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Comment by Frost1x | Hacker News Reader

Another issue is who owns these automation processes. If I used my vast financial resources to develop (i.e. pay people to develop) a new automation process, what rights do you have to my gains? Why should I share it with you?

This mentality and ownership really needs to be rethought.

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Imagine if all improvements over the course of history would be kept in secret for gains of owners of capital. Who own rights to the invention of an axe? Probably the first one who put a stone on a piece of wood. Should he has all rights for it forever? I couldn't really agree.

Which is why such property rights are supposed to fade with time. Corporate interests have just pushed that time frame to eternity in recent laws.

There’s a difference between having the right to the concept of an axe and having the right to my specific axe. I think GP was speaking more towards the latter.

It seems, sadly, that in software we have conflated the two. My specific iPhone is a brick without a government-recognized license for a copy of Apple’s sequence of numbers that instruct it.

You also didn’t make the phone. Apple did and sold it to you under certain arms-length terms, presumably terms that both sides were willing to accept.

That’s quite a bit more acceptable to me than someone deciding that Apple’s phones should be theirs because reasons.

You're making a lot of assumptions about ownership. "Your" vast financial resources are just measures of debt (money is not personal property) secured by the government. We can always collectively decide that what you did to accrue that owed debt was not worth its valuation and take steps (e.g., taxation) to correct. "Your" automation process is built on publicly-funded research and using publicly-funded resources; the public can decide to recoup its investment, and whatever else it needs to secure its mission of providing for the general welfare.

Feudalism is over, dude. You're connected. You're beholden.

You have to wonder why we don't just tax a little more? Do we have plenty of resources already and we just don't give it to the people struggling who need it? Or do we really not have resources to help the overworked underpaid masses out here in opioid infested flyover country? If we don't have enough resources, why not tax a bit more to get the resources? If we do have the resources, why are we not helping these people out more?

Sometimes it's just baffling how everyone can see an obvious problem and no one moves to try to at least ameliorate it. Not even asking that it be completely solved, just try to make things a little better for those people.

This line of thinking ("we can tax you however we like") is backdrop of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In the book, the creatives/creators go on strike rather than suffer the taxes. Whatever you believe about the reality of that story, successful tax collection is a negotiation, not a diktat. It's probably best to have everyone believe in taxes, so it's important to have a discussion around it.

The feasability of the circumstances described in AS aren't a triviality, they're the crux of your argument. Tax collection has been unsuccessful even with the fig leaf of "negotiation"; what's better is to have everyone believe in what happens if you don't pay your taxes.

Generally-speaking, I'm betting that the wealthy would rather live in a world where they still have essentially unfettered freedom of movement and resource access with slightly less collective wealth, than one in which they have to hold back their gifts and always have to be looking over their shoulder.

You having vast financial resources depends on the rest of society agreeing, otherwise what you have are numbers on a server somewhere and an angry mob around your house.

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