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Comment by wang_li | Hacker News Reader

One could argue that everyone has the same responsibilities to society at large. Thus for every Chuck Feeny and Bill Gates, you, personally you, have an obligation to create many billion dollars of value and give it away. If you don't do that, you're worse than any evil billionaire you care to name. They at least are paying millions of dollars in taxes for any money they pull out of investments. How many millions in taxes have you paid?

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You are assuming that billionaires create "billion dollars of value" .. quite a leap.

Do we really need to take time out of our day to praise billionaires? What about the workers who's productivity they robbed to get their status?

I think the billionaires are well compensated enough by society. Really odd to see people rushing to defend them.

This seems like a strange argument since someone who is say, running a large conglomerate, benefits much more from society's infrastructure and organization than a layperson. It then seems reasonable for their obligation to be proportionally greater.

In the US, according to the CBO[0], the people who are in the top two quintiles of income pay for all services and infrastructure. Saying that these people benefit more from this infrastructure than a middle income household is very odd. It's like I decide to be a farmer and need more water, so I dig a well to water my farm. Then my neighbor sees the well and asks if they can get drinking water from it and I say sure. Then they tell me I get more benefit from the well and I have to pay to maintain it.

0. See page 31. https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-...

Their large incomes are made possible by infrastructure. The analogy doesn't make much sense to me since even the most prolific billionaire didn't build much of this infrastructure.

As a class they did. Some of it was built by billionaires past, but is maintained by the current generation of the well to do. Regardless, the middle income household certainly did not build it.

Oh, I didn't know that "billionaires as a class" digged roads, erected buildings, manned trains, stores, telephones, farms, factories... "The low income households didn't build it", you have a very twisted definition of what that means.

I would assume that the taxes they pay and the people they hire and pay (and the taxes they pay) pays for much of that infrastructure.

And no, most companies don't pay zero tax.

In that argument you assume that the net effect to society of their winning billions of dollars is zero, which is obviously nonsense. For instance the net effect to society of somebody like Charles Koch is, undeniably, absurdly negative. He has (not even being hyperbolic here) the blood of thousands on his hands, with his pushing of climate change denialism. We could even argue about the net impact of Bill Gates (is Microsoft a net positive to society or negative? it's at least not obvious, and one can argue).

> One could argue that everyone has the same responsibilities to society at large.

Yes you could argue that.

> Thus for every Chuck Feeny and Bill Gates, you, personally you, have an obligation to create many billion dollars of value and give it away

Now that is a big jump. It does not follow that we all have the same responsibility that we all have a specific responsibility.

Historically some rights were tied to the ability of the upper classes to fulfill some base responsibilities that the lower the classes could never possibly meet. Such as being able to afford a full set of bronze armour and a spear. Thus achieving both moral and social superiority.

This is a good turnaround of the previous statement. It is incorrect to assume there is only so much wealth, and subsequently, billionaires need to be taxed in order to maintain our standard of living. Most billionaires have created something entirely new, not hoarded some scarce resource from the rest of us.

Perhaps, but only to an extent. It is not as if, if only average people were clever enough, we could all become billionaires, and the GDP could be 10,000x higher than it currently is. There are, in fact, scarce resources – including land and minerals and other natural resources, but also labor. Most billionaires become that way by being in charge of a large company, one with a lot of workers. Well, you can't be the ruler without people to rule over. And if not for you, those people would still exist and would be making some other contribution to society.

"To maintain our standard of living" is not even close to the reason we need to tax billionaires.

Let me put it to you this way: I couldn't give 2 shits how many mansions, yachts, and Ferraris anybody has, but, when there are people[0] who literally have the ability to spend an amount of money greater than the entire GDP of a small country[1] to influence my country's elections, then I have a problem with that. Put another way, it's not the amount of money that certain people have accumulated that bothers me. It's the amount of undue influence those people get because of it that's the problem. It's not 1 person = 1 vote. It's more like $1M = 1 vote, when you take that $1M and apply it in the right places (such as directly into the pockets of politicians by way of lobbyists).

Find a way to fix that problem, and then we can talk about allowing billionaires to exist. Until then, America isn't a republic: it's a de facto oligarchy. And that, I have a real problem with.

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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bloomberg_2020_preside...

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

$1M 1vote is no problem. So even a big short billionaire cannot influence much since 50,000 votes would be $50bn. Ok, this might effect Slovenia. One time. And then its a former billionaire.

When I utilize the interstate highways, I am doing so for my benefit with my personal vehicle. The wear and tear on the roads is negligible.

When the Waltons utilize the interstate highways, they do so using giant tractor trailers which chew up blacktop with heavy loads.

They deserve to have a higher tax burden because they use more resources.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24486539.

I apologize if my tone was poor.

Paying taxes is not a virtue. It is not voluntary, you are "forced to pay".

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