The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
antipope.org
antipope.org
I'd like to propose two very simple rules:
- no business entity can have more than 150 people.
- no individual can take part in more than one business.
Put those in place, and you destroy corporatism and with it you destroy the concentration of power. Politically, it's much easier to sell "no one should have this much power" over "no one should be allowed to amass so much money". Left and Right could easily be united on this.
I don't think you'll be able to find a couple of simple rules that can't easily be dodged.
More generally, there's a more simple way of converting money to power: Employment. As long as you have freedom of contract, you can pay somebody money to do stuff for you.
Yeah, but you can't tell them they can only get money from you, to do things that are in your interest. Your competitor is free to bid for their time/services/products as well.
As long as the company is not working exclusively in the interest of any single customer (in this case, the "parent" company), it's fine by me.
Haha. I think some of the folks in Washington have more power than the billionaires and they would be making the rules.
In terms of simple limits, let's prevent companies owning/buying/selling other companies. Or block corporate ownership or residential property. There are many other things that could reduce concentration of power. Let's ban campaign ad funding by out of state entities - including political parties.
Money, and it's concentration, is the mechanism that allows that.
> no individual can be a part of more than two business.
> You can have as many non-controlling/non-voting shares on any business entity, but you can only contribute directly to one.
That...seems rather contradictory. I think your simple rules are not so simple. Because your explanation of “not more than two” is that it is either “a lot more than two” or “not more than one”, depending on what kind of involvement is being referenced.
Also, just as advertisers drive advertising-dependent businesses with no direct voting stake, non-voting owners can substantially influence business decisions, especially if you set up a legal structure that means that most capital will often come from them by limiting the ability to participate in voting ownership.
> just as advertisers drive advertising-dependent businesses with no direct voting stake, non-voting owners can substantially influence business decisions
That seems to be arguing past the point. Can you give a more concrete example?
I have difficulty imagining how that society could compete economically, politically, and militarily unless they were already relatively tiny and focused (like a petrostate). I think you'd be losing economy of scale while making it much more difficult logistically to pursue any large scale engineering, military, or even social projects.
> I think you'd be losing economy of scale while making it much more difficult logistically to pursue any large scale engineering, military, or even social projects.
That, I don't agree. If software is eating the world, we can and should be using it as leverage to make individuals more productive. 150 people is a number big enough to get a good balance of specialization and coordination.
Do boards count? What about non-profits?
> - no business entity can have more than 150 people.
I'd note that future businesses will be less people dependent. Many businesses have > $1M revenue per employee. Perhaps some can even hit $1B per employee, this becomes trivial if you make everyone a contractor / gig worker.
Just like in accounting, the counting for the purposes of this rule can begin to get creative.
> Many businesses have > $1M revenue per employee. Perhaps some can even hit $1B per employee.
Yeah, but by limiting the size of the corporation, we get:
- more competition, and consequently a reduction in profit margins.
- more localized/niche offerings.
- less chances from the incumbents to buy out potential competitors. (Screw you, Facebook)
- more companies trying to succeed by commoditizing their complements.
- less capital going to loss-leaders. (Screw you, Google)
Or perhaps we just get concentrated capitalization in employee reduction? If machines don't some how count they'll just approach the limit of machination .
* 1 CEO who takes 98.8% of the value
* 149 robot maintenance staff who make just above median salary
* 1 Billion robots each making $1 of profit.
This is not some philosophical puzzle of pirates sharing a treasury. There are tons of other choices for everyone involved, and none of them have to lead to such extreme concentration.
> Can you?
Yes I can. It’s called freedom. These guys are free to do whatever they want as long as they don’t break any laws.
I value my freedoms a lot. I was born in a non-free country, and I don’t want to go back to living in a non-free country.
In other words, the author proposes to make laws such that it would be illegal - roughly speaking - to own a $bln.
The point, of course, is, should we consider that good enough - or not - to support with laws?
The main issue is that they do things that are unlawful (monopolies/duopolies, dumping, violating consumer and privacy laws, insider trading, regulatory capture, bribing, and a long etc.) even when they have enough money to last them a lifetime.
I think the only way to curtail that power concentration is forcing them to share a significant part of the profits with their employees, who did the lion's share of the work towards that goal. That way, to become a billionaire, you leave some millionaires among people who is helping you do so. I'm not talking about communism, but dividends.
