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Comment by Fins | Hacker News Reader

And of course you are the one who should decide how much every person is allowed to have?

Of course, every lefty believes that he will be the one standing in the guard tower, not the one inside the gulag. In practice it usually works out another way.

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We already decide how much you can keep. It's called taxes. Everyone pays them. Taxing extreme opulence never seen on the planet is quite a bit away from sending people to the gulag don't see what one has to do with the other. However the French did chop of the heads of all their royalty at one point, so there is that... if you want to argue for that route... it's up to you -- that's also a 300 year old possibility, just like the US constitution is a 240 year old possibility. But not really what I am getting at. And all this private property non-sense mythology is bullshit considering all the other factors at play, theft, imperialism, colonization -- the list goes on. All these broke embarrassed billionaires coming to defense of the wealthy is quite amusing while the wealthy themselves are arguing for being taxed more.

All money is debt. Why society should owe billions to these individuals is beyond me considering they themselves used all of the society's resources to produce it... and obviously don't need society to be in that level of debt to them... as what is the society going to gain out of that indebtedness. It's not as if they actually want anything from society that they could not have with far less. However, there are millions of other who would benefit from that debt as they could use it to get others to produce things that they need and make themselves better off as well as make society as a whole better off with creation of jobs to provide those goods and services.

Ummm, no. We absolutely don't. We decide how much one has to pay in taxes, absolutely not how much one can keep in total. Proposal in this thread is for that latter.

Arguing old and tired Soviet propaganda tropes of imperialism, theft et al is not even interesting at this point, but it would be interesting to see an example of when and where there were a society that did a forceful redistribution of wealth of this degree and managed to produce "things that they need" and made "society as a whole" better.

Are you daft? You make 20k, you pay no taxes. You make 200k, you pay 90k in taxes. At one point in the past if you made millions you paid 90% of your income in taxes. So yes how much you can make - 90%... make as much as you want.

Soviet propaganda is as relevant as Capitalist mythology which is as tired as Soviet propaganda.

> interesting to see an example of when and where there were a society that did a forceful redistribution of wealth of this degree and managed to produce "things that they need" and made "society as a whole" better

Okay, when 90% taxes were in play the economy was doing great. All of these are extremely short time periods. In the past no one has ever had these levels of wealth. Therefore, trying to see examples of the past which would validate current politics is a fool's errand.

And that 90% was effective, not marginal rate? Talk about being daft...

Obviously it's marginal, and so is this whole argument, tax massive amounts of wealth (at that time it was anything over 200k (2 million in today's dollars at 90%), not your average Joe. Keep grasping at straws. And yeah make as much as you want...

* make 2 million = get 1 million (50%)

* make 3 million = get 1.1 million (63%)

* 10 million = get 1.8 million (82%)

* 100 million = get 11 million (89.1%)

* 1 billion = get 101 million (89.9%)

Make as much as you want.

It is grasping at the straws indeed, to try to come up with any kind of justification for a scheme like this. Esp. when it would be pretty obvious to anyone who bothers to check, that people with that kind of "money" do not have it as cash they got as a salary, but rather as assets (stock). Do you propose taxing unrealized gains? Or simply confiscating assets when they appreciate "too much"?

The only positive I can see here is that this will kill SV for good. Unfortunately it will also kill most real innovation as well.

It does not make sense to take control away from people who are running companies and have all their assets tied up in them like Zuckerberg, Bezos, et. al. This is a disasterous recipe for sure. But once they are not longer doing that or especially when they die it's easy enough to tax it then. And yes it would wipe up some venture capital, but that's already going gangbusters. It went from 25 billion to 90 billion in 10 years, 4x growth. So yes it would reduce some of that.

https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Screen-Sho...

But isn't this what the original proposal in this thread was? Setting an upper limit for how much an individual can hold?

Apart from technical difficulties in determining if someone is still running the company, or just pretending to, what would the upside be from implementing something like that, apart form making those who like counting money in other peoples' pockets happy?

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