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Comment by tanto | Hacker News Reader

How about we take away everything down to 10^6$ from the 0.0001% richest and redistribute it to everyone. We repeat this with the 0.0001% of the richest every year from there on. Every time someone is chosen for this honour they get a medal.

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That's how communism was supposed to work, and the guys in charge of redistribution took the lion's share for themselves.

There are ways to making this work. Sadly, none applies to dollar.

One solution. Make dollars worthless, unless they have been stamped with a stamp, for the current month. Basically force people to pay taxes on money.

Say you have to pay 10% of the value. Got 2bil, congrats. You are paying $200 million each month.

A simpler way would be to print more money and cause more inflation. 10% wealth destruction per month matches the hyper inflation of Germany in the 20s.Of course the rich who store their assets in non liquid form weren't as affected as the poor who didn't know how to pay for bread.

There is another way, without issuing money. Create a new currency, dedicated for paying UBI to people. Then require that companies pay part of their taxes in this currency, in order to make it valuable. It should cycle itself back and there would be no need to issue new UBI money.

The deeper problem is that companies have a conflict of short term / long term interest. In the short term, they would prefer to sell their products with as little taxes as possible, and hire as few people as possible. But in the long term, their interest is to have a thriving population and a robust market.

If companies don't act responsibly towards society, there is a pressing need to organize self-reliance. We need to create a new economy based on unemployed people. With good management, they could cover a part of their needs without external help, maybe even be self sufficient. In a sense, we could employ the mass of jobless to work for their needs, thus finding employment and solving their problems directly.

I see this repeated all the time but I consider it to be completely wrong. It is always in my interest to keep $X rather than give it to someone else. Even if they use the $X to buy my product, that's still less favorable for me than to just keep it and not sell the product. And the chance that they would buy my product with that money is almost zero anyway.

Giving people money in hopes that they will buy your product is mathematically a losing strategy, in short or long term.

Companies are benefiting from paying less salary and thus not supporting society, but in tern, expecting the same society to buy their products.

Population was already reliant on salary, which was a part of the cost of production. It won't change much, just that now it is redistributed more.

I eagerly await you building the society of self-reliance of which you speak. It sounds like there's nothing stopping you!

If it's so bad, then you take the lead and provide a different idea.

I earnestly and honestly think that if you believe in the notions you have advanced, then you should work towards implementing them. Surely the jobless masses will be happy to work for their needs, and self-sufficiency will obviate the need for any external assistance.

No, that won't lead to inflation. Quite opposite, it would lead to deflation, since you have same material value, represented by a lower number of bonds/money.

The value of money, each month would go up, and printing money could be use to counter act the deflation, creating a stable currency.

Keep in mind that if you use your money before it expires each month, you get more value than if you just sit on it.

Many people don't think that a flat tax is a good system. I think you'd want to tax rich people more, percentage wise.

Inequality isn't there because the rich hoard actual dollar bills in their basement. What you suggest would affect the poor and middle class more than the rich.

True, there would need to be other methods to deal with super rich, although they'd just escape jurisdiction into other states.

I don't think poor/middle class would be that badly affected. With money taxed, you have a lot of incentive to give that money away, to avoid paying cost.

You have an incentive to exchange dollar bills for some other form of assets. This is easier for the rich, and richer people tend to hold a lower percentage of their wealth in cash. So the system you propose is regressive; it is actually less redistributive than some kind of flat tax. The idea is just incredibly stupid as a way to redistribute wealth.

Well, it did prove itself as a prototype once:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freigeld

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%B6rgl#The_W.C3.B6rgl_Expe...

Government still gets to redistribute whatever taxes it accrues.

No it hasn't, absolutely nothing on those pages is an argument against anything I wrote. Not only can the rich easily avoid this system, they don't even need to do anything because today, the rich already hold almost all of their assets in non-cash form. So your idea doesn't work even if the rich literally to do nothing about, they are already safe before you even start.