I'm aware this would result in a huge financial and economic shock, but any significant change does that. Modern capitalism, while probably headed in the right direction, is showing its deficiencies after a couple of centuries. I also don't worry about the consequences, because it's not going to happen on its own, and the crisis that would force it would be much bigger.
I live in a country where people are presumed innocent until proven guilty. I like this principle.
Just assuming that if someone is rich they must have broken the law somehow, that directly contradicts this principle. I stand against this, and lots of people in this country think like me.
And I'm not rich; I will never be a billionaire. And I am not paid by billionaires to advocate for their cause. I simply want to live in a country where the presumption of innocence is one of the foundational principles. Along with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Do I like wealth or income inequality? I don't really care. Inequality doesn't bother me. What bothers me is that the real estate market is crazy insane. The tuition for colleges promises to be absurdly unaffordable by the time my kids finish high school. The cost of healthcare is stupidly high, and it starts to feel quite high even after the insurance pays their part. All these things bother me, and they bother many tens of millions of other Americans. But in order to fix them, you have to try to fix them. Not to point the finger at the rich and say it's because of them.
They don't need that much money.
It's not even that much money, relative to the world.
That much money doesn't make you live forever.
They didn't even build the things that they're known for.
Sometimes, people haven't read the older thing before.
There was an excellent post a few months back about how overvalued creativity is.
If that's true, there should be better counterarguments than "this is unoriginal"Sounds interesting, do you have link, or may be keywords for search?
Even if the points aren't new, the level of wealth disparity we're seeing is new, so an updated discussion is warranted.
Is it, though?
Is it worse than between a serf and a king during the pre-industrial era? Is it worse than during the Gilded Age? I doubt it.
If the Egyptian elite didn't have such concentration of power and wealth, only very small pyramids would exist. If Elon Musk only was allowed $100 million, he probably wouldn't have the most advanced and cost-effective rocket company in the world, the insanely cool Spaceship, and the goal of a Martian colony.
On the other hand, few billionaires are working towards a lofty goal. Most just to make even more billions by whatever means, to put their initials in the high score board.
1. Networth is not something you can easily spend in it's entirety 2. Instantaneous networth ignores the fact that liquidation would cause a sell pressure that would cause it's own decline in value. Just because 100 shares of XYZ stock most recently sold for $N , does not mean that the entire shares outstanding could be sold at that price. There is a curve of open interest, a normal daily volume, and it's unlikely you could divest of 100% of a mulitbillion dollar asset in any short order, especially not for the full market price at the start of the divestment. "Billionaires" rarely have close to that much cash available to them.
Oh not this crap again. Perfectly good article ruined by petty pedantry.
You’ve only heard about Tesla because Elon became a co-founder.
> I can't see any good reason to let any individual claim ownership over more than a billion dollars of assets—even $100M is pushing it. Can you?
If they got their wealth "fair and square" within the systems of rules that we all are subject to I feel it would be wrong to just take their assets by changing the rules and taxing it away (or whatever form it takes.)
> And when one person holds the purse-strings, we lose [accountability].
It seems to me that that increases accountability. We know where the buck stops.
In a system where money affords power if we accept that power should be distributed at least somewhat evenly then there must be an upper bound placed on wealth. Otherwise we end up in the situation we have right now, where policy is merely a commodity that is bought and sold by those who can afford it.
I figure the way to curb excessive power concentrations is the panopticon: ubiquitous surveillance. (I'm not advocating for it, but I think it's unavoidable, so we might as well get some use out of it.)
People can have their wealth but have limited political power.
It reminds me of a story I heard about the Chinese Communists tackling their unruly billionaires. How do you take them down when they can bribe any agent or official? A special unit was formed and this was their basic M.O.: they would locate one of these billionaires and pick them up and sweat them and then offer them a deal. "You can keep all of your money, go into retirement, and promise to be good, just give us everyone in your organization." The alternative is prison (or maybe even death, who really knows?)
It's kind brilliant, eh?
Think it through.
Are you going to go to prison to protect your henchmen and underlings? Or retire to, say, Macau with all your money? You sell out your org, of course. What does that do to team morale for the other big boys' orgs when word gets around? They stop helping their bosses break laws.
