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Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of this magical tax. There's a lot of unearned wealth that was stolen, illegal, through wars or various forms of corruption. Unfortunately, these taxes won't work on them. If they were obtained illegally or unethically, they can be hidden in the same way.

For the most part, these kinds of taxes hurt the people who are being honest and declaring their wealth. Some billionaires are bad, some are good, and these will almost exclusively target the good ones.

So in practice, no, unless the magic button fixes the loopholes that come with it.

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Which billionaires are good?

Mark Cuban seems to be one of the good ones.

Bill Gates is doing a lot of good too, although he was pretty ruthless in the beginning against other companies.

I'll bet most people think that the 'good rich people' are the ones who share their political ideology and support causes that they agree with.

A 'bad rich person' is often someone who supports the opposition party or once tweeted something disagreeable. It doesn't matter if they employ thousands of people and generously give to charity.

When, of course, the reality is no one ever got rich by simply doing good things, treating others fairly, and conducting themselves in a way that overall benefits others.

And any individual "employing thousands of people" is really "exploiting thousands of people" unless the thousands of employees' wealth is increasing at a faster rate than the employer's.

Wow! So if the business owner who took all the risks somehow profits more than the 9-5 employee if the business takes off; then the owner is somehow 'exploiting' all their workers??? Karl Marx would be proud.

To me, the bad ones are the drug dealers, the politicians who siphon billions.

We still have plenty of robber barons who are doing borderline human trafficking but I don't think these are even that bad. They're exploiting some helpless guy in Bangladesh, but in the end, that guy is better off.

The truly bad ones imo are the "silver or lead" ones - you do things their way and you become rich, you go against them and you're literally dead.

The ones we want more of. None are perfectly ethical and none are fair.

Microsoft/Bill Gates is a good example. Without MS, we'd have open source and stuff like that. But it's just nice to have Windows, MS Office, less polio. People like Warren Buffett stabilize the economy, while people like Soros destabilise it. Nearly all the Big Tech ones are pretty good - they pay wages as high as possible.

Most are law abiding. Most of them actually want higher taxes but also want their competitors to be paying them as well. Bezos gets slack for dodging taxes, but he does it legitimately - most profits are reinvested and they actually pay good salaries even if they overwork their staff.

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