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Comment by DavidPiper | Hacker News Reader

I wholeheartedly agree with and encourage this kind of academic distinction. However...

Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others... The distinction has no practical use.

(And before someone says "that's the government's job!", consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies who know the domain best and are agitating for better financial and social safeguards for all. None, naturally.)

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We often look back on earlier stages in world history like we're somehow more advanced, or inherently smarter, than past societies. But one of the things made clear by the way this problem lines up perfectly with conflict during the industrial revolution (including the innovators flagrantly violating the law in order to win their advantage) is that for all our technological sophistication, we haven't really gotten better at the hard, human things: social coordination, planning, democracy. (Perhaps that's because we're still living under the same system that the industrial revolution finally birthed.)

How much actual money do you think the “people with billions of dollars” have in comparison to the needs of the population as a whole? I think you’re very confused about where the actual income in the economy goes.

I am not at all proposing that "people with billions of dollars" somehow directly pay for "the needs of the population as a whole".

I'm considering "actual power", rather than "actual income".

Then who pays for it?

That is the question society is currently asking with articles like this one.

Given that (allegedly) "your salary" won't be the answer for a significant chunk of the population soon, and all that money will instead (allegedly) go to the bosses doing the firings, and the AI companies they employ instead.

We get a view of this taken to its logical extreme in the final Resident Evil film featuring Milla Jovovich.

The entire Earth's population dead, with evil corporate board members holding votes underground as to who gets to be the CEO of the company.

Everyone. That includes the small number of people hoarding a majority of the wealth. Everyone needs to contribute to the wellbeing of society as a whole and nobody is exempt.

Good luck taking away the detached single family homes, pickup trucks, SUVs, commercial flights, out of season fruits/vegetables, and imported manufactured goods. The people that expect those things are the “ small number of people hoarding a majority of the wealth”, and there are quite a few of them (probably 1B+ worldwide).

Comparing those people to the richest few thousand people in the US and Europe is very disingenuous.

My comment did not compare those enjoying detached single family homes and large vehicles and flying to vacations with the richest few thousand people in the US and Europe.

Avicebron brought up inequality as the root cause.

DavidPiper indicated only the few thousand richest as the root cause.

Rayiner questioned if those few thousand richest have the means or capacity to reduce inequality.

estimator7292 responded that everyone has to help reduce inequality.

To which I wanted to point out exactly what would need to be sacrificed, because it would involve sacrifices among the top 10% to 20% of the world (constituting many on this forum) which those 10% to 20% would not even consider a "luxury". It is easy to claim a billionaire's private jet is an expendable luxury exacerbating inequality, but the reality is the bar is far lower than that (see statistics on energy used per capita, which can serve as a good proxy for which side of the inequality the lifestyle you might expect is).

That is why we are all mostly talk and no walk, because push comes to shove, we can't even get a sufficient fossil fuel tax passed to slow climate change for our own descendants, much less voluntarily decrease our standard of living solely for the benefit of others in the world.

Yes, but in the opposite way to what you think. Do the math, there's billions of people consuming the overly cheap, massively subsidized goods and services parent listed; there's only so many billionaires and they have only so many billions, and most of it is just fake bullshit accounting paper-shuffling anyway.

I have no idea what you are trying to say. Forbes Real-Time Billionaires covers the full ~3,000-person list. The 2025 annual snapshot: 3,028 billionaires with combined net worth of $16.1 trillion

And that is just the public list. We all know of people with family fortunes that don't show up on any of the public lists.

No, no, no you get that all wrong. MY lifestyle is just about fine and okay. but the ones above me should all pay more.

There is a wild difference between asking people not to eat apples in December in the northern hemisphere and asking people not to move wealth around to avoid paying taxes when they have more resources available to them than multiple countries.

Comparing middle income 1st world citizens to dragons on their mountains of gold is disingenuous at best.

> Comparing middle income 1st world citizens to dragons on their mountains of gold is disingenuous at best.

