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Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

'Robeyns, who has studied how people perceive wealth, opens with a provocative proposal — governments should set a wealth limit on the order of 10 million euros or US dollars per person.'

So people with wealth close to $10mil should keep all their money in cash and avoid higher-return investments, since the the excess above $10mil would be confiscated? Besides being morally wrong, that would discourage investment.

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Its an interesting thought experiment but falls apart very quickly when meeting reality of human nature. And just not very logical altogether, unenforceable globally.

The current global legal maze that allows all those money hiding places is exactly due to similar efforts in the past, they are half-assed at best. But it keeps wealth management companies busy, so at least somebody benefits at the end.

But not that far fetched in 2024, Bitcoin limits the total amount of coins. I'd think at a certain amount of money, probably a significant part is likely idleling (and not adding to economy) or not in full control of the owner.

The sole purpose of limiting coins was to create an asset with increasing value.

No, to stop inflation

Yes, by creating a limited amount of assets with increasing value, thus resulting in deflation. That's what I said.

It doesn't necessarily discourage investment much from the perspective of society as a whole - 1 person worth $20 million isn't obviously making way more investments than 2 people worth $10 million (or 4 people worth $5 million). It's also not obviously an improvement to morality for a society to worry about someone worth $10 million continuing to increase their net worth while looking the other way while children (who in absolute numbers surely outnumber those worth $10M+) lack food, housing, basic healthcare, etc.

Just because we are currently making one set of choices does not mean we could not be making a different set of choices.

I agree with you. But, while not the same, it seems related that for example, the tax rate in the USA was a times as high as 94%

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/tax/10/history-taxes.a...

I don't know how well that was at limiting wealth. Maybe people found ways to hide the money so it didn't get taxed. It also didn't limit wealth. 6% of a trillion is still 60 billion

The top rate was that high, but nobody was really taxed at 94% because there were a lot more exceptions. When they drastically reduced the top rate, they also eliminated a great many exceptions. Overall, the change was actually revenue-neutral. Which shows that you cannot compare that 94% number to the current rates and say that people used to pay more taxes. "Lowering the rate" was just simplifying things so that the printed rate more closely matched the reality.

There's no practical difference between $10m with no interest, versus $10m where any interest which puts the total holding over $10m is confiscated. I think people such a situation would put their money into low-risk, easy-access investments.

(And, of course, it would make sense if the $10m maximum was inflation-linked; and then as such it would make sense to invest to maintain the capital against inflation.)

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