We, as a collective humanity, should not allow anyone to have more than, say, $20 million, until the basic needs of others have been met.
Which I came to the sad conclusion, those that understand housing wont talk about it, those that dont understand will never talk about it.
Homes are a luxury.
The power of the state when it throws its weight behind something is awe-inspiring but the power of decentralized innovation leads to tinkering and unexpected breakthroughs that a government run project wouldn’t permit (due to the number of unnecessary bureaucracy and box checking)
Consider that once companies got involved in space they had incentive to lobby congress to make NASA less competitive.
Sadly becoming more and more popular.
Even if we did what david927 suggests, and imposed a $20 million/person wealth cap globally, no one would be meaningfully "leveled down." The differences between the lifestyle of someone with $20 million and someone with $200 billion aren't that different: what's different is the level of power the latter has over people and governments. Power that has no checks and balances, no strings, no way of ensuring it's not massively abused. And given the kind of person you need to be to amass a fortune in the billions in the first place, it's nearly guaranteed that it will be abused.
The amount of money people are actually talking about taking from the billionaires will not affect their lifestyle. Period. They will still be vastly, unimaginably rich. They will go on accumulating more money, probably faster than any wealth tax will be able to appropriate it, without doing *anything*.
No one deserves to be paid more in a year for simply existing than an average human needs to spend in their entire lives on food, clothing, and shelter.
Over the past two centuries, billions of humans have been lifted out of poverty. Approximately zero percent of that came from the redistribution of existing wealth. All of it came from raising economic productivity. And that vast majority of those productivity gains had foundations built by entrepreneurs seeking great fortunes.
$20 million per person is a great fortune. Show me any innovation that came from someone wanting more.
Andrew Carnegie was worth more than the equivalent of $20 million before US Steel. John Rockefeller was worth more than the equivalent of $20 million before starting Standard Oil. Edison was worth more than $20 million before starting General Electric. Howard Hughes was worth more than $20 million before starting his aviation business. Carl Bosch was worth more than $20 million before commercializing nitrogen fixation.
- Did Bezos think of AWS? I think not. It was literally selling excess processing capacity.
- Gmail was not innovative; it was just a better client. Web-based mail had been around for a while.
- I'm not sure how innovative Square is but I don't think any of it would have to do with Dorsey.
- The NeXT was based on innovation coming from Alan Kay. The iPod wasn't innovative; it was just a hit. The iPhone was already underway when Jobs came back. The iPad is a bigger iPhone.
Big companies don't mean innovation; they often mean acquiring innovation and monetizing it.
All the big innovations of the 20th century were accomplished by individuals who did not do so based purely on financial incentive. That's a myth.
"Let's not feed kids crying themselves to sleep at night from hunger because that might mean we won't get iPads with blue casing." Shame on you.
I remember before Tesla: electric cars were a joke, nothing more. Even if the only thing Musk did was convince rich people they were not-terrible, this was worth it. (Same RE: the iPod, which was infamously dismissed on slashdot, yet did in fact revolutionise the MP3 player market).
When it comes to SpaceX, however, Musk is an actual rocket scientist.
And of course, the iPods being popular created a lot of jobs that would otherwise not have existed, both for rich people like us and for the industrialisation in the same area as the Foxconn factories in China)
really? you think land reform and mechanization in russia, china, and former colonies had nothing to do with that? wage raises and other victories of labor organizing? welfare and schools and transit and healthcare and other public services? most of the poverty in the world that one can say has been lifted probably comes directly from all those efforts.
it's easy to miss that viewpoint in america, where our wealth came from the homesteading of an entire continent (made available by genocide, pretty redistributive) and then food and manufacturing exports to a bombed-out world (implementing those reforms and supported by intentional redistributive funding from us) which turned around over decades and provided us manufacturing services to supply our consumption. when you don't look more than two steps ahead it looks like pure entrepreneurship. but you have to remember most of humanity doesn't live in the core of this empire, where land was free and consumption markets were far away.
> by entrepreneurs seeking great fortunes
No. It was technological innovation, made by the brightest heads of our species that did science themselves or at publicly funded institutions. The private sector took these innovations to manufacture and accumulate, while the innovators were criminally underpaid.
