x more value than I have captured.

Why? because at the time that I did those deals, I was not in a powerful enough position to demand the value capture, because we’re stuck in a state where the vast majority of people need to debase themselves simply to survive.

Is that the type of system that has long term capacity for multigenerational equitable success? The answer is no and there’s no way you can slice that that makes it a yes.

If, however, your goal is a infinite race to the bottom for worker self exploitation, where people will literally destroy themselves in order to otherwise survive, based on the whims of hoarded capital owners arbitrary self inflated egos about how the world works. Having been a LP in a venture fund, a Director in a large public company, and a multitime start up founder I can guarantee this is exactly how it works. If that’s the world you want then we’re right on track.

Well, I wouldn't go nearly as far as you do, but I do appreciate your up front, clear argument for your point.

My perception is that the labor/capital allocation of return is far out of whack, due to a power imbalance.

But I feel you still aren't accounting for the value of capital. It's too easy an answer, intellectually, just to dismiss the whole thing and ignore the complication.

Production requires capital and labor. If I lend you my truck for your contracting service, shouldn't I get some return on that? What if you use my property to manufacture your skateboard (or whatever)? What if I give you some of my personal cash to hire workers, who then produce the skateboards, which you sell at a profit? I know these are simple, chosen examples, but where do you see the problem and how do you quantify appropriate returns?

No, you did nothing. Why would you get anything?

Holding keys to a cache of goods isn’t a skill.

Even if you claim to have thought really really hard about when to open the vault, the simple act of hoarding less, does not transform the goods into value.

The fact of hoarding, crowds out others use of the resource (reducing monetary velocity) so that means for people who want to make more, the choices made for when to open the vault are solely dependent on an mathematically unequitable distribution of the resultant created goods, in effect stealing directly from the people making value.

To be clear I’m not making the Labor Theory of Value argument - I’m simply demonstrating that by capitals own standard (increase in value based on capital labor mix) capital should get no excess return.

In fact the only argument capitialists have left is the contract and this is the Mises style MaximumCapitalist like Hans Hoppe. The argument goes that as long as a contract is signed, there cannot be anything unethical.

If we simplify away the personal issue of 'that's my truck; you'll have to pay me to use it' - we forget property rights and the psychological attachment to property, which I don't think is realistic or wise. (Also, I've recently been reading about 'cultural universals' - behaviors in all/most/many unrelated cultures through time and geography that are not biologically determined (as far as we know) - and property is one of them.)

I'm sure you know the next issue: How in your system is capital efficiently allocated? The issue is not hoarding (or not necessarily), it's natural scarcity of capital. How do we decide who gets to use the truck or the property, etc.? We know the capitalist method of allocation, which is rather productive in aggregate. Other methods have been unproductive, broadly speaking. First come first serve?

Also, the worker in your system gets all the return. Great. Now they have some money and they buy a truck. But now they own capital, the truck and hopefully some cash left over. Must they lend it to someone else without return? I dunno, but they might not be happy with that!

To your question on property: The claim that the idea of private property ownership is universal is just incorrect.

Proudhon famously deconstructed the concept mathematically: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudho...

(You can ignore the fact that it's on a Marxist site - Proudhon and Marx were not friends and had bitter disagreements - but unfortunately and unsurprisingly Marx's "Communism" got popular)

Plenty of groups through history and even today ban interest as usury - the early Islamists were known for this

On efficiency: Note your arguments. The conceit of a capitalist apologist are that the mechanisms of capitalism, (eg markets as a price clearing mechanism between free agents) according to the efficient market hypothesis should not require a central or other intermediary for allocation. Yet your entire claim is that the purpose of finance is to make that clearing happen efficiently, and to be significantly compensated for such.

How is that not centralized planning only by a different group, then a government? From an information and planning perspective it’s not, so any claims that you need a financial services market in order to make capitalism efficient, argues against the foundational argument of the efficiency of capitalism.

Syndicalism, however, does not require any intermediary, and in fact, any intermediary introduces net losses as I’ve already demonstrated, there is no value created by capital allocation, and therefore the only value if it is taken out of, it comes out of those the value that could be captured by the person creating it.

Finally I’d suggest you read my paper and see what you think:

https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html

Thanks for the debate

Thank you! I may not agree, but I learned a lot about your position.

You may be interested:

In the study of cultural universals, there are four leading anthropologists going back ~100 years afaik, and all four say private property is universal, based on the evidence. Some caveats: Generally speaking, they say it; there's detail there that I don't have time to look into now. Also, defining and classifying the behaviors of all cultures, current and past, and associating them with some modern English words, yields uncertain definitions - as those anthropologists will tell you. Certainly how a 'cultural universal' is expressed can look very different in different cultures.

* Clark Wissler, Man and Culture (1923)

* George Murdock, "The Common Denominator of Cultures", in The Science of Man in the World Crisis ed Ralph Linton. New York: Columbia University Press. 123-142. (1945)

* Charles Francis Hockett, Man's Place in Nature, McGraw-Hill (1973)

* Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (1991)

These are seminal works in that field - the seminal works as I understand it (I'm not an expert). You can find all/most at the Internet Archive, as far as I know.

Because, someone doesn't just create millions of dollars of value, teams of people do. And in the current system someone does get to choose where to cut the "sandwich" and they get to choose which side they take. And with negligible repercussion, they choose the largest portion. It's basically incentive to steal. It's basically taking credit for someone else's work. But it's taking their share of wealth.

> If someone is creating millions of dollars worth of goods or services what moral justification is there for it to be confiscated, particularly at your arbitrary level?

I think there are good "system stability" arguments to set limits. Roughly, states are dynamic multivariate systems whose objective function should ideally track citizen well being and state security, and taxes are one of the feedback loops that prevent individual actors from dominating or otherwise destabilizing the system.

The mistake is thinking that the fictions we created to establish this system are fundamental moral imperatives in and of themselves.

Hrmn. I might ask the same question in reverse.

What moral justification is there for them to hoard absurd sums of money, particularly when we have folks without homes and kids in poverty?

The goal wouldn't be confiscation. It would be to incentivize behavior to avoid confiscation. Charge less rent to mine minerals. Spread equity in business more broadly.

Setting aside whether wealth should be capped, wouldn’t doing it in this manner cause massive price mis-signalling?

Personally I find private land ownership a kind of ridiculous concept. Our current system provides the convenient and necessary fiction of land ownership but ultimately to the extent there is an owner, it is always the state.

Are you alluding to real estate taxes, or something else? I know that you have to pay property tax to keep your land, but you have to pay property tax to keep your car, and I don't see how that means that the state owns your car.

I think the current system, and specifically the Supreme Court under Roberts has done an excellent job protecting individual property rights from the state. The Roberts court gets criticized for protecting those rights too much.

