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Comment by lnxg33k1 | Hacker News Reader

I think we're wasting time here, as much as I hate Jeff Bezos, during his "meeting" with Boris Johnson he said something that is I think relatable to the current situation, I quote: “that this is a job for governments. And tax isn’t something that he’s going to pay as an ex-gratia act of kindness. It’s up to governments to come up with the right framework.” (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/26/jeff-b...). We need to stop wasting time appealing to the human-side of billionaires, we need to stop talking to them and create regulations and punishments, to prevent them to exploit the population

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People ask billionaires to do something because they are the ones who visibly accomplish something. I think, subconsciously, they don't expect their governments to do something.

I think that's a great point about visibly accomplishing something. I think a lot of the things that a government accomplishes happens more invisibly, in the background, whereas billionaires (especially the Bezos, Zuckerburg, and other B2C billionaires) do so with a much more direct relationship with people—and spend a lot of money promoting how well they've done things.

How much is the government doing well but we just don't see? Conversely, how much of business is doing things that harm people that we also don't see?

Yes, this is a question of competence, not resources.

Not just competence, I think something like the bystander effect is in play as well. If you single out any single congressperson to appeal to, they'll shrug and point to their 534 other congressional colleagues not doing anything as their excuse to not do anything either.

Their government is bought and run by the people and policy that billionaires fund and endorse.

That perspective is the result of decades of massively successful libertarian propaganda. Good efficient government is possible but only if we stop electing representatives that want to destroy government. I see some hope in Republican's new found hatred of tech billionaires.

> And tax isn’t something that he’s going to pay as an ex-gratia act of kindness. It’s up to governments to come up with the right framework.”

"It's up to you to fight me and my billionaire buddies and hundreds of corporations lobbying for new tax loopholes every year."

Accounting firms send people to Washington to "advise" legislators on changes to the tax code. Said people are then rewarded very handsomely, because the accounting companies get to use the changes for their clients, and because they "advised" legislators to do it, they know ahead of all the other accounting firms what's going to happen...

Unfortunately Amazon pays little taxes not because of trickery with tax loopholes, but mostly because by design companies only owe taxes on profits and Amazon has made (on net) very little profit to date.

Governments tax corporate revenue too, it's just that's called a sales tax.

I was speaking about Jeff Bezos, not Amazon.

And also, yes, Amazon gets lots of tax loopholes and freebies. They wave "jobs!" around and get property tax breaks and whatnot.

Agreed- an "adversarial" system is what makes strong policy. People / corporations will always try and exploit loopholes or flaws in regulation. When this happens, the regulation can get adapted to align with its actual objectives. Having flawed laws on the books an expecting actors to behave differently than the laws are written doesnt make any sense

It looks like recently our politicians have forgot that it's their duty to create regulations for the wellbeing of the society, or like they're acting like regulators with common populations and youth ministers with the rich

Well, at least in the US, Congress hasn't been legislating for a while now. They handed over that responsibility to the Executive and Judicial branch a long time ago so that they don't have to deal with unhappy voters because it's always someone else's fault.

How much do I agree with you, we can't afford as a society careers politicians, in Italy we've had for a while the five stars movement who said that politicians should be citizens temporarily lent to the common cause, who then go back to being citizens, but if you are a career politicians, then whoever you hit, is a lost vote, so you have no motivation to act, I think congressmen, deputies, 1-2 terms, then home, and I guess in that case, you are subject to the promise of a job from a big corp., I am not really sure how we can fix our society right now, but I think we have to as soon as possible

It's probably always been this way to some extent, bit with the concentration of power in tech companies and few others, it's optimal for people who want to get elected to focus on influencing the powerful and ignoring the masses. I think this effect has just gotten stronger recently.

Well, I think this ties in pretty well with the quote from Oscar Wilde posted here last week, which was quickly retorted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29413173

"We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table?"-- Oscar Wilde

I retorted it because the top level commentary was speaking critically and negatively about the donations being made by MacKenzie Scott.

She's donating more than anyone else, yet people are complaining about it.

https://gen.medium.com/the-case-against-philanthropy-c36b83d...

> We need to stop wasting time appealing to the human-side of billionaires, we need to stop talking to them and create regulations and punishments, to prevent them to exploit the population

Yep. If the past 10 years have shown us anything, it's that these billionaires are anticipating this pushback, so they'll add however many layers of fluff they need to prevent them from taking real action. Google didn't remotely care about privacy until they were relentlessly sued over it, and Europe implemented baseline privacy laws. Apple dragged their feet in the mud over App Store changes until the double-barrel end of the Supreme Court was staring them between the eyes. The only way we can make a change here is by exercising the powers we were given to keep these companies in check. The longer we hesitate and waffle over whether or not it's a good application, the more time we give them to exploit us.

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