It seems to me that it's vastly more effective, simpler, and safer for everyone if we focus on preventing people from amassing that much power in the first place.
To be clear I am not advocating for the Communist model. I was just relating a story about how the CCP reigned in errant (by their criteria) wealthy. It's an example that wealth doesn't automatically lead to power.
> we focus on preventing people from amassing that much power in the first place.
Sure, the question is how?
I agree that individual people should not have as much power as many of them seem to have today. I don't agree that the answer is a universal cap on personal wealth. I especially don't agree that we should confiscate the existing (legally-gained and legally-spent) wealth of private individuals, people who are not criminals. (At least not automatically criminal just because they're rich.)
I don't see how that's the case. Their wealth lead to a degree of power that necessitated a specialised task force in order to keep it in check. That the power afforded by that wealth was curtailed doesn't negate it's existence. Should the task force cease to exist they would be free to exercise that power without restriction.
> I agree that individual people should not have as much power as many of them seem to have today.
I agree but I don't see any reasonable alternative to reducing their level of influence while still maintaining a market based economy.
> I don't agree that the answer is a universal cap on personal wealth. I especially don't agree that we should confiscate the existing (legally-gained and legally-spent) wealth of private individuals, people who are not criminals. (At least not automatically criminal just because they're rich.)
This is where we disagree. I don't think any overall good comes from any individual having more than $1bn in wealth. At that point you can buy pretty much whatever you want and your offspring will still be unfathomably wealthy for generations. As an individual you essentially have the GDP of a small island nation in your pocket.
Personally I believe the marginal utility of more wealth at this point to be effectively zero. Adding a second billion makes no material difference to your quality of life, single digit percentages represent life changing amounts of money for the majority of society.
It's at this point I feel we need to seriously interrogate how that wealth is being accumulated and whether it would be better spent elsewhere. Take our good friends the Waltons for example. In accumulating their fabulous wealth they have successfully externalised the cost of labour to the extent that many of their workers can't afford to food or healthcare without society's help. While a pretty specific case, I don't believe the Waltons should receive a single penny until they've absorbed those costs.
A wealth cap also acknowledges that society plays a huge part in providing the framework for that wealth to exist in the first place. In my opinion a low degree of inequality is a requirement for a harmonious society. Without hundreds of years of societal investment none of the resources that billionaires relied on to amass their wealth would exist. Try creating a tech startup without literate workers.
The power of these wealthy Chinese billionaires was broken by cutting off the head (the guys with the money) from the body (the folks that actually carried out those guys' wishes.) Money won't buy power if no one is willing to accept it. It's not a solution that would get applied in the USA, which is pretty much run by and for the wealthy, but it shows that money != power in Communist China at least.
> Should the task force cease to exist they would be free to exercise that power without restriction.
But presumably the task force would only cease to exist if the CCP changed it's policies, no?
> I don't think any overall good comes from any individual having more than $1bn in wealth. At that point you can buy pretty much whatever you want and your offspring will still be unfathomably wealthy for generations. As an individual you essentially have the GDP of a small island nation in your pocket.
> Personally I believe the marginal utility of more wealth at this point to be effectively zero. Adding a second billion makes no material difference to your quality of life,
Even if I agree with that (and I do FWIW) so what? How does that give us the right to take their money? My neighbor doesn't really need his noisy smelly leaf blower, can I take that?
The Waltons are a great example: Walmart is a fantastic store, and even if those stories about the workers on food stamps are true (which they deny) it's still legal. Maybe we increase the minimum wage rather than going after this family for being too successful?
> In my opinion a low degree of inequality is a requirement for a harmonious society.
I suspect that's true. And I'll admit these billionaires make me nervous. I just don't see it as moral to take their stuff just because we think they might misuse it or, even more tenuous, that it might not do them any good.
I'm in general disagreeing with major points in the article, but it's too large topic to have a full discussion here. The idea is that billionaires can better focus resources on things they seem important than governments.
Stross anticipated your reply though,
> They can fund lobbying groups and politicians, rant about colonizing Mars, and buy midlife crisis toys like Twitter or weekend getaways on a space station, but their scope for effecting real change is actually tiny on a global scale. Even Putin and Xi, who are at the state-level actor end of the scale (individually they're multi-billionaires: but they also control nuclear weapons, armies, and populations in 8-9 digits) have little global leverage. Putin's catastrophic adventure in Ukraine has revealed how threadbare the emperor's suit is.
