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Comment by philipov | Hacker News Reader

How about paying people more? That's pretty actionable. Jeff Bezos doesn't need 100 billion dollars. "Just get rid of unexpected expenses" is the one that sounds ridiculous to me.

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I think you, I, and even Bezos would agree that he doesn't need 100 billion. Which is why he doesn't have anywhere near 100 billion dollars. He has ownership stakes in companies that have been estimated to be worth 100 billion dollars (it would be impossible to liquidate for anywhere near that valuation in practice, however)

Net worth is not the same as resource allocation. This isn't the 1500s where you could plunder a castle and pillage their stores of grain. Bezo's net worth has very little to do with the distribution of housing, food, and medical care to poor people.

Does he consume more housing, food, and medical care than average? Absolutely. Are his consumption levels even remotely similar to his absurd net worth? Absolutely not.

How is that actionable? Are you going to show up at Jeff Bezos’s house and rob him?

It's actionable by passing laws that limit the upside executives can extract from capital investments and raise minimum wage on large business. There will always be unexpected expenses, so you have to pay people enough to be able to save.

Much better than making people dependent on those who control the mechanisms for allegedly limiting unexpected expenses; that's just a plan for increasing social control available to elites. High density housing with shared kitchens and bathrooms sounds like a dystopian hellhole designed to strip people of their dignity, and that's something you think is a good thing? We already saw tenement buildings in the 19th century.

People have been trying that for 100 years or so. So far it hasn’t worked.

> People have been trying that for 100 years or so. So far it hasn’t worked.

We didn't even have the minimum wage 100 years ago in the United States. How are you going to deride people for not offering solutions, then, when they offer viable solutions, attempt to magically will-away history?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Bill_of_Rights

These ideas aren’t new. The idea of taxing the wealth even more is ALSO not new, and we already have tried it and had it fail. (France has tried this, as well as other European countries, with usually disastrous results).

Ahh, okay. I guess we'll just let people die in the streets then.

People aren’t dying in the streets because Bezos has 100 billion. Pointing to rich people is just a distraction for people who can’t do math.

Even if you could magically trap all of them in the US and wealth tax them away, it’s a meaningless drop in the bucket. Seize all of the money from everyone with 50 million+ in the US and you don’t even have enough to pay for Medicare for all.

Politicians have only been trying the bare minimum needed so they can continue enjoying benefits provided by lobbyists and keep the pesky annoying people (population) off their backs. It's hard to enjoy a life of luxury when you have people asking you to do your job and represent them.

I think, instead of minimum wage hikes etc, that maybe putting a cap on the ratio of CEO pay to entry level employee would work more effectively.

I think that falls under the umbrella of limiting the upside executives can extract from capital investments. It's not an either-or proposition, though. Minimum wage or something like it is needed to make sure that money goes to workers rather than shareholders.

How exactly do you think limiting upsides is meant to help the bottom? Tall poppy syndrome has never been an effective policy for helping the bottom. It’s strictly about taking down the rich.

You can argue about taking down the rich (they have too much power, your jealous, etc), but don’t for a second pretend you’re doing it to uplift the poor.

And what mechanism do you propose? Just a 100% tax on any gain over X%? Do you realize how easy it would be to then just sell at that threshold and invest in something else?

History is replete with the sudden removal or transfer of "private" property [1,2]. I'm not saying that this is good thing economically or morally, but when people get mad they vote for Hugo Chavez or whoever. I think this is highly unlikely in the US right now: in a "how many divisions does Jeff Bezos have" argument, I'm pretty sure you could make a case for the answer being "greater than zero" given regulatory capture and general financial/corporate influence on government.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reforms_by_country

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nationalizations_by_co...

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