Elon Musk: "Population rates are collapsing and it's a crisis we need to address!"
EIG: https://eig.org/remote-work-family-formation/
Billionaires should be banned from speaking on anything other than their areas of expertise.
They get an outsized platform to spout absolute nonsense on topics outside their core expertise.
Huge amounts of people don't have enough money to participate in the economy at the same time as billionaires show themselves to be useless or worse, ban them and have a decent basic income - let's say current min wage + some %
Maybe you actually think this should happen (I don't) but it's a much more disruptive change than it sounds like on the surface. You're flipping over the entire economic model to a different one, and this affects everyone not just the super rich. And even if hypothetically the government takes most of Musk's and Bezos' money, doesn't mean that you'll get the basic income you're asking for.
What you actually need is progressive taxation on extremely high incomes of any kind, and fewer loopholes to avoid that taxation.
You know what’s absurd? Money making more money.
As they say, follow (and act on) the money.
Billionaires can be stopped from taking their money elsewhere. Their bank accounts and corporate assets can be frozen or seized, and America's massive concentration of intellectual talent is unlikely to be moving out any time soon.
Going on a billionaire witch hunt would not only push residents out, it’d stop future wealthy residents from coming in.
The US actually doesn’t have much that other places don’t have, especially in the age of remote work. There is excellent education and talent in many parts of the world, often accompanied with a better quality of life too. The freezing of assets and seizures you’re describing would be very hard to enforce. And if such exit taxes were announced, they would likely lead to mass exodus before being enforced.
I’d add that this excessive confidence in American exceptionalism might be what will cause its demise. We already see it happening at the state level. California and NY are so arrogant in thinking they just have the best people, that they’re messing up and losing significant taxable income to Nevada, Texas and Florida right now. At the country level, many Americans are already moving to Portugal, Bahamas, Costa Rica, and others.
Under your proposal are millionaires okay? Or should society ban millionaires too?
If so why are they okay. If they are not okay, what should the wealth cap be?
Is it okay for anyone to have any private wealth? Your proposal sounds similar to socialism wherein everyone has a certain fixed income close to minimum wage and no one may accumulate wealth.
What are the differences between your suggestion and socialism as practiced historically?
Realistically though, the better way to address the problem is to progressively tax capital, no matter the income. A top bracket of 5% of capital gone per year will pretty much solve all but the most efficient of billionaire problems. And progressively tax inheritance in a similar way too.
And this is just one of the problems. What about high-capital-low-margins businesses like retail stores and, especially, farmers?
Also, assessing the net worth of a person is incredibly hard. How much is a private company worth? One might think it's easy because Forbes does that, but they're mostly pulling the numbers out of thin air.
Why draw the line at billionaires? BTW is your are of expertise to talk about Musk or what should and should not be banned?
Perhaps not even at that (since they can have undue influence on that area, just because they have more money, not because their ideas are better).
They should also be banned from owning media companies or contributing to campaigns in any way.
(I think people give Musk _far_ too much credit by imagining he would have any sort of coherent view on this stuff; he's just parroting stuff he was impressed by in both cases, and doesn't realise the conflict, because that's not how he works.)
I think it’s fair to estimate that policy is extraordinarily unlikely to be enacted in the US.