Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth
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I’m not advocating high rates as good for the poor; I’m championing shaping the yield curve with a market mechanism. It might be too late for that to be anything other than disastrous though, after years of addiction to funny money.
For people that might argue with this statement, I’d highly suggest reading the book The Panic of 1907.
And if you’re wondering I’m bringing up a book about 1907 instead of 1929, then that should lead you to go read the book.
This statement relies heavily on how one might want to measure an equal society.
"In 1907 there was a financial crisis. We learned our lessons and created an institution to prevent the next crisis. So, the next time things went south in finance, in 1929 there was no crisis. There was a catastrophe instead."
Love it!
Prior to these changes, bank runs and financial crises occurred about every twenty to thirty years. By contrast there were none until the 1980s S&L crisis following…major deregulation of the financial sector.
Many provisions of Glass-Steagall were repealed by late 1999. Less than ten years later, risky investments using consumer monies mostly in the form of real estate mortgage-backed securities imploded.
Deregulation of the financial sector often brings short term windfalls with near term crises and catastrophes.
When folks trot out the old "government is the problem" canard, I can't help but point out the economic arsons working on Wall Street and/or owning huge buildings in the middle of downtown financial districts. The government sometimes f's things up due to bureaucracy and ineptitude. The financial sector always f's things up because risk means nothing to them when it's someone else's money and they get their bonuses either way.
One makes infuriating mistakes. The other doesn't make mistakes; only self-interested sabotage. I consider the latter a greater evil frankly.
That isn't in itself a bad thing. There needs to be a mechanism to punish people who give their money to charlatans and to reign in malinvestment. If there aren't occasional bank runs then that suggests an excessively cautious investment environment that is destroying potential wealth. Or a lot off government bailouts to cover excessive risk.
As you point out in a few lines with the "risk means nothing to them" comment, a situation has been set up where only the government cares about whether the risk profile being taken on is appropriate. Bankers don't care because it isn't their money, depositors don't care because it isn't their problem. That is a very poor outcome, everyone should care about that. People are presently empowering incompetents by flooding money into stupid ventures and they get no feedback about the damage they are doing.
Mass voting once every few years combined with committees of professional bureaucrats is an ineffective way of doing risk assessment. This has to be something that people work out with their bankers on an ongoing basis. The US would look completely different and probably a lot better to live in if these incentives were corrected.
It is interesting that in the crypto space a group of people have gotten so sick of this that they're going and making their own financial system (with hookers and blackjack, one suspects). It is a really interesting ongoing experiment because if the situation plays out in the obvious way, we're going to see a much healthier system in crypto. We've already seen any number of frauds cleaned out that'd probably have gotten away with it in traditional finance. And the way Tether eventually explodes will be a really interesting case study.
Crypto will not stop this. Crypto has no intrinsic value. A car has intrinsic value. A house has intrinsic value. Farmland has intrinsic value.
If everyone decided all these things had zero currency value, you can still transport using the car. You can still keep the rain out in a house. Crypto leaves you with electron patterns in a box.
When the US dollar has dipped (and gold has gotten stronger), has the measured value of any crypto "currency" increased proportionally? No. Often it dips along with the dollar. When folks feel the crunch, they sell their crypto to pay bills. The reduced demand lowers the value of crypto. When the dollar is strongest and employment is robust, folks buy more crypto with their increased disposable income, raising demand and proportionally the price.
It's a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme with a much higher fraudster-to-legit ratio than other financial options. There ain't no FDIC for Bitcoin. Be prepared for crypto's 1929 moment.
And you say "lost their life savings" as though the current system doesn't do that. Anyone who has attempted to hold their life savings in a bank is being gently wiped out by inflation. We traded "might happen" for "government policy that this will happen". They're losing most of the value in their cash every 25 years. The official policies are consistently inflation combined with low interest rates.
> Be prepared for crypto's 1929 moment.
Hasn't it has already lost 80% of its value more than once? I'd hope people are prepared with a history like that.
You literally just described everyone who has a bank account. The finance sector is anything but transparent. See: Bear Sterns.
> I'd hope people are prepared with a history like that.
People play the lottery. Humans are REALLY bad at probability. There's an argument that the human brain itself is bad at it. Human perception is the source of optical illusions, sleight of hand, logical fallacies, etc. We are not biologically primed to handle these kinds of problems.
Snake on the ground is a threat? Excellent. Monty Hall Problem? Even after explaining it, a majority of folks still reject the solution because it isn't naturally intuitive.
ttfkam: "You literally just described everyone who has a bank account."
In some sense, well spotted. That is why I think the system is a bit cooked. People can't just put hand their money over to one institution, ignore what is done with it and expect to get a good outcome. This is a good way to get vast capital misallocations and, eventually, a lot of people ending up poor. More people than the alternative of the occasional bank run. I can see an argument for setting up full-reserve banks. But if people are going to lend their money to institutions that on-lend it, we should be seeing banking institutes get rolled up regularly and depositors losing at least some of their money. People shouldn't be allowed to ignore what is done with their money; it leads to some of the worst incentives in the modern economy.
But technically no, some people have their money spread over a few institutions. And most people don't seem to have cash savings these days anyway (which is rational given the inflation regime).
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/over-2-percent-of-th...
See: Mt. Gox
People flocked to Bitcoin because they saw people get rich. That's it. Real estate is very heavily regulated by comparison and yet folks were buying, selling, and flipping like crazy. People want money. Regulations are an excuse, not the primary motivator.
Fiscal policy is the only tool through which equity can be managed. Monetary policy is pointless.
A dollar today is always going to be worth more than a dollar tomorrow.
Think of a dollar today as one commodity and a dollar tomorrow as a separate and distinct one. There is a difference in our marginal preferences and that is where the interest rate comes from.
Just as both of us can be made better off trading blueberries and strawberries without actually creating anything new, the difference in our inter temporal marginal preference will reward the lender with a return even in the absence of risk.
A dollar you own today has zero risk of not being delivered tomorrow.
You can invest that dollar one day sooner.
If there’s a general expectation of inflation, it exchanges for more today than tomorrow.
If they didn't prop it up, it would tend to zero because banks have so much liquidity.
https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/interbank-rate
If you're lending someone a billion dollars, and your labour cost for doing the lending is in the hundreds (maybe thousands?) of dollars, then interest rates quickly approach 0.
Sure, no-one would do it for literally 0 dollars, but the rates at which banks lend to each other when there is a ZIRP policy at the central bank (including 0% paid on reserves) is negligible as far as the real economy is concerned.
Like the "cost of capital" in that case for issuing a mortgage has nothing to do with the interbank lending rate.
There is an official policy that prices will go up exponentially, controlled by a tiny committee who implements the policy by, effectively, money printing. The official justification is a just-so story with no compelling evidence that I've ever seen. We seem to have gotten there because politicians don't like sound management any more than anyone else and just borrow and spend until the money runs out. And the outcome is asset owners get an enormous leg up over everyone else and the biggest asset owners get privileged.
Given the level of this-sounds-crazy in the policy mix there should be much better justifications for all this policy than people accept. We should routinely be seeing actual studies by real economists justifying this madness. It looks like trash policy.
Any excuse is good to raise the price if some people really need your product and it doesn't jeopardise your demand enough. (This is called demand inelasticity.)
No price fall is needed or done when the excuse goes away.
If you control supply side sufficiently, you can also use that to further raise prices and keep them high. Thus equilibrium economics efficiency arguments fail.
Housing has limited but highly inelastic demand. So does food, water, healthcare, energy, fuel. Some of these cannot be substituted easily either.
And the smarter capitalist to get maximum profit will do anything to make this demand yet more inelastic by reducing choices, especially away from their control. Be it by monopoly, cartel, tacit cartel, hostile takeovers, PR to bury options, government intervention, over or underregulation...
Assets are liabilities unless they're directly in demand or are actively capital (as in used to make things). For example, having houses nobody can buy that will disintegrate is a liability. It's even clearer with office buildings which are a bit more elastic in demand. Unless you control most housing and can thus enhance relative demand, of course...
The justifications for current capitalism are very vacuous based on willing misinterpretation of it. Even ignoring the whole monetarist view which is a second order misinterpretation.
This is the primary cause of the poor getting poorer. Greed has nothing to do with it. Greed is linear. O(n). Inflation compounds. O(e^n).
Greed is unbound, if it is really greed. And it’s exponential, if it simply means ambitious and wise use of resources.
I would ditch the psychology economic babble.
There is certainly a case to be made that increasing employment by expanding the money supply is an addictive short term fix paid for with predictable long term damage to the purchasing power of existing laborers.
Inflation leaves valuable assets just as valuable, but undermines fixed or sticky income streams.
There are a couple of metrics that I'd accept as a goal for the economy. Maximising median leisure time, maximising wealth creation, maximising payoff for working hard, minimising waste. Something like that or any reasonable combination. I don't think exponentially increasing the prices of goods and services helps with any of those. As far as I can tell it just transfers wealth to asset owners. Which is nice enough if you are an asset owner but it seems arbitrary, unfair and pointless to me. I propose alternative strategies of asset owners have to rely on the value of the asset to make money, rather than waiting for handouts.
I own enough assets that this policy probably benefits me. But it also appears to be causing terrible damage to the community and general faith in capitalism so I expect there will be a nasty backlash at some point that will outweigh the short term benefits. I can't buy stuff if people don't see a benefit in making it.
I think you mean to say imply that wages don't increase, so relatively speaking wage-earners are poorer if assets become more expensive and wages don't rise?
The counterpoint is: Wages are at level X1 relative to price level Y1 because labor can demand these wages. If the price level rises to cY1, there is no reason to think wages won't rise to cX1, so the ratio stays the same?
Who got poorer?
New wealth is being created all the time by the fusion of labour and capital. There is a bit of a balance of how it is distributed - most of it goes to capitalists and some of it goes to labourers (labour labours, spends what they feel is necessary then buys capital with the rest. Over time they become wealthy capitalists too and we all get to be rich. In theory, a lot of people just waste the opportunity even under the best of conditions :[ ).
Over a long enough time frame money printing does nothing, but in the short term there is an effect where the first people to get the money benefit from distortions where they get more short term economic power (in the US typically bondholders, I suspect there are also programs of interference in stocks [0] although that is more of a theory).
I argue that when new capital is created, under a free market more of it should be going to people who draw wages. If I was right, I'd expect symptoms under the current system like people struggling to save, struggling to afford homes, etc, moreso than in the past. People being unable to transition smoothly from being labourers to capitalists and the middle class slowly shrinking.
The way the accounting identities shake out, I'd expect to see exponential increases in every price and valuation but consumables would rise slightly faster than wages and it'd become less and less effective to people relying on their labour to save.
* Part 2
But there are also secondary effects - because now "being an asset owner" is unfairly rewarded, people start creating fake assets in the hope of getting in front of the money hose [1]. That leads to misallocation of capital which IMO is likely to lead to major losses. If capitalists are incentivesed to own assets in the abstract rather than own assets that are actually productive then eventually the system has to recognise big losses because allocations aren't performing.
To give a specific example of that, if you happen to own gold the market is signalling that you have been making consistent "real" (ie, in excess of CPI) returns for something like 20 years. That is obvious bunk, gold is a dead asset that does nothing - the real price might jump up and down a bit in a band, but it doesn't climb steadily at that rate. I'm being asked to pretend I'm getting wealthier each year through my gold holdings, and a lot of people aren't switched on enough to realise that is a fake signal. The market is encouraging unproductive allocations because the metrics are being cooked. And the metrics are being cooked [2] likely on purpose - because it is in the interests of nobody powerful to stop printing money and let labour draw a bigger share of the wealth. Good metrics would suggest that as the obvious thing to do.
> Who got poorer?
Anyone who earns by them working. Especially people who try to retire.
The long story short here is the economic system is overly rewarding people who own assets, encouraging people to invest in bad assets and none of monkeying around with price levels is helpful. It just makes it harder to figure out what is going on.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Group_on_Financial_Mar...
[1] I'm basically in on this, I don't mind too much about whether my investments actually have good fundamentals because I'm looking to get in on the money printing. It has worked out great for me if you believe the CPI is important. Acceptable after doing normalisation against the M2.
[2] Totally different topic that I'm only alluding to here. Economics favours long blog posts or books, HN isn't really wordy enough to have a satisfying argument.
I've argued we should combine this with a move towards a worker owned economy - in which businesses are democratic institutions governed by the people who do the work involved.
But either of these changes on their own would do _substantial_ good. Going to make a note to read this book!
Wouldn’t a tax system that steeply ramps up, includes property and tends to it’s loopholes (family trusts, property etc) achieve most of this?
Datacenters, offices, warehouses, factories... these all sit on top of land. Even a fully-remote company running off Raspberry Pis in someone's closet still requires some quantity of land on which the employees' homes and that closet full of Raspberry Pis sit. Even if the companies themselves don't own that land directly, somebody does.
As for loopholes, LVT is the most effective way to patch them; you can't exactly move land to offshore bank accounts, after all.
It's all well and good to take away from the rich, but where does that tax money, once taken away, end up? You're saying it should be redistributed to those making less money, but what's stopping politicians from enriching themselves with that money?
> reaching levels where they stop using their wealth to contribute to the economy (by e.g. offshoring money)
Money in Cayman Islands numbered accounts generally only happens with illegally gained money (maybe by the likes of politicians I've described above), or by people in jurisdictions with harsh capital controls (like the sort you're describing). People like Bezos or Gates aren't stashing their money away like that. Most of the ultra-rich of America derive their net worth figures from ownership of publicly-traded companies.
It's not really all that uncommon for a company with a sole owner or a partnership to be worth in excess of $15 Million.
I think there are good "system stability" arguments to set limits. Roughly, states are dynamic multivariate systems whose objective function should ideally track citizen well being and state security, and taxes are one of the feedback loops that prevent individual actors from dominating or otherwise destabilizing the system.
The mistake is thinking that the fictions we created to establish this system are fundamental moral imperatives in and of themselves.
What moral justification is there for them to hoard absurd sums of money, particularly when we have folks without homes and kids in poverty?
“ if some minerals are discovered on your heretofore low value land”
And
“ creating millions of dollars worth of goods or services”
Where was the act of creation that led to the increase of the value?
How did the land to acquire become yours?
Most likely you didn’t discover the land, or do anything to find the materials (hiring people to do labor) so there’s no reason to think you should receive anything
You don't even need to construct the scenario where someone with enough capital just buys up as much as possible, knowing they will get lucky with some subset of their property. That's both a modern problem and the plot of Blazing Saddles (yes, I'm choosing that example to focus on how widespread of an issue this has been for centuries).
> Where was the act of creation that led to the increase of the value?
I'm not sure what you mean. Finding and extracting the asset adds a valuable, productive good to the economy (ignoring the enormous downside).
Are you debating the word choice, "creating"? I guess I don't see that discussion as valuable. Are you using the word choice to make a point? Make it!
> How did the land to acquire become yours?
You know how; again, please make your point?
> Most likely you didn’t discover the land, or do anything to find the materials (hiring people to do labor) so there’s no reason to think you should receive anything
Is all of this an argument for communism - the only ones who do anything valuable are the workers? I think that's as self-serving and narrow-minded as the ultra-capitalists who think only they matter. Providing and allocating capital is essential and a valuable skill; if it's easy for you, I'm sure you have plenty of it by now.
Correct! Because the act of creation is where value is created.
By definition capital does not create value, otherwise there would be no requirement to have labor to do the “transformation.”
Exactly to your point I have at points had quite a bit of money (not currently true). But it’s not from “capital growth” it’s from aggressively selling my labor and capturing the majority of my labor value. That said, if you were to compare the amount of value, I’ve created to the amount of money I received, It’s not even fucking close I’ve created 1000x more value than I have captured.
Why? because at the time that I did those deals, I was not in a powerful enough position to demand the value capture, because we’re stuck in a state where the vast majority of people need to debase themselves simply to survive.
Is that the type of system that has long term capacity for multigenerational equitable success? The answer is no and there’s no way you can slice that that makes it a yes.