Now you need to figure out how do scale up production? How do we control costs to keep it affordable to the average person? How do we get people aware of the product? Who do we target as early adopters? How do we incorporate feedback from real usage back into the engineering of the product? How do we design the product so it's intuitive and appealing to use? How can we convince investors to take the risk and give us the capital needed to get this process under way? How do we plan and budget for production to accommodate projected growth? Are there legal or regulatory considerations? How do we coordinate all the people that need to work together to make this happen?
Ask anyone who's actually successfully launched a product how far the gap is between "works in a lab" to "widespread distribution and adoption". Engineers are part of the equation, but they often arrogantly assume they're the only ones that matter. That's why there's no such thing as a company that's only engineers. Entrepreneurs are the ones responsible for coordinating all the complex work that needs to come together to actually get a product into the hands of consumers.
These are all valid questions whose answers are necessary, but ultimately they are solved problems for which we often can just copy the solution from previous iterations. Somebody just needs to do it and I don’t see why these persons should get far far more than the lions share. Let them get remunerated and also substantially, but not the most.
The vast majority of entrepreneurs does not deserve renumerations of such high proportions, they just get them because they can. Past accumulation, capital structures, capital dependency, path dependencies - which ultimately are all just positions of power - allow the entrepreneur class to squeeze out such high returns.
But they’re not even the root of the problem, because they are squeezed out by the financial class who has the privilege of squeezing others out by virtue of having squeezed out others before.
We have these systems of hierarchical exploitation and accumulation for thousands of years, but saw only real improvement with technological innovation.
who seizes ownership of my company?
What's to stop me from offering you $10 bucks for .0001% of your company and making you illegally rich?
Taxes on net worth won't work because net worth is abstract
In theory, this would act sort of as a general purpose regulation. Instead of using the force of law to make companies comply, it uses the force of its share votes.
Of course, there are a bunch of ways this kind of scheme could go wrong too.
Like I said, there's still a lot that could go wrong with that scheme, but it isn't like the current scheme doesn't have its problems too.
Ok, assuming that we're treating HN like a business and that business is large enough to have significant government voting share under this scheme:
The government voting with its shares to silence those stories would potentially be actual censorship under the US constitution, and therefore illegal. The same cannot be said about private owners.
Of course, the government could opt to transition the site away from those topics entirely, but again that's something the private owners could do too.
And none of this prevents small competitors from coming in to run those stories.
Let me turn it around: Would Facebook have more or less freedom of speech with government control?
And we all know how efficient government bureaucrats are. I can just imagine the joys of having civil servants dictating how you should run your company.
A common refrain in the private sector, but having worked in both I can assure you that any sufficiently large organization is at least as inefficient as a government.
> I can just imagine the joys of having civil servants dictating how you should run your company.
We do that today through regulation. There are reasons we collectively want some level of control over how companies are run.
Regulations are different from a Washington bureaucrat far removed from your company having to approve your new fiscal year roadmap or plans to pivot the company
Obviously, there's room for nuance and it's not just one or the other.
I'm under the impression that an increase in company value is not an end to itself, it's a means to an end (more investment, more dividends, higher sell-off/buy-off price, increased stock price, etc - all are more probable when company valuation increases).
So why are you looking to increase your company's value?
Granted, this also disincentives societally beneficial efficiency increases.
I wonder how much of this backlash is just a result of people being propagandized to by the media’s steady drumbeat about corporate abuses since the GFC.
Texaco dumped a bunch of waste in the Amazon and refused to clean it up or pay for it. Why is this not surprising to anybody? Oh, right, because we all know that this sort of thing happens all the goddamned time.
If it's abstract why can you use it as collateral? You have to make up your mind, it's funny money or real money?
Because that's what we're talking about here.
I don't know how the banking system works in the US but I doubt you'll be able to buy much money with your word alone.
Government seizing shares of companies from people if their valuation rises too much?
Seems almost impossible to implement
Oh, but don't worry. Greed is such an amazing motivator that it wouldn't take a decade before we accomplished meeting those basic needs.
Didn't think through it much, aiming for a national product that elevates everyone in the country. Kinda like a Norway oil fund.