Those two groups are on the greater side of the inequality, and the third group is on the lesser side of the inequality. All the dragons on their mountains of gold can stop existing, and the inequality barely changes.

Is what you say really controversial?

Except for commercial flights (which I would easily give up for a hopeful society), I do not find anything on your list remotely relevant to my happiness or well-being.

Imported cheap goods are obviously something all of us consume a lot, but we only need them to feel good in comparison to our neighbours.

As long as we keep them for hospitals and medicine, the rest going away would be just fine. Children would play with whatever they can find instead of cheap plastic toys, we would have to learn to multi-purpose our tools instead of having a specific object for every minor purpose.

Most of the younger people don't care about most of those things. That preference just isn't reflected in markets because older generations control a disproportionate (unfair) portion of wealth.

I'd like to emphasize that the above should be immediately obvious. The fact that it's not does not bode well for humanity's future.

Billionaires simply _should not exist_. The fact that the power to shape societies is concentrated in so few can account for many of the existential threats we face today. AI is not "the problem", it's merely the latest symptom of our broken system and the prioritization of the wrong goals and outcomes.

EDIT: grammar

AI, automation, and globalization would all be uncontroversially brilliant if the benefits weren't distributed like "150% of net benefit to capital, -50% net benefit to labor, better hope some of it trickles down brokie!"

I wholeheartedly agree, these are all "tools" at our disposal. We're just holding them wrong.

>Billionaires simply _should not exist_. T

If American billionaires couldn't exist then America would be even poorer and underdeveloped than Europe, the entire tech industry wouldn't exist, and it'd be entirely at the mercy of China. Because nobody's going to start a business in a country that violently confiscates their wealth just for being successful. The envy of people like yourself is a deep moral illness that destroys civilizations if left unchecked.

"violently confiscates their wealth just" Sure are jumping to some...conclusions there.

Have you actually spent an appreciable amount of time outside of the US? Europe isn't the place of destitution and squalor you imply. I highly suggest it, to widen your perspective at least. Maybe then you'll see it's quite the reverse in many cases.

> America would be even poorer and underdeveloped than Europe

Sounds like a self-defeating argument to me.

> Billionaires simply _should not exist

Billionaires who inherit their wealth shouldn’t exist. But I have no problem with people like Bezos owning a sizable percentage share of valuable companies they created. When I was a kid, getting something ordered by mail took a week or two, even if you called in the order. UPS and FedEx existed, warehouses and storage trucks existed, but Bezos reduced that to a matter of hours. And now the sheeple can get their daily Amazon deliveries while complaining that Bezos is making a nickel on each one.

In a purely analytical calculation—without emotional nonsense—one Jeff Bezos obviously is vastly more beneficial to society than thousands of ordinary people. If we just had school teachers, or whoever else you idealize, we’d all be living in mud huts. The average person would be living like an animal without the technology created by exceptional people like Bezos. Why shouldn’t society reward them lavishly?

> If we just had school teachers, or whoever else you idealize, we’d all be living in mud huts.

Let's just look at countries which have high income and very low income unequality, like Finland.

Turns out they don't live in mud huts, and most aspects of society work far better than in the USA.

Bezos didn't create that wealth alone. He had help from thousands upon thousands of people. It's impossible to calculate how much of the value of Amazon was actually created by the work Bezos did, how much by other people in the company, and how much was just natural evolution brought about by technological and societal change. Bezos gets billions because he is in a position of power where he gets to take it, not because he created that much value.

But even if Bezos actually creates billions of value on his own, it doesn't mean that he should get those billions. The reward for such high value work should be high enough that Bezos chooses to do it instead of something else, but it doesn't need to be higher than that. In a world where the highest paid position would reward a few million instead of a few billion, I'm sure Bezos and people like him would still gravitate towards that work since it'd still be work with the best rewards.