If, however, your goal is a infinite race to the bottom for worker self exploitation, where people will literally destroy themselves in order to otherwise survive, based on the whims of hoarded capital owners arbitrary self inflated egos about how the world works. Having been a LP in a venture fund, a Director in a large public company, and a multitime start up founder I can guarantee this is exactly how it works. If that’s the world you want then we’re right on track.
My perception is that the labor/capital allocation of return is far out of whack, due to a power imbalance.
But I feel you still aren't accounting for the value of capital. It's too easy an answer, intellectually, just to dismiss the whole thing and ignore the complication.
Production requires capital and labor. If I lend you my truck for your contracting service, shouldn't I get some return on that? What if you use my property to manufacture your skateboard (or whatever)? What if I give you some of my personal cash to hire workers, who then produce the skateboards, which you sell at a profit? I know these are simple, chosen examples, but where do you see the problem and how do you quantify appropriate returns?
Holding keys to a cache of goods isn’t a skill.
Even if you claim to have thought really really hard about when to open the vault, the simple act of hoarding less, does not transform the goods into value.
The fact of hoarding, crowds out others use of the resource (reducing monetary velocity) so that means for people who want to make more, the choices made for when to open the vault are solely dependent on an mathematically unequitable distribution of the resultant created goods, in effect stealing directly from the people making value.
To be clear I’m not making the Labor Theory of Value argument - I’m simply demonstrating that by capitals own standard (increase in value based on capital labor mix) capital should get no excess return.
In fact the only argument capitialists have left is the contract and this is the Mises style MaximumCapitalist like Hans Hoppe. The argument goes that as long as a contract is signed, there cannot be anything unethical.
I'm sure you know the next issue: How in your system is capital efficiently allocated? The issue is not hoarding (or not necessarily), it's natural scarcity of capital. How do we decide who gets to use the truck or the property, etc.? We know the capitalist method of allocation, which is rather productive in aggregate. Other methods have been unproductive, broadly speaking. First come first serve?
Also, the worker in your system gets all the return. Great. Now they have some money and they buy a truck. But now they own capital, the truck and hopefully some cash left over. Must they lend it to someone else without return? I dunno, but they might not be happy with that!
Proudhon famously deconstructed the concept mathematically: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudho...
(You can ignore the fact that it's on a Marxist site - Proudhon and Marx were not friends and had bitter disagreements - but unfortunately and unsurprisingly Marx's "Communism" got popular)
Plenty of groups through history and even today ban interest as usury - the early Islamists were known for this
On efficiency: Note your arguments. The conceit of a capitalist apologist are that the mechanisms of capitalism, (eg markets as a price clearing mechanism between free agents) according to the efficient market hypothesis should not require a central or other intermediary for allocation. Yet your entire claim is that the purpose of finance is to make that clearing happen efficiently, and to be significantly compensated for such.
How is that not centralized planning only by a different group, then a government? From an information and planning perspective it’s not, so any claims that you need a financial services market in order to make capitalism efficient, argues against the foundational argument of the efficiency of capitalism.
Syndicalism, however, does not require any intermediary, and in fact, any intermediary introduces net losses as I’ve already demonstrated, there is no value created by capital allocation, and therefore the only value if it is taken out of, it comes out of those the value that could be captured by the person creating it.
Finally I’d suggest you read my paper and see what you think:
https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html
Thanks for the debate
You may be interested:
In the study of cultural universals, there are four leading anthropologists going back ~100 years afaik, and all four say private property is universal, based on the evidence. Some caveats: Generally speaking, they say it; there's detail there that I don't have time to look into now. Also, defining and classifying the behaviors of all cultures, current and past, and associating them with some modern English words, yields uncertain definitions - as those anthropologists will tell you. Certainly how a 'cultural universal' is expressed can look very different in different cultures.
* Clark Wissler, Man and Culture (1923)
* George Murdock, "The Common Denominator of Cultures", in The Science of Man in the World Crisis ed Ralph Linton. New York: Columbia University Press. 123-142. (1945)
* Charles Francis Hockett, Man's Place in Nature, McGraw-Hill (1973)
* Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (1991)
These are seminal works in that field - the seminal works as I understand it (I'm not an expert). You can find all/most at the Internet Archive, as far as I know.
I think the current system, and specifically the Supreme Court under Roberts has done an excellent job protecting individual property rights from the state. The Roberts court gets criticized for protecting those rights too much.
You can still drive that car on racetracks and other such places.
The car/house comparison doesn’t make any sense here.
You don’t own the land and never will. You just lease it from the government and we all get that.
I pay property tax to keep my car. I get a yearly bill based on the value of my car, and I pay taxes based on that. I pay property tax to keep my house. I get a yearly bill based on the value of my house and I pay taxes based on that.
The car/house comparison makes sense here because I get a bill in the mail for property tax on my house and I get a bill in the mail for property tax on my car, they are from the same locality in two different envelopes.
I own the land. I own the car, I get property tax bills for both of them in the mail every year, they are precisely 100% the exact same.
In the US? This isn't common. I've heard of things like this to register your car but not to keep it.
There's no laws in the USA where they'll repossess your car if you don't pay registration fees. They just don't allow it to be on the road legally and you'll get ticketed.
It's state by state: https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-highest-and-lowest...
I support the latter, and protection of their rights, but the former certainly has more legitimacy.
Communism fails because no one has anything left to aspire to and everyone is therefore equally miserable.
> Ambition and envy are basic human traits
No they are not
The problem is that by looting rich people you will not end up with the problem.
In fact, you can make the problem much bigger mid-term by killing incentives and making people into poverty...
Cuba or Venezuela were richer than Spain in the 50s just to give you a couple of examples. And Venezuela has natural resources.
What happened? Well, yes, this kind of: let's take everything from the others and give to the poor.
It's the only perspective that matters.
> In fact, you can make the problem mich bigger mid-term by killing incentives and making people into poverty...
Being limited to $15 million is a far cry from "killing incentives and making people into poverty".
Um, the US?
Sorry, I checked GDP per capita charts, and it appears that Cuba was not richer than Spain in 50s. It would be implausible that a small country with little natural resources would become richer than the country that colonized it in so little time.
And Venezuela become poorer than Spain in 1982. So it had no relation with "take everything from the others and give to the poor".
Counterpoint for your argument: outside the west, between non-alignment countries, only places where marxist-leninist revolutions happened produced powers that were able to seriously compete with the west. For example, URSS and China.
I can tell you because many spanish families emigrated there.
I know cases from friends whose parents are from those countries.
I am spanish and it was common knowledge that those places had higher income at that time.
So I would say they should belong to the keeper right now.
And if it was a gift, it would still be a property transfer. So still his.
I suspect that whatever price was charged was a bargain compared to what it's actually worth - and thus the transfer was at the expense of the rest of society.
> And if it was a gift, it would still be a property transfer. So still his.
And if that "gift" was stolen from someone else beforehand?
Then that would be theft and not legitimate property transfer. I was talking about cases where a gift is from someone who earned it and transferred something, a donation.
Not from a government that gifts via regulations or a thief that steals something and donates after the fact. Though there is no difference in either IMHO.
How about from a government that - instead of taxing that aforementioned conquered land and the ownership thereof - shifts the tax burden onto the working class (via income and sales taxes), robbing us blind while subsidizing the owning class (who is then happy to rob the working class further via skyrocketing rents)?
The vast majority of people "earning" tens of millions of dollars in this country are not doing so via their own hard work. They are doing so by rentseeking - by being parasites on local, national, and global economies. Their wealth derives from theft, plain and simple.
And there just so happens to be a solution to that theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
So yes, a government that taxes people against their will for a service they do not use, from my perspective, is theft to tax payers.
A different story is wether we want to support to some extent people who need it: in that case, it would not be theft against a person giving support, but it would not be a tax either.
As for who earns and how, yes, crony capitalism is quite bad. What I support is mostly free market capitalism as much as it is feasible and realistic.
I am not sure it is ideal, but as long as laws for damage are applied and the consumer is informed, it works way better than all this political cloud full of a system with favors, licenses, and excuses to avoid comptetition.
I am even more against subsidizing than taxes themselves. That is the worst possible distortion of things.
I am hopeful there are other ways, and I would like to put them in practice.
But those come from our own beliefs.
The land conquering is a difficult topic. I agree it is not a good thing. But the history of humanity is the history of conquer. A person that violently takes territoy in some way should not be the owner. I am not sure it is practical or even possible to fix that, though.
Fortunately, that ain't the case for a land value tax as alluded to above. The government provides landowners a service (enforcement of their land deeds), and any "tax" on it is a payment for that service. As it stands, landowners have successfully lobbied the government such that they only pay a tiny fraction (at most) of the rents due to society at large. And so:
> For a tax to exist, there must be a justification.
And there you have the justification. Landowners owe the full value of the land they own to the society willing to respect and enforce that ownership. Anything short of that full value is theft, and is indeed rather directly responsible for the continued prevalence of socioeconomic inequality both here in the US and worldwide.
I do agree with you that how that tax revenue gets spent is an issue. The maximally fair answer would be to disburse it equally to all citizens as a dividend, and then citizens can put that money toward the things they believe to be worthwhile.
And on that note:
> A person that violently takes territoy in some way should not be the owner. I am not sure it is practical or even possible to fix that, though.
LVT happens to be a maximally fair and practical way to fix that, especially when paired with a citizens' dividend per above; assuming, per above, that land ownership and socioeconomic inequality are causally linked, shifting the tax base away from the products of labor (i.e. abolishing taxes on income, sales, and buildings) and onto land values would satisfy the goals of things like reparations, such that those who materially benefited from such conquest are the ones compensating those who did not.
Thanks for this very positive exchange.
There are two senses of theft at issue:
1. Some government establishes (or expands) its sovereign territory through violent conquest.
2. Private parties obtain a service from said government and the society it ostensibly represents without paying in full for it (specifically: the issuance, recognition, and enforcement of land titles/boundaries, those being definitionally subsets of said government's sovereign territory - which, again, may or may not have been obtained through violent conquest)
Here in the US, both of those sorts of theft are in play:
1. The entirety of US territory was obtained either by conquering it from other entities (e.g. Native American tribes, Mexico, Spain) or by purchasing it from other powers who had previously done so (e.g. France, Spain, Britain, Russia).
2. The US government (or state/local subdivisions thereof) issues and enforces deeds representing subsets of its sovereign territory to landowners, at the exclusion of the rest of its citizenry - yet the landowners do not pay anywhere near the full rental value of the land to said government or said citizenry.
> Am I to assume that every piece of land has an "original owner"? Who is that?
In the case of American land, that'd be the indigenous peoples thereof.
In a more general/legal sense, the "original owner" would be the government of whose sovereign territory that land is a subset. If that government ostensibly represents its citizens, then said "original ownership" would rest with each and every individual citizen equally. As Locke explained in his Second Treatise of Government:
> Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough and as good left, and more than the yet unprovided could use. So that, in effect, there was never the less left for others because of his enclosure for himself. For he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all. Nobody could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst. And the case of land and water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same.
That is: every member of society is entitled to an equal share (by value) of the land on which that society exists. Those who own more than their equal share of that land value owe compensation to those who own less than their equal share. The lack of said compensation is theft.
If I choose to buy land, goods, services, the seller chooses the "value". If I agree on the value, I have free will to to purchase the land, goods or service. If I do not agree on the value, I can either offer a lower price, or walk away.
If I purchase said land, goods or service, and later decide that I no longer want those things, I can choose to sell them. At that point, I set a value. If the purchaser agrees on the value, I then sell/transfer ownership to that person. If the value has grown since I purchased said land, goods, service, I could potentially profit. If the value has not increased, I am at a loss.
So, to directly answer your question about "authority". (In my case, land that was owned, and worked, for 100 years in an area that no one wanted to live). A price for said land was agreed upon. The sale was advantageous for the seller as he no longer wanted to tend it. I assumed the risk, taxes, etc. Working said land was extremely arduous. Shepherding it through multiple hurricanes, floods, etc bore a financial burden. Many years later, as the area began to develop, my asset grew in value. Selling it produced a profit. This profit allowed me more ability to purchase other land, goods and services.
As I'm tying this, I'm certain you're aware of these basic economic principles, but simply don't agree with them. Disagreement is fine. But this is the way things are done in my country. And, I choose to live here because I agree with those principles. If I wanted to live in a country where an entity could come and confiscate my wealth, and redistribute it, those countries exist. I could likely move to one of them.
The best definition I've ever found is "altruistic and cooperative with an in-group, competitive and aggressive towards out-groups".
And that doesn't say much at all on this particular point.
Empirical observation.
Look what happened in all the 20th century communist countries.
Since we know that human behavior ("nature") is substantively malleable, we need to know what could be, not merely what is.
It's not ethical to perform experiments on human subjects without their explicit consent.
That's why the Institutional Review Board was created:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board
You can't just perform experiments on large groups of people to see what will happen.
Capitalism on the other hand, you can look at and say "look how well it works for this country", because meanwhile it is doing terrible things to other countries.
Communism works just fine for small groups (<10), and passably up to a few hundred (e.g. kibbutzim). Your argument would apply equally well at those scales, but mine doesn't. Full disclosure -- there are other arguments that contradict mine while still differentiating these cases.
Of course it doesn't super matter, because this proposal (though not a great idea) isn't communism and communism reliably fails anyway at the scales most people mean.
So are compassion and generosity. And contradiction.
The role of systems in society should be to oil the pathways for the better parts of human nature to come forth, and make the other traits less convenient.
To be fair I don't know your wealth at all but its just an observation I've had from talking with others about this. The end result of this would be to make these people some of the wealthiest in the country by dragging the wealth curve to just above their level. It sounds like a moral hazard to me.
It would make for better discussion if these social justice warriors were at least honest about what they actually want.
Ergo, arguing justice (FSVO justice) for society.
As such, I am of the position that this is one of those rare situations where the term "social justice warrior" is meaningful and accurate.
The people complaining about these things are literally self-identifying themselves as the bad guy. We're not making you use these words. We're not making you self-identify as the bad guy. We didn't put the rake there, but they're proudly stomping on it anyways.
Take for example the aforementioned grandparent: It's justice to redistribute wealth from those above some arbitrary line to those below (grandparent is presumably below it). That's only justice for him, it's bullshit to everyone else.
And you know what happens when differing senses of justice collide? Possibly made worse by fervor? Very Unpleasant Things(tm).
This is why we use legal justice rather than social justice: There is one and only one standard of justice that we all agree to accept after much deliberation.
I'm a tech worker in the public sector.
To be blunt: tax me more, please.
Gifts to the United States
U.S. Department of the Treasury
Reporting and Analysis Branch 2
P.O. Box 1328
Parkersburg, WV 26106-1328
Progressive taxation is a good idea...
Are Elon’s rocket and car company infringing on your well-being? What about the pensioners holding Tesla shares? Are they stifling your ability to come up with some funds for the public good?
Oh, I forgot, poor victim Elon! The right-wingers pull out this rhetoric so consistently, it's a parody of itself every time. But now Elon Musk is a victim? Whose next? Trump?
And if we jointly pay for them, don't each of us have a share to pay?
(I think we both are in good faith. No need to imply I'm a thief or oppressor.)
> And if we jointly pay for them, don't each of us have a share to pay?
Yes, but despite them paying orders of magnitude more than you do, you still complain they don't pay their "fair share", the definition of "fair" being based solely on the fact that you want them to pay more. I don't see any justification for claiming this has anything to do with "fair".
That's exactly what I was thinking. I am the owner of your money, in fact. Hand it over. Post your BTC here (nobody else touch it, it's mine).
> "I want to do X therefor it's fair that Elon Musk will pay for it, and if he doesn't, he is evil and must be jailed"
We are equal under the law and we all should pay for it, nobody treated differently.
> the definition of "fair" being based solely on the fact that you want them to pay more.
When did I tell you what my basis was?
The image of Musk whining 'it's not fair' like a 6 year old is pretty incredible, but in fairness to Musk, someone else is doing it. But for reasons unknown - why are you advocating for this complete stranger?
