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Comment by justonepost | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly why I believe income tax is stupid. It's people like this who should be lifted up on our shoulders by our economic system and taxed 0%. They are the real leaders of us all. A high consumption tax that punishes buying stupid things like super cars and private yachts would help do this.

“the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor” - what a great thing to say. Where are these great men?

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Why would you let them accumulate an unreasonable amount of wealth if you then expect them to give it back to poor people? Why not limit the wealth in the first place to ensure that everyone get its share?

And do you really expect every millionaire / billionaire to do this? I'm afraid numbers are against you, that's why this appears in a newspaper: it's a rare event.

Finally, why let a few rich guys decide where the money goes? I think it would be better if the money was given to the government, so that the people can decide where the money will be useful. I'm not sure all of this guy's money went to good causes (you can check his Wikipedia page).

Not that I think low taxation would be a net transfer to the poor, but many disagree with how the government spends tax money.

> Not that I think low taxation would be a net transfer to the poor, but many disagree with how the government spends tax money.

Pretty sure a worker at Mercedes or at VW will oppose free of cost public transit in Germany. I have met old people whose only income is their Social Security check advocate for "small government" that does away with all the safety nets in the US.

Of course, we disagree with how governments spend money. If we all agreed, we wouldn't need a government. All in all, a charity cannot replace government safety net.

The reverse is also (somewhat) true - this is at least part of the reason that governments effectively subsidize charitable donations, usually through some sort of tax exemption / deduction. It's a form of outsourcing aid.

"many disagree with how the government spends tax money"

I suppose that's as good definition of democracy as any.

The whole purpose of democratic governance is to deal with a political situation where most people disagree.

Imagine if you'd limited Elon Musk's PayPal wealth with such confiscation taxes. We'd literally have no SpaceX or Tesla. Why should society put so much trust that politicians can allocate resources in a fair and economically beneficial manner?

But how many Elon Musks did we miss because some people didn't get the opportunity to try their ideas due to lack of ressources ?

Did musk really come up with all these ideas? He's the paypal guy, its rocket engineers doing all the rest.

He is also Chief Engineer. So yes, he is coming up with these ideas.

He is the one who ask the right questions.

Yes, there are smarter people than him but how many of those people have Vision he has plus the ability to execute it?

and are you saying that gov't would be better at allocating resources to those with greater talents, and/or ideas that would succeed?

We'd certainly have no SpaceX if the government didn't have a large budget for subsidising space companies and paying for their services (which was an order of magnitude larger again during the Space Race when there wasn't any market for any kind of space launch).

As far as I'm aware, Musk can and does pay tax on his earnings

I guess that's why Musk is paying big moneys to political campaigns of McCain and others to win legislative favors and maintain good relation with gov't.

SpaceX's development money was paid by NASA in exchange for launches, not subsidies. There's a big difference between the two.

It's something of a moot point when I'm really arguing NASA wouldn't exist to pay for launches without tax dollars, but the non-binding launch contracts were structured like a research subsidy with many of the payments being associated with hitting r&d milestones rather than with an obligation to actually render services, and encouragement to go and find other customers. Nothing unusual about that: it's the way the space industry works.

That's not a subsidy. That's progress payments. Many industries other than space have progress payments.

In fact you see some private contracts which are exactly like that NASA contract: "We want to pay you to create a much cheaper product than we can already buy, and here are some early progress payments so you don't have to finance it yourself."

You may think this is a moot point, that's totally fine. The difference between subsidies or not is important to others.

You'll find private sector contracts which pay in instalments for hitting milestones, but not ones which give companies hundreds of millions of non-reimbursable research dollars without the obligation to buy or sell any actual services or transfer IP or equity. Phase I of COTS was a series of grants for hitting planning milestones with a right to terminate before Phase II. The procurement contracts were separate and subsequent to this.

> Why would you let them accumulate an unreasonable amount of wealth

It's sad to see many people cheering at "philanthropist" billionaires while thousands or millions of unknowns people in the world ran their business while letting go of the opportunity to become rich by paying fair wages, or not patenting drugs or technologies or not adopting other aggressive tactics like cornering markets & so on.

This isn't how human society works. If you don't want to live in a world where individuals with considerably more ambition and intelligence than you who have built industries and consolidated empires and have been rewarded for doing so, get off your computer built by people who accumulated wealth and funded by people with wealth built from other inventions built and funded by wealthy individuals before that and return to the jungle to lick flies and learn what actual poverty is before you get eaten by something.