You don’t pay property tax to keep your car. You pay registration fees to drive your car on public roads.

You can still drive that car on racetracks and other such places.

The car/house comparison doesn’t make any sense here.

You don’t own the land and never will. You just lease it from the government and we all get that.

>> You don’t pay property tax to keep your car

I pay property tax to keep my car. I get a yearly bill based on the value of my car, and I pay taxes based on that. I pay property tax to keep my house. I get a yearly bill based on the value of my house and I pay taxes based on that.

The car/house comparison makes sense here because I get a bill in the mail for property tax on my house and I get a bill in the mail for property tax on my car, they are from the same locality in two different envelopes.

I own the land. I own the car, I get property tax bills for both of them in the mail every year, they are precisely 100% the exact same.

> I pay property tax to keep my car. I get a yearly bill based on the value of my car, and I pay taxes based on that. I pay property tax to keep my house. I get a yearly bill based on the value of my house and I pay taxes based on that.

In the US? This isn't common. I've heard of things like this to register your car but not to keep it.

There's no laws in the USA where they'll repossess your car if you don't pay registration fees. They just don't allow it to be on the road legally and you'll get ticketed.

>> In the US? This isn't common

It's state by state: https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-highest-and-lowest...

I own vehicles in CA. There is no property tax for vehicles in CA. I can guarantee you that. I specifically own vehicles that I don’t renew with the state and there’s no problems with that.

Do you pay a vehicle license fee on those vehicles?

I don't pay anything, man. That's my point. I don't have to as long as I don't put them on public roads. You can race them on the track or do whatever you want with them.

Why is a nation-state any less farcical to you than private land ownership? Its even more abstract and far removed from material reality.

It's chosen and controlled by the citizens. Private land ownership is chosen and controlled by the owner.

I support the latter, and protection of their rights, but the former certainly has more legitimacy.

Is a nation state necessarily chosen and controlled by citizens? Individual property rights predate nation states by thousands of years.

Agreed, I'm talking about democracies.

Whenever people talk about how much wealth is comfortable (or ethical) to have, its usually just a notch above their own (well within their social class status).

To be fair I don't know your wealth at all but its just an observation I've had from talking with others about this. The end result of this would be to make these people some of the wealthiest in the country by dragging the wealth curve to just above their level. It sounds like a moral hazard to me.

> its usually just a notch above their own (well within their social class status).

I'm a tech worker in the public sector.

To be blunt: tax me more, please.

Ok, big talker, step up:

Gifts to the United States

U.S. Department of the Treasury

Reporting and Analysis Branch 2

P.O. Box 1328

Parkersburg, WV 26106-1328

That's not how it works. Get Elon and friends to donate half his wealth and then we can talk.

Progressive taxation is a good idea...

GP said “tax me more.” Nothing is stopping him from paying more.

What he really means is tax me (and certain others I deem appropriate) more.

Specifically, this is how it works.

Are Elon’s rocket and car company infringing on your well-being? What about the pensioners holding Tesla shares? Are they stifling your ability to come up with some funds for the public good?

They infringe if they don't pay their share of what is needed to provide for the common welfare, defense, etc.

They are paying their share, for every worker they pay the appropriate taxes on the wages and those taxes are there to provide the common welfare, defense etc. since they pay their workers quite a lot they probably pay more than needed, so not sure why you would single them out, many companies pay much less like Walmart etc, they pay so much lower salaries so therefore contribute way less taxes per person they need to work there, complain about those first.

Why is that amount their share, and not more or less? Corporate taxes are pretty low, and also capital gains, so I tend to think it is much less.

Oh, I forgot, poor victim Elon! The right-wingers pull out this rhetoric so consistently, it's a parody of itself every time. But now Elon Musk is a victim? Whose next? Trump?

It's not "their share", it's your fantasy of getting part of their money that you're trying to impose. None of that money is yours to decide the fate of it.

How do we pay for the enormous amount of common public goods, such as roads, a legal system, safety, security, education, health, NASA, etc etc, if we don't jointly pay for them?

And if we jointly pay for them, don't each of us have a share to pay?

(I think we both are in good faith. No need to imply I'm a thief or oppressor.)

That's a separate question. The fact that you want to do something doesn't make you automatically the owner of somebody's else money. You can't just say "I want to do X therefor it's fair that Elon Musk will pay for it, and if he doesn't, he is evil and must be jailed". There's nothing "fair" in this. It's not what "fair" means or ever meant. Especially given that Elon Musk is already paying for so much - and still you think it's "not fair" he doesn't pay more, with the sole foundation for this being that you want more.

> And if we jointly pay for them, don't each of us have a share to pay?

Yes, but despite them paying orders of magnitude more than you do, you still complain they don't pay their "fair share", the definition of "fair" being based solely on the fact that you want them to pay more. I don't see any justification for claiming this has anything to do with "fair".

> The fact that you want to do something doesn't make you automatically the owner of somebody's else money.

That's exactly what I was thinking. I am the owner of your money, in fact. Hand it over. Post your BTC here (nobody else touch it, it's mine).

> "I want to do X therefor it's fair that Elon Musk will pay for it, and if he doesn't, he is evil and must be jailed"

We are equal under the law and we all should pay for it, nobody treated differently.

> the definition of "fair" being based solely on the fact that you want them to pay more.

When did I tell you what my basis was?

The image of Musk whining 'it's not fair' like a 6 year old is pretty incredible, but in fairness to Musk, someone else is doing it. But for reasons unknown - why are you advocating for this complete stranger?

I just point out your pretense at "fairness" is nothing but deception, and you have to resort to clowning and ad-hominem attacks as a response, which indeed proves you don't have any proper argument beyond "me want!". If is not me and not Musk who cries childishly "not fair!" when things are not as you like, as you can easily witness, and others are reluctant to finance your wants.

Your surprise that somebody can object to untruth where it's not personally beneficial to him tells yet more about your approach to fairness.

Nobody is stopping you from contributing more. In fact, contributions to charity are tax exempt.

But if you want to contribute more to the government directly, others here have pointed you to some good resources.

The individual wants his class to be taxed. Telling the individual they can simply pay more does nothing for everyone else in the class. Your reply is unserious.

Not only do I want everyone in my "class" to contribute more to society, everyone significantly above me should be contributing a larger share. This is the basis of progressive taxation.

If we're just airing what we think about taxation, I think people with low incomes should pay more than they do currently in taxes, so that everyone feels like they have skin in the game. People generally don't take as much care of something that was dropped in their laps as something that they had to work hard for.

Currently, over half of all federal personal income tax collected is paid by under 5% of taxpayers, and the bottom 50% of income earners as a whole pay under 3% of all federal income tax collected.

