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Comment by door5 | Hacker News Reader

Bezos didn't build Amazon or AWS, his workers did. He contributed as CEO, but the work was done by thousands of smart, hard-working and talented people around the world, but they don't own the company. Bezos's salary is just $80,000 a year -- his wealth doesn't come from the work he does for Amazon but the fact that he is the one who owns the capital and reaps the profit.

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such salaries are exhibit #1 for why we need to equalize taxes between capital and labor (e.g., recognize capital gains as ordinary income)

> Bezos's salary is just $80,000 a year

So he's not subject to max SSN and Medicare taxes?

There is no cap for Medicare taxation.

His workers would not have built it if he had not directed them to do it and provided them the resources to do it.

That's correct, but why does he have the resources to do it? Because he came from a rich family with capital to invest. Why isn't capital distributed evenly across all workers, not just of Amazon, but in an entire society, so that everyone shares in the profits instead of one man? What is exceptional about the fact that he had the capital to make an initial investment, why does that mean he should be a billionaire? We invested collectively in the technology that created the internet in the first place through publicly funded research, and yet we do not see the material benefits, only a small few do.

What would it mean for capital to be distributed evenly? Under such a system, what would be the advantage for someone to save and invest rather than consume? (After all, on "turn 2", the capital is going to all be redistributed so it's even again. Then again on turn 3...)

Could you sketch out your idea a bit more? At the moment, I'm not getting it.

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