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Comment by avidphantasm | Hacker News Reader

Yes. We should tax billionaires out of existence. This level of wealth and power accumulation is as unseemly as it is dangerous to our democracy and economy.

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Taking other people money by force is even more dangerous for democracy and economy.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this idea means we shouldn't have any government at all.

Not sure if that’s the line of reasoning. A well known danger of democracy is rule by mob. For instance a tough thing to get right is protecting rights of minority groups. If everyone voted for their own direct benefit, we’d just be locking minorities up and taking their assets with power of the majority. Luckily doesn’t seem to happen much.

If the government taking things by force, or by the implied threat of force, is bad, then taxation is bad, and if you don't have any kind of taxation you don't have a government in any meaningful sense.

I think taxes are a bit better because you're also agreeing to pay your own money (vs only taking other people's money only as the original commenter said). I had a different reading of "taking other people's money by force" as meaning specifically voting to tax a minority group more just because you can. This is based on the GP comment being "We should tax billionaires out of existence" as opposed to "taxes are immoral"

OP can clarify if necessary.

That isn't taxing a "minority group." It's just progressive taxation, an idea almost everyone accepts to some extent. "Taxing billionaires out of existence" could be achieved simply by increasing marginal tax rates.

billionaires are literally a minority group. they certainly don't need protected status, but, whether or not it is "good" to take their money, they can't effectively oppose this just by voting.

The argument for preventing one person to amass that much wealth is at least in part that it gives them tremendous political influence. The preferences of Sheldon Adelson arte far more consequential than an average voter living in the same district, for instance. Appropriating the language of "minority" discrimination, which traditionally refers to marginalized groups, to talk about people who are very rich strikes me as distasteful.

one could just as easily make the argument that academics and social theorists have appropriated a word that has a commonly understood statistical meaning. no one objects to calling the alawites of syria a "minority group", even though they are relatively privileged and literally control the country. especially in the context of a (putative) democracy, it makes sense to use the word in the statistical sense.

By your standard criminals are also a minority group.

i mean yeah, in addition to actually being disenfranchised.

Nonetheless, most of us would agree that some abridgement of rights is acceptable for this "minority group." This is why I don't think talking this way is helpful.

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