> and the bottom 50% of income earners as a whole pay under 3% of all federal income tax collected.

What percentage of annual cash flow in the USofA do they earn?

Is it more than 3%?

According to this source[0], the bottom 50% of income earners who paid 2.32% of all federal personal income taxes collected in 2020 comprised 10.18% of the share of income. So yes, it is more.

[0]: https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-pays-income-taxe...

You're equating giving money to the government with contributing to society, which is not the same thing. Politicians will give your money to any cause that will get them reelected, be that vanity projects or cronies that contribute to their campaigns. That's not even the worst case, they can spend it on the military killing people, spying on the populace including you, or distributing it in some other unjust way.

If you want to actually contribute to society you are better off investing it in some productive way or giving away to people in need as directly as possible. Government is a necessary evil, don't give it a dime more than what's absolutely needed as it can get out of control with little room to escape.

Begging for a tax increase as a proxy for societal contribution is something else.

I work 60 hours a week and volunteer for 20 more.

Not only do I want everyone in my "class" to contribute at least as much as I do, I want them to actually contribute something, not just voidposting about how they have too much money and wish the government would take more of it.

The entire discussion seems to have veered into the unserious.

While true and a fair rebuttal to all higher tax suggestions, increased tax on people like OP would have a much larger effect than just them giving a bit more away.

I'll make you a deal in which both of us come ahead - pay my taxes for this year. I'll even go for federal only. If you're in, I can accept venmo, cash, btc or anything commonly accepted. Think about it - you get less money, as you wanted, the money go to the taxman, as you wanted, and I get a little bit for helping you.

Unless, of course, you, as usual, meant that it's me that is going to be taxed more? While you are already getting paid from my money?

Another way would be to ask for pay reduction. Same effect on the public money, much less friction and transactional expenses. I'm sure your boss can find a way to make it happen.

These arguments nearly always come back to the fundamental desire (greed) for "Giev moniez pl0x.", as you say the limit is above their own wealth as to not be an inconvenience to themselves while siphoning monies from those around (and presumably above) them.

It would make for better discussion if these social justice warriors were at least honest about what they actually want.

Most people in this thread aren't making 6-7 figures. The boogeyman you're railing against isn't here.

Are you kidding? This HN.

Very few people on HN are making less than 6 figures.

I make less. It sucks.

How many people here aren't making 6 figures? I'd wager a slim minority. And I'll bet that some who show up here are making 7 figures. Did you think you were replying on reddit or twitter or something?

If you look at the job threads on HN you'll see a huge number of Europeans (and otherwise non-US persons), many of whom likely make less than $100k+. This isn't 2015, HN has quite a broad non-SV audience now.

Saying social justice warriors on hacker news is just awesome.

The grandparent comment argues for "businesses [which] are democratic institutions" and a "hard cap" on wealth which will presumably be taken and distributed to people with less wealth, for the goal of "do[ing] substantial good".

Ergo, arguing justice (FSVO justice) for society.

As such, I am of the position that this is one of those rare situations where the term "social justice warrior" is meaningful and accurate.

I agree it’s accurate, but you said “these social justice warriors,” which made me figure you were doing more than referring to the author. It seems like the goal of invoking the term was to aid in your dismissal of the author’s positions by linking them to a derided stereotype of activists. If I’m wrong then I apologize.

If you think about it, Social Justice is objectively a good thing. Being "Woke" means to be aware the United States is a white supremacist society. These terms are used as if they were Ad Hominems, but they're kind of the opposite.

The people complaining about these things are literally self-identifying themselves as the bad guy. We're not making you use these words. We're not making you self-identify as the bad guy. We didn't put the rake there, but they're proudly stomping on it anyways.

They’d probably argue social justice isn’t inherently good because it’s collectivist or something but yeah I agree with you.

Social justice isn't good because you have as many social justices as there are individuals.

Take for example the aforementioned grandparent: It's justice to redistribute wealth from those above some arbitrary line to those below (grandparent is presumably below it). That's only justice for him, it's bullshit to everyone else.

And you know what happens when differing senses of justice collide? Possibly made worse by fervor? Very Unpleasant Things(tm).

This is why we use legal justice rather than social justice: There is one and only one standard of justice that we all agree to accept after much deliberation.

There are only two measures of money: No money and not enough money. (Steinbeck)

I can't find it, but I think pg also said something like "when you're 20 if you're not doing bad you feel good. When you're 50 if you're not doing good you feel bad."

Which seems like common sense. A 50yo has fewer years to with to save up for any retirement, they face age discrimination, increasing health issues, etc. A 20yo has many years to work and pivot on case of setbacks, less age discrimination, usually fewer health issues.

True. Makes me wonder if half of being famous is coming up with creative ways to say the obvious.

> (well within their social class status)

I bet you've discovered the cause of this effect. I suspect we're seeing people who live comfortable lifestyles say "this seems about right" and then hedge a bit.

"Everyone driving slower than me is a slowpoke, everyone driving faster is a maniac"

This was on full display back in 2017-2018 when tax code was changed to limit the amount of State and Local taxes (SALT) that could be deducted from your Federal tax liability. The original SALT deduction, before the change, clearly benefited the wealthy, with large mortgages and living in high-tax (read: expensive) areas.

Cue articles like this one [1], which shows just how out of touch the wealthy can be:

> estimate the tax law’s impact on the value of a theoretical house in the New York City suburb of West Orange, New Jersey, purchased for $800,000 in 2017 by a theoretical family with a $250,000 annual income. Those home value and income numbers are very high by national standards — but middle class by the standards of large parts of suburban Essex County.

In 2017, $250K/HHI was in the top 5% of the entire US. Someone living in a house that cost 3X the median house, in one of the richest areas of the country, making more than 95% of everyone else considers themselves 'middle class'.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/trumps-trillion-dollar-hi...

> considers themselves 'middle class'

They don't consider themselves middle class, statistically they are middle class based on (income, wealth, purchasing power, etc.). They aren't out of touch - nobody asked them - they just live where there's a higher cost of living. But it pays off, or they would move someplace less expensive, and housing would cost the same nationwide.

They are not middle class by any metric. They may feel overextended, but that can happen at any income level, and (as in this case) is often due to the spending side of the equation.

They are by the metric in the article, and in the scope of their locale. I get your point, that they have lots of money. But at the same time it's not relevant: Just moving doesn't solve any problems, because they'd be much less productive in their new destination and have much less money. They are gathered around and investing in - very successfully and productively - the high-productivity resources of NYC, which produce higher income, which produce a higher standard of living.

The average US locality's economy produces more wealth and requires more expense to live in than the average locality in a low-income country. You can't just move the Americans to the low-income country; they wouldn't be nearly as productive, and thus have less income. NYC's economy is more productive than almost any place in the world.