Yes, the government can redistribute money of poor and middle class people that was collected this way back to them.

I never said it is enough to reduce inequality. You'd have to heavily tax luxury goods, so the rich would have to convert some of their assets to cash, to pay for their taxes. Sure it won't make rich into middle class, but it is possible.

This childish understanding of economy and prosperity would be funnier if authoritarian regimes wouldn't try them on a regular basis. They find out that cash holders don't use it to fill their bathtub but run their business.

This would be totally devastating to many people who do not earn that much. Before, you could stash $200 per month to make a nice "rainy day fund" in case you lose job, get sick or your car breaks down. Now you would not be able to do so -- just work work work and don't even think about leaving your job!

And the worst part, it would not even work against rich people. So I got 2bil? Great, I will buy 5 houses and a furniture factory. And move the rest to my shell company in Caribbeans.

Imagine for a moment you are a driven, self-made .00001%er. If you KNEW your profits were taken at the top, would you work hard and innovate? Or would you commit fraud and squirrel away your wealth or not bother. Im sure a few would see it as a 'goal', but stakeholders would doubtlessly disagree. The spirit, I agree with, but not possible to cleanly implement.

Maybe the .00001% don't work hard to innovate, but they with hard to exploit and concentrate wealth.

Lots of innovation for example Congress it of universities, from people who are not millionaires.

Who are these mythical self-made 0.0001%? All the ones I've heard about relied on family wealth and connections, inheritance, and most often worker exploitation.

The filthy rich do enjoy this ego-feeding narrative that it was all just talent and hard work that gave them a disproportionate slice of the world's wealth, but it's not borne out by the facts.

There is no amount of work a human being could do that justifies the wealth that is in the hands of people like Zuckerberg and Warren Buffet. They seem like decent enough people, but they have an obscene amount of wealth and power.

Great wealth is rewarded for placing winning bets, not for hard work.

For example, gambling on investments, as with Buffet, or on a new idea, as with Zuckerberg. Sometimes just for gambling on Powerball.

The great rewards are balanced by great risks, and many of these gambles are valuable to society. Where would we be without new businesses and new ideas?

It seems to me that we all recognize the need for incentives and disincentives in order to promote behaviours valuable for society.

But, the idea that a person deserve the financial power of a country in order to be motivate is a little ridiculous. Are we saying that Zuckerberg would not be creating Facebook if he though that it's going to get only 100 million dollars? or that Buffet would not invest if he is only to be the 5th in the Forbes list?

I suspect most of Zuckerberg's wealth is in Facebook stock. Are you proposing the government should take control of Facebook? Or force him to sell the majority of Facebook to someone else to pay taxes?

I do think it would be demotivating to know that if you start a really successful company, the government will take it away.

>The great rewards are balanced by great risks

Zuckerburgs wealth exceeds that of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of his countrymen. Do you honestly believe that the risk he incurred was greater than all of our nations oil rig workers, foresters, soldiers and police combined?

Am I missing something? If Facebook goes belly up do his shareholders get to cut off his hands?

Imagine investing $1000 in something with a 1 in a million chance of success (just for example). For that to be a rational bet, the payoff would need to be a billion dollars.

Oil rig workers, foresters, soldiers and police have guaranteed pay instead of a very small chance of very great rewards.

maybe the could innovate for the good of other humans instead of the good of their wallet ? Or at least, accept a proper balance ?

money is just a proxy for status.

the rich can be brought to heel so long as they're allowed to feel as though they're high status. if you take that away from them, they will not "produce" whatever value they're claimed to.

that's exactly what the article is talking about. there's nobody rich who'll willingly do it so there usually is violence involved and given the rich have resources to defend themselves, there's a lot of it. it's why the bolshevik revolutions of 1917 resulted in their outcomes.

They could buy gold or Bitcoins which are impossible to take away if they use the proper precautions.

It would remain theft.

But since you asked for numbers: http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/feed-your-famil...

Actually: I did not ask for numbers.

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