Of course there are also arguments to the contrary - e.g. Apollo project was rather effective, large military operations like working during WW2 shows government can actually be quite efficient etc. That doesn't matter though, we only need to point to an example - let it be SpaceX - when a billionaire shows better results than the government.
Stross anticipated this too:
> Granting individuals enormous leverage can sometimes be socially useful. But before you point at Musk and Tesla or SpaceX, I need to remind you that he didn't found Tesla, he merely bought into it then took over: SpaceX's focus on reusability is good, but we had reusable space launchers before—the only really new angle is that it's a cost-reduction measure. Starlink isn't an original, it's merely a modern, bigger, faster version of 1990's Teledesic (which fell victim to over-ambitious technology goals and the dot-com bust). Meanwhile, billionaires can do immense damage: the Koch network has largely bankrolled climate change denial, Musk's Mars colony plan is fatally flawed, and so on.
You say "better" results than the government... but it's not obvious that a government can't make these marginal improvements... you just assert that "these words are basically wrong".
As I said, the article is very questionable - and not because billionaires couldn't use some healthy attention, just because too many statements in the article are doubtful.
They don't have a PR budget, just trucks and sprayers. But they are absolutely the reason that there isn't endemic malaria in your county.
And yet, the F150 was built by capitalists, the sprayers are built with capitalists. The chemicals were built by capitalists.
so yes some problems are best solved by government, but innovation isnt one of them.
1. I've worked in gov labs, industry labs, and academic labs. Mostly industry labs. People and culture are the most important thing. The variability in innovation between companies is often WAY higher than the variability between the public and private sector. Gov labs can be insanely innovative or quagmires. Same for industry labs. It's all about the people and culture. Good people and good culture and possible in the public and private sectors. Bad people and bad culture are also possible in the public and private sectors. Anyone telling you otherwise is trolling and/or selling an idiology (sic).
2. The whole point of the above post was that there's ENORMOUS value in the "tried and true". Getting rid of endemic malaria has been possible for the better part of a century. It's a governance problem, not an innovation problem.
Please explain why winner-take-all competitive rewards are necessary for innovation.
I mean, they seem to work today in the US. But I don't see why that means they are the only possible way forward.
By spraying DDT over all the places mosquitoes live, which is now banned.
It's also a powerful bioaccumulative neurotoxin!"
What we’re saying when we say “limit their wealth” is that we should force them to lose control of the company they founded and led to success — almost entirely!
Eg, Jeff Bezos would go from ~10% of Amazon to ~0.01% if we wanted to reduce his “wealth” below a billion dollars.
Given that neither government nor Wall St seem to show greater wisdom than these business leaders with demonstrated success, I’m strongly against forcing corporate leaders to cede more power to those groups.
It seems supremely unimaginative to believe that we couldn't easily come up with a situation where Jeff Bezos owns 0.01% of Amazon but still maintains full control of the company.
Personally I think affording that level of control to an individual is supremely irresponsible once a corporation has reached a size that it's failure would cause severe harm to society. Especially since the people responsible, more often than not, remain extremely well off while the rest of us get to pick up the pieces.
This is equally true of Wall St and the government, except that neither has shown they’re capable of managing the company — while the founder has.
I’m not seeing what the benefit is in removing control from someone successful to give it to people who are routinely not - eg, Wall St running Boeing into the ground, to the point their planes self-crash (737), can’t be certified because the doors blow off (777), or be manufactured to spec (787).
> supremely unimaginative to believe that we couldn't easily come up with a situation where Jeff Bezos owns 0.01% of Amazon but still maintains full control of the company
Your only argument for really complicated legal structures, including having to constantly change the ownership structure, is that you don’t like people who are wildly successful can parlay that success into other efforts?
Okay — but I think that’s dumb.
Why is it a problem that Jeff Bezos can try his hand at rockets now that he’s demonstrated success at leading Amazon? — or that Elon Musk can try fixing Twitter now that helps demonstrated success at Tesla?
Those are the people who should be celebrated, not the guy who happens to own the organisation, and nudges it now and again like some tinkering monarch.
Also no matter how much money the government is given, it will never have enough.