Your surprise that somebody can object to untruth where it's not personally beneficial to him tells yet more about your approach to fairness.
What he really means is tax me (and certain others I deem appropriate) more.
But if you want to contribute more to the government directly, others here have pointed you to some good resources.
Currently, over half of all federal personal income tax collected is paid by under 5% of taxpayers, and the bottom 50% of income earners as a whole pay under 3% of all federal income tax collected.
What percentage of annual cash flow in the USofA do they earn?
Is it more than 3%?
[0]: https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-pays-income-taxe...
If you want to actually contribute to society you are better off investing it in some productive way or giving away to people in need as directly as possible. Government is a necessary evil, don't give it a dime more than what's absolutely needed as it can get out of control with little room to escape.
I work 60 hours a week and volunteer for 20 more.
Not only do I want everyone in my "class" to contribute at least as much as I do, I want them to actually contribute something, not just voidposting about how they have too much money and wish the government would take more of it.
Unless, of course, you, as usual, meant that it's me that is going to be taxed more? While you are already getting paid from my money?
Another way would be to ask for pay reduction. Same effect on the public money, much less friction and transactional expenses. I'm sure your boss can find a way to make it happen.
I bet you've discovered the cause of this effect. I suspect we're seeing people who live comfortable lifestyles say "this seems about right" and then hedge a bit.
This was on full display back in 2017-2018 when tax code was changed to limit the amount of State and Local taxes (SALT) that could be deducted from your Federal tax liability. The original SALT deduction, before the change, clearly benefited the wealthy, with large mortgages and living in high-tax (read: expensive) areas.
Cue articles like this one [1], which shows just how out of touch the wealthy can be:
> estimate the tax law’s impact on the value of a theoretical house in the New York City suburb of West Orange, New Jersey, purchased for $800,000 in 2017 by a theoretical family with a $250,000 annual income. Those home value and income numbers are very high by national standards — but middle class by the standards of large parts of suburban Essex County.
In 2017, $250K/HHI was in the top 5% of the entire US. Someone living in a house that cost 3X the median house, in one of the richest areas of the country, making more than 95% of everyone else considers themselves 'middle class'.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/trumps-trillion-dollar-hi...
They don't consider themselves middle class, statistically they are middle class based on (income, wealth, purchasing power, etc.). They aren't out of touch - nobody asked them - they just live where there's a higher cost of living. But it pays off, or they would move someplace less expensive, and housing would cost the same nationwide.
The average US locality's economy produces more wealth and requires more expense to live in than the average locality in a low-income country. You can't just move the Americans to the low-income country; they wouldn't be nearly as productive, and thus have less income. NYC's economy is more productive than almost any place in the world.
We could widen the scope to all of human history, and then we're all unimaginably wealthy compared to hunter-gatherers we were until 10K years ago. But does that mean we're just as wealthy here and now?
Cue comments like these that show just how out of touch people can be I guess.
These people are not meaningfully wealthy. They have no more power than the next 5% down the ladder. Even among the top 1%, 90% are not meaningfully wealthy in terms of the power they can exert.
The idea that some poor bozo with a mortgage on an $800k house is wealthy for any useful definition of the term is nonsense.
I haven't observed that, and it's very unlikely the GP is a "notch" below $10-15 million.
Why shouldn't a billionaire be capable of starting a genetics lab to fund cancer research and pay for it in cash, if they are so inclined?
Also almost all of super wealthy people's "wealth" is tied up in assets that are funding entire economies. This money is creating jobs, allowing for affordable loans, the money is working for many other people... It's not as if the money wealthy people have is just in physical gold coins in their swimming pools.
The answer might be "they should be able to"
But are you open to the possibility of the answer being "Despite the apparent potential benefits, it isn't beneficial overall to society or humanity to have extremely rich individuals starting research projects, and perhaps not beneficial overall to even have extremely rich individuals at all" ?
> perhaps not beneficial overall to even have extremely rich individuals at all
To mean there would be fewer. I suppose it depends on where the "extremely rich" line is drawn, but I feel like you must be extremely rich to start a project that normally only a government could start.
As the bumper sticker says, it seems easier for most people today to imagine the end of the world than to imagine an alternative to corporate capitalism.
We do have Kickstarter, Go Fund Me, etc, but I don't think those have turned out to be great tools for raising a very large amount of money. And I am referring to large capital allocations towards a goal. I wish there was a better version of Kickstarter, but VCs seem like a better tool.
I'm just talking about capitalism and what ideal wealth distributions look like under a fundamentally capitalist system. I think America's system has lots of points for improvement, particularly on the side of worker protection from exploitation, wealth distribution, and campaign finance. But, I still think that we should have individuals wealthy enough to fund weird projects just because they want to. And in fact we should have more than we have today just with less extreme wealth.
What is it exactly that you are saying we should change? Everything? Please be specific.
In a hypothetical country, if there's 1B dollars and no limit, one person could own the 1B and everyone else in the country be dirt poor.
If there is a 1M limit, then one person could own 1M tops, and the rest of the money is still there.
Therefore there would be more entities capable of allocating large sources of money.
> are you open to the possibility of the answer being "Despite the apparent potential benefits, it isn't beneficial overall to society or humanity to have extremely rich individuals starting research projects, and perhaps not beneficial overall to even have extremely rich individuals at all" ?
That seems to me to say "maybe no one should be rich enough to fund a major project on their own".
I'm not arguing against a limitation on wealth, I'm actually in favor of one, because like you point out then there would be a less extreme distribution of wealth. I'm saying that if such a limit were to be imposed that it should be high enough to allow significant projects to be started by an individual. That limit is still probably really low compared to the high valuations some billionaires have today.
In regards to fame, Adam Savage recently said:
"When there’s no one around you that can tell you ‘no,’ you’re in deep trouble, and you’re also going to traumatize the people around you.”
Even on a deserted with five people, there isn't a fixed amount of wealth that can be divided over those five people. A fixed amount of land? Sure. Maybe a fixed amount of rocks and trees? Okay. But there's no fixed amount of the ingenuity and labor that is required to convert those natural resources into things actually desired by people, like a roof over one's head or warmth during a cold night.
And some people are more industrious and clever than others and therefore are better at meeting people's needs and being compensated for it.
You could replace the words industrious and clever with manipulative and abusive, and where does that lead you?
Well, why should they? What if instead of a genetics lab, they want to start a flat earth research center? Or a think tank to influence policy in their favor?
Starting land to fund cancer research is fine, but I don't see why we need billionairs for that? Multiple people can fund it. They are going to work alone in that lab either.
>It's not as if the money wealthy people have is just in physical gold coins in their swimming pools.
And it's not as if taxing that wealth makes that fact go away.
What's different is that when all that wealth is concentrated with a few people, they get to decide what research they spend it on and which jobs are created. And that's a bad thing, it's a threath to democracy.
I fundamentally agree with your arguments, but not your conclusion.
IMO we need a greater number of rich folks and fewer ultra rich ones. Those with over 100 billion dollars simply cannot spend it, which means capital is not being allocated at all! Bill Gates has so many employees just dedicated to spending his money responsibly, and he still keeps getting richer.
Because governments can't fund projects?
Not sure what you are arguing for, but IMO there is this idea of the "great men" who build cool things like Space-X. So we should let the wealthy keep their great wealth so that we get more companies like Space-X.
Except what we really get is more corporate looting, oppression and monopoly, plus the hyper-wealthy having excessive influence over government.
If the wealth is spread around, and we no longer have to be wage slaves our whole lives, then collectives of like-minded people could band together and build cool things. We do see that in the open-source world, but most contributors are not earning money they need to pay bills.
I am arguing that more-or-less randomly allocating wealth to individuals to then re-allocate will produce better results and the larger number of individuals, above a certain amount of wealth necessary for grand projects, the better. I think we are better off when we have a diversity of directions in funding grand projects. There is a very real cap on how much money is actually necessary for great projects. No one needs 100 billion dollars to do any particular thing. Idk where the line is, probably the high hundred millions or low billions?
We also really need better wealth distribution in the middle too, but the main post's assertion is literally "no rich people" so I'm arguing against that because private investment has created an incredible amount of the good things we enjoy every day. I'm not talking about the "great men" I'm talking about boring people writing checks for new companies that they think sound cool.
So you can only have $15mil of assets? But your partner can have $15mil too, as can your kids, and parents. And if that's not enough, you can still try to hoard extra wealth in easier-to-hide forms - whether it's physical gold, bitcoin, art, fine wines, etc.
Or worse still, the super-rich will realise that they can spend many times the wealth cap per year consumable/disposable items (so long as they stay under the cap, or get back there by year-end), and become more wasteful. "Might as well spend a few million on a private jet, if I don't, I'll hit the wealth cap!".
> Or worse still, the super-rich will realise that they can spend many times the wealth cap per year consumable/disposable items (so long as they stay under the cap, or get back there by year-end), and become more wasteful. "Might as well spend a few million on a private jet, if I don't, I'll hit the wealth cap!".
This is a very interesting point! I'd worry less about rich folks spending to be below the cap (that money re-enters the economy), but rather evasion by sending money back and forth between a small set. Clearly evasion would need to be monitored.
Next come regulations about having to "cooperate".
Then the question will be raised as to what happens to those rich people who don't cooperate, or middle class / poor people who, god forbid, don't agree with this plan for society. Pretty soon, you've got your jackboots and your re-education camps.
When you are convicted of committing tax fraud, you may get incarcerated in a prison. Most often, you pay a fine.
Call the prisons re-education camps or the tax people jackboots, if you like.
Started as regular police, ended up doing purges 13 crazy years later.
The real way to measure the size of the state is % of GDP. This includes shadow taxes such as printing-induced inflation and deficit spending.
And guess what? The size of the state skyrocketed from a historic baseline of 1-2% to 35% in recent decades. Every now and then there's a war or a crisis and spending pops up like crazy, but it always used to go back down. Not anymore.
The only time it's been higher than this year is in WW2 and during Covid.
Indeed, and even more on an aggregate basis, the population also being much smaller.
> modern capitalism hadn’t had time to create
You're assuming that was created by modern capitalism, which I think is a major flaw. Capitalism contributed certainly, but so did democracy, freedom, rule of law, government investment, civil society, etc. etc. Just look at most of the education system, courts, security, roads, most of science, soldiers, etc etc etc.
> abundant, filled-with-medical-marvels lifestyle we enjoy today.
A great many, maybe most people in the US don't live in that world.
So, surely, you will agree the people who live the easiest and highest quality lives are people today, and lowering tax is actually fully indicative of increasing life expectancy and quality of life.
Be consistent.
I don't mean there's a 100% direct correlation, but that investment is needed for returns. If we don't invest in healthcare, we'll have worse health. If we don't invest in education, etc.
What returns? A very important part of "investing" is ensuring your losing positions are cut early and cut fast, its not continuously putting money into a black hole hoping one day the worst of the worst magically becomes the best of the best.
The rest of your comment is you being quite inconsistent, and frankly, a position that is full of lies.
An argument could be made that the big social media companies are also taking care of re-education, although through less overt means.
> Because that's the point at which you have enough wealth to live a comfortably middle class lifestyle for the rest of your life
15M is far from middle class by any measure. 15M affords you a big city place, a place for winter holidays, and a place for summer holidays. With still left to have spoiled little kids (and possibly spoiled grand children).
Also, 15M is not static money. If you have that much money you will certainly gain an income from just having that much money.
However, I do take strong offense to politico-economic systems where the billionaire has more political power than a poor person. In the current system in almost every country, both individual super rich people and collectively the top 1-5% have enormously more political power than the remaining people. The system much be changed.
I think politico-economic interference is the crux of the problem.
For example, someone with $10 million are trying to maintain their lifestyle, they want to know what stocks, bonds, and certificates, and real estate to invest in.
Someone with $100 million are trying to leverage through venture capital, joining corporate boards, owning platforms, etc.
Someone with $1+ billion will find that the most cost effective way to keep and gain wealth is buying lobbyists, campaign donations, starting and controlling some non-profits that have tax and spending incentives, getting favors by giving politician's kids high profile jobs, and any other innumberable political grift that maintain their wealth status and that only really work at that scale.
I wouldn't care if billionaires were just hoarding some money. But they are not, and all this while they pay bad wages and have even shoved off the cost of training for their jobs onto society and the labor force who have to speculate and pay for their own training.
What workers did J.K. Rowling exploit to become a billionaire? Did Stephen King only cheat half as much to arrive at his half-billion net worth? They produced something that people wanted to buy that previously did not exist, and everyone in the chain got paid what they were willing to work for.
In what world does it "seem likely" that you can only become a billionaire through illicit means?
To some people what I wrote will be a truism and to others it will beg the question.
I see what side that fell on for you and that's good, I'm not citing anything, so definitely question my reasoning. But don't think for a second that producing a handful of books people ended up wanting can generate that amount of value.
In the case of Rowling, she was also executive producer of several Harry Potter films and was no doubt a benificiary of motion picture accounting to a greater or lesser degree. She controls charities and who knows how many shell companies and trusts to hide and manipulate wealth. That's what you have access to at that scale of rich.
Furthermore, if she wasn't cooking the books, hiding and differentiating wealth for tax benefit, placing herself in position to extract more wealth, then she would be the stupid one among her rich peer group and would quickly find herself like one of those lottery winners who are back to being poor and none the wiser 5 years later.
Another truism is that it sounds fun to be rich, but it probably isn't very.
Another truism is that I'm sure we'd all rather suffer being rich than be poor.
Who's being exploited if I upload a song (or ringtone, or wallpaper) to an app store for $0.99 and it gets millions - perhaps even billions - of downloads?
(Answer: me, because of the app stores' rapacious policies)
Where's the empirical evidence that such a cutoff benefits society as a whole?
> I've argued we should combine this with a move towards a worker owned economy - in which businesses are democratic institutions governed by the people who do the work involved.
I like the German system of giving labor a board seat. We should try that first before burning our entire economic model to the ground and starting over, based on a gut feeling with no hard evidence to support it.
However when the power is held by people who would potentially face significant financial loss from either theoretical or empirical evidence, it shouldn't be a surprise that such evidence is lacking, no?
So there's no way for you to be wrong? But there is indeed all the ways for everyone else to be wrong?
Just your assertions that are always true, in every universe.
I also like the sound of the German system.
While I'm sympathetic to this ideal, I don't think it works. All you'd do is add all the inefficiencies of politics into business-level decision making. Democratic processes should be reserved for governing shared resources, like water and air, where independent decision making has pathologies, and independent hierarchical systems are good for optimizing efficiency and value for all other goods and services. We just have to ensure there's competition and fairness for good outcomes.
The only change here is who limiting who allowed to own shares to people work are directly involved.
The more shares you hold, the greater your voice, when it comes to corporate governance. It's not at all the same as the typical idea of democracy as "one person, one vote".
Would you rather corporate governance be more like a political democracy, where no matter if someone has 30% of the shares or 0.0001%, they get the same vote? Or, perhaps the other way around, you'd like to change a political democracy to:
> limiting who allowed to own shares to people work are directly involved
where suffrage is limited to people who work and contribute to society?
"One person, one vote" is not how the presidency works in the USA.
Beyond that, you seem to trying setup some strawman positions rather than engaging in a discussion about anything anyone actually said.
While I'm sympathetic to that line of thought, I feel like it ignores the reality that most business-level decision making is already inefficient and political. Where is the competition and fairness when a sustainable business is bought out, prices increased and development halted to wring out every bit of value, and then sold off for parts to competitors when no profit is left? There are so many common business practices that are actively hollowing out the free market.
Far less than it would be under the proposed system. There's effectively a dictator after all.
> Where is the competition and fairness when a sustainable business is bought out, prices increased and development halted to wring out every bit of value, and then sold off for parts to competitors when no profit is left?
I never said it didn't have pathologies of its own, which is why I said that we have to ensure there's competition and fairness. Arguably, anti-competitive laws have not been properly enforced for quite some time.
Do you think your standard of living under such a system would be lower, the same, or higher than it is now?
