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Comment by bluescrn | Hacker News Reader

It's just not practical to enforce a cap though. Even with a very authoritarian world government to stop people moving assets elsewhere, there'll be too many ways around it.

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!".

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Its not that its not practical as much as it is actively counterproductive to progress since the minimum effective size in many sectors is larger than that so you would end up force liquidating founders out of companies they start, which is a bad thing in for progress in mlst cases. You want quality founders to ma*ntain control and grow a business up to the point it starts abusing market power rather than innovating and that is often far beyond 15 mm valuation. Tje real problem is the market power and that is when heavy regulation and breakup should set in, not at some arbitrarily low asset limit.

But even in your family hypothetical, the overall inequality is still much less than between billionaires and the middle-class (nothing said of the truly destitute).

> 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.

Ah yes, here come the arguments for "monitoring".

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.

I don't know how this is different from filing income taxes.

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.

You made quite a few significant leaps there.

"The slippery slope is a fallacy!" quoth those actively greasing the slope.

So did the NKVD!

Started as regular police, ended up doing purges 13 crazy years later.

lol, put the meth pipe down

The US used to tax up to 90% or so at the highest brackets. Rich people survived.

No it didn't - there were multitudes of loopholes. Nobody paid that much.

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.

https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA

The US also used to have no income tax. Lots of people survived then too.

Many fewer, actually. People lived significantly shorter, harder lives; many more died young.

Of course the economy was much smaller then, especially on a per capita basis, and modern capitalism hadn’t had time to create the safe, abundant, filled-with-medical-marvels lifestyle we enjoy today.

> Of course the economy was much smaller then, especially on a per capita basis

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.

Now that tax rates are lower again compared to the "90%" rates, is the same saying not true for today compared to that time period?

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.

As we've cut taxes beginning in the 1980s, most people in the US have been living worse. Now life expectancy has been dropping, iirc home ownership, access to education, etc.

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.

> investment is needed for returns

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.

I'm trying to parse if this is meant to be an argument against enforcing limits on wealth, and if so, point out the humor that we already reached the road of monitoring through having corporations have uncapped power.

An argument could be made that the big social media companies are also taking care of re-education, although through less overt means.

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