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Comment by jeffreyrogers | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. It seems to work for Finland. In some countries it would probably make you a kidnapping target.

You become a kidnapping target by being rich, whether that's a matter of public record or just someone cruising the wealthier neighbourhoods is arbitrary.

I mean over here you can't look up who makes how much, but the rough value of houses and neighbourhoods, which is used to determine property taxes, is public record.

I'm sure there's some rich people / families living in otherwise underwhelming houses, but they're generally a minority.

The solution to this is to eliminate wealth disparity.

We tried that already. It wasn’t pretty.

When? When did we actually try that?

Why stop at eliminating wealth disparity when you can eliminate wealth?

Same thing, the only way to eliminating wealth disparity is to eliminate wealth.

The Authoritarian Left that goes on and on about eliminating wealth disparity has no interest in lifting everyone up to be wealthy, not they want to seize the wealth and drag anyone down they deem is "too wealthy"

Which is ironically always someone more wealthy than the person advocating for wealth redistribution, for example Bernie Sanders used to talk about "millionaires and billionaires" until he became a millionaire, now like magic only billionaires are a problem for him

You know being a millionaire today has a massively different meaning than 20 years ago.

What? Now you're making me feel old. I remember 20 years ago... it didn't seem that different from today. What's "massively different" about being a millionaire then? You mean, inflation-adjusted, how it's $1.5 million today?

you still get get to retire in comfort, but you don't get invited to the really swank parties

seriously - maybe narcissism isn't the best character trait to structure your society around?

This has been demonstrated feasible! We can all be similarly poor together.

Maybe. But how?

I think that, if you could somehow collect all the wealth and redistribute it equally, within a few years we would see disparity reappear. Some folks are better at accumulating wealth than others.

It seems to me that you would have to keep reallocating wealth. And many would then ask, what's the motive for generating wealth if it's just going to be taken away from you?

> And many would then ask, what's the motive for generating wealth if it's just going to be taken away from you?

The same motivation that drives some folks to study e.g. philosophy, even though it's perfectly well known that this will never make you rich: Because they like it.

You don't just e.g. found a company for the sake of money - you also do it because it allows you to do things on your own terms, it gives you prestige, it gives you the satisfaction of being 'successful'. In todays day and age, this is usually equivalent with 'generating wealth', but I'm a firm believer that this does not necessarily have to be the case.

Economies based on this idea tend to do very poorly.

For one thing, people won't have money to invest in new ventures.

I’m not so sure. Running a business exposes you to tremendous personal risk, especially in a litigious country like the US. It’s also incredibly hard, most often fails, and typically confers less prestige than other much more reliable and substantially less risky high paying career paths (finance, law, medicine, consulting, etc).

I find it absolutely fascinating that your arguments are shot down on this board, because it's business, but that is literally what you're told on a constant basis if you want to go into the education field in the US.

You don't do it for the paycheck, you do it because you like it. Why education, social work, and other human services fields, but not business? That is odd to me.

> I find it absolutely fascinating that your arguments are shot down on this board, because it's business, but that is literally what you're told on a constant basis if you want to go into the education field in the US.

It’s not actually that fascinating, and has a simple explanation: the people saying this about teachers are not the same people that are commenting here. It’s a non-sequitur.

The notion that educators (or anyone else for that matter) ought to accept bad pay or working conditions because of “passion” is completely objectionable. Teachers should be well-compensated for the important and difficult work they do.

Folks who want to start and run a business and give away their profit can already do so. E.g. Warren Buffet gives away half his wealth voluntarily. Or take the case of Dan Price https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Price

Is it ethical to force people to give up against their will money that they (presumably) earned "fair and square"?

Assuming we find that ethical formula (which seems dubious to me but let it ride for the sake of discussion) the next question is, would the people willing to work under that system be "enough"? And then we have to ask "enough for what purpose?"

That gets into ethical and speculative issues that cut right to the heart of the human condition. Wendell Berry asked, "What are people for?" Bucky Fuller calculated that we could bring about a secular utopia for ~$25 billion by sometime in the 1970's if we applied our technology efficiently to supplying our physical needs. I'm open to the idea that we don't need open-ended profit motive to create a good and worthwhile global society (in fact even Adam Smith thought the capitalist "greed is good" phase would be just that: a temporary phase between the old system and the new.)

This has happened before.

After the end of WW2, the Allies decided to repudiate the ReichsMark (the German dollar) and issue a new Mark. Everyone who held ReichsMarks saw it go to zero. To get the economy going again, everyone was issued 50 of the new Deutsch Marks.

Within a couple weeks, the people who had been wealthy before were rapidly moving ahead, and the ones who had not been were again at the bottom.

I.e. the people who knew how to make money still knew how to make money, and the people who didn't still didn't.

This is why the system has to be designed to prevent concentrations of wealth or power.

How? (I'm not trolling, I'm sincerely curious. I respect and appreciate your viewpoint pmoriarty even though I don't always agree with you.)