I think it would be much lower. I think most people will stop working when they stop getting paid. Some I guess would spend money as fast as they make it on experiences and services and other things that don't increase wealth. But I think many people who would in the current system have gone on to create billions in wealth would stop at $10 million and say, "OK I hit the number, moving on to the next challenge".
that would probably depend on whether you're being exploited by the current system
Imagine looking at a group of slave owners and slaves and asking a similar question with regards to ending slavery, and being all like "well let's hear both sides".
Employee, consumer, or even municipal ownership of firms would be a natural consequence of such a limit. No other way to offload assets fast enough, especially since the usual sources of capital would be under the same limits.
100%
Similarly any place on the side of a hill, a cliff, a beach, ... You're unlikely to ban such places (all buildings 1 story?) Even if you managed that they're the house on the quiet street and the loud house next to the highway/trainline/airport
You could try to make such places merit based but that only turns into a different kind of bribe and cronyism. Money is at least, somewhat obtainable by anyone. Plenty of people were not rich and became rich, maybe by luck, but at least it's a higher rate of churn than central authority has ever been.
A few notes... another way to make the economy more worker owned is to have a a portion of the shares of companies held by public entities, which then use dividends for a basic income. Public investment in companies like this could also be a way of incubating industries.
Another note: the biggest problem with businesses being democratic institutions is the pace at which decisions can be collectively made. This is an information systems problem that can be solved by software. Instead of voting for representatives who make decisions, we need an institutional programming language, and people can vote directly on implementations of modifications to this institutional code that defines every institution. Votes are essentially approvals to a PR. No need for intermediaries to misinterpret voters' intentions.
Now you have a created a society where that sort of social entrepreneurism is impossible.
Society has had enough of ostensibly singular “great persons” inflicting their idea of the greater good on the rest of us in exchange for love, respect, and money. The rest of us have to earn those three.
That's underpants-gnomes level bullshit and you know it. Especially since I've given a concrete example that doesn't exist and would be AWESOME for society
Because if not, people with insatiable appetites will simply seek control of those corporations rather than direct control of piles of money.
Personally I'm an advocate of the exact opposite of what seems to be proposed here: controls on corporate size rather than individual wealth. Living cells don't grow without bounds; at a certain point they get too big and are forced to divide. Simply imposing a tax on corporate size (not a limit) would accomplish this.
Industries where massive size is simply unavoidable (e.g. passenger airplane manufacturing) would simply pay the tax; any economic distortions can be nulled out by reducing the industry's VAT rate in proportion to average size-tax paid by that industry. In all other industries smaller competitors would have the persistent advantage of lower tax costs, allowing them to eventually undermine the bloated colossuses.
I think this has been tried already, unfortunately.
I don't see why that would be true, and abundant evidence that both large and small corporations add value to the world.
No, in fact, it doesn't. Please re-read the comment you're replying to.
There is no cutoff, limit, or threshhold. It doesn't prescribe a naturally-right size any more than a graduated income tax "prescribes a naturally-right amount of income".
No cap is proposed.
Everywhere.
and how quickly to ramp
Yes, that is the one and only tuneable variable. It's a single, obvious scalar, like the interest rate set by a central bank. There's no room for favoritism or shenanighans. Of course, like central bank interest rates, it will be an object of impassioned political debate. That's expected.
which will eventually lead to you having to make some “assumptions” about what size (range) is “too big”
Absolutely false. You're confusing a value with its rate of change. The speed limit on the highway doesn't constrain the length of the road.
Although you gave me an opportunity to clarify that, which isn't nothing, I suppose.
My point is that when you start arguing about capping and/or taxes you should take into account the concept of power, governments, and realpolitik into account. You can put a set of rules for handling corporate power (e.g. taxes) but those corporations could be really smart and move to another jurisdiction such as Ireland (e.g. Google) as a kind of safe heaven. In those cases the whole thinking turns more complex. Gaming the system is part of the game and every rule you put has a loophole except if a government is really strict and/or a dictatorship, and power (e.g. reality) plays there beyond the rules.
The size tax should be applied to imports, just like VAT is.
I strongly prefer a society which permits the existence of Jeff Bezos over one which does not. Of course, more strongly than that, I prefer a society which taxes inelastic goods and negative externalities and returns that wealth to the public over one which does not.
Do you think Lindberg brought a port-a-potty along with his Spirit of St Louis? I remember the opening sequence in a Jeff Bridges movie where he pulls over in his car and dumps his pee bottle.
P.S. My dad was a B-17 navigator in WW2. I asked him what did they do when had to go. He said an empty ammo box was used. What was done with the full box? "Extra bombs over Germany!"
Heck, during the recent pandemic, all the public restrooms were locked closed.
What do you think people do when they go hiking?
I'd rather live in a world where Amazon employees have time to pee on the job and Jeff Bezos has $10M less. Iterate until Jeff Bezos only makes ~10^2 what the median Amazon employee makes instead of ~10^6.
Only in the sense that modernity produces a lot more wealth than any other system humans have come up with.
> What many see as prosperity, is irreconcilable with sustainability.
No, it isn't. What might be is allowing people to accumulate wealth by playing zero sum games, siphoning wealth out of other people's pockets into their own, instead of producing more wealth.
Wealth, as measured in GDP. A metric that has proven itself a poor predictor for happiness and fulfilling lives, and we do all this at the cost to our environment https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/.
> No, it isn't.
Our economies, political systems and culture are all built on the concept of infinite growth. Argue as much as you want, physics makes that impossible in a universe with limited resources.
Not really, everything could work exactly the same as now even when growth stops. The current system did bet on growth continuing for 40 more years, but there is no infinite there, other than those bets failing there is nothing in current society that demands infinite growth.
The reason is straightforward - people take care of things that they own, they don't take care of things they don't.
For example, which is threatened with extinction - ocean fish, or cows?
Are you more careful with your boss's money, or your money?
And so on.
"you'd be hard pressed to find a system more effective at destroying our world"
I recall reading after the USSR collapsed that Poland was the most polluted country in the world. All due to the rush to industrialize and to heck with the environment.
Chernobyl is another case about communism giving short shrift to environmental considerations.
Lest we forget when that paragon of free market capitalism, the United States, prior to the creation of the EPA and its glorious burning Cuyahoga River.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught...
Communist governments simply have to, as starving people tend to revolt.
Free market economies generated enough surplus that they can afford to be clean. Communist economies cannot even feed themselves.
I'm glad we see that the inevitable outcome of free market deregulation is destruction.
BTW, dignity comes from within. It is not imposed by external influences.
The power the workers have in a free market is the power to say "no" and walk away.
Guess what? The free market didn’t provide one either. It doesn’t actually provide a lot of things needed for a robust society.
It’s almost as if Wall Streets communism vs capitalism is a giant canard to distract from very basic, proven, and effective socioeconomic reforms.
Look at the sky in any given photograph of china.
Ecosphere destruction is tied to that sort of wealth https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/09/death-by-hockey-sticks/. You grow one, you grow the other.
That's not true, unless in very basic technical sense - like, we need energy to exist, turn on our computers, etc. But resource extraction and energy production is not the dominating source of wealth for many years now. Look at the current market's magnificent seven: Alphabet (GOOGL; GOOG), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Meta Platforms (META), Microsoft (MSFT), NVIDIA (NVDA), and Tesla (TSLA). Not a single of them does resource extraction or sells energy.
It's not true socially either. If someone wants to get rich, they go into finance, high tech, entertainment maybe. Not in oil prospecting or gold digging (not that there aren't money in it - there are, but it's not what the society considers to be a lucrative business anymore). It's not 1849 now.
Carbon taxes. Water prices reflecting scarcity. Compensating people living in rain forests to not cut down their trees.
Capitalism is still the best tool we have for setting prices and incentivizing efficiency. Just needs to be guided to place appropriate prices on externalities.
The problem is not enough water. You can't make water by taxing it.
All you're doing is making it less accessible for people lower down the hierarchy - which makes it even scarcer, because people at the top of the hierarchy end up hoarding it and/or profiteering.
Which is why price signals are one of the dumbest of all possible ways of managing resources. They're a political non-solution to a physical problem.
You may try to argue that "incentizing efficiency" means more water is produced. But that is empirically false.
The only real competition is capitalism is for shareholder cash. Customers are thrown overboard if their interests conflict with that goal.
None of this solves the physical, tangible problem of providing a stable water supply.
If you're having trouble understanding this, ask the people in Flint MI how making imaginary money game tokens more important than providing a usable utility has worked out for them.
You might also want to look into why the UK's water companies are currently dumping raw sewage into rivers. Hint: because they can, and because it's more profitable than filtering it first.
Au contraire; distorting or ignoring price signals is the dumbest of all possible ways of managing resources, precisely because you let people pretend that the underlying realities don't need to be contended with.
> Water prices reflecting scarcity are not a solution for water scarcity.
I assume the GP is referring to things like how agricultural water is dirt cheap in arid parts of the US. By making those prices better reflect reality (of scarce water in those regions), water-intensive agriculture will need to happen elsewhere, freeing up water for residential consumption, for example.
> why the UK's water companies are currently dumping raw sewage into rivers. Hint: because they can, and because it's more profitable than filtering it first.
So you agree that price signals would fix this problem?
You either accept that infinite growth in a universe with limited resources is impossible, or you're stuck loosing the rhetoric battle against physics.
I think the only sustainable way forward is to divorce our concept of wealth from growth, and ever increasing exploitation of resources.
Capitalism requires a philosophical split between labor, productivity, and capital ownership
A market is simply a price clearing mechanism in the context of known exchange rates of commodities, you don’t even need money for it, and says nothing about the ownership composition of the actors making trading decisions
I’m not sure what this proves though
Again the concept of a market is independent of capitalism, they are not mutually excluding
You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some metric) than an arbitrary political process. I don't mind if Jeff Bezos the person exists, but I have no reason whatsoever to want him to have control over the scale of resources and decision-making that he does.
A key advantage of leaving it to the rich is that when rich people fail, they tend to end up losing their wealth and power, hurting mostly themselves — while even a political process that isn’t being corrupted or gamed by someone powerful is badly incentivized to throw buckets and buckets of good money after bad, hurting lots of people.
Elon ruining Twitter is at least his own money. The California bullet train will be an unprofitable multibillion drain on the state for decades to come …
When an enterprise fails, it is not just the stockholders and corporate officers who suffer. The employees do too. Worse, only the foolhardy investor puts more than they can afford to lose into a risky investment, meaning that while they have undoubtedly lost money from the failure, they are almost certainly still "whole" in terms of their ability to meet their basic needs. By contrast, the employees, who may have lost no capital, often face much more dire circumstances in the aftermath of a venture failing.
>even a political process that isn’t being corrupted or gamed by someone powerful is badly incentivized to throw good money after bad
It isn't clear to me what you mean by this.
Elon is not "ruining his own money". He gained control over large quantities of economic and financial resources, and because of the way our society works, he gets to "ruin" those resources by choosing to direct them to the purchase of an asset followed by its degradation.
But there's an opportunity cost to all that: what might have happened in Elon was not in a position to command the utilization of the wealth that purchased Twitter? What else might that wealth have been used for? What might it have been accomplished?
Secondly, we now see a company whose products have severe safety defects due to the influence of cost-cutting managers, more concerned with profits than quality.
There's not really much evidence to support that claim (though to be fair, not much evidence to refute it either).
He wrecked a company and thousands of lives. They pay the price, not him.
It's always the workers that pay the price.
Not at all. A large fraction of the "already rich" did not get their wealth by productive efforts. They got it by convincing other people to take the wrong end of zero sum trades, thus siphoning wealth out of other people's pockets into their own. Even in the case of Jeff Bezos, who has certainly created a lot of wealth through Amazon, it's also true that his own personal wealth is not entirely due to that productive effort; a significant part of it is due to Amazon playing zero sum games with its supply chain and its workers.
In other words, the real problem is not wealth accumulation, but wealth accumulation through zero sum games, or more generally through gaming the system instead of producing. (There was a pg essay on this years ago.)
Why would any worker or supplier do an exchange with Amazon where they lose?
Zero-sum games are called "theft", "fraud" and/or "wealth redistribution" schemes.
I have faith that an Olympic athlete is a lot better about making diet and exercise decisions than I am.
I have faith that Mick Jagger is far better at crafting a new song than I am.
I have faith that Tom Hanks could make a far better movie than I can.
Smart athletes let technocrats (e.g. scientists and doctors) make those decisions for them!
In the case or billionaires, we know Zuckerberg is really good at making social media apps. That doesn't mean he's good at anything else!
Plenty of talented rich people have demonstrated that given the chance they'll lose lots of money on foolish ventures outside their area of expertise.
Frontline ran an episode a few years ago about 401k plans. They found that the wealthier the employee was, the better returns they had on the company 401k plan, despite the fact that the plan was identical for all the employees.
This is a tautology.
The question is not whether rich people are better at running their own finances, it is whether they are the best people to be making resource allocation decisions.
In US capitalism, the argument for coupling the two normally consists of "well, they want to make money, so they will do what people want, and so we get what we want and they get rich and that's good".
This is just so absurd that it's really not worth deconstructing.
Do you believe Bezos got rich by not giving people what they wanted?
Bezos got rich by buying labor from people for less it was worth, buying products for less than he could sell them, and using them both to create a new retail possibility that had some distinct benefits for a lot of us in our role as consumers.
Oh, and AWS.
It was worth it to the people who took the jobs.
> buying products for less than he could sell them,
It was worth it to the people who sold it to Amazon.
> and using them both to create a new retail possibility that had some distinct benefits for a lot of us in our role as consumers.
I.e. not zero sum.
There's almost nothing that happens in a modern society that isn't a good deal for some of the people involved. Consequently, "it was worth it to X" isn't much of a metric. I get the sense that you're not a big fan of the concept of externalities.
I think it is an important part of government, now that we know about Nash equilibria, to make sure that social and economic incentives are such that the collective good is aligned with the personal good. Neither Adam Smith and Karl Marx knew about these when they wrote their famous works, and (I think) just assumed these would be aligned.
This is not to say that Bezos did or didn't do anything in particular; while there are things I'd criticise Amazon for, I think roughly half the usual talking points are misunderstandings.
Our current society rewards people that can lie, cheat and backstab while punishing those who care about anything other than profits. Just take a look at SBF and all the startup snake oil culture and it's clear they're not competent at anything that helps society.
It's about both. Musk, Bezos, Gates, they sure did all get lucky, but they also had skill. Skill alone isn't enough, because there are plenty of people with more skill. Luck alone also isn't enough, because that would give a distribution like lottery winners rather than repeated year-on-year growth.
> Our current society rewards people that can lie, cheat and backstab while punishing those who care about anything other than profits. Just take a look at SBF and all the startup snake oil culture and it's clear they're not competent at anything that helps society.
That's a terrible argument. SBF was convicted and is awaiting sentencing, that's not rewarding his misbehaviour; "startup snake oil culture" is tautologically going to be the specific set of bad actors without telling you anything about the relative frequency compared to all startup culture; and the Effective Altruism movement, which has inspired many startups in many areas, is collectively quite embarrassed by the association with SBF.
Also, to be competent at lying, cheating and backstabbing, necessarily means "knowing how to get away with it" rather than just "does it". Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a book about that 500 years ago, and Chanakya wrote a treatise also covering those things about 1800 years before Machiavelli.
I agree. But then why would we ever worship the few lucky ones and allow them to have basically unlimited power? We could even claim intelligence is mostly about genetic luck. But if we really wanted to reward people for hard work, then there wouldn't be billionaires, we'd have many, many more millionaires.
Why do they deserve that disproportionate amount of power? I simply cannot believe a system that rewards like that is anything but unfair. If everyone also got much more, that would be fine, but it's always: 9999999 for me, 1 for you.
>Skill alone isn't enough, because there are plenty of people with more skill. Luck alone also isn't enough, because that would give a distribution like lottery winners rather than repeated year-on-year growth.
That would be true, if the fact that monopolies - which are the consequence of competition - didn't allow them to hold their positions indefinitely.
