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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> The fact that capital owners successfully avoid contributing to the financing of our states and social systems is

Are you sure capital owners do not contribute to our states and financial systems?

For instance, Jeff Bezos is worth $238 billion even though Amazon has a $2.6 trillion market cap. That's $2.4 trillion of value created for other shareholders plus trillions more for employees, customers, suppliers, governments, and other stakeholders.

Jensen Huang is worth $164 billion while NVIDIA’s market cap is $5 trillion. That’s $4.8 trillion of value for other people (ignoring value created for non-equity stakeholders).

etc.

I'm not saying that there should not ALSO be other ways to force contribution (e.g. via taxes), but to say they do not contribute at all is false.

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You are assuming:

1. Value created for other shareholders is a good thing

2. $ "value" directly translates to actual resources or services

3. These employees and customers would not get the same or more value elsewhere if Amazon did not exist

4. This "value" created by Amazon is better compared to the alternative (such as more resources used locally instead of global trade)

Well, you are assuming there is a central benevolent dictator who can compute "Value" more accurately than millions of people collectively voting with their wallets.

Not to speak for the other poster but I didn't see any implication of a central benevolent dictator in their comment.

It's implicit. Amazon has billions of dollars because customers freely handed over the money. We know they found the service valuable because they wouldn't have done so otherwise.

The poster is suggesting there is some _true_ value separate from what these customers who know their own situations best think. That they are secretly being fleeced and a central planner will somehow better allocate the resources.

>It's implicit

Not at all. What if it were an employee co-op?

"The ultra-wealthy should have less power" != "We should implement a five-year plan for our command economy as thought up by glorious and correct Party."

If AGI is actually attainable, then, sure, planned economies will be more performant than market economies, especially for high value industrial captal equipment. No need for Gosplan to decide on your candy bars and craft breweries.

> If AGI is actually attainable, then, sure, planned economies will be more performant than market economies

What is the logic?

Most of the definitions I've heard of AGI are that it outperforms humans at complex professional tasks. That would include capital allocation.

Capital allocation is not an IQ problem with only one correct solution that can be made only with hard data.

That sounds like the finance bro version of mystical woo. There's nothing special about it. There must be doctors who say diagnosis is an art form. But AI will still out perform the diagnosis.

You misunderstood.

AI can calculate stuff that can be measured and calculated.

But investing (in stocks or otherwise) is not that. Investing is about the phychology of the people (all other investors). If investors as a whole make stupid decisions, the market movements make their decisions correct (like the incredibly stupid drop in Nvidia's stock due to release of Deepseek). AI can be more objective and better at calculating facts, but it doesn't matter if the market is driven by emotions and people.

A market economy is a distributed compute engine. The main reason why planned economies do worse historically is because the amount of compute needed to actually account for everything centrally is so immense (and thus costly), the implementers necessarily have to adopt some kind of simplified model, and then you get divergence between what the plan says and what's actually happening.

It's not a given that this will remain true forever, although I don't think it's tied to AGI. One could argue that AGI push is the trigger for a massive increase in compute capacity and corresponding decrease in price that might make this kind of thing viable, but that's just wishful thinking, not a fact.

If I run around town smashing windows with a rock, GDP goes up. Computing value more accurately than financial markets is not difficult: the bar is on the floor.

If I run around town smashing windows with a rock, GDP goes up.

Not generally. Window repairmen get higher incomes, but the rest of the economy has less consumption and investment.

> If I run around town smashing windows with a rock, GDP goes up.

I don't believe that's true. I believe that's called the "Broken Window Fallacy" in Economics.

Breaking windows DOES increase GDP, just like the parent said. The argument ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window ) only argues that not all GDP increase is good, because of waste of resources, because of the opportunity cost. That's why measuring success only by GDP is a bad idea.

One thing to point out that is lost in these arguments of “they create value for the shareholders”.

Folks that own a vast amount of stock do not pay taxes on that stock. They own the shares, and they take out loans against those shares. At some point they rollover or pay off those loans by selling some shares, but the shares have increased in value significantly in that time, or they’ve been granted new shares.

When we say “<business> has created value for shareholders”, it’s said in a way that implies that somehow that wealth creation makes its way into the tax system by virtue of the fact the wealth was ‘created’. It does not.

First, taxes still get paid when the individual dies as estate tax. Second, increased shareholder value typically means more corporate profit which is also taxed. Third, dividends are taxed. So your claim that the shareholder value never makes its way into the tax system is plainly false.