I mean.. a $20M bakery is a huge bakery with a lot of people... but a $20M car factory is basically nothing.
I create a bakery... it's successfull, it grows to 21M... now I have to sell a part of it... and it grows.. sell another part.. it grows.. sell another part.. what then? What if the second coowner bought a half of it, and the price has gone over 41M, do we now both have to sell a part of it? What if it loses value?
What if you own a farm somewhere, with many hectares of nice land, and someone decides to build a railway and a highway there, and that land becomes worth many millions overnight?
Hard limits on wealth are not practical. Taxing private persons for taking out and using that wealth is the solution.
The other question is: why $20 million? Looking at the rates on teleport.org, software developers in Nairobi look at the average Silicon Valley software engineer’s pay the same way the latter looks at someone who can earn $1-2 million per year, and I can’t think of any reason why the USA might care to limit its own salaries while other countries catch up.
If you distribute the excess wealth, you will create a lot of inflation because if people have twice the money they will be prone to pay a twice bigger rent or a twice bigger restaurant check, or twice the money for the same land plot.
If you decide to somehow destroy the excess wealth (for example, burning cash or the houses they don't need), you will shrink a bit the economy by creating some job losses for those today working on superfluous activities of the rich such as yatch cleaning.
Ah, I see! So what you're saying is, if we tax the poor instead, that'll deflate the currency and make everyone richer!
E.g. the free market depends entirely upon the amount of money people have? And nothing to do with supply/demand and the elasticity of the market? In a more nuanced view demand creates supply, efficiencies of scale reduce cost, and everything is cheaper.
Folks love to throw out the "More money means prices go up!" as if it's a truism.
We need to define "have." "Have" as in have X$ as personally owned liquid assets? Or "have" as in having X$ invested in economic development?
I'd agree with you in the former case, but not so much the latter.
For example, Elon Musk would be forced to sell all but a minuscule sliver of his shares in Tesla, SpaceX, etc and give the proceeds to the tax man. He'd be out on his arse and replaced by an executive hired by whoever bought the shares. It would be the death of Tesla and SpaceX as we know them.
That's just a highly visible example, but the effect would be to take tens of thousands of companies out of the hands of the people who currently run them, and into the hands of random investors. It's not clear to me this would actually be any good for those companies, or the economy, or the people working at those companies, or their customers.
Finally, if everyone who's currently an investor in these companies, but has more than $20m also get taxed down to $20m, who is going to buy all the shares? You'd also tax out of existence the vast majority of the source of investment and capitalisation in the economy. There's be functionally nobody left capable of making significant investments.
These things matter. It's nonsense like this that is why Marxist experiments the world over have caused such havoc and misery on unimaginably vast scales.
If there was an island with 100 people and one person had almost all of the coconuts and others were starving, no one will care about details for very long. Fix it now because people won't ask nicely for long.
Likely to their friends and family.
So we end up with the same scenario again, inequality persists only this time it’s because of a centralized authority figure that now has a monopoly on violence.
No one is saying that.
We take all the coconuts, gather all the people, and work to come to a decision.
Or are you saying you need someone to tell you what to do, and you'd rather it be the guy that got rich off everyone else than someone randomly chosen? I can understand that at least, although I still disagree.
There have long been simple answers but we have been to greedy to look at them. We have been able to eradicate hunger, homelessness and educational poverty for a long time. We have just chosen not to.
I find it funny that so many people are terrified of being capped to $20M/person and so few are concerned about children sleeping outside, hungry.
Yes these problems have been solvable for some time, but it’s not billionaires stopping that happening. Their job is creating companies, jobs, products and services not ending poverty. We have the resources in the public purse already. Richard Nixon came very close to announcing a basic income.
The problem is political. Too many Marxist on the left that are economically illiterate and don’t know how wealth works or even what it is (hint it’s not piles of money); and too many radical libertarians on the right that think western European style liberal welfare is communism.
They're being asked to pay their fair share of taxes and instead are using their wealth to find loopholes so that they pay nothing. The US has regressive taxation.
> Too many Marxists on the left...
I'm not sure that there really are any Marxists on the left and that's certainly not what's holding back addressing poverty. Neither of the groups you mentioned have any real political power.