This is late stage capitalism. The opportunities that existed back in those days simply aren't there anymore. The best you can hope for is to find someone to fund you (or bootstrap), then get bought by one of the mega corporations allowing them to keep their monopolies.
>That's a terrible argument. SBF was convicted and is awaiting sentencing, that's not rewarding his misbehaviour;
No? Come on mate, SBF was ONE guy that got arrested. What about all the other ones that are still out there? Did all the cryptobros that cheated people out of billions of dollars get arrested? 5 minutes of googling and you'll find thousands of scammers that got away with it. Not including the ones that won't even show up in searches.
So, yes, that's rewarding misbehavior in my view.
The easiest way to get rich in our system is to lower your scruples. That's exactly what the system was designed to do: reward exploitation. That's the whole premise!
If I can cheat you out your salary, your labor, your working conditions, your naivety, your situation, your health or whatever else I can, capitalism will reward you for it. That's what profit is.
Because hero worship is an evolved instinct that we're trying to confabulate a post-hoc justification for, rather than a coherent predictive framework.
And because our monkey brains, being only numerate by evolutionary luck, have an emotional reaction to "a billion" approximately as if it was "two million" rather than "a thousand million".
When kings ruled, some claimed it was by divine right. Those with power who didn't like the rise of money displacing the old forms of wealth use the term "nouveau riche" as a pejorative — this phrasing may be relatively modern French, but the idea goes back to at least Ancient Greece.
> Why do they deserve that disproportionate amount of power?
For most new-money billionaires — though ironically, not ones who got there "fairly" like JK Rowling or (after actually selling to Microsoft) Markus Persson, but I bet they invested their money in something like this after being paid — the money is predominantly in the form of shares granting the right to a say in the management of, and disbursal of the profits of, some corporation which gained its value through their leadership.
As countries want tax revenue to get stuff done, their governments don't need any complex reasoning to place a high value on people who are competent at making high-value corporations.
> That would be true, if the fact that monopolies - which are the consequence of competition - didn't allow them to hold their positions indefinitely.
Their monopolies don't remain indefinitely. IBM used to be a monopoly, until it wasn't. Internet Explorer triggered a monopoly lawsuit, now even Microsoft doesn't support it. Games consoles was a Sega/Nintendo duopoly when I was a kid, Sega no longer makes hardware. Amazon wasn't allowed to buy up iRobot (nor Adobe, Figma) because governments are bigger than corporations and do actually step into prevent abusive behaviour. Bell Systems was, famously, forcibly broken up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
I won't be at all surprised if in the next decade half of Big Tech is split the same way Bell Systems was split — e.g. Amazon forced to split apart its main storefront, Audible, the Kindle book store, and all the web services.
> Come on mate, SBF was ONE guy that got arrested. What about all the other ones that are still out there?
Then don't use him as the example. Him being arrested is what makes him a bad example. If you want to say people don't get punished, give those other people as your example, not the very obvious example of someone who is getting punished.
> 5 minutes of googling and you'll find thousands of scammers that got away with it.
You clearly have different search results to me; the results I get are "until we arrested them".
> Not including the ones that won't even show up in searches.
Tautologically, but you have to show a reason why some invisible group is of some actual specific size in order to make any argument about them; and in your case you have to also show that the size of this invisible group is due to the economic choices of Capitalism rather than anything else.
> The easiest way to get rich in our system is to lower your scruples.
In any system. You don't get far in a feudal system without being willing to take freemen into debt bondage, or to bow before each of a series of monarchs that take turns flipping between "Catholicism is mandatory" and "Catholicism is forbidden" as the British ones did for a bit.
> That's exactly what the system was designed to do: reward exploitation. That's the whole premise!
No, the premise (which I would argue is flawed for due to "Prisoner's Dilemma"-type scenarios) is that everyone acting in their own self-interest will ultimately reward the collective. It assumes that any worker who is not treated fairly will switch jobs because someone else will want to out-bid their current employer. Etc.
> If I can cheat you out your salary, your labor, your working conditions, your naivety, your situation, your health or whatever else I can, capitalism will reward you for it. That's what profit is.
If.
Under capitalism, a completely free market in a steady state and with perfect information will have no profit, because everyone will try to undercut everyone else until profits disappear. Temporary circumstances, such as floods or famines or whatever, drive up demand, creating a profit opportunity, attracting business to supply more stuff.
Real markets don't have perfect information, and I'm told can't because that's apparently NP-hard. This is part of why I value government intervention, and also why I currently believe that it would be good for governments to directly control (either by owning or commissioning) parts of national production. Not all production in any sector, that would probably fail due to government monopolies having their own weird pathologies, but some production in several sectors.
But that's not why I'm posing the question. Maybe my phrasing wasn't great.
We are all about becoming more than just monkeys, so perpetuating a silly tendency especially on such a serious topic with enormous consequences should be avoided at all costs. I argue we should not worship lucky rich folks.
> I bet they invested their money in something like this after being paid
Yeah, probably. But once again, I posed a question of why should they be rewarded in such a way. There's no answer to that here. I'm not arguing people shouldn't be rewarded, but as it stands the proportions are simply insane.
Part of the issue is that when you have capital you can literally change the rules of the game. So they don't just get rewarded with capital, they now can generate capital more easily too. It's a double advantage that breaks the system, in my view.
> Their monopolies don't remain indefinitely.
I honestly hope you are right, but I have serious doubts here. Rules that applied back in IBM days were different and companies and individuals simply got way better at retaining power. Monopolies are basically impossible to be broken in a globalized world, and companies know that. They also no longer leave room for the small guy. You won't ever have the Yahoo/Google situation again. If any company starts to show any threat to any monopoly, they get acquired immediately.
In theory regulators could try to enforce some of these rules but I don't see it happening. Even the latest Apple app store debacle shows how little they actually care. They can get away with pretending to do something about it because they have too much power and money.
> Then don't use him as the example.
Fair, I guess. My point is that for every one guy that gets arrested, you have all the hundreds/thousands of people around them that also profited from these scams. Those are almost never arrested and end up profiting without consequences.
For a high-profile example, you have famous influencers like Jake Paul scamming millions out of people and thriving. I watched a recent Netflix documentary Bitconned [1] which also shows another perfect example of someone scamming, getting caught, getting "punished" and still living their best lives.
For every SBF with hundreds of years in prison, you have dozens/hundreds of others that get a slap on the wrist. Fines, for example, could just be written off as cost of business.
I won't go searching for more because the topic doesn't interest me as much, but I am absolutely sure there are many, many more stories like these. But to your point, I can't prove the existence of those hundreds of millionaires that didn't get caught without going deep into it, so I won't try to. Guess you're a glass half-full kind of guy. I can't see how they don't exist.
> It assumes that any worker who is not treated fairly will switch jobs because someone else will want to out-bid their current employer. Etc.
Which would be true, in the utopia Capitalists believe in, where everyone has a choice. The reality, monopolies and lobbying exist, so workers always get fucked. Work or starve.
> I currently believe that it would be good for governments to directly control
I 100% agree that many parts of the national production should be owned by the people. Companies can simply exploit natural resources today basically for free, without consequences.
> If
Looking at what we have today, there's barely an "if" there. Take any company above a certain size and a lot of its profit comes from exploitation: underpaying workers because they target vulnerable communities, bad working conditions because they lobbied for no worker rights, cheap materials/manufacturing from poorer countries that in turn exploit their workers even more, exploiting/overworking young talent because of their naivety, overcharging due to monopolies, and the list goes on.
I take it back, there is definitely an "if", but it is only a matter of capital. Once the company gets enough capital, it turns up its dials of exploitation. If they don't do that, they don't survive.
Maybe there are examples of companies that grow and don't become an exploitation center, but I have never seen one. The system rewards exploitation, because that's the best way to extract profit out of human resources. And since companies are not people, they can and will do anything regardless of morality, leading to the current state of affairs.
After all, wisdom of the crowds and all that!
It seems impossible to perfectly allocate capital, of course there will be stupid and actively harmful allocations. But the government does both of those things too.
So yes it is legitimately good to have a really large number of actors allocating capital, to in ADDITION to the government.
Kind of.
If the premise that government + a few rich people is a better way to spend $ (e.g. our current system !) then how about we also try government + spreading $ around so a lot of people are well off and can "allocate capital".
The fact is a rising tide lifts all boats.
I think a better system would include more money spread around the middle class, fewer people in poverty, and a larger number of rich people with fewer individuals having > 10 billion dollars. That makes it harder for a small group of rich folks to band together to screw up democracy since there should, presumably, be greater diversity of opinions in the group of rich folks.
The main post is literally saying "no rich people" so that's the part I'm focusing on, but yes the middle class in America needs far more help than it's getting.
No human organization always makes the best decision.
The question is: how best to make decisions about resource allocation? Do we favor this being the domain of (primarily) already rich and powerful people? Can we even imagine an alternative?
Are you advocating for more organizations created as cooperatives and the like? I think that would be great too. However a lot of ambitious projects like curing diseases, inventing new materials, building spacecraft, and more require a lot of money.
It's much easier to start on these things if you can skip fundraising from thousands of individuals.
Time passes, it is now year Y and an individual has managed to amass control over sufficient resources to at least begin this project.
More time passes, it is now year Z and the project requires further investment. The individual who initiated it seeks public funding to continue the work?
1. is it appropriate in a democratic society that an individual can direct resources on a large scale into projects rejected by most people in that society?
2. should the society consider funding the continuation of the project?
If the answer to (1) seems immediately clear to you, consider your answer in the case that the project is "Invade our largest neighboring country" or "Develop new bioweapons that will only affect people of a certain genetic makeup" or even, somewhat realistically, "Develop ways to burn fossil fuels on sufficient scale to alter the composition of the atmosphere".
What is the qualification possessed by the very rich, other than "well, they're rich", that should entitle them to make such decisions?
A majority of Americans disapproved of the Apollo program. So the government does not avoid doing unpopular things.
I whole heartedly agree with 1. Society in aggregate doesn't support all the things that would benefit it. In the case of 2, if society has suddenly decided that in fact it does support the project from 1 now, then yes, it should of course fund it. And this actually really demonstrates the value of private investment. A project can be started that most people don't think is worthwhile and then it can show benefits and the general population can support it further. That's wonderful.
I don't recall proposing no government. Those first two were illegal and the government willingly ignored the third in the past, so IDK why you think the government would have done differently.
There was a lot of interest in this in the 1960s, but it fell away as neoliberalism triumphed, and with it the idea that some sort of multiplicity of private actors will always make the best possible choice that we could. I don't believe this, especially since "multiplicity" has frequently come down "a few, maybe 2 or 3".
Yes, I love cooperatives, though they are hard to make sustainable and successful. Big projects requiring lots of resources should be hard to start, and should start only when we agree that devoting lots of resources to the problem is the right thing to do, via a democratic process. Problems that require very few resources do not need to meet such standards, and efforts to solve them can come and go as people feel like doing.
You can even look at space exploration as an example since when we talk about rich people everyone thinks of Elon now. There are so many space companies started with private investment. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, Virgin Orbit, Armadillo Aerospace, Rocket lab, Polaris, a planetary resources, and more that I've never heard of. That's way more than 2 or 3.
I think humanity is at its best when it can organize into small groups working on big things that can be made available and/or useful to everyone else and that's just really hard to do without money. I don't want to spend my time allocating capital. Randomly assigning the job to as many of those interested in doing so as possible seems like the best solution, with augmentation from the government of course.
Whereas our recent Pax Neoliberalia only caters for the interests and priorities of the richest. Thomas Piketty wrote a whole book demonstrating this: r > g.
I completely agree with both of your statements. But I don't see it being related to what I said? Unless you're saying that having any rich people contaminates the system?
Alternatively, but in the same direction, the taxpayer should get a dividend on their investment. Is not by chance that big tech prospered in comfortable societies, and not in, say, some place full of roaming gangs flashing fixed big machine guns on the back of their pickup trucks.
You final sentence is precisely on point, IMO.
Can you expand? What did Bezos contribute to society?
The wealth of a man like Bezos isn't a pile of gold he wallows in like Scrooge McDuck, it exists in his shareholder control of a vast set of companies full of employees and doing productive work. These companies would not exist without his ability to identify new markets, build efficient companies, and raise capital and deploy it effectively.
Take away the ability to do that, and who is going to found the new companies? Who is going to fund and control them? Who is going to identify the new goods and services of the future, and make them happen?
There is an alternative, and that's run the economy as a bureaucratic extension of government. Run companies as extensions of government departments and place economic planning under political control. It's been tried over and over.
Open source software is wonderful and amazing. But it's not a replacement for Amazon and other companies.
Yes. It is not, however, a skill worth 100 billion dollars.
And if Bezos had not founded Amazon, you and others would have been unemployed and poor?
> Take away the ability to do that, and who is going to found the new companies?
Other people. There are many people who are driven by their non-financial passions that would benefit society. History is full of philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, doctors who weren't after money, yet managed to contribute more than Bezos ever could.
PS: I have no problems with Bezos, to clarify.
If nobody founded companies like Amazon, yes many more people would be unemployed and poor.
Bezos is just one example.
> History is full of philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, doctors who weren't after money, yet managed to contribute more than Bezos ever could.
If all the philosophers, mathematicians and scientists and doctors were put in charge of running all the world's companies, we'd be in big trouble. Totally different skill sets.
Eh, worked well enough for Singapore.
Also it worked well enough for the founding of many great companies.
Ford, GE, Intel, Microsoft, Google, companies started by people who were experts in their field.
Traditionally that is how things went. Sadly the meme of a dedicated management class has taken hold on America and we've decided that people who actually understand what a business does aren't needed to run the business.
That leads to crap like airplanes falling apart, software companies who are just barely able to release software, and hospitals that are so misran they are unable to afford actually treating patients.
Amazon as well, Jeff Bezos has a degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer science, he doesn't have a typical management only background.
But yeah in general successful companies were made by experts, not the management nobility class.
- your mind on capitalism.
What things of importance has Bezos done? End world hunger? Or are we celebrating the death of local stores and malls? What about a society that prevents kids from starving instead of making bombs and satellites for world wars?
That's all the clear and evident result of the market system which is very democratic. People vote with their dollars every day. The winners of these billions of daily democratic votes rise to the top and losers die out.
Let's be clear: Amazon has been responsible for the shutting down of so many in-person businesses that entire product categories are can only be purchased on Amazon.
The choice is a false one.
And capitalism as it exists today isn't even close to being "unbridled". In fact many have good arguments that it's far too bridled in terms of tariffs and import quotas and price controls and so on and so forth.
I don't know enough to weigh in on if this was a thing in past Amazon, but if Amazon isn't willing to lose, say, 5% profit to ensure that people aren't overworked, that seems to be done in bad faith. And the lost profit certainly doesn't have to come out of the manual workers' paychecks.
> And capitalism as it exists today isn't even close to being "unbridled". In fact many have good arguments that it's far too bridled in terms of tariffs and import quotas and price controls and so on and so forth.
I think it's unbridled enough if we have companies outsourcing to other countries or hiring illegal immigrants so they can pay workers a pittance, exorbitant sums spent on lobbying to preserve the environment-negative status quo and whatnot, anti-competitive behavior leading to monopolies/oligopolies, and Boeing planes having fatal malfunctions because executives know how to build planes, I guess? (Hint: they clearly don't.) Oh, but the bottom line will be harmed. My bad, I guess we should continue overpaying executives and heaping negative externalities onto consumers and broader society.
Maybe that isn't all what you personally think, but clearly a "profit at all costs" model has huge ramifications. You pretty much have to abandon your morals to become a person who comes out on top of the system.
No, its just something you personally dislike and generate false equivalences to.
That said I think you've helped a bit with my confusion here. The point where it moves from democracy to something else is obviously not clear -- so probably the people who consider the market system to be democratic just draw that line differently from me.
Bezos' Amazon lowers the cost and availability of goods of all kinds drastically, enriching everyone (and especially the poorer among us).
