Why There's No Such Thing as a Good Billionaire | Hacker News Reader

Why There's No Such Thing as a Good Billionaire

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4 pointsjonny_eh8 comments

For the life of me I dont understand why society keeps them around.

It’s now clear that their existence is bothering people and causing them to have low morale due to wealth inequality and political cronysm + corruption

Once a company becomes a public company not to mention part of the sp500 you could dilute the founder or just transfer their shares to the big pension funds, install a new CEO and nothing would essentially change

So who would decide where the shares go, and who gets to runs the company now? Which pension funds get the shares and why? I'm guessing government bureaucrats with no track record of making sound investments or running companies, who I'm sure wouldn't get cushy jobs at the pension funds after they retired. Nationalising industries like this, and yes that's really what this would become, has been tried many times and it just doesn't work.

The way to address wealth inequality is through tax and inheritance reform to shift the incentive system. They way to address political cronyism is political funding reform. Changing the ownership structure of corporations by putting them int eh hands of bureaucrats isn't going to do anything whatever to address either of those issues, in fact it would almost certainly make both of them much worse.

The reason we have billionaires is because these are the people that create tens of thousands of jobs, produce innovative products, provide valuable services. The billionaire owner of a company doesn't have billions of dollars in cash, that wealth is embodied in the value of the jobs and goods and services that make up the companies they control. So if you're going to take that away from them, who do you give it all to? Who gets to decide that?

The fact is capitalism for all it's flaws does work, and compared to the alternative systems that have been tried it's spectacularly successful. Capitalism has raised billions of people worldwide out of poverty, and raised hundreds of millions of people into the middle class. In fact today for the first time in history half the world's population is middle class. These are staggering achievements made possible by unleashing the creative power of individual people exercising straight forward individual economic freedoms. The freedoms that you want to take away.

A billionaire is just a guy who was piloting the plane during a flight which got a once in a lifetime 200mph tailwind.

Now idiots are convinced the pilot is special , wiseguys don’t believe in fairytales and they just look at the weather chart for that flight so that the truth becomes perfectly crystal clear.

That is all there is to it.

If playing roulette was as popular as business or hustling in general, (being played by 8bn people 24/7/365) you’d have billionaires roulette players too. Doesn’t mean they are special it’s just that with a sample that big somebody is bound to be benefiting from the 200mph tailwind

The socialist mind everyone just grows into their role in society like mushrooms, and some people accidentally fall into a role where they are able to hoard all the resources?!? No. Not everyone wants to wallow around in filthy tent communities begging for equal distribution. The billionaires are often the people who built significant portions of society by taking risks and out maneuvering everyone else to create massive economic value. They do that because there was incentive from the beginning. The laws society decides on should force everyone to play fairly. There might be political corruption that allows people to cheat or use loop holes that cause inequality. This is much different than stupidly chanting 'billionaires bad'. It requires a much different solution to actually fix problems in reality.

Not everyone is equally talented. Billionaires are the same as sports stars, rock stars, famous actors. You can't just decide to be a sports star, and it doesn't happen by random chance. If society can just decide on a whim to remove the top sports stars cause they are getting too much attention what kind of effect would that have on how sports are played?

I have met people with fortunes in the hundreds of millions (which is basically the same as billionaires) and rock stars and actors.

They are all just dudes, and I didn’t expect anything more than that because although I loved to party back in college I made sure to be sober for the lecture on Powers law.

As the sample gets bigger a layman observer can be fooled into thinking that subject x or y is special , whereas in reality it’s just a combination of a big sample and powers law doing its thing

You met someone and you can confidently judge their life's work and how deserving they are of their position? And then you can make the correct judgement for when and to what degree someone has become too successful and how to enact countermeasures to undo the effects of the 'power law' and unequal luck distribution? I don't think anyone has this amount of wisdom. You are correct that some people are disproportionally rewarded for their efforts, but the other side is true too. Some people are disproportionally punished for no reason at all. You can't do anything about either, it's part of nature. How do you know to what degree a very successful person is successful due to luck vs. hard work? You are going to track the minute details of every person on the planet's life path and make a fair judgement? It seems out of resentment society could arbitrarily punish the most fortunate people by redistributing their earnings and removing them from their position, but that doesn't stop the misfortunes on the other end. So the result would be a net negative direction. A person could certainly be born unlucky, or experience injustice, but we would guarantee that no one could be successful. This experiment has already been played out multiple times throughout history.

Stop making this topic romantic and poetic. It’s just statistics.

Big ass sample (8bn individuals) and power law produces stuff like billionaires.

> fair

It’s not about fairness, people have been saying loud and clear that they can’s stand billionaires and the uber wealthy. They also been saying they want them out.

JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Prudential, General Electric, General Motors… they have been in the hands of pension funds forever, with the CEO taking a salary, and they have been working just fine.

If you diluted the whole Forbes 400 into oblivion or just transfered their shares to pension funds the companies they lead would go along just fine .

we know because there are countless examplers

In one society power is concentrated in the church, in another the military, in another the rich, in another who can kill the most game, in another who can build big statues and then bury them waist deep facing the ocean.

It's the concentration itself that matters, not what it's concentrated in.

TL:DR; unchecked power concentration eventually leads to being overthrown by 200 spaniards with "horses" and "gunpowder"

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