No, the political center has the power, and it's that center which has moved right to be more concerned with protecting wealth than helping the poorest, at least in America. As you said, Richard Nixon considered UBI and Milton Friedmann was quite clear about the need for a negative income tax. That was the right; now that's the radical left. See the problem?
I honestly didn't mean to start a fire with my first statement above. I'm saying that the wealth inequality gap is disastrously large and growing. The wealthiest, much like before the French Revolution, both won't pay taxes and frankly don't care how much poverty exists. And that's unacceptable. We should be talking about that and nothing else.
I have to say, I’m not entirely convinced by the growing wealth gap argument. Pickety’s numbers are all before taxes and transfers, there are huge holes in the analysis. On the other hand, there are too many renty ways to grow wealth. I believe the right approach is to recalibrate taxation and the incentive system, not just slap huge punitive taxes on top of what’s already there.
I was thinking the other day about companies and the impetus behind patents. I agree we want Elon and Jobs and Bezos to have ownership and run the show, like they do now, and with as much “wealth” and power as they have, exclusively, for some amount of time. But I’m not sure if we want the mass of power they accrue to sit around indefinitely. Once the head leaves, as you saqy, the company is entirely different. Society does not really benefit from a scenario where say Jobs accrues tons of wealth doing great things and then leaves this zombie beast of a company lying around continuing to suck money out of people and transfer it to shareholders.
So I think something like a limited exclusive right to profits might work. You (a company) can profit no questions asked for say 14, extendable to 28, years if more time is needed and/or you’re still under a certain size. After that a company gets turned into a non profit. It may still operate and pay employees and staff and whatnot, but it may no longer pay owners out the wealth that it accrues. It either has to spend that wealth, pay taxes, or lower prices so that it’s not taxing people, essentially. Obviously this needs more ironing out but I think it is possibly a compromise that is radical enough to combat the large and dangerous wealth vacuuming machines that companies turn into while still preserving the incentives structure that drives capitalism.
There are a lot of people in the US deeply dissatisfied with the levels of inequality and the way the deck is stacked against low earners. That does need to be addresses, but plenty of countries have done so without turning to outright Communism and Marxism. Is Britain a Marxist state because it has a robust social security and public health system? Is Germany?
The point is that Musk would/should never have gotten to such an oversized amount of control in the first place, and thus these businesses wouldn't be in any danger at all from such a move because they'd already be staffed by competent people who wouldn't need his approval or "executive powers" to run things. And if Tesla and/or SpaceX can't stay afloat without Musk, then I'd argue they're failures, or at the very least shouldn't have gotten this big while still being dependent on him.
Besides, so what if companies fail? They're not people, they should never be more important than people. As long as the people are taken care of we should be fine with businesses failing. It leaves room for others, and stops tying up human output for unproductive endeavors.
> This would take the ownership of huge swathes of the companies in the world out of the hands of the people who created them and operate them and into the hands of random executives with little or no track record.
Who's giving you this idea? The whole point is to give more power/control back to the people running those companies, i.e. the workers making stuff, serving people, maintaining, etc. No-one is arguing to blindly dilute ownership of companies among the populace _just_ to keep from having billionaires. This is scare-mongering at its finest.
> Finally, if everyone who's currently an investor in these companies, but has more than $20m also get taxed down to $20m, who is going to buy all the shares?
The wealth being taxed doesn't just vanish into thin air. If so many currently wealthy investors are being taxed down, it stands to reason that the redistribution of said wealth would mean that _more_ investors appear. Also, from an ideological point of view, it seems more democratic to have many smaller investors, than allow a few to accrete such wealth that they can do such things as bully or starve projects of investment for personal reasons.
> It's nonsense like this that is why Marxist experiments the world over have caused such havoc and misery on unimaginably vast scales
Funny how someone who immediately thinks to reference "Marxist experiments" in response to an argument for better wealth redistribution, can't envision an economy without a top-level executive being vital for a company to survive, or investments being impossible if 1 person can't do it all by themselves. Seems like a really fragile model to me. Meanwhile, these Marxist experiments aren't broiling the planet for an extra 50 years to milk profit off of fossil fuels, nor expecting people to sacrifice their health and time to themselves to work 50-,60-,70- hour workweeks without getting an ounce of recognition whether they do a good job or just adequate. Or how about leaving people to die of poverty because there's no direct profit to be had in them?
