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Comment by Majestic121 | Hacker News Reader

I am torn on this kind of subject.

On the one hand, this amount of money is ludicrous. However, he did put in both the work and the risks to get it.

The real problem to me is the fact that this money will get down to his descendants, who will have done nothing more than be born.

We all are born with our own stars, some better than other (and I definitely count myself among the lucky ones), but it's being born into this kind of wealth that is disturbing to me, making it for yourself not so much (depending on how you made it of course)

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>>The real problem to me is the fact that this money will get down to his descendants, who will have done nothing more than be born.

I always look at it from the opposite side - it's my choice to leave my money that I made to my descendants. If I didn't want to do it, I would have donated it or spent it on stuff, or simply written them out of my will. So yes, maybe they didn't do anything to "earn" it but it is my choice to give it to them - just like we pay for our children's education and clothing and buy them presents and gifts, one should be free to chose to leave them a massive pile of money. That money should probably be taxed, sure, but if we approach it from the angle of "should I be free to leave my descendants inheritance" then I think the answer is a resounding yes.

> but if we approach it from the angle of "should I be free to leave my descendants inheritance" then I think the answer is a resounding yes.

Is the answer a resounding "yes"? I don't see why it should be. There are many ways in which we restrict freedom in order to have better social cohesion (e.g. fraud is illegal). If inherited wealth creates social problems through distorting, over generations, access to opportunity and unbalanced political power, then of course we should restrict the ability to pass wealth down generations.

It is very clear that inheritance allows accumulation of wealth (and therefore political power) beyond what a single human would (normally) accumulate (because of access to opportunities, starting from well above zero, etc.). This is clearly bad for society (reduces opportunity etc.). Therefore we should restrict it.

Are you against all inheritance? Or inheritance only above a certain level? Because I honestly, hand on heart, cannot see anything wrong with the idea that if I worked hard and have a house + some savings, I should be able to give it to my children just so they don't have to spend 30 years of their lives paying off a mortgage. It's my gift to them. How is that different than gifting them a laptop or a car, except for the scale of the gift?

I can see the argument for extreme taxation above certain levels, so you don't end up with effectively dynasties snowballing all wealth, but the level above which I'd restrict it is so high it would be maybe in thousands of people. Other than those extreme high levels of wealth, I think you should be able to leave to your kids whatever you want to leave(again, not against taxation on it etc).

This is against the grain, but I am against inheritance. It seems most egalitarian for us all to start at the same level. I would of course like the "lower bound" to be much higher than the state currently provides, but that's a different issue.

In The History of Western Philosopy, Bertrand Russell made an observation (to which I'm parapharsing):

In modern society, we have come to expect, almost demand, and seem to inherently know it is best that no political power be transferred by heredity. Curiously, we have not made the same conclusion with economic power.

If not inheritance how do you feel about parents spending on their kids (and grand kids and great grand kids and nieces and uncles ...) directly? Not being sarcastic. No money, No problems applies to me so I myself am trying to find where Id fall if I ever came to this kind of wealth!

Another related aspect to consider is that it's really not very hard for the wealthy to create an inheritance-like legal vehicle even without special cases like trusts.

Should it be legal to contract with someone that you will give them $1B now, and they will provide each of your descendants at least $X/year (or guaranteed job, housing, etc.) for the next 50 years? If this kind of contract remains legal — and I don't see how you could make it illegal without stomping on a lot of contract principles — then the only thing we're really changing is the timing and quantity of taxation.

Allowing inheritance makes intergenerational economic development possible for far more than the ultra-rich (who could already do it anyway). That doesn't mean taxation policy shouldn't be considered, of course.

Just how collectivist would you like the United States to become?

I don't live in the United States, so don't really care that much what happens there to be honest. There are a lot of assumptions (and lazy labels) being used in this debate, and many models exist in which you don't have such extremes of wealth, and it's not all passed down. Attitudes to inheritance vary widely (look at the difference between attitudes in the UK and Sweden, for example).

If you really want my personal view (which I'm not sure of given the phrasing of the question): I would prefer to see a system where people have the opportunity to create great things, but in which their opportunities are not tightly constrained by what their parents did. I'd also like to see a system where we didn't have such gaping wealth inequality as it creates political inequality (and health inequality, etc.). This does not translate as me wanting (insert country) to become "collectivist" as much as wanting a different balance.

Probably the question is not wether inheritance should be allowed or not, but how much. Let's cap it at 100 * median yearly salary? Or tax the rest, or whatever.

Or tax it once and for all while it's "earned". (Make tax rate wealth dependent above a certain line?)

There are plenty of policy possibilities to explore that are redistributive and not binary.

> On the one hand, this amount of money is ludicrous. However, he did put in both the work and the risks to get it.

Did he? Don't get me wrong, I think if he's earning that amount of money and legally, then he deserve it... but I don't think he's the only one putting "both the work and the risks to get it". If any, is the sum of every (exploted) Amazon employee that makes possible to Bezos to make that amount of money.

He made a lot of good decisions. It was unlikely that an outsider would become the world's largest retailer, because others were there with existing infrastructure and knowledge, especially mail order retailers like Sears in the US or Otto in Germany. But they missed the boat. All they had to do was to transfer their catalogue to the internet and expand. But somehow they failed and a nerd with an online bookstore grew bigger and bigger because he understood the internet much better. Oh, and the mail order businesses were no angels, either. Otto has been running its own logistics company since the seventies and they are not particularly famous for high salaries.

