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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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/
- 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.
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.