People who have some revolutionary ideas wouldn't abandon them if the potential highest reward was millions instead of billions. Or do you believe that there are people with good ideas right now that abandon them because they can't earn trillions with the idea? What people expect as a reward for their work is what decides whether they do it or not. If we can lower the expectation, we can get the high value work without creating dangerous levels of power concentration.

My parent comment points out why society should not "reward them lavishly" as you say. However, I would (and did) put it in different terms. I'll elaborate as I think you misunderstand me.

I have no issue with incentivising and rewarding individuals who contribute great works. Any rewards, monetary or otherwise, would be fine if our institutions could continue to serve all and not just the few "rewarded" individuals.

Unfortunately, time has proven that money and power are intrinsically linked and those same few will continue to shape how and what paths humanity takes at large. I'm simply stating we should tread more carefully and not place all trust in a few cult of personalities as many seem to, and your response implies. Perhaps the stories of the self-made individual and the chances of becoming one of those few (however vanishing small the chance) is too ingrained in our collective psyche that we blind ourselves to what parts we actually play in this game.

The trade offs here aren't as simple as getting packages sooner rather than later. The tradeoffs are accepting a brutal, fuedalistic society where the negative outcomes for the many are disregarded for the positive outcomes of the few.

Perhaps the negative outcomes are too "invisible" in our daily lives because we, in tech, are isolated enough by nature of being fairly well compensated for the work we do. This in all likelihood will change if history is our guide. I personally know many individuals that work 2 or 3 jobs to be able to afford a roof over their heads because of wage suppression by corporations like the one you mention. Teachers, healthcare workers and the like. You may not see them as important but you may want to reflect on why. Meanwhile, the commons are actively being destroyed: hard won clean air and water protections are being rolled back. My father is dying of cancer because of exposure to chemicals that corporations actively lobbied to hide from the public at all costs, even though they were well aware of the dangers. These are the real results of direct corporate lobbying efforts made by the rewarded few. I don't see this as an "emotional" argument to make, but rather an inherently humanist one.

My children are growing up in a world with dimmer prospects than I or my parents had. If this is simply the cost of faster packages, than I want none of it.

A quote that stuck with me: "We are all crew on Spaceship Earth. There are no passengers." And anyone that thinks they are the captain, is wrong.

At societal level money is not a resource.

Money is just a way of keeping track to how high of a fraction of the future output of the civilization any one person or entity is entitled to. This is by consent.

With AI all is subject to change.

> With AI all is subject to change.

Nope. AI is an accelerant that makes the divide between rich and poor grow even faster.

Raising taxes is the only possible way a UBI would be feasible, and even then it wouldn't be a large enough amount for most people to live off of.

Also, a UBI is likely to cause inflation.

I don’t understand why welfare is the answer. To me it seems we’ve super failed if that’s the case — just brings everyone down except a few ultra rich people.

If the promises of AGI pan out, there will be nothing a human will be able to do better than an AI. If humans can't contribute economically, what else could things look like?

UBI is not welfare. It is just a livable minimum wage, for everyone who works. For those who cannot work, it replaces welfare, but that is not it's primary purpose.

As a welfare replacement, it is much more efficient, since there is no effort spent determining who qualifies. People can spent their money however they want, rather than the patchwork of separate programs we have now.

It doesn't need to bring anyone down. It's just a different way of distributing what we already receive. For you ordinary workers, they will receive $X in a monthly check, and their salary can be reduced by $X (since the minimum wage can also be abolished).

That does mean that the desirability of some jobs will shift. Good. We have a bunch of very dirty jobs being done for minimum wage, even though demand is extremely high. I'd love to see the garbage men and chicken processors get more money for their dangerous work.

And if I get less for my cushy desk job, oh well. Especially since we seem to be putting all of the effort into replacing me, and none into the jobs that come with hazards to life and limb.

A UBI is basically impossible to implement on a large scale without there being significant downsides. In what world does increasing the budget by a trillion dollars or more work out well?