Of course, there are lots of people at Amazon who work hard and/or smart, but without the guy at the top making the right decisions, it does not work.

Does it mean Jeff Bezos deserves to be THAT rich? I dunno.

I think it's useful to realize this isn't a binary question, in almost any sense:

1. As you said, the amount of luck you are born with makes a huge difference in how much you "deserve" the money, for some definition of deserve.

2. Part of this luck includes things like your intelligence, ability to work, energy levels, etc, risk tolerance, all of which is (partially) genetic, and contributes to the whole "he put in lots of work" part of the equation. So even for that, you can't really give him sole "credit".

3. And obviously, the society he lives in paved the way for lots of this success, in so many different ways (not least of which is creating the internet in the first place).

4. Then again, we don't have to say "well he did the hard work, so he should reap 100% of the benefits". In fact, we don't say that - we tax him quite a bit, so that not 100% of his money goes to his descendants, rather part of it goes to maintaining society, helping poorer people, etc.

5. Worth mentioning that "put in the hard work" is one framing of what he did - but I'd personally prefer framing it as "created a huge amount of value for other people, worth so much money, and he got some percentage of that.

6. Of course other people might disagree with point 5, or at least want to point out that part of the value created was possibly do to exploitation (I mostly disagree with this framing - not saying there was or wasn't exploitation, but I think at a minimum you have to acknowledge that Amazon did provide a lot of value to a lot of people, way more than the insanely large amount of money that Bezos has).

I mention all the above, because I think it's useful to reframe things from moralistic question of "what someone deserves" in an abstract sense, to the much more practically relevant question of "someone created some amount of value, got to extract some (smaller) part of that value, how much of what they extracted do we want to take and spread around society, versus how much do we want them to keep?". That is usually the actual question facing voters/lawmakers, and has lots of ramifications, but is much more concrete, and more easily lends itself to optimization.

Western society is very individualistic, and so this kind of reasoning makes sense.

But let's say you view the world like you are part of a family tree. The farmer makes sure he works hard to give his kids an education. The educated kid finds a well paying job, but notices that the real money is when you run your own business. He sets his kid up with starting capital to run his own business.

If you look at the world like this, is it still wrong that you try to give your kids an advantage? It's of course up to the kids to either waste it or build something meaningful. But I don't think you want to discard any benefit that a parent tries to give their kid.

If by "risks" you mean subverting the law, then yes he did "earn" this money.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i...

Come on, you don’t need to be a Marxist to realize Amazon is enabled by thousands of exploited grunts.

I feel like it's such a small step to go from recognizing this to accepting that all labor under capitalism is exploitation. Some less than others for sure, but ultimately wealth and power flow up and the workers of the country (world) have no say in that. We don't get to capture the full value of our labor.

He didn't put in work worth 100b dollars.

Imagine you bake cakes by hand, how many can you make? Few dozen a day? Imagine that you then put together a machine that automatically makes cakes - thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of cakes a day. It was your idea, and sure, other people helped make it, but you initiated the machine building process. You now have a warehouse with million of cakes in it - would you also argue that you didn't put in the work to have them, since they weren't made by hand?

Bezos built an empire. And like all empires, they are built by other people. But it's Bezos who started it.

Even in your customtailored analogy, the dude who is wasting cake-making supplies on an unprecedented level to just hoard them up in a warehouse is definitely in the wrong.

Thanks for the pre-school analogy, but I still think it is wrong for one person to control 100b dollars of assets/wealth. Someone being a founder doesn't really translate to any meaningful explanation of why they should have this much power.

Not to say I agree or disagree with you, but I believe you're talking about different things.

1. Did he do work worth 100b usd?

2. Should this mean he controls 100b dollars of assets/wealth and/or have this much power.

I'd actually state 2 more specifically- should having control of 100b dollars give someone so much power

(3. An alternative point that many people state: should people who have much less than the average have such poor lives in comparison to what is achievable.)

I probably fall on different answers to the above questions than you, but I think it's helpful to separate out the various different statements that are being made here, at least as I see it.

If I make an invention that provides $1000 value to 100 million people, the work i put in is worth $100B. It doesn't matter if i did that in a day or decade.

Sure. The point being that Bezos didn't do that. He did provide value and should be filthy rich, but not $200 billion rich. Much of his wealth is unfairly extracted from others he exploited. If he treated every employee humanely and gave them salaries roughly corresponding to the value they provided, he might only be worth $100 million instead of $200 billion.

What "invention" are we talking about actually? Amazon was simply the first to grab an emerging market. If there was no Bezos, someone else would have made the same thing soon anyway. It was just a matter of being fast to act and having resources to invest, no more no less.

It would be unjust—nay, it would be abusive if we didn't let bezos make this much

But I can click a button and a book and a computer and a pair of scissors show up, giving me free time for things I want to do.

And this happens for more people than I can even imagine.

I assume since he's handing over some of the responsibility that he might do something beneficial to the human race with his money.

C'mon, he put in at least 4 dollars worth of work.

True, but he did create value worth 100b.

Why does it matter how much you suffer or work or whatever? It's all about results.

Is it fair? No idea, but that is how the world works. If you don't agree, you can take a look at societies that value the work inputted, such as communism. But in the end the real world cares about value, not work.

Where were you born and raised?

>The real problem to me is the fact that this money will get down to his descendants, who will have done nothing more than be born.

Well, then wait until you hear how much his ex wife got after divorcing... At least he chooses to give the money to his children or not—regarding his ex wife, he had no choice at all.

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