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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

Cutting out many of the already shaky social safety nets, still accumulating massive debt. This should end well.

I understand the self-interested desire for the ultra wealthy to have lower taxes on an individual level, but yet I still don't understand how they are perpetually blind to the fact that whatever the release valve for the historic and still growing massive wealth inequality we have takes, it won't be great for them either in the long term.

Sure its nice for them to make asset grabs during economic downturns, but eventually there's always a tipping point where things go upside down chaotic and I don't feel like we are that far away from it now.

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Well some of the new rich, tech guys are clearly insane. Peter Thiel cannot stop talking about the Antichrist, for example. I don't understand what was so different about the robber barons of the past, who at least had some obsession with their legacy enough to go around building schools and libraries to name after themselves.

The robber barons of the past gave us the Great Depression and WWII.

> Well some of the new rich, tech guys are clearly insane. Peter Thiel cannot stop talking about the Antichrist, for example.

Agreed on the insanity and it seems to be getting worse over time.

I personally think its due to malignant narcissism bumping up into the (subconscious) midlife realization that there is no chance their theoretical singularity god will arrive in time to make them immortal.

Sorry bro(ligarch)s, you're all going to end up as worm food just like the rest of us. There isn't any amount of underground concrete bunker wall thickness that is going to change that.

> I understand the self-interested desire for the ultra wealthy to have lower taxes on an individual level,

I don't. It seems like mental illness to me

To clarify a bit...

I meant I understand it in the sense that to get that wealthy in the first place you have to have a special kind of self-interested sociopathy, so in that regard I understand their desire. Not that I agree with it.

Gotcha. I should have realized you meant that from the rest of your post.

Every human is self-interested. Fortunately there are a lot of good people out there who try to temper that instinct, but remembering that everybody by default has a "what's in it for me" line of thinking (even if consciously attempting to subjugate it) is important for understanding as much as we can about how the world works. I don't think a sleasy real estate agent is behaving any differently (by jacking up fees, putting people in properties that may not be in their best interest, strong-arming FSBOs into listing with them) than the billionaire is, it's just the scale of their blast radius that is different. That's not to equate the two, because obviously scale matters, but the underlying motiviation is largely the same.

What is so hard about understanding their desire? They want to keep more money for themselves so they can buy more yachts, invest in more things, whatever. This is just how humans are.

It's up to policy makers (i.e. government when it comes to taxation) to structure the system to mitigate the inherent self-interest that people have. Obviously that's easier said than done when the ultra-rich buy off the politicians, but human nature just is what it is.

> This is just how *some* humans are.

To clarify, I don't mean all humans want to keep all money for themselves even when filthy rich, I just mean that all humans are self-interested. The extent to which that governs our behavior of course differs and I agree there are people who willingly sacrifice to help others. A bit more in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45683652

The thing is they have so much money they can't buy enough. Even if all they do is consume, consume, consume they will still be trending upwards. In effect, every yacht has a negative price tag.

It bears the same hallmarks as any other addict: the next hit has to be even bigger than the last, and everyday enjoyments in life are practically invisible to them. Their drug of choice may be different, but the outcome on their life, relationships and society is largely the same.

I'm imagining these things happen on scales greater than many people's lifetimes. The Roman empire took hundreds of years to fall, there is so much time for these pathological wealth hoarders to enrich themselves and profit while there's still wine and grapes to be fed.

> but eventually there's always a tipping point where things go upside down chaotic and I don't feel like we are that far away from it now.

The members of the billionaire class with any foresight are making a calculated bet that they will be in control of sufficient technological measures to suppress any kind of mass uprising by the populace. Look at all the resources going to Anduril and Palantir. Foucault's boomerang is on its way back towards the US populace right now.

That said, even that cadre far overestimates what technology can do. Adaptation is a fundamental pillar of the human condition.

They also also hedging this bet by building bunkers in far away places [0]. Truly insane.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly17834524o

> understand the self-interested desire for the ultra wealthy to have lower taxes on an individual level

I don’t. They have tens of millions to billions. What more do they want? Three yachts instead of two? A higher score than some other rich douchebag destroying lives for fun?

> A higher score than some other rich douchebag destroying lives for fun?

I mean, yeah, I think this is mostly it. Its gamification.

At the top level they all have more wealth than they could ever possibly use, even accounting for many generations of offspring.

In large part, but I also suspect its about consolidation of political control...we are making our own permanent oligarchy.

> we are making our own permanent oligarchy.

Attempting to, and might get away with it for a while.

But I suspect next time there is an inevitable "equal but opposite reaction" the guillotine plans will be optimized using LLMs with shared open sourced designs.

(And in the current political environment, I think I should clarify this isn't me threatening violence -- I don't want violence. It is me recognizing that history "rhymes" while the rhyming patterns tend to happen on a faster and faster pace)

All. They want it all.

"Business is a good game—lots of competition and a minimum of rules. You keep score with money" -- Nolan Bushnell

Once you get that wealthy the money is more of a disk measuring contest. There is no productive way for one person to really use money of that magnitude, the best they can do is dump it into stocks, bonds, real-estate, etc..., but nothing that really moves the economy. It's a big failure from an economic standpoint. Lots of "dead" money not being productively used.

> Three yachts instead of two?

No, the thing is to have a yacht with a yacht for a dinghy. And that comes with a helicopter.

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