We could widen the scope to all of human history, and then we're all unimaginably wealthy compared to hunter-gatherers we were until 10K years ago. But does that mean we're just as wealthy here and now?

> Cue articles like this one [1], which shows just how out of touch the wealthy can be

Cue comments like these that show just how out of touch people can be I guess.

These people are not meaningfully wealthy. They have no more power than the next 5% down the ladder. Even among the top 1%, 90% are not meaningfully wealthy in terms of the power they can exert.

The idea that some poor bozo with a mortgage on an $800k house is wealthy for any useful definition of the term is nonsense.

> Whenever people talk about how much wealth is comfortable (or ethical) to have, its usually just a notch above their own (well within their social class status).

I haven't observed that, and it's very unlikely the GP is a "notch" below $10-15 million.

> Adding this to my reading list. I've thought for years that we should place at hard cap on wealth somewhere around $10 or $15 million.

Wouldn’t a tax system that steeply ramps up, includes property and tends to it’s loopholes (family trusts, property etc) achieve most of this?

A land value tax alone would address the vast majority of this, considering that virtually all wealth derives from land access/ownership.

Almost anyone that's making substantial money off of land is already paying property tax on it, as well as any income tax that applies. Now, the income and the property taxes they're paying are in many cases woefully inadequate, but I'm pretty sure the solution to that is to improve the tax system and patch the loopholes, not to add a separate additional tax for everyone to keep track of.

This wouldn't be a separate additional tax; the vast majority of LVT proponents (myself included) propose it to replace property/sales/income taxes (all of which are just economically-inefficient taxes on land anyway: http://www.wealthandwant.com/themes/ATCOR.html).

As for loopholes, LVT is the most effective way to patch them; you can't exactly move land to offshore bank accounts, after all.

Is that still true? I’m probably in a software bubble, but like: none of FAANG have any real land holdings, for instance?

I think it’s not a coincidence that land value tax is popular on Hacker News. Replacing all the taxes that tech companies currently pay with a land value tax that hardly affects them would be an incredible boon.

It's an incredible boon to the vast majority of society. The only ones who suffer under LVT are land speculators and landlords.

Their servers exist somewhere, and while it's called The Cloud™, that ain't literal ;)

Datacenters, offices, warehouses, factories... these all sit on top of land. Even a fully-remote company running off Raspberry Pis in someone's closet still requires some quantity of land on which the employees' homes and that closet full of Raspberry Pis sit. Even if the companies themselves don't own that land directly, somebody does.

Yes I think so. I’m not the original commenter, but I’ve also landed on the idea of limiting wealth to the ballpark of $10-15 million, primarily using progressive taxation. The point is to prevent any one person or small group of people from accruing too much power within our democratic society or reaching levels where they stop using their wealth to contribute to the economy (by e.g. offshoring money).

> primarily using progressive taxation

It's all well and good to take away from the rich, but where does that tax money, once taken away, end up? You're saying it should be redistributed to those making less money, but what's stopping politicians from enriching themselves with that money?

> reaching levels where they stop using their wealth to contribute to the economy (by e.g. offshoring money)

Money in Cayman Islands numbered accounts generally only happens with illegally gained money (maybe by the likes of politicians I've described above), or by people in jurisdictions with harsh capital controls (like the sort you're describing). People like Bezos or Gates aren't stashing their money away like that. Most of the ultra-rich of America derive their net worth figures from ownership of publicly-traded companies.

I don't have a problem with someone being a billionaire per se. Assuming, of course, the wealth was earned without worker exploitation.

However, I do take strong offense to politico-economic systems where the billionaire has more political power than a poor person. In the current system in almost every country, both individual super rich people and collectively the top 1-5% have enormously more political power than the remaining people. The system much be changed.

It seems likely that the only way to become a billionaire is through worker exploitation, collusion, cheating the system through tax evation and asset laundering, etc.

I think politico-economic interference is the crux of the problem.

For example, someone with $10 million are trying to maintain their lifestyle, they want to know what stocks, bonds, and certificates, and real estate to invest in.

Someone with $100 million are trying to leverage through venture capital, joining corporate boards, owning platforms, etc.

Someone with $1+ billion will find that the most cost effective way to keep and gain wealth is buying lobbyists, campaign donations, starting and controlling some non-profits that have tax and spending incentives, getting favors by giving politician's kids high profile jobs, and any other innumberable political grift that maintain their wealth status and that only really work at that scale.

I wouldn't care if billionaires were just hoarding some money. But they are not, and all this while they pay bad wages and have even shoved off the cost of training for their jobs onto society and the labor force who have to speculate and pay for their own training.

> It seems likely that the only way to become a billionaire is through worker exploitation, collusion, cheating the system through tax evation and asset laundering, etc.

What workers did J.K. Rowling exploit to become a billionaire? Did Stephen King only cheat half as much to arrive at his half-billion net worth? They produced something that people wanted to buy that previously did not exist, and everyone in the chain got paid what they were willing to work for.

In what world does it "seem likely" that you can only become a billionaire through illicit means?

JK Rowling exploiting workers is a straw man and sidesteps the point.

To some people what I wrote will be a truism and to others it will beg the question.

I see what side that fell on for you and that's good, I'm not citing anything, so definitely question my reasoning. But don't think for a second that producing a handful of books people ended up wanting can generate that amount of value.

In the case of Rowling, she was also executive producer of several Harry Potter films and was no doubt a benificiary of motion picture accounting to a greater or lesser degree. She controls charities and who knows how many shell companies and trusts to hide and manipulate wealth. That's what you have access to at that scale of rich.

Furthermore, if she wasn't cooking the books, hiding and differentiating wealth for tax benefit, placing herself in position to extract more wealth, then she would be the stupid one among her rich peer group and would quickly find herself like one of those lottery winners who are back to being poor and none the wiser 5 years later.

Another truism is that it sounds fun to be rich, but it probably isn't very.

Another truism is that I'm sure we'd all rather suffer being rich than be poor.

It doesn't sidestep the point, it shows the value of your truism, particularly in a 21st century globalized, internet-scale economy.

Who's being exploited if I upload a song (or ringtone, or wallpaper) to an app store for $0.99 and it gets millions - perhaps even billions - of downloads?

(Answer: me, because of the app stores' rapacious policies)

Some things cost way more than 10 or 15 million in terms of investment.

Why shouldn't a billionaire be capable of starting a genetics lab to fund cancer research and pay for it in cash, if they are so inclined?

Also almost all of super wealthy people's "wealth" is tied up in assets that are funding entire economies. This money is creating jobs, allowing for affordable loans, the money is working for many other people... It's not as if the money wealthy people have is just in physical gold coins in their swimming pools.