The State makes bombs and drops bombs, not Bezos. Bezos deploys capital in ways which have proved to fill market needs. Markets are people. His money is meeting the needs of the people while taxes build bombs.
Bezos's net worth is basically just the number of shares of Amazon he holds times the price per share that the market arrived at (and continues to arrive at, changing every minute of every day). How would you cap him at $5B?
Would you force him to divest his shares as that equation approaches $5B, even though he's not the one setting the price per share? That hardly seems fair, like an old widower whose home's value arbitrarily fluctuates with the real estate market, and who may no longer be able to afford the property taxes at a higher valuation. Would you force the market to not value each share above that which would place his stake at $5B, even though each buyer and seller (neither of which is Bezos) agrees that it's a fair price for them to transact at? That doesn't seem right, either.
He used money he hoarded from another venture to allow the thousands of engineers to build it. Anyone can do that.
And I'm 100% sure Bezos was not the one that came up with the idea either. He just benefited from being in a position of power with tons of capital at the right time.
So why didn't they?
> And I'm 100% sure Bezos was not the one that came up with the idea either. He just benefited from being in a position of power with tons of capital at the right time.
Same question again. What in your opinion, is a bet that you can make right now, today, that will lead to another Amazon? Or maybe even something bigger?
I have a similar amount of capital as Bezos did free and ready to go to when he started Amazon, even inflation adjusted. I probably have a lot more power than he did at the same time since I am actually a manager of a few engineers which he was not.
Are you going to make that bet?
Let me guess: no?
What an odd request. This is such a lazy argument.
> So why didn't they?
The truth of the matter is: they couldn't. Bezos, Musk and Bill Gates were perfectly positioned to do what they did. You don't even hear about the hundreds of others that had the same (or better) ideas, that didn't have the capital, the connections, or even the timing.
This hero worship makes zero sense. If Bezos wasn't already rich, Amazon wouldn't exist. If Bill Gates didn't have contacts inside IBM, Microsoft wouldn't be what it is. If Elon didn't grow up filthy rich, he wouldn't be the world's richest man.
I know it's easier to believe the good old "work hard and you'll be rewarded" adage, but it's a plain lie. We have multiple orders of magnitude more of hard workers compared to billionaires (or even millionaires) to prove that. No, it's not because they were geniuses or hard workers. They might've even been that, it's beyond the point. They were plain lucky.
In today's society, previous capital is the best predictor of success there is. Not intelligence. Not hard work.
> In today's society, previous capital is the best predictor of success there is. Not intelligence. Not hard work.
Absolutely! However, those latter two things help a lot with generating the former, if not for yourself, then maybe for your children. Who knows, you might raise the next Bezos or Musk! Probably not, but maybe! At the very least, you'll throw money away helping your kid do something they enjoy.
Alas, it is inescapably true that money begets money, but that's why I emphasize a tax on zero-sum harm and hoarding (e.g., burning coal, buying land) to the benefit of positive-sum productive investment (e.g., taking risks, paying salaries).
Quite notably, that number of people developing, distributing, supporting, and extending AWS is a few magnitudes smaller than the billions of people that live on the earth and benefit from or use AWS everyday.
So, what do you have to say about that inequality?
You can claim the man sweeping streets in Africa was quite integral to developing AWS alongside myself and thousands of engineers, but you will never make me believe it.
If you’ve got property, as in, the asset most normal folks own end to end and drives their wealth - negative externality.
Interesting take.
Yes, it's a wildly popular and literally ancient meme that land ownership is the path to wealth, but people aren't stupid. When the structure of the economy changes, human behavior follows. Current landowners don't even get screwed over, they just stop accumulating additional wealth from hoarding land. More likely than not, they'll sell that land for roughly whatever it was worth when the tax came into effect to enterprising developers who will buy it and attempt to turn it into something more productive for a profit. After all, land value taxes only apply to the space occupied by the land itself, not any improvements on that land like apartments or offices. Coupled with zoning reforms, we'd see apartment complexes replace single-family housing and train stations replace parking lots as suburban sprawl transformed into walkable paradise.
[1] https://ubique.americangeo.org/map-of-the-week/map-of-the-we...
[2] https://www.fool.com/research/how-many-americans-own-stock/
They're not wealth if they're hoarded. Undeveloped land, or gold and oil in the ground, are no use to anybody. They're only wealth if they're used. And that requires lots of productive effort to develop the land, or to get the gold and oil out of the ground and into productive use. I agree that unproductive wealth is the real problem, but we need to be careful how we define it.
The problem is that this kind of society, even if we assume for the sake of argument that it would be preferable, is not really achievable politically. The only way to implement it is to have a government that has the power to coercively tax people, and all history shows that governments will not use that power to redistribute wealth to the public at large; instead they will use it to enrich themselves and their preferred special interests.
Recently there has been a down swing in willingness to fund new programs that redistribute wealth. But that could change.
They purport to, yes, but for most of them, when you dig into the details, you find that what redistribution actually occurs is not from richer to poorer, but the opposite. And much of the money spent on the programs doesn't go to the purported recipients of redistribution at all, but to third parties. (For example, you cite public schools as redistributing wealth--but government funds for public schools only pass through the hands of the families whose children need schooling in the case of school vouchers, which are fairly rare, and in any case the money doesn't stay with those people, it ends up in the hands of the schools themselves. Given the current state of education in the US, anyone who wants to make a case that whatever redistribution of wealth occurs actually benefits the children and families has a very tough case to make.)
In other words: POSIWID, or "the purpose of a system is what it does" (and not what it purports to do, because anyone can purport to do anything).
I'm generally a fan though I would also add pollution taxes and short term capital gains (gambling) taxes.
Ah, so you've seen the cat! Yes, this is precisely what I was getting at.
> I'm generally a fan though I would also add pollution taxes and short term capital gains (gambling) taxes.
The former is known as a Pigouvian tax[2], and I yearn for such taxes with no less of my heart than I yearn for land value taxes. The latter, however, seems almost completely unnecessary. Why not allow people to gamble on noise? And if they're making a profit, it's more likely than not that they're adding signal and contributing to price discovery, along with providing short-term liquidity to all market participants! I don't mind anyone getting paid for that.
How would hoarding of gold, in and of itself, be bad? Say someone goes out and works and makes money, and they take the money and buy gold coins and keep them in a safe, or fill up a swimming pool so they can dive into their hoard of gold like Scrooge McDuck. They are contributing to society, and to the extent they hoard gold, asking nothing back for what they have contributed.
It's like what Charlie Munger did. Made a massive fortune, spent his whole life doing it, had an amount of money that he could have used for extravagant spending, could have bought whole islands in Hawaii, could have bought politicians. But he didn't. He earned the money, earned dividends on the money, piled up all the money in a hoard. Then he died.
Now, if gold or other precious metals are necessary for the production of desirable goods, the hoarding of such assets increases the price of those goods in a zero-sum fashion. Of course, I'd never want to deny someone the pleasure of swimming in a pile of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck. I'm just saying that they shouldn't be able to profit as much off of keeping the pile locked away in their mansion. Rather, they should repay society for its losses in the form of a land value tax.
This has been the case since the 1980s when capital gains started being taxed below income, and the carried interest loophole was created. In fact, this is a well known economic phenomenon. Some would go as far as to say that it is an intentional outcome of the policy.
In the end, the problem with Bezos and the rest of the oligarchs is the same problem with monopolies, it’s a command economy. Only instead of being dictated by some unelected government bureaucrats in a totalitarian state, it’s a a bunch unelected rich dudes with dreams of a totalitarian state.
It’s an unhealthy economy.
Oh, but it is! That value isn't locked up, it's invested in the company. That investment raises the level of capital available to the company, allowing them to hire more employees and offer more goods and services. That's all real value for real people, and yes, if it works out, capitalists get paid for making it possible.
We already live in a world where one can own the means of production. The likes of Vanguard and Robinhood broker access. With a few clicks, you too can become a more productive capitalist.
What do you mean by "hoarding"? I don't think any living person owns enough land, gold or oil to represent even tiny percentage of the overall market. The whole Russia, for comparison, owns 12% of oil market. So if you personally owned all the oil in Russia (by any measure an achievement far beyond the wildest dreams even of the richest Russian oligarchs, who still have to share among many others) you'd still be just one of the players. So I don't think those mystical "hoarders" really are as scary as you seem to think they are.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, but one of the most effective changes we could make in the world is to get money out of politics, as its the only real way democracy can be put back in the hands of the people.
Reducing the influence of $ in politics is at the heart of the matter.
In the US, the mega billionaires are hated in Washington by left and right alike. Bloomberg spent a fortune on his own campaign and didn't win a single state in the primaries.
Even if you look abroad, the billionaires are not the ones with political power. In places like Russia and China, billionaires have to suck up to the politicians or they risk getting disappeared, disbarred, or thrown from windows.
If you're talking about people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates who have giant wealth because of their investments in businesses, then arguing that they should have that wealth taken away would literally take money out of the coffers of businesses that are currently using that money for things like payroll.
The GP is correct -- these people are not sitting around on a vault of gold like McDuck. Their money is in the economy, doing stuff. That's what investments are. That's why investors exist, and why they get a cut of the profit for taking a risk and lending their money to industry.
Unless people there somehow have much lower IQs than their neighbours, who do vastly better, the difference in outcome must lie in the system that co-ordinates their work.
The Soviet block and DPRK was exactly as close to socialism as it was to democracy: 100% in their propaganda, 0% in reality. Or would you say democracy doesn't work because the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a shit show country despite being "democratic"?
This concept that there is a well defined polar opposite to western “freedom” capitalism is so far from reality in literally any economic history understanding
Not only that but the USSR was in no sense Marxist Communist. It was well known that the Lenin-Trotskyist Bolshevism was the core, specifically the command economy part.
That regime coopted the philosophy of Marxism well after his death.
That’s what happens when both sides are spinning the same propaganda.
BTW I’m equally not a fan of Marxist material dialectic as I am the trotsy-lenin unholiness or the American oligopolies.
We need a true state-free attempt at anarcho socialism but that’s nearly impossible as such a concept fundamentally threatens the basic structure of the modern state.
In no revolution are the poorest and weakest persons ever benefited it’s only typically been to the benefit of some small group they just recycles hands so in fact, the last thing I want is some kind of hard break.
No, I’m an anarcho syndicalist. Which is a gradual reappropriation of the means to worker collectives slowly and peacefully.
“enforce strict protections for worker pay, fairness, and whatever“
This assumes a lot about the foundational structure of the environment these agents are operating within
Unless you address who reaps the benefits of commerce then its just the same situation with slightly different tyrants
What you describe is precisely the structure of what exists now - but you’re not satisfied with the rates
That's something I hadn't thought of before. I suppose the part of the solution that addresses that would go hand-in-hand with TFA?
So for example, if I own a table saw and my neighbor doesn’t and needed one for his labor, anarcho-syndicalism would suggest that if my saw was not planning to be used for a day, and he uses it for a day of creation, then the neighbor owns 100% of the resulting value. Much like if you rented a tool from Home Depot.
That makes sense and there’s no reason to believe that simply because I own a fallow tool, would benefit even equally from the labor.
Now look at how companies are created they are created in such a way that 100% of the value is retained by the organization and labor does not get to set its own rate. It Hass to simply be responsive to the rate offered by the organization decoupled from an alienated from, the labor that I’m inputting into it.
This isn’t accidental it’s a type of accounting that assumes labor inputs are not valued based on the productivity outcome they are simply, and only based on the relative bargaining power of the respective organizations.
This is why you see corporations, so aggressively fight the concept of collective bargaining because it creates the power dynamic that is actually appropriate for equitable relief, but reduces the amount that the more powerful organization can determine the relationship between the less powerful individual.
So anarcho-syndicalism is really about ensuring the individual worker cannot be put into a position of deprivation or suffering such that they have so little relative bargaining power in labor production that they can only choose between oppressive tyrants.
The key fallacy that people love here is that it’s all about relative deprivation so people have exceptionally varied views on what is considered oppressive or what a lifestyle would look like that is, let’s say inequitable.
Often times and you’ll see in many threads is the argument that “Actually we’re objectively more comfortable and well off that really, you shouldn’t be complaining about anything because you’re not starving to death”
The problem here is that it’s a completely separate argument than the argument for long term concentration of power, and who is actually controlling the economy, and has the ability to be flexible and create a life free of intermediaries that are confiscating your labor.
It all comes back to who has the power to set their own destiny in the economy, and the reality is, it’s always been small groups of exploiters who are able to do whatever they want to do because they’re taking advantage of the relative deprivation around them to not make things actively better for everybody. The people in situations like this, take no responsibility for their surroundings, their community their environment, they simply say how do I take advantage of this environment to my own best ends, and if that is the foundational conceit of a society, then you will not have a society that long and history tells us that society is built on this go through this political cycle, which so far has been basically every society in recorded history, unfortunately.
Anyway, there’s a lot of Intersectionality here with, for example, global finance, how this got really amplified after Bretton Woods two and the kind of fiatization, and then financialation of all possible value so there’s a giant kind of systematic thing here that is encoded in a lot of these as foundational assumptions in western capitalist economics.
The reason there has been no successful implementation of it is that the process of enacting it is inherently fragile. And some bastard is going to exploit that fragility.
Then you're screwed and we end up with the bountiful historical examples that people love to cite & then others refute as "that's not real xyz-ism".
You're absolutely correct that they're not "real" xyz-ism. And that should make you very worried about supporting something that has the same or similar end goals as those initiatives once had.
Socialism is nothing more than extending democracy beyond the state to the workplace. It is no more collectivist than democracy is in any other economic system. And like any other form of democracy, it is naturally opposed to authoritarian rule, not conducive to it.
As such, the problem with socialism is not at all that it's easy for it to fall into dictatorship. The problem is that it is hard to convince the rich to allow it to form without aggression, since it necessitates them losing much of their power. The same problem that democracy faced: kings rarely step down, and bloody revolutions are typically worse than the status quo (and you can never be sure what will happen after one).
Social democracy has numerous successful implementations (eg Scandinavia).
But the more “hardcore” collectivist -isms have from what I can recall basically zero successes, despite numerous attempts.
Edit: You wouldn't have that item without that compensation. This should be more traumatic than people make it out to be. You wouldn't have your iphones, twitters, facebooks, vr goggles, steams, ikea tables, etc.
And it’s easy to argue (EDIT: more like assert without evidence) that cherry-picked aspects of the status quo for the last forty years is the linchpin of everything.
Asserted without evidence.
Shortly thereafter CEO pay started to skyrocket. There's no evidence CEOs started doing a 10x better job running companies but their pay sure as heck increased, 10x then 100x!
Countless studies have shown that workers are not motivated by money beyond around low six figures.
There is no reason to suspect a CEO earning $100 million is 100 times more dedicated to the job than one earning $1 million dollars.
God, don't threaten me with a good time.
You are swapping cause and effect. First comes the item, then the compensation.
"Let's just try a planned society one more time, THIS time will be different, look how nice and kind we are!" is a perfectly reasonable statement to many educated people today.
It's really an indictment of the education system.
As of today, I think Russia's idiotic invasion to Ukraine has destroyed those mind-games of a functioning society with very strong central planning. Even if it might truly include thoughtful, interesting ideas in countries that by now have a long, unbroken tradition with democracy, I guess people of the former Soviet Bloc are extra careful these days. YMMV, of course.
It implies a central authority that has opinions on the wealth of private citizens (inappropriate) that also has the ability to act on it (dangerous) and that goes ahead and implements its utopian visions (has never not ended in utter catastrophe).
What practical difference is there in your life now that Musk is worth 200B versus when he had 100B or 0B? Probably your life is actually better because there is now Starlink and Tesla and you have more options.
Let's say we can push a button and grow the economy 10% in real terms, but some rich guy like Bill Gates gets his wealth not increased 10%, but 10x. Do we press it? Next time we press it, some other billionaire gets 10x-ed.
The rational thing to do is to smash that button an infinite number of times. That button exists and is called economic growth.
That’s right there in my premise! So what? It lifts up everyone a little bit; most people a lot; and one or two get boosted to orbit for a generation or so.
