Hacker News Reader

Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

> One proposal, posted on Twitter by Adam Bonica, a political science professor at Stanford, was for a 100% tax on wealth beyond $500 million. He based it on what he called “Beyoncé’s rule,” which he explains as, “Think of the most talented and hardest-working person you know, and think about how much money they have and how much money they deserve.” Queen Bey, he tweeted, has an estimated net worth in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars. “Let’s have Howard Schultz explain to us why he should be worth more than Beyoncé.”

I don't think a statement has ever made me more furious than this.

View on HN

This may be considered OT, but since we are on the subject of the "Super Rich" I'd just like to remark that I've never understood the cult of personality surrounding Beyonce. The people I know who like Beyonce, really like Beyonce. It's borderline religious worship.

About the only pop star that has ever made sense to me for was Michael Jackson, and that's pushing it.

I think it may have been intended specifically to make you that angry.

I think 100% is too high, but I'd consider 80%-90% reasonable.

There comes a point at which marginal wealth stops having much utility, other than as a metric to compare yourself to others.

Steve Jobs's behavior provides a decent demonstration of this. He was okay taking a $1 salary because it cast him as the great CEO taking a hit for his company. But when the board insisted on paying him, he told them their offer was too low. He wanted to be _either_ the great sacrificing CEO or the great CEO who is equally well-compensated, because he didn't actually need the money, but he wanted the reputation from it.

If it's just being used as a yardstick anyway, we might as well tax most of it.

There comes a point at which marginal wealth stops having any utility

No there doesn't. Whatever you can't spend goes towards making sure your descendants are taken care of. Or you can donate it to the various charitable organizations of your choosing.

Fuck that. Leave your descendants no more than 10M each and anything over goes into a social dividend. It's the "you got to be incredibly wealthy for decades and leave a fortune to your family and now you can repay the society that gave you all that wealth" tax.

If we make it as easy as we do to become incredibly wealthy, we should make it just as hard to stay wealthy.

Lol. If it were easy to become wealthy then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion. Besides, a social dividend implies that somebody else decides how to spend my hard-earned money. Fuck that!

> Lol. If it were easy to become wealthy then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion.

That doesn't logically follow. I think that a great portion of what makes wealthy people wealthy is blind luck. That's not to say that Jeff Bazos isn't a great businessman or a hard worker, but I'm not convinced he's the greatest businessman there is.

> If we make it as easy as we do to become incredibly wealthy, we should make it just as hard to stay wealthy.

What possible reason could one have for making it “hard” to stay wealthy, other than pure spite and jealousy? How does it benefit society in any way?

Circulating money is a good thing. Stagnant money not so much.

Wealthy people invest their money. It doesn’t “stagnate”.

Extreme concentration of wealth is detrimental to society as a whole.

How exactly are you measuring “concentration of wealth”? And why do you think high values of that measure are “detrimental to society as a whole”? Take note of the difference between cause and effect.

Only to the extent that the disutility to other people isn't too high. Imagine, say, the CEO of Foxconn pushing their staff to the extent that an unusually high number commit suicide, then dying and choosing to give it all to a cat charity. Are we really saying that's the best we can possibly achieve in terms of human social organisation?

You can also start projects that mere mortals can only dream of, and hedge your bets against amazing technology being available only to the wealthiest people in the future.

I think that it is great that Jeff Bezos was able to grow his wealth by owning a good part of the company he started and now is in the position to spend about $1 billion a year on developing rockets and spacecraft.

I can’t think of a statement - beyond, perhaps, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights - that I have agreed with more.

There is simply no use for one individual to have that much wealth. Tax it, and individuals will find creative ways to put it to use instead of hoarding it.

Tax it, and individuals will find creative ways to put it to use instead of hoarding it.

You seem to think the ultra rich have Scrooge McDuck style swimming pools of cash or stacks of gold bars in a cave somewhere doing nothing but somehow "storing" accumulated wealth.

This is generally not true. Most billionaires appear to have most of their wealth in the form of stocks in a company they run. (AKA investment in the economy)

There's lots of valid criticisms to be made of extreme wealth inequality. The rich supposedly "doing nothing" with their money doesn't seem to be one of them.

> Most billionaires appear to have most of their wealth in the form of stocks in a company they run.

That's a lot worse. Owning stocks means having control over a company and thus power. One unelected person having so much more power than others is incompatible with democracy.

A Scrooge McDuck style gold pile, in contrast, would make gold slightly more expensive but wouldn't influence the economy otherwise.

He's more or less saying "no one should ever be richer than my favorite singer." I can't possibly think of a shallower way to talk about wealth inequality.

The argument was that nobody should be richer than what they can earn through work, or "exploitation" of themselves as a capital asset. Ronaldo would also work as a yardstick. Earning purely through property or being a boss wouldn't. It's an interesting one to explore, as there are all sorts of annoying corner cases possible.

The royalties an artist receives are a form of passive income. Beyonce had to work to create an asset (her music), but when she's done with a recording the income comes from controlling the asset, not directly from her labor. It's really not that much different to owning a business. She's still capturing an outsize portion of the value from a process that involves thousands of other people.

Wealthy musicians are still capitalists, and getting rich running a business that employs thousands should be as respectable as singing, if not more so.

Seriously, stop thinking about the singer and think about the number. $500,000,000. That's a lot of money. The world is a crazy place right now, and part of it has to do with so few people amassing so much wealth.

Sorry, to clarify, I wasn't necessarily opposing the wealth cap. I was reacting to the view that Beyonce and Schulz's contribution to the world are comparable, or even the suggestion that somehow Beyonce has contributed more. Starbucks is a company that employees tens of thousand of people, and delivers value to millions of customers around the world.

I think the view that Schulz shouldn't have more than 500 million isn't unreasonable, but it seems very clear to me that he should have more than Beyonce.

> I can’t think of a statement - beyond, perhaps, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights - that I have agreed with more.

That Beyonce is the most talented and hardworking person? That no one should have a higher net worth than her? You have some very strange views.

If you are worried about wealth concentration, there is nothing that concentrates more of it than government.

I'm having a very hard time believing your statement, because all you need to do is substitute $500,000,000 for her name and ask yourself should people have more wealth than that, with all the inequality in the world right now?

I was upset by the notion that Beyonce's contribution to the world would be considered on par with, or even remotely close to, Howard Schulz's. Starbucks is a company that employs tens of thousands of people, and delivers value to millions of customers the world over. Beyonce's great, but they're pretty clearly not in the same league.

>I'm having a very hard time believing your statement, because all you need to do is substitute $500,000,000 for her name and ask yourself should people have more wealth than that, with all the inequality in the world right now?

Imagine a world where every human being on the planet had another $100 a month in wealth but Beyonce happened to double her wealth as a result. This seems like a good thing to me but others may disagree.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com