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Comment by tomcam | Hacker News Reader

How much money should people be allowed to have?

Ok let me take a stab at it. I actually am on the fence on this so purely a thought exercise for me. Plus as someone getting into midlife crisis this has been on top of mind for me.

How about take (in no order):

1. 1 or 2 fancy cars/suvs

2. Be able to travel business class (say once a month) for vacations and stay in decent hotels

3. Nice education (say 2 degrees at a top college)

4. Nice house (say 2 rooms per family member in a "decent" neighborhood) (add things like backyard, poop etc if you like)

5. Obviously enough money to pay taxes

6. Oh and ensure health-issue-free lifestyle

7. (Hobby or two)

8. (Ultra Branded clothing?)

See what it takes to get all of the above and double it. Or even 3x it. Ymmv ofcourse. I am not a traveller so fancy hotels or biz class is not a big deal. I am also not a car person so 1 and 2 are not big deals for now (things can always change).

I still can't see this needing billionaire status?

What if I have all that, but also have a great idea for a business. Let's say I want to try it out, but to do so I'll need to hire some industrial space, expensive equipment, 5-10 engineers, and some business / marketing people to get it going. Should I have to risk my standard of living to do that?

What if I have 10 ideas that require that?

That's a great point. I wasn't suggesting people shouldn't desire things. We talk as if billionaires are not a zero sum game. But is that really true? #billionaires has gone up but the basic line around housing, education, healthcare, pollution have all been declining no? If I was to venture a hypothesis, will the billionaire's ability to realize the billions actually be viable if it wasn't for the workers who desperately need to cover (the stripped down basic form of) needs 1-7 above?

Add social expenses -- what it takes to fit into a society or community.

Add a buffer for risk and uncertainty about the future.

And then consider what role location has on the whole package. If you want proximity to one of the global hubs / power centers, then you're looking at doing this all in a top-tier cost market.

Then you easily push into tens of millions. Breaking a hundred million to super thoroughly check those boxes isn't a stretch.

This is before considering an agenda / passion that you want to see changed in the world. And before any ambitious desires from family members and close friends.

Breaking into a hundred million is an absurdity given the criteria GP set.

No it’s not. Given the house prices in places like Palo Alto, Malibu, London, or Moscow, the house alone could easily be $50 million.

Postulating that anyone needs 100M is simply absurd. Just because there is insanity in house pricing doesn't mean that this needs to reflect into incomes.

I didn’t say they needed it. But those are the parameters given

Can you describe the new governmental Department of Hobby Restrictions? I study music history, transcribe old popular songs, and play many different instruments. Does this count as one hobby called music or does it count as three different hobbies?

What would be the penalty for an asshole like me having three hobbies instead of the two allowed under your plan?

Am I allowed to have one flute, or if I play professionally am I allowed to have two in case one is broken? Am I allowed to have an alto flute and a bass flute as well, or am I limited to just the garden-variety soprano flute?

So the #hobbies is really up to you. At some point personal responsibility would need to kick in to support things beyond some level of basic necessities no?

Is it irresponsible that I know how to play a dozen different instruments?

I worry about the unaccounted soft power of someone with that much money. Through lobbying and market consolidation, the extremely wealthy hold disproportionate political and economic power. At least with corrupt politicians, in a liberal democracy there is some amount to which they are accountable to the people. The power of the wealthy is without account except through government action. laisse-faire capitalists like to hand wave and imagine this power is "not a problem" when it very clearly is, with people like the Kochs wielding their power to sow political propaganda. They did not "earn" that power, or at the very least I don't think people deserve that power even if they were skillful businessmen. For me, it has nothing to do with sour grapes, I don't care that they have more money then I can imagine, other than they can use that money to have a greater voice than me.

I agree with this. I don't care when someone has 1000 cars or 100 houses and owns a jet plane or whatever. I do care about how it enables them to unfairly direct other peoples lives to their personal agenda. I also care when people have too little that they can barely feed themselves and have nowhere to live.

I feel like there must be some way these two problems can help solve eachother.

How has your life been badly affected by someone who owns 1000 cars?

It probably hasn't very much which is why it doesn't bother me. Which is what I said.

How much money should people be allowed to have?

Tree fiddy, certainly.

Analysis: true

No more than it would make others envy you, no less than it would make them pity you.

How do you measure the envy level of citizens such that you can control their income?

Should a large labor union, nonprofit, or a non-governmental organization have exactly the same voice as you?

There is obviously no exact dollar amount. I don't believe everyone should have the same amount, but there should probably be some lower and upper limit. Maybe it is possible to calculate the difference between the two. Perhaps the upper limit would be 10000x that of the lower limit. Just as an example. There being a lower limit also implies some kind of universal basic income. Theoretically partially supplied by the upper limits excess.

What happens to the excess is what’s interesting. And if it’s in volatile assets, how do you shave off the top? E.g. your stocks go way above the limit in a bubble but then crash by 50% right after you got taxed.

The other "fun" side effect of this is that the government is slowly going to become the majority owner of every business.

Yeah. I guess that model implies that the govt will take a percent ownership of whatever you own. I think it would destroy the prospect of high risk high reward ventures like Tesla. Maybe the tax rate can be divided by a volatility metric so investors in high risk ventures aren’t severely punished randomly.

Do you feel random government employees would be more productive and knowledgeable than the owners of the business whose shares were taken away by this scheme? Do you feel good businesses would continue to be good when handled by bureaucrats? Bonus points for the name of a bureaucracy that has done this kind of thing well.

No I don’t support this. I keep trying to figure out how it could work, so I can understand the point of view of the people who propose it. I haven’t seen any salient proposal.

There is obviously an exact upper dollar amount. You described it yourself: $1 billion.

Do you think restricting the amount of money people can make and therefore pay taxes on is a good way to pay for universal basic income? Elon Musk will famously pay something like $12 billion this year. What’s the best way to sustain welfare programs that you like without a large tax base?

How much should people be allowed to spend on a share of a company? How do you limit it?

I think billionaires should exist.. but to answer anyway:

the most fair approach is probably starting with "how little money should people be allowed to have" (UBI) and then what ever is leftover is fair game.

Whatever the people decide. That's why we have democracy.

I don’t know who your “we” is, but in the USA it is precisely why we do not have a democracy. We have a republic in the USA. The Senate and electoral college help temper the intoxicating effects that a pure democracy would produce .

> we do not have a democracy

Republics are a type of democracy.

In a taxonomy of government types, sure. Practically speaking, the difference between a pure democracy and a republic is enormous. The framers of the constitution were explicitly aware of this.

" Harrison Bergeron " by Kurt Vonnegut.

The issue is assuming people who are anti billionaire are anywhere remotely close to the ideology in that book. It’s a good story, but a billion dollars is staggering and hardly anywhere near desiring ballet dancers to wear chains.

100x of the average net-worth in the 50km radius of their primary residence.

You have invented maybe the best way to concentrate wealth even further than it already is.

Less than billions

"One million dollars baby!"

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