Your arguments against Starlink are so silly I struggle to believe someone typed them into this site. Don’t you think one more internet option for most of the globe is a good thing? And yes, it directly addresses both hunger and cancer through better internet, more research, a bigger economy, connected tractors. It’sneven helping Ukraine defend itself against another totalitarian state right now.
None of which is relevant. It’s another internet option and therefore a good thing in and of itself. You don’t even have to like it or use it for it to make your life better.
No, it doesn't. It helps the people who are lucky enough to already have one foot in the race. But that's not remotely everyone.
> directly addresses both hunger and cancer through better internet, more research, a bigger economy, connected tractors.
Perhaps, although that's not really "directly". But then you're saying that we need to allow multi-billionaires in order to have things like Starlink. How about we stop ISPs from being stingy with their money and suddenly we don't need to rely on one rich person to save us from the other rich people? You seem to think that if the government takes some control/wealth out of the hands of these people, we're suddenly going to have stagnation. I don't see why it has to be all-or-nothing; we don't have to implement scary, spooky communism. You know what I think is even better than having Starlink? If we had Starlink and we didn't have exploitative, ruthless businesses that led to needing to have Starlink as it is now. It would just be the new technology that Comcast or Verizon made, without the weird "Elon Musk will save us all" fanfare.
Apart from land, Inheritance and seizing power, individual and community wealth comes from what you create and invest in
We simply don't know if a different system could produce the same, because the few attempts we had were either corrupted or actively sabotaged. I'd argue if we look at China we actually can see how something other than capitalism can improve people's lives: hundreds of millions raised out of poverty through basic planning.
Another aspect is that many of the issues with previous attempts at something other than capitalism happened without the technology we have today. This would change everything.
> The rational thing to do is to smash that button an infinite number of times. That button exists and is called economic growth.
Of course it would be if there were zero bad consequences from it. But every time you press that button more people starve, the planet dies faster, workers conditions deteriorate, more people go homeless and so on.
But the big issue with your entire premise is that growing the economy means we improve people's lives. That's exactly the issue with the wealth gap: it doesn't. The economy right now basically only grows for the rich, not for everyone else. It's always money being siphoned from the bottom into the top.
It's very easy to pretend that everything is alright when you are in a privileged position, but the main reason 1st world countries like the US "grow" is by exploiting the poorer countries. You get access to better living standards at the cost of child labor in another country, deforestation, workers without a living wage or all the other nastiness that we don't want to know about.
There's no free lunch. It's the same siphoning of wealth, at all levels.
Monkeys living in a cave could drastically improve their lives by banging rocks together and making simple tools. Another big improvement comes from fire. Again when the rocks are stacked into buildings. By having more rocks, and arranging them more intelligently, we can hugely improve life. This is economic growth.
Your arguments against growth fail: first you say “other systems” (they all suck because they all have one thing in common - they are planned) can cause growth just as well as capitalism. Second you say growth is bad because the environment. Third you say that only rich people get the growth anyway. Fourth you say growth comes from siphoning wealth from the poor.
Well, I have news for you. The people who benefit most from growth are the poor. In my native Africa, there are millions of babies who are currently not dead due to economic growth:
- the state left the farmer alone for five whole minutes and it turns out he managed to grow some actual food when he didn’t have to pay so many bribes, taxes, and obey 1000 regulations
- technology improved business and trade, so mom and dad can buy food now
- some guy named Bill Gates donated mosquito nets and medicine and genetically modified crops that have all the vitamins.
Your ideas are rooted in ancient, pre-growth economic models. Poor people simply aren’t a good source of wealth; otherwise why aren’t dictators who do seize their wealth from the poor indredibly rich & celebrated? Why are Bezos and Musk and Gates the richest? They are producers, not seizers.
> In my native Africa, there are millions of babies who are currently not dead due to economic growth:
And that's great! But it's not a given, and global climate change also has a huge impact on geographies. And clearly, Mr. Beast was actually doing something when he paid for a bunch of wells to be built in Africa. The wells don't just come out from economic growth magically, unless maybe if you wait fifty years and more people die in the meantime. Mr. Beast is rich, which is why he could have wells built.
Saying that capitalism promotes economic growth may be true, and saying that economic growth lifts everyone up may be true, but the timescales and proportions don't match up to what many would consider fair, and our current model of capitalism isn't necessary for economic growth. That economic growth has benefitted them is less a boon of capitalism than of economic growth in general, so don't conflate the two. Also, should we talk about all the people in Africa and elsewhere who are employed at a pittance to make clothes, harvest crops, and sift through AI training data?
> Why are Bezos and Musk and Gates the richest? They are producers, not seizers.
https://scribe.rip/bc-digest/the-xerox-thieves-steve-jobs-bi...
Bill Gates (and Steve Jobs) profitting from the work of people at Xerox. Maybe not outright theft, but they're clearly not tech gods who somehow had everything planned out.
https://investinganswers.com/articles/how-did-bill-gates-bui...
Don't have a source for this right now, but Amazon has used many underhanded business practices involving driving other businesses out of town. It's also a thing Walmart was known for.
https://www.theverge.com/23815634/tesla-elon-musk-origin-fou...
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...
The details emerald mine stuff seem hard to discern, so take that with a grain of salt.
I'm not saying that Bezos, Musk, or Gates have done nothing useful and they're just lucky all the way. At least Bezos and Gates, I acknowledge that they did had an entrepreneurial spirit and could grasp their opportunities well. But people who have a lot of money or are in a wealthier country have an outsized proportion to people who don't, there are numerous instances of unscrupulous business practices, blah blah. To say that they are producers is right, but they aren't the pinnacle of human excellence. People who were oppressed and live in squalor, people whose inventions are taken without due credit, people who are expendable laborers. Bezos, Musk, Gates aren't merely a product of themselves and their wit. They were already placed above most due to the circumstances of society, and as they succeeded more they gained disproportionately more power to continue climbing up.
I suggest you read The Republic of Walmart [1]. Every big corporation in existence works with planned systems. Every. Single. One. That argument is a fantasy repeated by people that never truly thought/read about it.
Most people read somewhere that the USSR failed because of their planned economies, therefore it doesn't work. They had so much more going wrong that simplifying why they failed with "planned economy" is preposterous.
Not to mention capitalists conveniently forget all of the failed capitalist experiments. Perhaps because now the bigger capitalist countries benefit from exploiting those same countries.
From all the answers I've seen you give in this thread, it's clear you're very deep into the capitalist mindset. It really seems you don't even attempt to consider alternatives. You have your winner and everything is a confirmation of that. I would earnestly ask you to reconsider your position. Really read up on the subject.
There is no perfect solution, but the current one is absolutely unsustainable by definition. There is no infinite growth, and the pursuit of it has now reached the point where it only harms everyone that is not at the top. We could save the planet, we could house all the homeless, we could end famine, but we choose not to because it's not profitable. I personally can't look at that and think: that looks reasonable.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal...
Edison was famous for caring about money more than other inventors. One of his most famous quotes was “Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.” The guy helped found some of the largest companies of his era and died as one of the richest men in the world.
Who said anything about not being allowed to get rich? 10s of millions of dollars is rich by any measure.
Which are the examples driven by extreme wealth (note: not just regular 1%er wealth and not people who became extremely wealthy - I mean people who expressed that the reason they created something was because they knew it would make them extremely top-0.01% wealthy)?
That's because for 99.999% of people, being paid money has utility. So the payment provides some benefit for them. But for someone with $2B, my argument is precisely this: whatever it is that drove them to make $2B (inveting the best product, or whatever) is NOT what drives them to make the NEXT $1B.
> you can't just take all their future wealth and expect them to continue > they will stop the instant they stop making money, just like any other person.
You cabsolutely can, and they absoluteluy will not.
That's the whole point again: assuming a high enough "cap", we are talking about people who will never not be extremely wealthy. Whether the cap is $100M; $1B or $10B can be argued, but the central point is that the utility of more wealth is diminishing. That's why me giving you $1B would make a massive difference, but then me giving you another $1B would make almost no difference to your lifestyle/happniess/whatever measure you choose.
No they don't.
Satya has a much lower cap earning money at Microsoft then Bill or Balmer did.
Does that make him a worse CEO? Does it mean he is less dedicated?
Very few people who are competitive are competitive because of money.
They want to be known as the best, have the most power, the most influence, run the largest company, their name the most number of history books.
Money is a rough proxy for power, but, to give an example, pharmaceutical companies have an outsized influence in American politics versus how much their CEOs are worth.
Heck for the vast majority of companies their leadership has 0% chance of becoming billionaires. Most industries are too low margin. That doesn't mean the leaders of those companies still don't want to win in their chosen market.
I’d rather do art or open source or go fishing.
(That’s not quite what you asked but I don’t know how many actual billionaires will read your comment so figured I’d chime in — to me it doesn’t seem unreasonable that calling wealth would change what people work on and how much they produce.)
That doesn't measure underemployment, nor does it measure people who've given up on finding work. That's why it needs to be considered alongside things like the labor force participation rate - which has been on a downward trend since 2000 - and alongside wage growth, which has lagged below inflation since the 70's.
> January 2024 saw the most growth followed closely by December 2023.
Which jobs, specifically? At what pay? Destroying a $50k/year job to create two $25k/year jobs ain't progress.
Wage growth beat inflation by almost double most months last year, rising around 5-6% YoY each month vs ~3-4% inflation. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-i...
This focus on unemployment is absurd. It has nothing to do with the wealth gap.
More people working, but always with less wealth, while companies keep getting richer.
We could as a society literally end unemployment at any time by redistributing some of the wealth. We don't because it's more profitable to have people worrying if they will be able to eat every month.
Wage growth has lagged behind inflation and cost of living since the 70's. There have been multiple job market crashes in my lifetime; I entered the workforce in the middle of the 2008 recession. There have been multiple layoff waves since COVID alone, during each of which companies would lay off significant fractions of their workforce despite making record profits for no discernible reason other than "well everyone else is doing it so we'll do it, too". How much longer of a time frame do you expect me to examine?
> Expecting a system to be getting strictly better every second of every day is utopian.
Employers have been increasingly shafting their employees for decades. I expect a system to not spend multiple decades getting worse.
> shutting down legacy industries
My last two jobs were as a cloud infrastructure engineer. If even cloud computing is a "legacy industry" then the vast majority of the users on this website are utterly screwed.
People with positive inability to create wealth self-appoint to control the people that have demonstrable ability to create wealth. Doing so is the only way for the former to end up in control of wealth, again because they are incapable of generating it themselves.
It's a bit amusing that no one about the commie paradox - the group of people that profess the greatest ability to central plan and redistribute wealth is entirely devoid of individuals with a track record of creating wealth. A reasonable person would expect a strong correlation there.
IMHO this is a bad submission; not because the book or the premise of it is good or bad, but because all most of us can do is discus the title and (very) brief premise.
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if someone involved with marketing the book posted this knowing that it would provoke some kind of response from the community.
- Bezos
- Musk
- et al
These can be removed by market power, even during their own lifetimes. I bet you anything that in a generation or two, their fortune will be mostly dissipated.
The vast majority of rich people are much less rich than these two; their money will dissipate even quicker. Most of them made their fortunes in their own lifetimes; many will lose it in the same timeframe. They have to keep performing economically (work + investment) to keep their money.
But: I will also bet you anything that in a generation or two, the state will be larger than it is today, and will have assigned to itself more rights and prerogatives, and will somehow have inserted itself into our daily lives in an even more intimate way, whether anybody likes it or not.
The best counter to these jumped-up mini-Mao's is to spread the power far and wide; to have lots of little decision-makers rather than a few grand ones; to have those little decision-makers make tons of small but important decisions every day, rather than trusting everything to one election every few years.
Getting lots of people to make lots of small decisions is not easy and the masses are not necessarily that sensible. Delegating decision making to a chosen representative is the least bad system seen so far, but has a way to go.
> the masses are not necessarily that sensible
is an absolutely toxic sentiment. "We, the smart ones, will decide for them" has led to disaster every time.
I want someone to who understands to make good decisions, and the ability to remove them if they start failing. How that’s best done from my perspective is with an electoral cycle that’s fine tuned such that results can be achieved, but that incumbents can’t rest.
For the few collective decisions that really do have to be made, regular elections are the only way to keep the decision-makers on their toes.
I'm with William F. Buckley on this one:
> “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory,” he said, “than by the Harvard University faculty.”
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/10/31/telegovern/#google_...
Doubleplusungood crimethink?
> If you block the game of capitalism you stunt all of the growth and innovation that comes with it. It’s how people tick.
Where's the evidence for that? People help each other much more than they hurt each other, despite the common perception. What kind of sucker helps his adversaries?
Because a few people with power want to exploit everyone else, we somehow assume that everyone is like that. It's simply not true.
When we keep reinforcing these "winner takes all" scenarios we're playing into the hands of those few that truly believe that's how the world works. People cooperate and we only got here in the first place was through cooperation. If this capitalism mentality existed back then, our species would have simply died. Now we survived, thrived and forgot that our real strength is in communities, not individuals.
The individualist capitalism mentality got people with hook, line and sinker. Most can't even comprehend that there are different ways.
All the other things we've tried.
> People help each other much more than they hurt each other, despite the common perception. What kind of sucker helps his adversaries?
Is just as true within capitalism as communism, for example. Likewise feudalism, theocracy, anarchy.
> People cooperate and we only got here in the first place was through cooperation.
Yes.
> If this capitalism mentality existed back then, our species would have simply died.
No.
Why did I split these two up like this? Because capitalism only functions through cooperation (hence the etymology of "corporations"); and because "winner-takes-all" was the dominant behaviour that our species has displayed as far back as archeology shows, with our God-kings, slavery, and evidence of mass brutality before the invention of writing.
The solution for this doesn't have to target the rich explicitly. We can strengthen labor laws; update anti-monopoly laws. Make human dignity the central argument.
This will circumvent knee jerk reactions like "I work hard, I deserve to be rich". The question to ask is how are you, as an owner of capital, treating your labor? Like do they get to have a life after work? Have dignity at work? Do you use your wealth to circumvent democratic will and weaken labor protections? The answers to those questions should determine whether you deserve your wealth or not.
The larger the organization, the more the leaders can insulate themselves from the human reality on the ground, which in turn makes it easier to justify policies that fail to treat workers with basic human decency, let alone provide them the opportunity to share in the the economic surplus they produce.
It takes work and discipline for leaders to avoid this without external coercion, and that is in demonstrably short supply.
When employees of a small business see their company tank while being forced to hold their shares for a year under a SPAC acquisition, while the founders and SPAC sell at a overvalued projected cost — nothing productive results and who holds the sum? I’d wager a number of people here have experienced that personally.
And when Bezos wants diapers.com…?
Equity in a for profit corporation is fixed to the current round of funding with theoretical increases at certain intervals. These increases very specifically reduce the existing size of the “wedge of the pie” - aka takes from and redistributes ownership in the new pie size. This is called “Dilution” and we’re just told it’s how the game works.
Note that the theoretical expectation is that the overall “value” stays the same despite literally being called “less than.” However, we know that those valuations are not rooted in any type of mathematical or otherwise natural function like let’s say the gravitational constant, that is unchanged and unmoved by exogenous circumstances, therefore the fact of splitting the pie Redistributes functional ownership, irrespective of what the value theoretically is.
you’ll also note that the specific function of private equity is to ensure the retention and growth of equity ownership over all goals. So specific to the mechanisms within the commerce system, specifically ownership, they are not only functionally but mathematically zero-sum.
So I don't accept it as a given that becoming wealthy requires inhumane exploitation.
I happen to agree that there needs to be some big legal changes to ensure workers at Amazon and other companies are treated better, because before Amazon it was Walmart, and in 50 years it'll probably be another company. But that doesn't mean you can use Amazon as a reason to legislate personal wealth away.
