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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

Nobody needs more than a billion dollars. Nobody even needs more than 10 million dollars.

But that isn't really the question(s). The real questions are:

1. Can you morally take what others have, just because they have more than enough? By what standard of morality? And, given that "don't take other peoples' stuff" has worked out pretty well as a standard of morality, what justification is there for choosing a different one?

2. More broadly, there will be collateral damage from any approach to take wealth from the wealthy. Will that collateral damage leave society better or worse off than the status quo?

Probably the most minimalistic way to do it would be a progressive tax on wealth above 10 million dollars. But even that would lead to massive attempts to hide assets (or get them out of the country), and more and more invasive attempts to detect such things. And the invasiveness itself is damaging to society.

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What moral right does anybody have to that much wealth? They are not personally responsible for anywhere close to 100% of that wealth -- it was accumulated because they could take advantage of markets and education and science and infrastructure that was set up by society to benefit all.

A subsistence farmer may be personally responsible for 100% of their wealth. Anybody wealthier owes society.

Our wealth is due to standing on the shoulders of giants.

Anybody wealthier pays taxes, why would they owe anything? At what point does one repay their debt? Does this abstract debt have a limit?

They exploit tax loopholes and pay less tax than the average worker.

No, they don't. They might pay a smaller percentage in some cases, but it's definitely not universal.

So that abstract debt scales linearly with income? Why should a programmer that made his wealth from selling an app on the internet owe more than a truck driver?

Wouldn't it be more reasonable to tax consumption according to its cost and effect on the society, rather than income?

Wealth above $50M or so is generally not useful for consumption -- your second private jet and your 7th house add very little marginal utility.

What great wealth is useful for is power & status. But you often don't consume wealth to gain power & status -- spending $44B on Twitter isn't consumption.

The best way to tax the wealthy is to tax wealth, not consumption nor income.

Private jets are usually bought through air operator companies that use them to do business - that's not consumption. Using the private jet is a service and that's consumption, so that should be fairly taxed. 7th house, if not used to do business, is consumption too - so again, that should be fairly taxed.

I don't know what "marginal utility" even means, who determines it and based on what objective facts, and I don't think it's relevant anyways - taxes should be payments of the debt to the society, debt is not determined by utility in any way.

Buying a company is investment, not consumption - so yeah, that shouldn't be taxed. I don't care about "the best way to tax the wealthy", I care about a fair way to pay for what society provided. If the society didn't provide to the wealthy more than it provided to the not-wealthy, it's not fair to demand more.

> taxes should be payments of the debt to the society, debt is not determined by utility in any way.

Yes, exactly. Consumption taxes are a tax on utility. The wealthy owe their wealth to society. Their debt is relative to their wealth, not their consumption.

No, that doesn't make any sense. Nobody owes their wealth to anybody. People should pay for what they use/cause, not just because they exist. Consumption taxes are not taxing utility, they are taxing consumption - it's a very direct relationship of usage->payment, regardless of whether it was completely useless, for laughs, or helped something. Again, how do you even objectively determine utility? Is having fun enough to claim utility? What if we rephrase it as "mental health"?

If I can make my wealth without causing any effect on society, there's no reason my debt should increase - my debt doesn't scale linearly with my wealth, it scales with whatever the society provided to me.

If I make my wealth by selling an app on the internet, there's no reason I should pay as much as someone who polluted the environment in the process by shipping stuff all around the world and used fossil fuels to make the products.

And if I make my wealth by selling stuff in Europe, there's no reason it should be taxed in US just because I live there. At the very least, it should be taxed at the place where the society actually provided something that led to earning it. Because otherwise I'd just move to a nice tropical island with no wealth tax.

I think the rationale isn't "do they have more than enough?" it's "is this amount of wealth commensurate with any value provided?"

I imagine this would be a controversial subject anywhere, let alone HN, but I think implicitly is some belief that some individual's (or institution's) contributions are overcompensated relative to their actual contributions. I think as the amount of wealth increases, the probability that that wealth represents some equitable and rational reflection of actual contribution of value relative to others goes down.

The problem is that in any market there's all sorts of "leakage" and hidden unrecognized contributions just as much as there is hidden costs (environmental costs etc) of any business or individual. Also fraud, misrepresentation, irrational decision making on the part of consumers etc.

So my objection to say, Bezos' wealth isn't so much that he has more than he needs, it's that I do not see any way to rationalize his wealth relative to his contributions. The ideas behind Amazon would have probably proliferated anyway, the company is more than Bezos, including the many employees etc, and I think a lot of arguments can be made that Amazon's total societal value is controversial or debatable anyway.

What's a "correct" evaluation of Bezos' wealth in terms of societal value? I have no idea, it's probably a lot, but I do agree that at some point the wealth becomes so extreme that it's more likely to reflect societal and economic failures in value appraisal (implicit or explicit) than some actual justifiable value he has provided.

Regarding (2) we do this all the time in all kinds of indirect ways anyway. There's an assumption there about ownership and the conditions under which that is legally instantiated that is maybe at the heart of what needs to change. If you set up the rules to prevent certain things from happening in the first place, you don't end up "taking" any wealth.

I feel like this is the sort of thing that is so involved it would necessitate a book-length treatment instead of a comment on HN.

Why do you think nobody needs more than billion dollars?

