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Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

You really have to squint to get the idea that the 1% have more money than the bottom 90%. In reality, they own businesses that are valuable. You couldn't liquidate all their stocks and end up with their paper net worths in your bank.

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One wonders then why they need so much of this imaginary value.

If you start a company and that company is successful, you will be worth a lot of money through your ownership of that company. Does that make you a scrooge mcduck wealth hoarder? No.

> Does that make you a scrooge mcduck wealth hoarder? No.

My first guess was that "scrooge mcduck wealth hoarding" made you a scrooge mcduck wealth hoarder, but good to see you're ruling out the strawmen early.

I'm trying to point out how the 1% aren't somehow hoarding all the cash, which was the implication the parent made.

Congrats on knowing the phrase "straw man" though, even if its not applicable in this case.

The idea you’re arguing is well known on this forum in my experience. In principle I agree, people who act like Jeff Bezos has $100 billion in the bank do more damage to the conversation than good. But I think it also avoids some truth. The wealthy are not usually buying $50 million apartments or $100 million super yachts with stock.

> “Billionaires don’t actually HAVE all that money, most of it is stocks” that’s fine i’ll take the stocks

-- InternetHippo on Twitter

Yeah of course there's some truth that wealthy people have more money than poor people, but you have to argue from actual facts about these things. If I start a company that's worth a ton of money then it's because I'm providing a ton of value to my customers (excluding some more arguable examples like HFTs). So the value I have is exchange value in the case of net assets, or the potential for future exchange value in the case of shares. Its a reward for doing societally-valued work.

Of course there are reasonable arguments that shareholders are treated preferentially to labour in our economy and that that's as bad thing, but the basic premise of "the wealthy people have all the stuff so let's take their stuff" is just class warfare, not a reasonable argument.

It's already class warfare, whether you like it or not. The people are only playing the role of self defence.

> not a reasonable argument

It's only "not a reasonable argument" if you mentally substitute how cartoonishly huge, rich, authoritarian, etc. Bezos and Amazon actually are with a mom and pop shop or a guy who owns a single factory.

Self defence against what? Authoritarian against who? I genuinely don't see why rich people as a whole are evil. Some, sure - Bezos clearly treats his workers like shit. But as a class I don't see them as inherently bad.

Assets are taxed. If your money is 100% illiquid, you’ve done something dumb. You prepare to liquify to settle your taxes yearly — if the taxes are higher, you liquify further; the equation isn’t changing.

That is, the format of your money is irrelevant to whether you can be taxed more for it.

It may be irrelevant for taxation purposes, but not for narrative purposes - there's a pervasive "the rich people are hoarding all the money" narrative that just isn't true. I'm pretty ambivalent on the tax front. I think UBI might be the way to go but I wouldn't say I have researched enough to say it'd work as intended.

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