Bring up the topic of central planning and you'll have everyone pointing out the folly of putting all the power in the hands of a few people. Our corporation ruled society is not that far off from a centrally planned dystopia. Instead of patting our backs comparing ourselves to the communist bloc, we need to focus on the technology we have today and what possibilities the technology could have opened up, and ask why the said possibilities haven't become a reality.
This is exactly why I don't really care how rich Elon, Gates, Bezos, Buffett are. If they have money, great... If they don't... oh well. Doesn't change my life. It's also the reason why you shouldn't care and why this book is likely a load of crock.
Certainly a lot of people among most driven would work less or emigrate. If I can't earn more, I would work that's most joyful and relaxed. So, no banking or any other demanding job where there are a lot of rules.
I don't spend much time worrying about what we'll do without billionaires working towards their next billion.
Please, just name the people who you want to “wealth limit” and explain how you will go about it. Specifically address the obvious problem: wealth gets distributed across families and other groups in such a way as to make it impossible to even count let alone try to limit. If it could be done, it would have been done. Digital currency shouldn’t be the impetus to relearn governance mistakes of the past.
Once you understand the problem is not a should or shouldn’t problem, but a how is it possible to problem you quickly realize the answer is more individual freedom.
We should also say no one should be devastatingly handsome or pretty, outstandingly intelligent, excessively lucky, or extraordinarily persuasive. Or tall. Or athletic. Or motivated. Or powerful (which is rather more related to limiting someone else's money).
Or with Taylor Swift hogging the charts? I sing in the shower - I want a record deal too!
On a smaller scale, these damn farmers are making too much money. I'm sure I can grow an orange just as well - they should be made to hand over part of their farms to me.
Same goes for all the software startups and those coders hogging the SaaS startups!
A billionaire could target their money differently, like funding research or setting up labs to target their money toward solving pressing problems rather than managing them. I don't really know much about the big problems, like maybe they are all already at the point of being at the edge of unknown unknowns, where you just have to throw money at them to do exploratory research. But I'd imagine there are others that are along the lines of "we know how to solve this, it just needs funding", funding beyond what could be crowd-sourced or from your average charitable giver, and I'd like to see those opportunities in some sort of ordered list.
The most interesting proposal I've heard recently basically suggested that instead of governments selling bonds (to the central bank and to the markets) when it creates new currency for public spending, it should essentially just give the newly created bonds to citizens since it's the people's money anyway that it's loaning out... It would have to split them equally among all citizens.
1) maximum revenue per employee at privately held companies, eg. $1m
2) maximum ownership of a company by a single person or entity of, say, 5%
What this means is that when you hit a good stride with a business and solve the entrepreneurial problem, you have to go public and sell your stake in it.
Everyone gets a rewarding pay day, but there is greater accountability and earlier on and more even distribution of the gains.
They expect to one day buy things from us.
If we want to honor that agrement we should at least attempt to not make it worse.
It is the wealth that gives us the freedom to invest in new knowledge creation to solve problems.
The more wealth the more opportunities, especially when they are in the hands of someone who have proven again and again their ability to create value to society. Elon Musk is of course the obvious example but not the only one, Jeff Bezos, Larry and Sergey and we could go on. These people are excellent capital allocators.
The alternative to extreme wealth is extreme poverty and
Almost no one in western society gets to keep their wealth for more than 3 generations because other have the freedom to outcompete them. Everyone over time gets richer.
The alternative to that is dictatorships where there is no economic freedom, capitalist ownership and the way to make money is governed by the ruler.
Anyone making a case against extreme wealth in a society that is fairly free is spreading extremely bad ideas that if they become popular leads to revolutions.
In modern society the issue is not big corporations or extreme wealth, it's institutional capture by politicians and that entire system.
IE: If you get very wealthy because you start a company, and manage your company in a way to improve other peoples' lives, that's a great thing. (Now, does Elon Musk deserve 50+ billion dollars? I'll just handwave and say that I think he could still live the same kind of life, and make a better contribution to society, with a fraction of that money.)
But, if Elon's kids all inherit many billions each, they either have to manage it in a way that improves other peoples' lives, or they need to be taxed back to the upper middle class.
Elon's an interesting case because he very passionately and sincerely spends his money on what he believes are the most pressing problems facing humanity. Almost all of his wealth is invested towards those goals.
He's an asshole and treats people terribly. But he is very consistent about investing in what he believes to be most important.
(source: Isaacson's biography)
The Beatles were horrible business operators and were essentially being taxed back to the upper middle class. I always chuckle when I listen to "Taxman."
The irony of charging 20 pounds for this is palpable.
(I'm not defending the thesis, but it needs a stronger argument against than that.)
It depends how this is structured. If the limit is you can't save, this actually puts pressure on housing prices as people are looking at ways to 'productively' spend the money.
If you do the math, millionaire is just about where your assets start to balance your liabilities. By liabilities, I mean the cost of a modest and frugal life. In that fuller accounting, the millionaire is merely the freedman, the person who has climbed out of the debt-hole into which almost all of us are born.
Let's do the math.
1. A millennial can get a decent Gold PPO plan on the health insurance marketplace, including basic dental and vision, for about $500/month. Anything below Gold merely coinsures ER visits and does not actually protect against catastrophic loss.
2. If you move to a cheap city and shop around, you can rent a decent one-bedroom apartment for $1,300/month. Even in a cheaper city, it will not be new and it will not be downtown.
3. Now consider utilities. Say $30 for a cheap cell phone plan, $50 for Internet, $100 for electricity (if you have electric heat), $20 for water. That's $200/month total
4. Allow another $80/week for groceries and $100/month very-occasional minor luxuries (get lunch out, get Starbucks).
5. Finally, let's say you really hit the jackpot with apartment and job location and are able to get by with a monthly bus pass costing $50/month.
We're at $2,230/month, or $26,760/yr.
Now assume you can get a 3% real yield. To finance your $26,760 annual costs, you need $892k invested -- nearly $900k.
This analysis has assumed unusually cheap rent and lifestyle. Add in car payments for a Corolla, or a less optimistic rent, and you're quickly at $1M needed. Yet I'm still talking about living frugally. I'm also assuming no childcare expenses.
So, for those reasons, and because $1M is a nice round number, I simply summarize that $1M is actually zero.
And it's only zero in a cheap place. If you're in California with only $1M you're still in the hole.
...
Yes, there is a problem. The natural world was expropriated from us before we were born, we were born into a system we didn't choose, and we must work off an indenture we never signed up for. So I agree with much of the spirit of what the author says.
But, quantitatively, if everything else about the current system remains as it is and we are only talking about where the cap is, then $1M is too low. Because $1M is merely where assets begin to balance a single person's liabilities.
You can get an apartment in a cheap city for under $800 a month. In a cheaper city it will most likely be downtown, and that will be a bad thing.
I forgot about subsidies, once your income gets that low. (Remembered that marginal tax rates would be low, at least.)
The difference between "cheap city downtown" and "expensive city downtown" is an interesting phenomenon. It isn't a hard and fast rule, but you're right about the general pattern.
It's also true that I could have aimed even lower than I did. If I'd assumed roommates in a larger apartment, I could have ended up with lower numbers.
If you really wanted to be a starving artist, you could probably get by on $1k/month. So then, as little as $400k invested plus a $30k cash cushion might suffice. It'd be pretty rough though if you were trying to pull it off in the US. Honestly we're starting to get into food-stamp territory.
Now I'm an old man and I'm looking at it from the other direction. Is $x amount enough to get me by until SS and Medicare. It's scary because as an old man I don't think I'm going to be able to jump back in to a software developer job once I quit. And on the other hand, the clock is ticking.
Yeah, I'm not always sure whether "retirement" is a carrot held in front of us, or really a threat.
The scenario you outlined is one of unimaginable privilege for most humans living today, and arguably most humans and non-human animals through history. A climate controlled, personal living space in a safe society, varied and effectively limitless food/clean water, modern conveniences like a car/internet/telephone, access to healthcare by highly-trained doctors -- completely free of drudgery and effort (i.e. work).
When we go further to speak of "unimaginable privilege", then I have mixed feelings. In historical and global terms this is comparatively true. But if this comparison is simply used to scold workers when they get too uppity, then it serves another purpose.
Returning to "reciprocity" -- it might be worth pausing to ask why my imagination is limited to financial rents. If I were the baker, and I lived next door to the butcher and the candlestick-maker, then maybe I wouldn't mind making a loaf of bread and trading it for some meat or some light. (Yes, I see the predation involved in the meat -- perhaps it is inescapable -- but I will choose to gloss over it for now, privileging humans.) In this imaginary village, people have roles and trade labor, but you understand that your labor is in fact useful, and you understand who it is helping. I guess I am talking about Marx's "alienation", or lack thereof.
As a software developer, in many industries it is not clear that your work really benefits any individual person, or even society in the abstract. You perform drudgery and endure stress, but it all seems to be some terrible social game that accomplishes nothing, and you participate only because you must, to justify your existence.
So it makes sense why many software developers -- despite the flexible work arrangements, and the physically undemanding job, and the good pay -- would see work as only an evil and seek to escape it.
There has to be a way to do reasonable amounts of useful labor -- to pull your own weight -- without participating in Silicon Valley style "life".
Unfortunately, a degree of financial independence has to be an intermediate goal. But what the next step should be after that, I am not sure. For the super-rich, the answer is philanthropy. But for the yeoman programmer, it's less clear. It will need to be less grandiose than all that. It will need to continue to produce some cashflow, but it should provide understandable value to the community. I will need to think about this.
The rounds to always that extreme personal and corporate wealth becomes fungible into induced market failure, is deployed exactly that way, leading to you guessed it, even more extreme personal and corporate wealth is a huge problem. It’s going to cook us even faster than carbon emissions in fact on present course.
I can see why a middling academic like Friedman, or an embittered Eastern Bloc emigre like Rand, or generations of ambitious apparatchiks and politicos have seen fit to endorse some nonsense, zero-evidence economic theories to the contrary.
As for why a community like HN that both knows better and stands to lose thereby endorses this manure?
I don’t have any better explanation than Clements on temporarily impoverished millionaires.
The trouble with restricting owning a company type wealth is what do you do with cases like Google or Facebook where some people build a better bit of software and because people like using it the company becomes valuable? Do you just ban successful ventures? Or confiscate them? When that's been tried under communism it hasn't worked very well.
A person with a lot of wealth must invest his wealth in some way that it will generate jobs or invest the money in other business.
That is also a benefit for the rest. So that thing about "we cannot see" I do not think it is such.
I mean, it is easier to see poverty on poorer people BUT the wealth invested is also what makes people have incomes. And you need people investing and managing wealth because someone needs to pay bills and multi-year investments or risk capital.
It does not need to be a single person, but a group of wealthier people are usually more inclined to risk wealth than average.
I think this role is also necessary in societies.
This is just not true: the share and absolute number of poor people has been decreasing for a long time. See https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief.
Socialist/communist countries that tried to limit the ability of people to get rich made all of their citizens poor.
In anything other than the short term, you can really make yourself better off by making other people worse off. It’s a feudalist mentality that’s totally obsolete in free markets. Loads of people just continue buying this snake oil by the tankload, making themselves unhappy and unfortunate. Not a way forward.
> ‘The best case I've read for putting an upper limit on the accumulation of wealth’ Richard WilkinsonNo-one deserves to be a millionaire.
Mobile Safari.
"No-one deserves to be a millionaire. Not even you."
Stopped reading right there. Hubris overload.
I know there's social security, and other welfare payments, and various adjustments, but I don't see how these calculations would be so mismatched as to warrant the moniker of "extreme wealth".
It won't cure envy.
Nearly everyone alive today is a "millionaire" compared to people living a few generations ago in terms of standard of living. Absolute standard of living continues to grow but that is invisible if you compare yourself to your peers.
Laughable - the state has been growing on a one-way trajectory: ever larger, ever more powerful. It is run by bureaucrats who look after their own interests first, and who have no feedback loop between their own performance and reality.
Think about this next time you go to the DMV or have to wait in line to see a doctor or deal with some kafkaesque snarl of paperwork. Your democratic will counts for nothing in the face of limitless state power.
What if those in power are elected? What if it wasn’t an absolute limit but harsh taxation?
Relatively speaking this would increase the power of military generals, presidents, and criminals, for a start. Is that a good thing? maybe, but restricting power from a group needs to be assessed in terms of holistic power balance not naive platitudes like 'No one should be a millionaire/billionaire'.
Like the power of JD Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, which was much greater than any rich man today.... oh wait.. those went defunct too.
Honestly, the fact that their heirs, despite having untold wealth were unable to keep the business going actually shows that individuals sometimes do have merits on their own, independent of the amount of money they were able to collect.
Ah so both literal millionaires and common people should be happy with a median wealth life. I agree.
Part the problem is that the word isn’t inflation adjusted.
‘Billionaire’ is probably a closer comparison to the railroad tycoon, millionaire of ye-olden-times.
But the mindset of many is still caught up in the uber-conservative (from an economic point of view) mindset dating to the middle ages that wealth is like land: it's just always there, and if you want more, you have to get it from someone else buy buying or seizing.
Also, for one person to make profit, they need to spend more than they earn, which inherently means the rest of the economy is in debt. Now you might say the profit will be spent, but then it isn't profit anymore.
Oh and if you want to talk about the real economy, entropy always rises, so no free lunch there either. When the economy grows, all that happens is that the human domain expands and humanity exerts more authority over the processes that occur within its domain. This by definition results in a loss of agency of the non human domain.
Perhaps you meant "value"? Be careful though, if you start differentiating between money and value, you arrive at communism. This is literally the first and last chapters of Capital vol 1.
Bizarre isn't it? If I were to commit one of the seven deadly sins, I'd choose a funner one than envy.
1) We can afford for them to stop working. Really, it's okay. People can just chill. We're more than efficient enough for it. 2) People don't need monetary incentives to work. Most of us get bored just chilling. We want to feel useful. We need community. We need something to engage our brains. The vast majority of people, left to their own devices, will find some sort of work to do.
There are a lot of healthcare systems where the wages aren’t that impressive and the hours are very long. There are benefits beyond money.
Job satisfaction, societal standing, caring about people, etc etc.
I’ve been hunting around but can’t find any decent journal article with new students polled on motivations - it would be interesting to see.
The things I’m readying are broadly around a want to help people, often after a health scare of their own or a close family member/friend. I’d prefer something a bit more objective than the puff pieces I’m finding.
There are far easier ways to make a ton of money than being a doctor.
Fun historical fact: the father of the European Union, Jean Monnet, was the head of the “central planning committee” in France in 1950 (and he really wasn't a commie).
Unfortunately as our system works now the oligarch wields both substantially more political power through lobbying and general corruption in the government and courts as well as clearly wielding more economic power. What I am saying is that we as a society should endeavor to reduce the misbalance in economic power between the oligarch and the average citizen.
But then, if you look at the US from the new deal to Reagan or most of Western Europe from WWII to the 80s, you have an idea of what a planned[1] democratic society looks like. And then the scarecrow is less powerful as an argument, isn't it?
Also, Communism hasn't been defeated by the power of the Free Market. It has been defeated by the appeal of democratic societies living under a welfare state system.
When all a democracy has to offer is a free market but no shared well-being, dictatorship is around the corner. (You can already see it with the rise of populists leaders all around the western world).
[1] there used to be so much more planning compared to what goes now that from today's perspective I feel it's fair to call that “planned societies”.
For example, my California city has "democratic" control of how many homes are allowed to be built, and therefore some control over the number of people allowed into the city. The city has decided not to build enough to meet the needs of the general population, but instead pays attention to a tiny minority of city constituents that profit from housing scarcity. They may profit in financial terms from their home valuations, but for some it's not about the money, it's just about keeping people out. It is an intensely unfair system, yet touted as "democratic" control of the means of production of housing.
So color me skeptical that democratic control won't result in even worse outcomes. If we had market control of the amount of housing, at least housing would be cheaper and we wouldn't be kicking people onto the streets continuously due to housing scarcity.
It didn't help that prior attempts, while making their own mistakes, were facing an implacable powerful enemy that constantly set out to destroy them. Security threats generate centralization and reduced democracy in all societies.