> Why shouldn't a billionaire be capable of starting a genetics lab to fund cancer research and pay for it in cash, if they are so inclined?

The answer might be "they should be able to"

But are you open to the possibility of the answer being "Despite the apparent potential benefits, it isn't beneficial overall to society or humanity to have extremely rich individuals starting research projects, and perhaps not beneficial overall to even have extremely rich individuals at all" ?

Why would it be better to have fewer entities allocating large chunks of capital?

Who said anything about fewer?

I was taking this last comment

> perhaps not beneficial overall to even have extremely rich individuals at all

To mean there would be fewer. I suppose it depends on where the "extremely rich" line is drawn, but I feel like you must be extremely rich to start a project that normally only a government could start.

Why do only the resource allocations of rich people count as the decisions about resource allocation? What about the decisions made by non-rich people?

As the bumper sticker says, it seems easier for most people today to imagine the end of the world than to imagine an alternative to corporate capitalism.

I said why, because for capital intensive processes it's unrealistic to expect large groups of individuals to raise enough money to start them.

We do have Kickstarter, Go Fund Me, etc, but I don't think those have turned out to be great tools for raising a very large amount of money. And I am referring to large capital allocations towards a goal. I wish there was a better version of Kickstarter, but VCs seem like a better tool.

I'm just talking about capitalism and what ideal wealth distributions look like under a fundamentally capitalist system. I think America's system has lots of points for improvement, particularly on the side of worker protection from exploitation, wealth distribution, and campaign finance. But, I still think that we should have individuals wealthy enough to fund weird projects just because they want to. And in fact we should have more than we have today just with less extreme wealth.

What is it exactly that you are saying we should change? Everything? Please be specific.

Wouldn't it be the opposite?

In a hypothetical country, if there's 1B dollars and no limit, one person could own the 1B and everyone else in the country be dirt poor.

If there is a 1M limit, then one person could own 1M tops, and the rest of the money is still there.

Therefore there would be more entities capable of allocating large sources of money.

This hypothesis presupposes the "manna from heaven" concept of wealth, which isn't how it works. Wealth is what people want[0]. There isn't a real limit to what people want, so there's no real limit to what wealth can be created, either.

Even on a deserted with five people, there isn't a fixed amount of wealth that can be divided over those five people. A fixed amount of land? Sure. Maybe a fixed amount of rocks and trees? Okay. But there's no fixed amount of the ingenuity and labor that is required to convert those natural resources into things actually desired by people, like a roof over one's head or warmth during a cold night.

And some people are more industrious and clever than others and therefore are better at meeting people's needs and being compensated for it.

[0]: https://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

> And some people are more industrious and clever than others and therefore are better at meeting people's needs and being compensated for it.

You could replace the words industrious and clever with manipulative and abusive, and where does that lead you?

The parent comment said:

> are you open to the possibility of the answer being "Despite the apparent potential benefits, it isn't beneficial overall to society or humanity to have extremely rich individuals starting research projects, and perhaps not beneficial overall to even have extremely rich individuals at all" ?

That seems to me to say "maybe no one should be rich enough to fund a major project on their own".

I'm not arguing against a limitation on wealth, I'm actually in favor of one, because like you point out then there would be a less extreme distribution of wealth. I'm saying that if such a limit were to be imposed that it should be high enough to allow significant projects to be started by an individual. That limit is still probably really low compared to the high valuations some billionaires have today.

I do see a fair reasoning in not allowing the possibility for a lone mad man to start a big project without needing to like, check up with other people on whether what he's doing is right.

In regards to fame, Adam Savage recently said:

"When there’s no one around you that can tell you ‘no,’ you’re in deep trouble, and you’re also going to traumatize the people around you.”

We have that though, they're called laws. I'm not advocating for getting rid of them.

> Why shouldn't a billionaire be capable of starting a genetics lab to fund cancer research and pay for it in cash, if they are so inclined?

Well, why should they? What if instead of a genetics lab, they want to start a flat earth research center? Or a think tank to influence policy in their favor?

Who instead should be capable of doing such a thing?

Groups of many people working together. Historically, this has proven far less likely to produce bad results.

What exactly do you think a research lab or think tank is? A single-person effort?

>Why shouldn't a billionaire be capable of starting a genetics lab to fund cancer research and pay for it in cash, if they are so inclined?

Starting land to fund cancer research is fine, but I don't see why we need billionairs for that? Multiple people can fund it. They are going to work alone in that lab either.

>It's not as if the money wealthy people have is just in physical gold coins in their swimming pools.

And it's not as if taxing that wealth makes that fact go away.

What's different is that when all that wealth is concentrated with a few people, they get to decide what research they spend it on and which jobs are created. And that's a bad thing, it's a threath to democracy.

Needing more people for funding just adds friction to an already hard problem and will reduce the number of such things that get started.

I fundamentally agree with your arguments, but not your conclusion.

IMO we need a greater number of rich folks and fewer ultra rich ones. Those with over 100 billion dollars simply cannot spend it, which means capital is not being allocated at all! Bill Gates has so many employees just dedicated to spending his money responsibly, and he still keeps getting richer.

>Needing more people for funding just adds friction to an already hard problem and will reduce the number of such things that get started.

Because governments can't fund projects?

Not sure what you are arguing for, but IMO there is this idea of the "great men" who build cool things like Space-X. So we should let the wealthy keep their great wealth so that we get more companies like Space-X.

Except what we really get is more corporate looting, oppression and monopoly, plus the hyper-wealthy having excessive influence over government.

If the wealth is spread around, and we no longer have to be wage slaves our whole lives, then collectives of like-minded people could band together and build cool things. We do see that in the open-source world, but most contributors are not earning money they need to pay bills.

I very specifically said that the government should fund projects and personally I think it should fund more. But they can't do everything and they won't always have the foresight to fund everything worth funding.

I am arguing that more-or-less randomly allocating wealth to individuals to then re-allocate will produce better results and the larger number of individuals, above a certain amount of wealth necessary for grand projects, the better. I think we are better off when we have a diversity of directions in funding grand projects. There is a very real cap on how much money is actually necessary for great projects. No one needs 100 billion dollars to do any particular thing. Idk where the line is, probably the high hundred millions or low billions?

We also really need better wealth distribution in the middle too, but the main post's assertion is literally "no rich people" so I'm arguing against that because private investment has created an incredible amount of the good things we enjoy every day. I'm not talking about the "great men" I'm talking about boring people writing checks for new companies that they think sound cool.

That is exactly what I thought also.

