Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

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but seriously everything you are saying is seething with value judgements.

> should get them to pay their damn taxes and fair share

what constitutes a 'fair share'? Who gets to decide?

it's easy to criticize yachts. Let's say a billionaire did something "you might like" like throw a ton of money into a basic physics project. But what if that basic physics project is looking for superluminal neutrinos? Or maybe you'd criticize that the billionaire just wanted to get their name out, which is, essentially vanity, an obviously negative character trait.

Or we could get into sketchier territory. What if the billionaire spent tons of money in "development" in an "underdeveloped country". Is that bad or good? Who gets to decide?

I mean the ironic thing is that on many metrics, buying a yacht could be the least bad thing of the three things that I have mentioned, at least the likelihood of buying a yacht actively hurting someone else is relatively low.

Absolutely, there are certainly ways to put on a show like you're helping people and not really care.

Finding those people is harder than the Yacht idiots, but that's why we have watchdogs for public charities and can make laws regulating what people can do with a charity.

If people are making investments not as part of a public charity, we have journalists to hopefully keep some high level accountability, but yeah youn can do bad stuff with money in a lot of ways, go figure.

Even people doing lots of good can still be seen on a spectrum, I love a lot of the work Bill Gates is doing around the world, but I think he worked really hard to fight FOSS, and I think the world is worse off in some ways for it.

I'm saying buying crazy expensive luxury goods is never a good thing, it's just a waste of resources to prop up someone's shallow ego.

On taxes this will forever be an evolving discussion. Hopefully with good policies over the next few decades we can even out some of the income and wealth disparities and need a smaller welfare state. When that happens I'm all for tax cuts.

But at this point the capital gains rate is absolutely in need of change. Taxing the rich is really politically popular, across the political spectrum. If someone has to pay %39 on a million dollars of earned income, the "job creators" making billions can pay something closer to that on their income too.

Well the whole taxation thing, IMO is insane. There was a year when I made 30k and paid a higher proportion of my income to taxes than Bernie Sanders. Anyways if it's income disparity you're looking to fix, taxing the rich isn't going to help. You need to stop stealing from the poor, which is what the government does via policies like QE. Taxing the rich is linear, the QE is compounding damage.

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