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Comment by logicchains | Hacker News Reader

Spending money doesn't grow the economy; the economy grows by saving and investment. Punishing people who successfully save and invest by giving money to people who prefer to spend everything they earn leads to less savings and investment, and lower economic growth, as the poor economic conditions of Brazil and Spain demonstrate.

Rich people don't "hoard" the means of production, they create it. Confiscatory policies lead to less business creation; if Gates, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Page had not had the wealth to create the businesses that made them billionaires, those businesses wouldn't exist, the jobs and products they create wouldn't exist. Europe demonstrates this empirically with its complete lack of any big tech companies, a result of its hostile policies and cultural attitudes to entrepreneurship.

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Investing in passive assets such as property that already exists does not create new economy.

"Rich people don't "hoard" the means of production, they create it."

Actually they do. Look at the GDP growth rates across western countries. 1-2%.

The wealthy people (since pandemic) have grown their wealth 10-20%. Where did that come from if the GDP didn't grow.

The only way they were able to do this was by literally hoarding wealth and by buying assets that already exist and by doing so displacing other people with less assets.

Indeed. There's a whole street in London (The Bishop's Avenue) that's essentially unoccupied - every house on it is owned by foreign billionaires. Every now and then one of them knocks down the house and builds a new, more garish one in its place. It used to be stunning, now it's grotesque.

I think the GP comment has some issues, but this is not the right way to address them.

If someone owns all the houses but does not rent them out at a reasonable cost, so people have to sleep on the street while the house stays empty, then I will call that hoarding. You don't really address that core problem.

Europe has plenty of startups. The real issue is scale-ups, where the main cause is lack of risk capital.

Spain is actually one of the few countries in EU that is growing a lot, actually.

> if Gates, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Page had not had the wealth to create the businesses that made them billionaires, those businesses wouldn't exist

Bullshit. They would have all created those businesses as long as their personal financial situation improved through them.

Arguing that it takes 0.1% wealth payoffs to incentivize business creation is false.

Someone would do it for anything greater than average, if there were global minimums, and a tax structure that allowed corporations to retain capital was used.

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