I hear this all the time and it’s a silly comparison. Some small homogenous country in Western Europe with citizens who subscribe to an empowering philosophy and share the same culture will obviously have a higher QoL.
It’s way easier to get the ship where you want it to go when most everyone is actually rowing and agrees on the direction.
Dedicating more budget and leaving more laws up to localities like States, municipalities, etc.
It should also be noted these changes would only practically be achieved with a time machine, because the social/economic/military cost of changing anything involving the foundation of the US nowadays would be apocalyptic
It's not a large topic at all. There's a belief that there should be no upper limit to wealth accumulation for an individual. It's nonsensical in extreme cases.
In practice, even the ultra wealthy know to split the wealth over multiple individuals/companies, which provides stability and splits accountability[1]. The IRS failure to audit the wealthy is both a testament to how effective wealth hiding is (making most attempts to curtail it, futile in the short term), but how ingrained the idea of limitless capitalism is with the current US Government as anything but a net-negative.
While the poor eventually try to "eat" the rich, statistically, it's unlikely that any given wealthy individual will be the unlucky one over time. So the idea of uncapped wealth as a virtue persists.
[1] It also introduces wasteage and grifting, to a degree.
I mean, "there is a wealth tax that kicks in at $1,000,000,000 at 100%" is a one-line change. I don't see much issue. I mean, Bezos and Musk would have to sell some stock. And? That certainly is a possibility.
- You've now changed corporate governance, since companies can only grow to $2bn before a majority shareholder can no longer exist.
- You've created an opportunity for market manipulation since speculators can drive the price up to force a large shareholder to have to liquidate part of their position.
- What do you do in the event of a takeover? The acquirer buys the company for stock, the previous owner now has to liquidate some of that stock to pay for his increase in net worth. Situations like these are going to create problems for the legal and regulatory system.
Maybe some of those are unimportant or even desirable, my point is that it's not a simple change. It has large, far-reaching effects.
The vast majority of companies worth over $2bn don't have a majority shareholder. Do you think if Elon Musk didn't have a majority share of Tesla they would boot him. (BTW, he doesn't). I actually don't see any examples where that couldn't happen nor do I see any negative consequences.
> You've created an opportunity for market manipulation since speculators can drive the price up to force a large shareholder to have to liquidate part of their position.
To what end? But sure, market fluctuations happen, and we would need to prevent that.
> What do you do in the event of a takeover? The acquirer buys the company for stock, the previous owner now has to liquidate some of that stock to pay for his increase in net worth. Situations like these are going to create problems for the legal and regulatory system.
I don't understand how that's different from "what happens when stocks go up".
Obviously, the effects are far reaching, I'm pretty sure that's the goal. And I think a naive wealth cutoff isn't a good idea. But the idea that we couldn't deal with the fallout seems a bit crazy to me.
Even if you are #1 of 8,000,000,000 , you are still just 1 in 8,000,000,000
To be perfectly fair I think many of the leaders cited in this piece know perfectly well that they are easily replaced.
Like, take the most traumatic instances such as JFK or Lincoln being shot. Yes there were a couple of days of sorrow (or better yet fake sorrow) but after a couple of days everybody moved on.
Pyramids were supposed to be monuments to the Pharoahs, but after a while the fame of structure managed to surpass the fame of the person buried underneath.
When there are so many humans the marginal value of any human plummets to record lows.
Take Jesus, he's unrivaled at #1, but if we are being honest what's really the % of waking hours that humanity as a whole spends thinking about him during a fiscal year?
It gets diluted into almost insignificant levels of attention.
If you live in NYC you get to see all leaders come around for the General Assembly, you'd see Presidents , Prime Ministers etc. Including people who have been in public office for 20 years.
It's not like servers at NOBU get on their knees to worship them when they take their order.
It's people like the author of this piece who make a big deal about it or even Lex Fridman who see such figures and would become a doormat for the privilege of an interview with Putin or Musk, interview during which they'd just repeat over and over again the same talking points they have been fed by their PR managers or lawyers.
So I don't see the need for a numerical ceiling to wealth, at least in the US the ceiling is provided by the self-respect of the avg. citizen. Americans are very proud and don't allow anybody to buy them out easily.