I agree wholeheartedly with this concept. I wonder if the most realistic way to do it is to hardcap inheritance. As much as I'm uncomfortable with the power hoarding with the Bezo, Gates, Musks of the worlds, I'm much more uncomfortable with their hundred great grandchildren still being the most powerful group on the planet. An honest meritocracy type should even be able to get behind that. Bezos built something, his kids were just born into it. Cap their total inheritance at $15M and call it a day.

Any solutions that are in conflict with human nature will never be successful. Ambition and envy are basic human traits. At a deeper level, we are beings that measure everything (including light, sound, smell, touch and taste) by way of comparison.

Communism fails because no one has anything left to aspire to and everyone is therefore equally miserable.

This presupposes there is some way to know what human nature is.

The best definition I've ever found is "altruistic and cooperative with an in-group, competitive and aggressive towards out-groups".

And that doesn't say much at all on this particular point.

The best one I heard, I am pretty sure was from a Stephen Baxter novel, was our tendency to create valuable "caches" of resources.

> This presupposes there is some way to know what human nature is.

Empirical observation.

Look what happened in all the 20th century communist countries.

Empirical observation is only a way to determine what is, and not what could be.

Since we know that human behavior ("nature") is substantively malleable, we need to know what could be, not merely what is.

That's the problem.

It's not ethical to perform experiments on human subjects without their explicit consent.

That's why the Institutional Review Board was created:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board

You can't just perform experiments on large groups of people to see what will happen.

So in short, neither you nor I know what human nature is, and thus setting up criteria for social organization on whether it aligns with "human nature" is impossible, and a foolish goal.

There is a sort of sleight of hand being performed here. Communism is being blamed for the consequences it has on its own country.

Capitalism on the other hand, you can look at and say "look how well it works for this country", because meanwhile it is doing terrible things to other countries.

What horrible things, to what countries?

Vietnam? Invading Iraq for oil? The multiple coups in Latin America to establish an authoritarian government? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Communism fails because it’s just a different - and more difficult - kind of propaganda for politicians to make off with the loot.

Wealth caps of 15M is certainly not communism

> Ambition and envy are basic human traits

No they are not

As someone who has worked extremely hard to acquire assets great than 15 million, who do you suggest has the authority to come and take some of it away from me. And what will they do with the resources they confiscate?

By what authority are those assets "yours" in the first place? Whence did those assets originate?

I suspect it is not someone that came and gave it for free.

So I would say they should belong to the keeper right now.

And if it was a gift, it would still be a property transfer. So still his.

> I suspect it is not someone that came and gave it for free.

I suspect that whatever price was charged was a bargain compared to what it's actually worth - and thus the transfer was at the expense of the rest of society.

> And if it was a gift, it would still be a property transfer. So still his.

And if that "gift" was stolen from someone else beforehand?

> And if that "gift" was stolen from someone else beforehand?

Then that would be theft and not legitimate property transfer. I was talking about cases where a gift is from someone who earned it and transferred something, a donation.

Not from a government that gifts via regulations or a thief that steals something and donates after the fact. Though there is no difference in either IMHO.

How about from a government that conquers land and sells it to profiteers on the cheap (who then rent it out and/or resell it for considerable profit)?

How about from a government that - instead of taxing that aforementioned conquered land and the ownership thereof - shifts the tax burden onto the working class (via income and sales taxes), robbing us blind while subsidizing the owning class (who is then happy to rob the working class further via skyrocketing rents)?

The vast majority of people "earning" tens of millions of dollars in this country are not doing so via their own hard work. They are doing so by rentseeking - by being parasites on local, national, and global economies. Their wealth derives from theft, plain and simple.

And there just so happens to be a solution to that theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

I am against taxes in general. For a tax to exist, there must be a justification. And even after that, I doubt it is fully legitimate: what if someone does not want or use the public schools system or health system? It must pay for it?

So yes, a government that taxes people against their will for a service they do not use, from my perspective, is theft to tax payers.

A different story is wether we want to support to some extent people who need it: in that case, it would not be theft against a person giving support, but it would not be a tax either.

As for who earns and how, yes, crony capitalism is quite bad. What I support is mostly free market capitalism as much as it is feasible and realistic.

I am not sure it is ideal, but as long as laws for damage are applied and the consumer is informed, it works way better than all this political cloud full of a system with favors, licenses, and excuses to avoid comptetition.

I am even more against subsidizing than taxes themselves. That is the worst possible distortion of things.

I am hopeful there are other ways, and I would like to put them in practice.

But those come from our own beliefs.

The land conquering is a difficult topic. I agree it is not a good thing. But the history of humanity is the history of conquer. A person that violently takes territoy in some way should not be the owner. I am not sure it is practical or even possible to fix that, though.

> So yes, a government that taxes people against their will for a service they do not use, from my perspective, is theft to tax payers.

Fortunately, that ain't the case for a land value tax as alluded to above. The government provides landowners a service (enforcement of their land deeds), and any "tax" on it is a payment for that service. As it stands, landowners have successfully lobbied the government such that they only pay a tiny fraction (at most) of the rents due to society at large. And so:

> For a tax to exist, there must be a justification.

And there you have the justification. Landowners owe the full value of the land they own to the society willing to respect and enforce that ownership. Anything short of that full value is theft, and is indeed rather directly responsible for the continued prevalence of socioeconomic inequality both here in the US and worldwide.

I do agree with you that how that tax revenue gets spent is an issue. The maximally fair answer would be to disburse it equally to all citizens as a dividend, and then citizens can put that money toward the things they believe to be worthwhile.

And on that note:

> A person that violently takes territoy in some way should not be the owner. I am not sure it is practical or even possible to fix that, though.

LVT happens to be a maximally fair and practical way to fix that, especially when paired with a citizens' dividend per above; assuming, per above, that land ownership and socioeconomic inequality are causally linked, shifting the tax base away from the products of labor (i.e. abolishing taxes on income, sales, and buildings) and onto land values would satisfy the goals of things like reparations, such that those who materially benefited from such conquest are the ones compensating those who did not.

I would need careful analysis of your explanation before having an opinion since I admit to not have read, thought or known about this very concrete topic, feasibility, etc. in depth.

Thanks for this very positive exchange.

Perhaps you should clarify what "stolen" means. Am I to assume that every piece of land has an "original owner"? Who is that?

> Perhaps you should clarify what "stolen" means.

There are two senses of theft at issue:

1. Some government establishes (or expands) its sovereign territory through violent conquest.

2. Private parties obtain a service from said government and the society it ostensibly represents without paying in full for it (specifically: the issuance, recognition, and enforcement of land titles/boundaries, those being definitionally subsets of said government's sovereign territory - which, again, may or may not have been obtained through violent conquest)

Here in the US, both of those sorts of theft are in play:

1. The entirety of US territory was obtained either by conquering it from other entities (e.g. Native American tribes, Mexico, Spain) or by purchasing it from other powers who had previously done so (e.g. France, Spain, Britain, Russia).

