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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

> There seems built into it some kind of strange assumption that anyone who has money got it in an unjust fashion.

I don't think that's the assumption. Rather, the assumption is that you can't make $100 billion dollars without some kind of grave injustice occurring. And this makes intuitive sense to most people: a healthy society shouldn't allow people to become so fantastically rich (or, correspondingly, so fantastically poor that they die of homelessness and exposure.)

This doesn't justify massive wealth confiscation as much as it explains why it's an extremely reasonable reaction to the wealth amassing behavior we're expected to explain away as "normal."

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Someone who co-founded a company that literally became the verb for “search for shit on the entire internet” and helped connect billions of customers with tens of millions of companies could easily have created a significant multiple of that value for the world (literally well over a trillion dollars of value that Google has created) and kept a fraction of that value created for themselves. I don’t see the grave injustice in that part of the story.

If others are capable to create a trillion dollars of value, I want them to be enjoy a significant share of that.

What part of that value helped someone who is homeless?

If they want to search for services or help at the library (or maybe on their Android phone), Google can help with that.

Hundreds of thousands of Google employees who aren't homeless.

Millions of people who make a living with AdSense, preventing them from becoming homeless.

Millions more who make a living consulting on SEO, optimizing ad campaigns who aren't homeless.

Millions more whose businesses were helped to succeed by Google search and ads, preventing them and their employees from becoming homeless.

It's not clear to me, in a hedonic treadmill sense, that someone with a net value of $100B is meaningfully enjoying any amount of money past, say, the first billion.

The cool thing about property rights is that when you legally obtain something it belongs to you and you don't have to justify your ownership of it to random strangers in order to continue owning it.

I don't see where the GP mentioned property rights. Besides, taxation of property is not a particularly novel concept.

Very little of Sergey's wealth is legal, we just suck at enforcing the law against people who grease the right pockets. Google is currently embroiled in multiple dozens of legal procedures about their various not legal behaviors, all of which entail things that have been illegal longer than Google has been doing them.

Google as a company operates entirely by abusing human rights. Sergey Brin in particular is a particularly awful person, known for things like stating "the point" of hiring female employees was f***ing them.

I think we should take at least $99 billion of his $100 billion and do something decent with it to offset the fact that we have to deal with him.

Reasonable or not the reaction is just a conséquence of poor being too poor in america, and having NO POLITICAL PARTY at all defendign them.

They dont realize it most ofbthem, but they really have 0 prospect, 0 hope. Some go on reddit thinikg other people will sympathize on rant subreddits like r antiwork.. but at the end of the day they have 0 power and 0 prospect of having some in the future if thet stay in ze country.

Just move. For your own sake

> the assumption is that you can't make $100 billion dollars without some kind of grave injustice occurring

No one's hands are clean, rich or poor, to be sure, but the assumption is unwarranted and aggressive in its broadness. One does not assume particular guilt based on broad assumptions. Besides, these aren't liquid assets. Do people think these guys have a $100 billion dollars just laying around in a Scrooge McDuck-style Money Bin? That's not how net worth works.

> a healthy society shouldn't allow people to become so fantastically rich

Allow?

> (or, correspondingly, so fantastically poor that they die of homelessness and exposure.)

This is unrelated. It construes wealth as a zero sum game. There is no such tension between wealth and poverty unless some kind of injustice was involved in robbing the poor.

Tax codes, medical bankruptcy, loan sharks, and student loans sure have shades of injustice that rob or turn people poor.

A clean moral record has nothing to do with it: I'm saying that, on a basic civic level, gross inequality is perceived as bad. It doesn't matter that said gross inequality is mostly in illiquid assets, because illiquid assets are just collateral for liquid ones (and people who aren't worth $100B understand this just fine.)

And yes, "allow" is correct. Healthy societies don't allow their members to throw knives at each other in public places, or blow cigarette smoke in premature babies' faces, or do any number of basically antisocial things. The intuitive belief is that amassing wealth to the degree of hundreds of billions of dollars is essentially antisocial in the same way that being Mr. Marlboro in the NICU is.

So one persons intuition works better at working out exactly what too much wealth or a healthy society means, than a feedback system of about 7bn independent entities kind of trading freely and making decisions, and for example awarding Jeff bezos 100bn for making almost all products available within 24 hours at the lowest possible margins, almost never making a profit, and employing 400k people extra during Covid.

Yes I’m sure these independent “experts” like yourself have a much better grasp at “fairness” and we should all believe that 100bn is too much.

Could you just scientifically deduce for me where the limit is? If I have 100m is that ok? In your expert opinion? Or is that too much? Should we cap at 1m? I’d love to see your maths on what constitutes a fair amount of wealth.

I didn't call myself an expert, or say that it was fair.

So you’re not even an expert but you think you know what too much wealth is.