In human history, when people like you attempt to force wealthy individuals to hand over their wealth, the country stagnates, and the ambition and intelligence move to other nations that have better social systems built by ambitious men, and the nation gradually rises.

Finally, why do you think "the people" or the government is an efficient instrument for ensuring charitable interests are met? That's really silly

Do me a big favor and don't use any publicly funded or or tax payer subsidized utility or service ever again. Don't drive on roads, don't take public transit, don't ever call the police, don't do business with anyone with a government job or government contract, don't use products or medicines that have resulted from basic research at public universities or NASA, don't use public schools or libraries, if you have a degree from a public institution give it back or pay the difference. Im sure with all your ambition and intelligence you will make due just fine though.

The rest of us here aren't exactly looking for handouts; on average I'd say HNs do pretty well. However we can appreciate the many ways income tax helps support a functioning society.

Your point is not relevant to what I am arguing.

High income and high estate taxes exist in the same world as wealth and I think they should be higher than they are now - the wealthy use considerably higher resources than the rest of society, and it requires extreme stability in society to even keep and maintain wealth which people in the US take for granted.

The comment did not say anything of that nature, he's describing a hard cap on wealth.. what would that number be? 1 million? 5? - "limit[ing] the wealth in the first place to ensure that everyone get its share" - this is the ignorance of a mob with torches.

Phones to make 911 calls from and cars for the police to drive over in were built by American entrepreneurs who became wealthy. It's part of the system. They did not take value out of society to become rich at it's expense - they were not perfect, but there was a significant net gain. If Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg is forced to liquidate 99% of their ownership in their company tomorrow because the guy above me thinks "I want more money, it's not fair he has more than me" to himself and builds a set of quasi-logical ideals around that and those ideas take root, then we begin declining as a society. The system always needs to be re-balanced and kept in check, but having a maximum bank account is not the answer.

I think we were just not on the same page with regard to OP's comment: "limit wealth"

You interpreted this as "hard limit", I assumed they just meant limit using tiered tax brackets (i.e. status quo). And, I assumed this is what you assumed.

The top-level comment in this thread advocates zero income tax; it's clear now this is not a position you are defending. My bad.

That said, I fixed your original comment...

"If you don't want to be a machine in multiverse where some AI has considerably more resources, training examples, and optimizations than you... with accounts holding more Ether and funded by AI who gamed ICOs... and something something something, dark side... then power down"

Communism was tried and it did not work well. Capitalism is bad but communism is worse. Why let a few politicians decide where the money goes?

it's almost like there's a massive space between the extremes of the two

Perhaps we can study the Russian Oligarchy and learn more about that space.

Communism hasn't every really happened. What we've had are bizarre dictatorships veiled in communist language that tap the masses discontent as a source of support, but these haven't resulted in communist states. Communism, in theory, comes after capitalism gets bad, but you need capitalism to come before it, otherwise you get the Soviet Union and China which try to be communist states without being industrialized states first.

My thoughts on this change quite often, but if we were in a situation where we had a hard limit on wealth I think there should still be the chance to accumulate it, and the people who did the best that year get an award for it. Just to keep the incentive there. It's not like someone who has over 100 million in the bank is putting in the effort just because they want more things.

Are you familiar with the term "progressive taxes"?

Consumption tax is the same for multimillionaires and for people who have 3 part time jobs and struggle to feed their family.

Then, imagine that you put a massive consumption tax for cards, for instance. What happens when the car of the 3 jobs guy is broken?

Also, how do you decide which products are the products that rich people buy and which are the products for "the poor"?

Also, how do you decide which products are the products that rich people buy and which are the products for "the poor"?

Congress did that by price - specifically, by imposing a 10% Luxury Tax cars over $30k.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxury_tax#Luxury_tax_in_the_U...

Not agreeing with OP but have studied this and want to provide color to it. Most of the proposals I've seen that promote a consumption tax deal with that by giving cash back to everyone in the form of refundable tax credits or block grants (yearly or monthly). They would figure out what the middle income person / family would consume, tie that to the CPI for those (breads, meats, consumables) and come up with the refundable tax credit amount to cover that persons estimated consumption tax.

In the U.S. you can deduct your charitable contributions (up to 50% of your income) to not have income tax on that money.

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