2. The US government (or state/local subdivisions thereof) issues and enforces deeds representing subsets of its sovereign territory to landowners, at the exclusion of the rest of its citizenry - yet the landowners do not pay anywhere near the full rental value of the land to said government or said citizenry.

> Am I to assume that every piece of land has an "original owner"? Who is that?

In the case of American land, that'd be the indigenous peoples thereof.

In a more general/legal sense, the "original owner" would be the government of whose sovereign territory that land is a subset. If that government ostensibly represents its citizens, then said "original ownership" would rest with each and every individual citizen equally. As Locke explained in his Second Treatise of Government:

> Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough and as good left, and more than the yet unprovided could use. So that, in effect, there was never the less left for others because of his enclosure for himself. For he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all. Nobody could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst. And the case of land and water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same.

That is: every member of society is entitled to an equal share (by value) of the land on which that society exists. Those who own more than their equal share of that land value owe compensation to those who own less than their equal share. The lack of said compensation is theft.

When one makes an agreement that if I set certain goals, and I achieve said goals, I will be compensated a certain amount.

If I choose to buy land, goods, services, the seller chooses the "value". If I agree on the value, I have free will to to purchase the land, goods or service. If I do not agree on the value, I can either offer a lower price, or walk away.

If I purchase said land, goods or service, and later decide that I no longer want those things, I can choose to sell them. At that point, I set a value. If the purchaser agrees on the value, I then sell/transfer ownership to that person. If the value has grown since I purchased said land, goods, service, I could potentially profit. If the value has not increased, I am at a loss.

So, to directly answer your question about "authority". (In my case, land that was owned, and worked, for 100 years in an area that no one wanted to live). A price for said land was agreed upon. The sale was advantageous for the seller as he no longer wanted to tend it. I assumed the risk, taxes, etc. Working said land was extremely arduous. Shepherding it through multiple hurricanes, floods, etc bore a financial burden. Many years later, as the area began to develop, my asset grew in value. Selling it produced a profit. This profit allowed me more ability to purchase other land, goods and services.

As I'm tying this, I'm certain you're aware of these basic economic principles, but simply don't agree with them. Disagreement is fine. But this is the way things are done in my country. And, I choose to live here because I agree with those principles. If I wanted to live in a country where an entity could come and confiscate my wealth, and redistribute it, those countries exist. I could likely move to one of them.

The same people that already have the power to confiscate your assets - the tax office.

Yes, they are. If they weren't you wouldn't care if someone made more than $15M.

Is watching those around you starve/freeze to death due to having $0 (or less!) not a reason to care about whether some people make more than $15M? How many people could that hoarded wealth have housed and clothed and fed?

I think that is a wrong perspective. Of course many people care about that.

The problem is that by looting rich people you will not end up with the problem.

In fact, you can make the problem much bigger mid-term by killing incentives and making people into poverty...

Cuba or Venezuela were richer than Spain in the 50s just to give you a couple of examples. And Venezuela has natural resources.

What happened? Well, yes, this kind of: let's take everything from the others and give to the poor.

> I think that is a wrong perspective.

It's the only perspective that matters.

> In fact, you can make the problem mich bigger mid-term by killing incentives and making people into poverty...

Being limited to $15 million is a far cry from "killing incentives and making people into poverty".

> What happened?

Um, the US?

> Cuba or Venezuela were richer than Spain in the 50s just to give you a couple of examples. And Venezuela has natural resources.

Sorry, I checked GDP per capita charts, and it appears that Cuba was not richer than Spain in 50s. It would be implausible that a small country with little natural resources would become richer than the country that colonized it in so little time.

And Venezuela become poorer than Spain in 1982. So it had no relation with "take everything from the others and give to the poor".

Counterpoint for your argument: outside the west, between non-alignment countries, only places where marxist-leninist revolutions happened produced powers that were able to seriously compete with the west. For example, URSS and China.

I never talked about GDP. I meant per capita. How people lived.

I can tell you because many spanish families emigrated there.

I know cases from friends whose parents are from those countries.

I am spanish and it was common knowledge that those places had higher income at that time.

If someone makes the grand claim that something is a basic (fundamental) human trait, the burden of proof is on them.

Communism fails because giving everyone a voice in central planning can't scale up to an economy of millions of people. It requires a degree of central planning that permits too much corruption. The only known vaccine against corruption is high civic engagement. Every society has a given level of civic engagement; and thus a given maximum level of central planning before corruption becomes intolerable. No known large society has a high enough level of civic engagement to support the amount of central planning required by communism.

Communism works just fine for small groups (<10), and passably up to a few hundred (e.g. kibbutzim). Your argument would apply equally well at those scales, but mine doesn't. Full disclosure -- there are other arguments that contradict mine while still differentiating these cases.

Of course it doesn't super matter, because this proposal (though not a great idea) isn't communism and communism reliably fails anyway at the scales most people mean.

> Ambition and envy are basic human traits.

So are compassion and generosity. And contradiction.

The role of systems in society should be to oil the pathways for the better parts of human nature to come forth, and make the other traits less convenient.

I agree with this except just to point out

> Because that's the point at which you have enough wealth to live a comfortably middle class lifestyle for the rest of your life

15M is far from middle class by any measure. 15M affords you a big city place, a place for winter holidays, and a place for summer holidays. With still left to have spoiled little kids (and possibly spoiled grand children).

Also, 15M is not static money. If you have that much money you will certainly gain an income from just having that much money.

Yeah, my family lives very comfortably in the US, all things considered ("upper middle class"??), but still far from having $15 million in total wealth.

> I've thought for years that we should place at hard cap on wealth somewhere around $10 or $15 million.

Where's the empirical evidence that such a cutoff benefits society as a whole?

> I've argued we should combine this with a move towards a worker owned economy - in which businesses are democratic institutions governed by the people who do the work involved.

I like the German system of giving labor a board seat. We should try that first before burning our entire economic model to the ground and starting over, based on a gut feeling with no hard evidence to support it.

There’s decent evidence (backing up clear intuition) that wellbeing scales with the log of income. There’s also decent evidence for losses being about twice as painful as gains are pleasurable. Moving money from richer to poorer people should therefore increase average wellbeing as long as the richer people are sufficiently richer, or as long you can make the loss feel like a foregone gain instead.

I also like the sound of the German system.

Not to be snarky, but how could there be empirical evidence for anything that hasn't been done before?

That's true. Although when embarking on a brand new frontier without any empirical evidence available, one would assume there's ample theoretical evidence to make up for it. In this case both appear to be lacking.