Like when Musk tried to bribe that kid tracking his jet with 5,000$ . The kid asked him 50,000$. Had Musk accepted 50,000$ , he'd have asked 500,000$. Had Musk accepted 500,000$ he'd asked 5,000,000$...
There might be some crazy people who easily fall into cults, but by and large they are the minority and the halo effect vanishes very early.
Socialist countries routinely nationalize food production and immediately create shortages. This happens over and over.
Capitalism isnt just the innovation of the kernel of a product, it is marketing, selling, manufacturing, distributing, and supporting a product.
That takes capital and it requires risk. Capital is constantly being squandered on ideas that go nowhere, but some are successful and the overall system is more productive.
The key point is that no one can predict in advance which ideas and teams will be successful. Capital backs them all and the market determines which ones succeed.
It is human nature to try to acquire more, when that is rewarded, people respond (by working harder, more efficiently, or with innovation).
Labor usually thinks management is useless or dumb. And most managers are bad. But you can look at world class leaders and see that they do matter and can make or break an organization. Look at the bulls under phil jackson, then when he left for the lakers. And then when he left the lakers.
Socialist countries are routinely embargoed by capitalist countries, severely limiting their access to global markets. That's if they're lucky, if they're unlucky they're destabilised through targeted assassination of their leaders[0].
If you're even less lucky you'll be captured by the people the U.S. think are the good guys[1] instead of whatever socialist party was gaining traction. I sure hope the torture centre the U.S. military helped set up was built with private capital:
> The United States backed Alfredo Stroessner's anti-communist military dictatorship and played a "critical supporting role" in the domestic affairs of Stroessner's Paraguay. For instance, U.S. Army officer Lieutenant Colonel Robert Thierry was sent to help local workmen build a detention and interrogation center named "La Technica" as part of Operation Condor. La Technica was also a well known torture centre. Stroessner's secret police, headed by Pastor Coronel, bathed their captives in tubs of human vomit and excrement and shocked them in the rectum with electric cattle prods. They dismembered the Communist party secretary, Miguel Ángel Soler , alive with a chainsaw while Stroessner listened on the phone. Stroessner demanded the tapes of detainees screaming in pain to be played to their family members.
> That takes capital and it requires risk. Capital is constantly being squandered on ideas that go nowhere, but some are successful and the overall system is more productive.
Government funded research through universities and the military do so much of the foundational work here that it seems crazy to attribute it to private capital.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_attempts_on_Fide... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
One of the hard part is trying to understand what capitalism even is. In that endeavour, Marx has only laid out the basis for an analysis at the end of his life in The Capital. It's an unfinished work, hindered by a philosophical education he did his best to shake off. Most social sciences did not exist or weren't well established to help him then.
You are only seeing the good sides of capitalism because you are on the good side of the stick if I may say. But without regulations, capitalism incentives are to brutally exploit all living workforce at hand, and this has been very from the beginning of capitalism. It is true that scientific advances in production (and especially the algricultural revolutions) have enabled to production of a incredibly well (in terms of calories available) and cheaply fed workforce which in the end also benefits the working class but this might well be a relatively recent development in the history of capitalism and may have with the fact that investing in mechanization may have seem the best of option in times of working people unrest. Plus you have to factor in the competition that took place with the USSR to be the most prosperous for all state/model.
Maybe the solution is capitalism with regulations/better incentives, maybe it is democratic governance inside of corporations, maybe something else I don't know but history has shown times and times again that unregulated capitalism is awful for most of humankind. I am ready to acknowlegde that market mechanisms have their usefulness but that usefulness must be harnessed for greater good, it should not be turned into a religion.
Whether there exists or not a "human nature", trying to derive social phenomenas directly from it seems a deeply unscientific approach to understanding social systems that does not seem fit for the 21st century.
But before you point at Musk and Tesla or SpaceX, I need to remind you that he didn't found Tesla, he merely bought into it then took over: SpaceX's focus on reusability is good, but we had reusable space launchers before—the only really new angle is that it's a cost-reduction measure. Starlink isn't an original, it's merely a modern, bigger, faster version of 1990's Teledesic (which fell victim to over-ambitious technology goals and the dot-com bust).
I sometimes wonder what kind of psychopathology motivates this kind of mindset and ideology, that prioritizes the demonization of the most financially successful over even basic integrity and truth.