I feel like it's probably a bad idea to let individuals acquire so much wealth and power that they rival some nations, yet I haven't been able to frame an ethical way to prevent it if the "0.001%" have acquired their wealth legitimately, that is, by the rules we all must follow.

There are two ways: redistribution, and state control of production.

I'm not familiar with this case study but was wouldn't that be due to retaining asset ownership? Even if the dollar became worthless, presumably I'd still control all my assets(the stocks in my brokerage/401k, my car, etc.). The companies I have ownership for would still be able to generate goods/services for Dollar2.0

People storing money under their mattress presumably were in trouble, but doing that already puts you at risk of devaluation through inflation. And I'd imagine that most wealthy people are wealthy because they do exactly the opposite and hold assets instead of currency.

Consider, for example, that Berlin was bombed flat. Every industrial area was bombed. The houses were carpet bombed. The remaining factories were boxed up and shipped to the Soviet Union. The rest was looted by the troops. The young men were dead or in POW camps.

The people that told me this story were in Berlin at the time.

Or, anyone with significant enough wealth had already diversified to gold and stashed it in Switzerland. Not too conspicuously as you wouldn't want to draw the attention of the Gestapo on your "short" but enough to be in a better position for a fresh start, than a 50 DM.

The tax system is part and parcel with inequality.

> I'm sure there's some rich people / families living in otherwise underwhelming houses, but they're generally a minority.

There are more than you think. Pretty much every city has a nice neighborhood where the wealthy residents live. The difference between someone worth $10mm vs someone worth $100mm is not visible from the street.

Does that difference matter when kidnapping? Its not like the 100mm person has more money readily available, as they'll likely both have the bulk invested/tied up in some way.

You can only get their fluid money which is probably quite similar in a time sensitive situation like that.

I would assume someone with $100mm in assets has more of it in liquid assets than someone with $10mm in assets (a large amount of which would be their home).

when someone has a gun to your childs head, i dont think you will be thinking about longer term or short term capital gains

Per The Millionaire Next Door (see https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Surprising-Amer... for the link), most wealthy are those who have a reasonable income but good financial discipline.

Which means that a shocking number of millionaires live in poor neighborhoods and have modest lifestyles.

Those aren't the super-wealthy, of course. But most wealthy people can't be identified by where they live.

The millionaire next door uses an artificially low threshold for wealth. It’s not a book about the wealthy, it’s largely a book about retirement. 1M is only generating ~40k per year, if that’s your savings you can’t afford to live in an affluent area without a job.

That book was originally written decades ago. Its threshold corresponds to about $1.7 million in savings in today's world. Their median was $1.6 million, or about $2.7 million in today's dollars.

And given that the people who attained that status on average lived in cheap neighborhoods, the fact that their income wouldn't stretch long in an affluent neighborhood isn't really a concern for them.

Even adjusting for inflation from 1996 half the population had 1.0 - 1.6 million.

That translates to ~$1.7M - 2.7M, or an income of ~68k to 108k which is still not that significant.

Where do you get half the population from?

According to the statistics that they gave, an estimated 3.5 million Americans were that wealthy. In 1996 the US population was around 270 million so we're talking about the top 1.3% of Americans by net worth.

For more about what this group looked like, read https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/c....

That’s what a a median of $1.6 million and a minimum of 1.0 million means. Half of their population was 1.0 to 1.6 Million the other half was over 1.6 million.

> Those aren't the super-wealthy, of course. But most wealthy people can't be identified by where they live.

This is particularly true for intergenerational wealth. I grew up in a area with fair number of affluent households. You couldn't realize it until you became familiar the community.

The kidnapping problem is on a whole other level.

Denmark is known for "leaving babies in strollers outside of cafes". The Nordic social-liberal countries (Finland included) solve this problem not by opacity but by having social support and trust.

Dumb person here. What is "leaving babies in strollers outside of cafes"?

When going into a cafe to order something, they leave their child (in a stroller) outside with the (allegedly justified) expectation that nothing bad will happen to it. (To be fair, babies aren't especially easy to liquidate if stolen, and strollers are inconveniently bulky, so this arguably says less about the amount of crime than about how petty, blatant, and asinine the criminals are.)

Reminds me of a Michael Moore movie where he goes to Canada, and checks in a neighbourhood whether people lock their main door or not. He litteraly enters a house, and asks directly to the inhabitants: "Why don't you lock your door?". And the canadians answer: "Why should I?"

I know that, but you mostly don't get to choose whether you live in such a country or not. Everyone would choose to live in a country like that if they could.

I think the point is, that the society as a whole should support public tax records. Finland (and Sweden) does.

> kidnapping target.

Or a target for scamming.

Seems privacy nightmare too. I hope there is an opt out where you don't ask and yours is private.

My guess the records are public but access is not anonymous; you'd need to identify yourself and leave a plausible reason on record.

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