Hacker News Reader

Comment by valzam | Hacker News Reader

I always find the anti-billionaire sentiment a bit weird in the sense that it's not like they have literally been given billions of dollars in cash. Most billionaires net worth is highly centralised in the stock of the companies they founded, which at some point were worth nothing.

When people say they find the "very idea of billionaires" abhorrent, what exactly is the solution here? After the stock in your company becomes worth > billion you have to give it away for free? Because selling it means you are still a billionaire. I think there is something to be said about inheritance taxes and limiting the infinite perpetuation of wealth through generations but unless we are talking asset seizure I am not quite sure how you would do away with the Musks, Brins, Gates' etc. of today.

View on HN

> When people say they find the "very idea of billionaires" abhorrent, what exactly is the solution here? After the stock in your company becomes worth > billion you have to give it away for free?

Yes. Arguably it was never rightfully theirs to begin with—owning someone else's labor output without working yourself is a pretty antisocial act.

Furthermore I'd argue that billionaires have repeatedly demonstrated they are unable to invest in public good. Philanthropy used to be a thing; even the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is a pathetic shadow of that practice with obvious ideological blind spots.

>owning someone else's labor output without working yourself is a pretty antisocial act.

This is what happens when you buy literally anything. What is the distinction you are trying to make?

> This is what happens when you buy literally anything.

Well presumably if you buy from the sole creator of a product, they're justly compensated as they could simply refuse the sale. Buying from a privately owned enterprise allows the owners of the enterprise to siphon off of the work of the people who actually build the phone without contributing anything themselves. That doesn't sit right with me, and it doesn't sit right with a lot of people. This creates hugely perverse incentives that magnify to global economic dysfunction and inefficiency and irrational resource distribution and social volatility. The world we live in!

> When people say they find the "very idea of billionaires" abhorrent, what exactly is the solution here?

There’s a quote[1] which makes the rounds occasionally and I think sums up the sentiment pretty well:

> Ok how about this:

> No more billionaires. None.

> After you reach $999 million, every red cent goes to schools and health care.

> You get a trophy that says, “I won capitalism” and we name a dog park after you.

---

> Most billionaires net worth is highly centralised in the stock of the companies they founded[...] unless we are talking asset seizure I am not quite sure how you would do away with [billionaires]

Marginal asset tax rate of 100%? (Really, the main difference between that and the inheritance tax you favor is the timing.) The Wikipedia article[2] has a bunch of arguments for why that might be a bad idea, but it’s reasonably straightforward in principle.

[1] https://twitter.com/Mikel_Jollett/status/1241843944238923777

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax

This already exists.

It's called taxes, death, and children. Billionaires only have a single lifetime to spend their wealth, taxed at pretty high rates when they actually liquidate their assets, and it eventually evaporates over a few generations.

There's ~3k billionaires and they're powerful enough that they'll be able to avoid those caps through loopholes, like through shell companies. There's no real practical way to prevent someone from accumulating wealth if they wanted to continue to do so.

That quote about no more billionaires is from someone that cares more about making a point than actual policy.

> There's no real practical way to prevent someone from accumulating wealth if they wanted to continue to do so.

Not within a capitalist system, no. There are other systems though.

This worked surprisingly well in the communist countries. Look at China and Russia. There has never been a black market where distributors go rich. Never once.

That's easy. They shouldn't even come close to being billionaires. How? Stock should not be theirs in the first place.

Investors are buying the company's stock, why would it be theirs?

Especially after going public, it's not "your" company anymore.

And the investors aren’t billionaires themselves? Do you think investors give away their money for nothing? What are you even talking about?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com