This is all aside from the fact that increased shareholder value means a more abundance society regardless of the increase in taxes. We could quibble over the exact distribution of who gains from the enlarged pie but it's certainly not the case the 100% of it goes to capitalists so consumers and employees also benefit.

> taxes still get paid when the individual dies as estate tax

Almost no one in the US pays the estate tax. It only applies to estates over $14MM and most large estates get reorganized into trusts with estate tax avoidance as a primary motive.

> It only applies to estates over $14MM

Yes this entire conversation is about the ultra wealthy not paying their "fair share". A $14MM exemption is practically irrelevant here.

> most large estates get reorganized into trusts with estate tax avoidance

This isn't so simple. Transfers to a irrevocable trust count against your lifetime 14mm estate and gift tax exemption and a trust in excess of the 14M exemption is subject to gift tax.

Also, this discussion was about "Buy Borrow Die" strategy. Irrevocable trusts don't make much sense in this context because trusts aren't subject to stepped up basis.

> That's $2.4 trillion of value created for other shareholders plus trillions more for employees, customers, suppliers, governments, and other stakeholders.

That's not Bezos' doing alone, that's Bezos plus over a million workers that did that. If Bezos never existed in history, someone else would have filled in that market. We need to stop this myth that a few men alone create all this value and that without them we'd still be dragging plows through the mud for our farms.

This is a two-edged discussion. On one extreme, there’s an interesting Marxist idea that value creation is largely the product of historical and social forces, not just individual effort. However, I don’t think it’s fair to single out AI, or any billionaire to fit that narrative while ignoring other factors, such as the idea that nations should not exist since they can be thought in the same terms.

On the other side, Jeff Bezos is clearly an outlier. Even if we agree that ecommerce would have existed without him, we don’t know whether someone else would have created the same scale of value.

Neither do we know if things would have turned out better without him.

But we know that there are few winners and past competitors like eBay faded out. It is more extreme with Microsoft: they have survived more market shifts than anybody else, there is no doubt they have something special and at that business level it is difficult to argue that competitors have not tried everything, and the idea of good and bad behaviors is naive at that level. For example, a "good" company such as Sun Microsystems was involved in bribes to gain markets.

I would say they dont contribute. I don't think Jeff Bezos has contributed anything positive, at all. He's managed to become insanely rich in a system that rewards bad behavior, so what? All that value isnt doing anything.

Absolutely. Creating value in the stock market is not the same thing as creating value for society. Are we really better off as a society now that amazon has closed down all the mom & pop stores? Are we really better off as a society now that the entire internet is centralized around AWS? It made a lot of people rich, but the internet sucks more than ever

Are you saying Amazon isn't a positive? Or that Bezos didn't contribute to making Amazon what it is?

I think it's pretty clear Amazon is quite a positive given by how many people like using it so much for it's convenient 1-stop shop, quick shipping, and hassle-free return process.

Are you saying it would be better to have to shop at 1000 different little websites with probably crappy or at least inconsistent return processes?

People would be more likely to shop in their local stores, buy local products, and sustain the local economy.

OK but how realistic is that? Not everyone lives in a city nearby local stores.

There is such a wide variety of products that people go to Amazon for. I know I do. So many things are niche I can't see how any local stores could exist to stock things like that in even a 1 hour range from a majority of the population.

How many people are going to drive hours to go to a special boutique that has this random thing they want or need?

Maybe people use Amazon to buy routine things that could easily be stocked locally. But I guess I use Amazon to get things that I can't really get or even usually find anywhere else for that matter. Most come from small operations using Amazon as their sales platform. Amazon is providing a lot of discoverability and logistics to them and I am not sure I would even stumble across the seller if I had to find some tiny website that they operated themselves.

I am not sure most people would prefer to shop locally, most people don't seem to even go to the store anymore and instead use delivery services for everything. This saves so much time to allow us to do other things that we enjoy in our lives. I don't think small shops would be able to offer this level of convenience.

> OK but how realistic is that? Not everyone lives in a city nearby local stores.

Are you serious? I live in country where we are not using Amazon.

And you don’t have another big online marketplace that’s basically similar?

And if not, you are saying you have a similar availability of such a vast network of goods, almost anything you might want and the convenience of fast delivery and simple returns via local shops or something?

I guess I’m not sure what you are suggesting. I personally find that shopping and finding and acquiring the products I want is vastly more convenient and easier with Amazon than before we had Amazon and yes I was around back then too. I’d never want to go back personally. Most family and friend I know seem to feel the same.

Amazon the company that makes its employees pee in bottles?

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