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Comment by sschueller | Hacker News Reader

It should not be possible for a single human to amass any amount over a billion maybe even less. We managed a global cooperate min. tax rate of 12.5% we can manage to also tax billionaires down to billion. Stock can be converted to voting only, don't let them borrow against their stock etc. etc.

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> It should not be possible for a single human to amass any amount over a billion maybe even less.

You are constantly told about "billionaires" as though they actually have billions. They don't. They have shareholdings, which if they all sold at today's share price would equate to billions. In reality that will never happen, because the price would instantly start dipping.

You can take away their value without taking their voting power. The billions stay in the company not with an individual which can then take out a loan based on that value.

If they started selling a lot of them their value would dip massively anyway.

To a degree. However, they're also able to take out loans for liquid funds at near zero or zero interest rates (because the banks want their business) secured against stock holdings.

Just because you don't have access to 100% of your net worth in liquid cash today doesn't mean it's not worth anything/as much.

This is always the response, and it is true, but it is a vanishingly small point compared to the accusation. The conversation often goes:

We should tax billionaires to pay for everything

But they don't have billions - they have equity!

Well they can take out loans!

So... what're we going to tax?

How do you propose to implement that?

the whole point of the law is to avoid people being able to take their base insticts out on others. your feelings about what is "too much" are irrelevant.

Sharing this in a forum full of "billionaires temporarily down on their luck" is bold and not likely to end well; yet, I agree with you and GP. Hacking should not be synonymous with runaway capitalism, siphoning human energy, and plundering the earth.

Star Trek economy for all!

As a fellow temporarily embarrassed billionaire I'm more than happy to be taxed down to just the one billion.

> billionaires temporarily down on their luck

This is such a pretentious, bad faith line that you’ve heard from someone else and are repeating. Yeah I heard it in philosophy class freshman year too. You gloss over the possibility that maybe other people just aren’t as hateful and jealous as you and believe that capital allocating into the hands of those who have created the most value is an efficient economic system. That doesn’t equate to those people believing they will one day create that much value and profit for it. Maybe stop projecting your mindset on others.

There is no hate here nor anything intended to be a personal attack on specific individuals, but clearly my comment struck a nerve.

This comes across as a saddeningly extreme armchair psychological evaluation and extrapolation to just attack my entire character.

> capital allocating into the hands of those who have created the most value is an efficient economic system

Then let's try it in a different way, "less hateful and jealous"...

What is the net benefit to society of one individual having a net worth approaching $220,000,000,000? Or of ten individuals having a net worth of $1,200,000,000,000?

Explain the "efficiencies" of that with respect to the economic system as a whole.

The 220 billion is equity in companies that are growing at a ~50% 5 year compound annual growth rate. That is about 10x faster than the broader economy. The average Tesla factory worker has >40% higher total compensation than a UAW worker.

If Musk stops using his wealth to grow the economy and sells his shares then he gets taxed. His sales of Tesla shares to buy twitter were taxed at California rates and he paid 10 billion in tax.

If the government could replicate that record of growth and efficient allocation of capital I would be the first one in line to say tax successful capital allocators, but in this case you'd be giving up 10x the economic growth. The US government is incredibly inefficient and poor at doing their job. Just reforming the health care system to be in line with other western countries would free up >1 trillion annually and it wouldn't hamstring the country's growth. You don't see huge threads about that twice a week though. I wonder why.

You can't create a Star Trek economy without advanced technology like replicators and AGI, not to mention space ships. This is how we get to that future, by letting people build the technology and profit from it. They are using the profits to build more technology. There is direct evidence of this, look at Starship, the most advanced rocket in the whole world and literally the only hope of humanity becoming a spacefaring species. It makes 0 profits itself and was built with the profits made by the evil rocket man.

Star Trek economy is for worlds without scarcity. Given we have scarcity, we allocate finite resources to things we want. If someone does something a lot of people want, they get more money.

Some people get money in other ways (e.g. working in government and being extremely lucky in the stock market) but that seems different.

By the way, there is always some form of scarcity even in a Star Trek world that can create stuff out of thin air. Do you want a house on that very scenic spot of the coast? There are only a handful of them. Hope that only two or three families like the place.

Quite. Maybe the Star Trek utopia is everyone gets their own Holodeck, and then no one can ever do anything better than you?

But someone still has the real house at the exclusive beach on that planet. "It's just not the same!" /s

Presumably everyone in the Holodeck will be simulating everyone else as being slightly worse off than them.

You should learn the difference between television fantasy and reality.

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