In an abstract context that all seems dandy.

However when the power is held by people who would potentially face significant financial loss from either theoretical or empirical evidence, it shouldn't be a surprise that such evidence is lacking, no?

> it shouldn't be a surprise that such evidence is lacking, no?

So there's no way for you to be wrong? But there is indeed all the ways for everyone else to be wrong?

I'm not the one with the power to stop that evidence from being gathered.

Right, so, no way for you to be wrong, ever.

Just your assertions that are always true, in every universe.

What assertion have I made?

> I've argued we should combine this with a move towards a worker owned economy

While I'm sympathetic to this ideal, I don't think it works. All you'd do is add all the inefficiencies of politics into business-level decision making. Democratic processes should be reserved for governing shared resources, like water and air, where independent decision making has pathologies, and independent hierarchical systems are good for optimizing efficiency and value for all other goods and services. We just have to ensure there's competition and fairness for good outcomes.

> All you'd do is add all the inefficiencies of politics into business-level decision making.

While I'm sympathetic to that line of thought, I feel like it ignores the reality that most business-level decision making is already inefficient and political. Where is the competition and fairness when a sustainable business is bought out, prices increased and development halted to wring out every bit of value, and then sold off for parts to competitors when no profit is left? There are so many common business practices that are actively hollowing out the free market.

> While I'm sympathetic to that line of thought, I feel like it ignores the reality that most business-level decision making is already inefficient and political.

Far less than it would be under the proposed system. There's effectively a dictator after all.

> Where is the competition and fairness when a sustainable business is bought out, prices increased and development halted to wring out every bit of value, and then sold off for parts to competitors when no profit is left?

I never said it didn't have pathologies of its own, which is why I said that we have to ensure there's competition and fairness. Arguably, anti-competitive laws have not been properly enforced for quite some time.

You're aware that all publicly traded companies are run by a democratic system where the voters are shareholders?

The only change here is who limiting who allowed to own shares to people work are directly involved.

> run by a democratic system where the voters are shareholders

The more shares you hold, the greater your voice, when it comes to corporate governance. It's not at all the same as the typical idea of democracy as "one person, one vote".

Would you rather corporate governance be more like a political democracy, where no matter if someone has 30% of the shares or 0.0001%, they get the same vote? Or, perhaps the other way around, you'd like to change a political democracy to:

> limiting who allowed to own shares to people work are directly involved

where suffrage is limited to people who work and contribute to society?

> The more shares you hold, the greater your voice, when it comes to corporate governance. It's not at all the same as the typical idea of democracy as "one person, one vote".

"One person, one vote" is not how the presidency works in the USA.

Beyond that, you seem to trying setup some strawman positions rather than engaging in a discussion about anything anyone actually said.

>> I've thought for years that we should place at hard cap on wealth somewhere around $10 or $15 million

Do you think your standard of living under such a system would be lower, the same, or higher than it is now?

I think it would be much lower. I think most people will stop working when they stop getting paid. Some I guess would spend money as fast as they make it on experiences and services and other things that don't increase wealth. But I think many people who would in the current system have gone on to create billions in wealth would stop at $10 million and say, "OK I hit the number, moving on to the next challenge".

Even if that's true, I think a lot of people have a long way to go before reaching $10 million in wealth, and there always would be, so it's not like there are just a few "chosen ones" who could do so much more if they were motivated to earn $1 billion, and society will suffer otherwise.

> Do you think your standard of living under such a system would be lower, the same, or higher than it is now?

that would probably depend on whether you're being exploited by the current system

Imagine looking at a group of slave owners and slaves and asking a similar question with regards to ending slavery, and being all like "well let's hear both sides".

I fail to see the relation between people participating in an economy based on a voluntary exchange of goods and services and slavery.

There's people participating in that economy benefiting from people in other countries being exploited in order for those participants to get cheap products.

Let folks keep their wine and art collections. Limits need to be placed on ownership of productive assets.

Employee, consumer, or even municipal ownership of firms would be a natural consequence of such a limit. No other way to offload assets fast enough, especially since the usual sources of capital would be under the same limits.

I've argued we should combine this with a move towards a worker owned economy - in which businesses are democratic institutions governed by the people who do the work involved.

100%

The problem is some places are more desirable than others. Penthouses, even if they're not big, they are, for most people, more desirable than the bottom floor. They have a view. They're away from noise. They're often away from rats, roaches, ants which start at the bottom.

Similarly any place on the side of a hill, a cliff, a beach, ... You're unlikely to ban such places (all buildings 1 story?) Even if you managed that they're the house on the quiet street and the loud house next to the highway/trainline/airport

You could try to make such places merit based but that only turns into a different kind of bribe and cronyism. Money is at least, somewhat obtainable by anyone. Plenty of people were not rich and became rich, maybe by luck, but at least it's a higher rate of churn than central authority has ever been.

> a worker owned economy - in which businesses are democratic institutions governed by the people who do the work involved

A few notes... another way to make the economy more worker owned is to have a a portion of the shares of companies held by public entities, which then use dividends for a basic income. Public investment in companies like this could also be a way of incubating industries.

Another note: the biggest problem with businesses being democratic institutions is the pace at which decisions can be collectively made. This is an information systems problem that can be solved by software. Instead of voting for representatives who make decisions, we need an institutional programming language, and people can vote directly on implementations of modifications to this institutional code that defines every institution. Votes are essentially approvals to a PR. No need for intermediaries to misinterpret voters' intentions.

I have to laugh when $15M is considered enough wealth to "live a middle class lifestyle." I live in flyover country in a city of two million where the average household income is $60K. A 4% investment return on $15M would keep ten ordinary middle-class households afloat in my neighborhood forever without anyone ever having to work again (and without ever having to touch the investment principal). It's easy to lose track of what an immense amount of money $15M is.

That's terrible. Suppose you want to go some amount of social good that will cost you $15M. Let's say. Develop a new drug. Maybe you want to do something crazy, like don't patent it. It's clearly great for society. But nobody will give you money to do that. Your only recourse to do it is to amass wealth yourself and fund it personally.

Now you have a created a society where that sort of social entrepreneurism is impossible.

If this good were “clearly” great for society, they wouldn’t have trouble forming a conglomerate towards achieving it. We can use the wealth that isn’t sponged up and locked away at the bottom of the sea for such initiatives.

Society has had enough of ostensibly singular “great persons” inflicting their idea of the greater good on the rest of us in exchange for love, respect, and money. The rest of us have to earn those three.

> they wouldn’t have trouble forming a conglomerate towards achieving it.

That's underpants-gnomes level bullshit and you know it. Especially since I've given a concrete example that doesn't exist and would be AWESOME for society

yeah, $15.1 million is just obviously, blatantly too much