There would never have been anything for people to be in control of without Musk. It isn't as if companies like SpaceX or Tesla just spontaneously "occur" from time to time, for whoever's standing nearby to claim as their own.
>Meanwhile, these Marxist experiments aren't broiling the planet for an extra 50 years...
Oh come on, the Soviet Union and China have been responsible for catastrophic environmental mismanagement on a scale that dwarfs anything in the democratic world. Authoritarian economic systems are only possible within authoritarian political systems, and as soon as you do that you're on a path to disaster.
Inflation destroys the value of money, not the underlying goods or services. Whether there are 100 dollars to go around or 10 billion, for the same "physical context"/material reality a rule along the lines of "no more than %5 of total wealth accumulated in 1 person's account" seems inflation-resistant.
If this seems insane to you, consider the insanity of trying to define a fixed container size with an infinite flow of water.
As someone from a post-communist country: when you put a limit on capital, another form of accumulating one will be created. Some people will be more able and motivated to get the new form of the value, others will be less able or simply not interested in it, some will inherit it over time. And we will end almost exactly where we had begun.
Limiting ways to accumulate wealth will not get rid of the desire to do so. Such a law will only force it to change the way it is manifesting.
All while millions of humans go hungry and die from poverty. It’s about time this issue is discussed more publicly.
Don‘t get me wrong, I‘m no socialist whatsoever and have nothing against a decent lavish lifestyle. I just don‘t think the world needs more megayachts, shipping around the world to be near wherever the owner is, in case he/she might want to use it for a day or two. Or 15+ megamansions around the world per billionaire, stockpiled at all times with the most expensive and rare food money can buy.
At some point society has to think about a fair allocation of scarce resources.
I mean the politicians would love this because they understand it is not about owning things but about having control. And then they could control the most.
The scary part to me is the amount of people who think this same way as you.
If we as humanity just confiscate others wealth, then the world will be better. Forgetting there has to be those in charge of confiscating it.
No, the problems in our society will not be solved that way. People get a president like trump because they deserved it, and then they got a president like Biden, because the people still haven’t learned and still get what th wet deserve.
> you’d find less people fed, less people sheltered and less education
Countries with higher and progressive tax rates have better success in all of these issues.
what a "wonderful" principle, in the spirit of "people are already being raped, carry on, there's nothing wrong to see here"
Everyday society is improving.
So they voted for an administration that would keep things that way. The world is weird.
We can have empathy now, or we can be surprised later.
(1) Strongly suspect based on what? There's 0 precedent for the scenario you suggested, but plenty of examples of right-wingers using this idea to scaremonger.
(2) Where are you actually going to go? European countries already take higher taxes, and most other countries have higher inequality and lower general standards of living than the US. I don't doubt that some of the wealthy consider themselves "global citizens", but the majority of people aren't going to leave their home country over marginally higher taxes - especially at today's pitifully low rates.
(3) Most of the upper middle class people I know will stop being hysterical about paying higher taxes after a moment, and recognize that a billion is 1,000x more than a million, and 10,000x more than 100K. American's don't hate wealth, they hate aristocrats, which is what the billionaire class has become. The same logic does not apply to people with "mere" eight-figure wealth.
2. If I understand correctly, this proposal is not an income tax, it is a wealth tax. I know of no European country that has such a thing.
3. See 1.
Netherlands has a wealth tax system, just for reference. I agree with your 1. point
I guess that's somewhat true, yet the upper middle class only got stronger and stronger, which seems strange if they were all fleeing the jurisdiction because of high tax rates. It seems much stronger evidence that it's not a real threat that should concern the country - most high income Americans are reasonable and understand that we need to pay to maintain all this modern stuff we have, and hopefully improve upon it. It wouldn't seem to be a major concern if a small, selfish minority decided to pay the exit tax and go somewhere else.
You should read history books more often.
I'd be confident in calling out the rich on this bluff.
(But, as I said on another comment, his theoretical net worth isn’t real money, it’s how much other people reckon they could extract from the companies he controls).