I know if I had a billion dollars there are lots of things I'd fund. Why should I not be allowed to do that? If I had a trillion I also have things I'd fund that I couldn't at a billion

The only way to have a billion dollars in the first place is to take it from the workers who created the wealth. No individual's labor or creative output can anywhere near reach that value.

We already allow taking from others, from whom and what justification used is simply a matter of ideology. The current system is what we're used to and so it seems necessary and inevitable to us, anything else an abhorrent deviation.

Take it from the workers?

Are you suggesting that workers do not have employment contracts where they agreed to trade labour for wages at a fixed price?

Workers always have the choice to take the risk of starting their own company for higher potential earnings.

Profit is surplus value created by the labor of workers. I'm simply saying no one works hard enough to create a billion dollars worth of anything.

Wealth accruing to owners rather than the workers who produce it is older than employment contracts. I'm pointing out that this arrangement is the result of a set of choices that have been made, and we could choose otherwise. The fact that we consider this one approach correct and fair and not others is not inevitable.

Your overly abstract language has no value here.

Profit is not surplus value created by worker - that’s a 4 year olds understanding and negates all the other components of the system of which labour is only one.

We have tried “choosing” various “arrangements” (or more correctly, competing economic systems) and evidence points to capitalism being the correct approach to maximise liberty, growth and progress.

A) Profit is not necessarily connected to any workers, this is industrial revolution-era economics straight from the 19th century, modern world is different. Today I can create intellectual property and keep copying it until forever - without a single worker in sight.

B) These workers are free to work on their own - why don't they form their own company or become self employed?

It's mainly people with generational wealth and robust safety nets that have the choice to take a risk for higher potential earnings. For most workers the risk just is too big, the odds of success too low, based not on their merit but their runway to screw up/burn money. To the extent it's true that "you gotta fail to succeed", you need to be able to afford failure, to succeed.

This is a rediculous assertion.

To begin, you know nothing of the circumstances of millions of people. Certainly not enough to make sweeping statements.

In 2023, there were 5.5 MILLION new businesses started in the USA. Do those people all have generational wealth? of course not.

The reality is it’s easy to start a business but very hard to succeed.

Generational wealth can be just, an intact family that has savings. Borrow from the folks, start a coffee shop.

It is simple - so simple that 5.5 millions of Americans can use their family money to do it. That doesn't preclude there being 360M Americans that don't start a business, because they don't have family money.

Sweeping statements on both sides I think.

I tried to throw in some words like "mainly, most" to leave room for the many exceptions to my generalization, but perhaps it was a bit strongly worded. Even so, the point stands that people need a fall back plan to feel comfortable taking risks. I often hear business leaders patting themselves on the back for taking big risks, but leaving it unsaid that they had no real chance of losing everything. Risk tolerance enables risk taking.

Again I disagree on cost. I just had a look again at what it costs to buy a company off the shelf in the UK (last place I did that). It’s about £299 and another £50 a year. Theres probably some other small change fees in there.

I completely agree on risk though and it highlights the core of the argument - building a business is time consuming and risky in a way that being an employee is not.

That’s one reason why business owners are able to capture more profit. They took more risk and placed themselves into a situation where their earnings are not bounded by a single contract.

Everybody has free will and could start a business but not everybody is capable due to skill, capacity, circumstance, etc.

Therein lies the irony. None of the people whining loudest will start a company because it’s risky and fraught with danger but they want all the spoils of ownership and responsibility.

Starting another plumbing business is very unlikely to net you a billion dollars. To achieve that you need to bet on riskier businesses, they are more likely to fail. If your parents are well off you can afford to fail a few times by betting big. Most still won't succeed but it doesn't affect them that much because they're insulated from the downside risk due to well-off parents.

My point isn't really that people from well-off families are more likely to start a family, although that probably is true as well. My point is that people coming from a regular background are more likely to start less riskier businesses, less chance of failure but also less chance of reaching a billion dollars.

Op is correct though. A CEO of a major US company who makes 1000x the wage of a factory owner in Shanghai who makes 100x the wage on the back of illegal migrant labor (very common) who is working to send money home to support their parents in the rural city they were born.

Just a few decades ago, that CEO would have paid his fellow countryman a modest salary and would have also made less themselves.

When you just imagine the staggering gap we've created, it feels deeply unfair. And it's not just a matter of starting a business. It is a structural moral failing.

If the worker in Shanghai had similar economic freedom and rights to workers in the west have then this would not be an issue.

Instead, useful idiots everywhere are proposing to add restrictions to the parts of the system working well.

> If the worker in Shanghai had similar economic freedom and rights to workers in the west have then this would not be an issue.

You're right. So I guess we are agreeing that the hyper-capitalist system we currently have relies on exploiting others?

We can build a system with less sharp edges without blowing it up.

Like worker representation on boards (Germany does this), cap gains that reduces as you hold investments (Clayton Christensen proposal), and holding the countries we outsource to similar environmental and labor standards.

Not everyone has access to the amount of capital needed to start a business or the savings to support them while they grow that business. Most people live paycheck to paycheck. Those people will never have the same bargaining power as their employers.

Your first question is literally "begging the question" because there is a premise that that wealth was earned and therefore "had" by others, when that wealth only accrued to them because of the system we have.

If we lived in another multiverse where Elon Musk was only worth $100 million and his other $200 billion were in bank accounts of 100 million other people, none of us would be the wiser about this one.

We are in that universe - nothing stops people from risking everything like Musk did. But they don't want to.

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