Comment by cactus2093 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cactus2093 | Hacker News Reader

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You left out a key part in this simplified formula - you pay $X and make $Y from the work, and you do this for N people. If you leave X and Y the same and scale N down to like 50 or 100 employees, you have a good old hard working American business that's creating solid working class jobs. When you scale N up to an almost inconceivably large number (Amazon has over a million employees) you get an owner with an inconceivably large fortune.

The problem with just taxing it all away to prevent him from being a billionaire is the money is tied to control of the company, so it's equivalent to saying nobody can build a business bigger than some arbitrary limit. Which is equivalent to saying nobody can build a business with more than a certain arbitrary number of employees. Where would any of us work if that were the case? It's not at all a given that you would get millions of new small and medium businesses that would completely make up for that gap you'd have from lopping off every big company at a couple billion dollar market cap. The world is just not zero-sum like that as much as progressives might (either deceptively, or obliviously) pretend that it is.

> Paul would never fund a founder who wanted to divide all profits among employees

While YC might not recommend a founder take literally 0% equity, they are hugely supportive of founders giving more equity to employees and keeping less for themselves and have done a lot to move the industry in that direction https://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity

> The problem with just taxing it all away to prevent him from being a billionaire is the money is tied to control of the company, so it's equivalent to saying nobody can build a business bigger than some arbitrary limit.

Limits are hardly arbitrary. If you control a large enough chunk of economic output that your decisions have distortionary effects on other markets and people it’s not an “arbitrary” standard that this should be disallowed. I assume everyone on HN would be pretty pro something like net neutrality to constrain gatekeepers from carving a slice out of all business done on the internet for themselves on these grounds. But, for some reason, people seem to have trouble connecting how the same logic applies to distortionary control over the media or something like urban transit.

So make laws to prevent monopoly, rather than making size/employee count based.

> So make laws to prevent monopoly, rather than making size/employee count based.

Yes. That's generally what "no billionaires" policies are focused on. But "market power" is still a useful consideration.

You would be some sort of metrics to say when something has become a monopoly wouldn't you? Why can't company size be such a metric?

Or that business with a million employees could just return a greater share of the wealth to the employees instead of the owners, thereby avoiding triggering the marginal tax

“Return”? The employees never had it in the first place. Amazon runs on razor thin margins on the retail side so I pay $50 for a keyboard that cost them $45 wholesale + $1 to store + $3 ship + $0.20 labor for the 10 seconds employees interact with it. That 80 cents of profit goes into the business and is used to expand.

Jeff Bezos is rich because his ownership stake (stock shares) are worth a lot of money on the stock market. He did not get paid out profits (amazon doesn’t pay dividends). There is nothing here than even makes sense to ‘return’ to the employees.

Hmm, that's weird. I've never seen a more expensive online store than Amazon. All the small online shops I've visited offer lower prices for identical products. They also generally have a better selection within their niche so you don't end up overpaying for products that are way more capable than you need. It's also much easier to find products on those small online shops thanks to aggregators like geizhals.de

Meanwhile searching products on Amazon is still a shitshow and it's generally not possible to disable third party listings.

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