The intellectual arrogance of your comment is staggering. And unfortunately it’s a common opinion.

You found my charitable interpretation of what someone else said arrogant?

Many things that make intuitive sense to most people are wildly wrong. Reorganizing society to accommodate the grab bag of misunderstandings and prejudices that make up the intuitive sense of most people is usually a mistake.

Indeed, every society that used their "intuitive sense" to confiscate wealth from private citizens ended up collapsing.

> Indeed, every society that used their "intuitive sense" to confiscate wealth from private citizens ended up collapsing.

Not ours[1]!

Edit: At least, not yet. I, for one, welcome the application of this logic to our current scheme.

[1]: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021/

No, not ours, not yet, unless the faction that thinks stealing someone else's stuff will solve all our problems gets their way.

So much of this conversation is breathless: who said anything about "solving all our problems"?

Then you just want to take people's stuff for fun, not to solve any problem? Is that supposed to be better?

No, I think I'd be happy with somewhere between "all" and "any."

And the solution to the problems is to give more and more money to the government that already spent trillions of dollars and didn't solve the problem. You don't see a problem with that? You don't think that maybe we should get the government working effectively with what we already give it before we decide to give it more?

The government spent $6.8 trillion last year. Do think at some time in November they were like "Damn, we were just about to end homelessness, but we came up $100 billion short. Oh well!"

Imagine if you had an employee who wasn't doing their job. Is the solution to give them a raise?

Again: this is very breathless. I don't have to be any particular fan of how the US Government spends its money to observe that taxing wealthy people, even aggressively, is the civically appropriate thing to do.

Edit: it's also worth nothing that this reasoning is perfectly symmetrical. Why in the world should I continue to allow a billionaire to profiteer, at the cost of immense civic damage?

> Why in the world should I continue to allow a billionaire to profiteer, at the cost of immense civic damage?

1. Because creating a valuable company that provides a useful service is not profiteering.

2. Because creating a company did not cause civic damage in the first place.

3. Therefore confiscating the value of that company and transferring it to the government could not reverse any civic damage.

4. Destroying the engine of wealth creation in our society would cause immensely more civic damage.

This is also symmetrical in that once you realize this will not solve any problems - and that it will in fact create many more problems, you can then conclude it is not a civically appropriate thing to do. Even if it gives a sense of satisfaction to envious people "intuitively reason" that knocking people down a peg is "civically appropriate".

You're using terms of anger and envy ("satisfaction," "knocking down a peg"), when neither is present.

I'm really just interested in taxing them a bit more, because I don't think it's healthy for democratic, pluralistic societies to have such large wealth gaps. There are enough things to dislike about each other without bringing in immense, unspendable amounts of money.

Making rich people poorer doesn’t do anything to help people who are poor.

We could instead work on ways to make poor people richer, which would actually make their lives better instead of making someone else life worse, and would also reduce the wealth gap. Somehow none of the “tax the rich” crowd seem interested in that.

I'm pretty sure I (speaking metaphorically) could take some of Brin's wealth, while still leaving him fabulously wealthy, and make some poor people less poor. This is a not uncommon thing for governments to do, and in most of the developed world it works relatively well.

Sociologically speaking, we have decent evidence that eliminating privation can break generational cycles of poverty. Our own (broadly successful!) attempt at it is still within living memory, as is its dismantling[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Society

Well good news, the government already takes a portion of everyone's wealth, especially Brin, via capital gains, income, property and other taxes. The Great Society happened just fine without a wealth tax and the government collects far more in taxes today than it did in the 1960s.

You're also pinballing between "the government needs more money to give to poor people" and "we should just take rich people's money because it makes poor people feel bad that some people are rich and it will make them feel better if the rich aren't so rich". Does the government actually need the money or not?

People might be temporarily helped by handouts, but they won't rise out of poverty until there's work available for them to support themselves. That is hampered by discouraging investment in productive enterprise via excessive taxes.

> I'm really just interested in taxing them a bit more

How much more exactly? How do you know when to stop raising taxes? You think current wealth gap is unacceptable, well what kind of gap is acceptable?

The higher your taxes are, the lower is the incentive for innovation and investment. What makes you think that "a bit more" is going to be a net positive? Higher taxes have tendency to slow down the economy. Should US be growing slower than China, for instance?

While taxes do help transfer wealth from rich to poor, they do it through government, which is incredibly inefficient (and, in many countries, corrupt).

> I don't think it's healthy for democratic, pluralistic societies to have such large wealth gaps

There were some big movements that shared similar ideas. Somehow they all have a tendency to cause millions of deaths due to famine and repressions. I'd rather have my wealth gaps.

There are interesting discussions to be had around inequality, but I don't think simple solutions like "just raise taxes until inequality goes away" or "take away their wealth and give it to the poor" (like another commenter suggested) are productive.

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