We are about to crank the budget by a half trillion just for the Department of War. Nobody seems to think that's a threat.

Plenty of people do.

The annual minimum wage (at the federal level, not counting states with higher) is around $15k. There are about 267 million adults in the US.

That is double current federal and state welfare spending.

I'm dead tired right now so I'm sure I'm missing something, but considering that is far below the poverty threshold in any big city, I dont think we'll be solving anything by eliminating welfare in favor of UBI.

UBI is basically of no benefit to the upper middle class or wealthy, and it won't be enough for the poor who cannot work enough. It really only benefits the upper lower class and lower middle class the most.

That sounds right. But I think that's a reasonable goal.

It doesn't benefit the wealthy at all. They come off worse for it. (There are revenue-neutral versions but I don't think they suffice.) But I believe that they can afford it, and will find the result a healthier America that they won't want to abandon.

But surely you can see that if the main selling point of UBI is

"Everyone gets a livable minimum wage! Oh by the way if you had a cushy desk job, that's gone because Claude can do it, or you get paid peanuts to manage Claude instances if you're lucky. Don't worry though, you can still make big bucks by working as a garbage man or at a chicken processing plant"

and the alternative is

"Burn the data centers down"

then the 2nd option may have a bit more appeal?

well inflation is equivalent to a flat wealth tax that doesn't consider insoluble assets, and is entirely in the hands of the government that imposes the UBI.

"cause increased prices for consumer/essential goods" is what you meant (since buying power is moved to people who are reliant on buying them), but this is a one-time transition to a new equilibrium (so is mitigable by increasing the UBI to account for it), not a constant ever-looming devaluator.

True, but again, the other points are more damning.

We're talking about an increased federal budget in the hundreds of billions/trillions to support such a UBI. That will cause a massive increase in taxation on the people who can still find jobs.

To make matters worst, the government in 10-15 years will likely be spending ~25% of it's budget on interest payments alone. Hiking the federal budget up even more sounds like a hard sell.

I’m not saying it would be revenue neutral, but a UBI would (or should) eliminate a bunch of various other entitlements. Even social security should be relatively non controversial to get rid of.

As opposed to dead people because no one is hiring to pay people to participate in a market they've been evicted from?

You seem to think feeding the population is optional. The current form of government and personal asset accumulation is actually much more optional in the situation.

Look at Rome and what it had to do when the system shock of so many slaves disrupted labor. Wild that Roman patricians understood you have to...like...feed society, but modern right wing Americans don't.

There is currently more than enough total production for people to live quite well.

If AIs simply replace people, the same total work gets done. It's just a matter of who gets the profits from it.

It won't be that simple, to be sure. Nonetheless we already produce far more than subsistence, and there's no reason why a UBI would change that. If it increases the price of some commodities because now everyone can buy them, I'm ok with that. It already horrifies me that some go hungry in the fattest nation in history.

If that were true, we wouldn’t see the inflation we do from more dollars chasing the same (or less) goods.

Even if it were true, you still have distribution. You can’t get goods across a nation, let alone the globe, without significant inputs.

Are you checking the local grocery store and extrapolating globally?

Inflation is more likely when the net number of dollars increases without a corresponding increase to production. Taxing earners at a higher rate doesn’t do this. Printing money at the central bank does.

If nearly everyone is already covering subsistence needs directly or via assistance (SNAP, food banks), why would UBI cause inflation? the only thing changing is who buys it

A national dividend from the combined profits of all companies.

Frankly, the entire world is now paying for what is happening in the US.

Were you talking about specifically how do you restrain the power of massive corporations to harm people? AI is coming but a lot of the other things that are happening are preventable - like the rise of no-benefit gig work.

That is a great question for those in power to figure out before the masses get upset enough to harm them.

We all do. With our taxes. It’s just that the people allocate our taxes refuse to spend it responsibly. We could fix education. We could take care of the unhoused. We could treat addiction. We could pay for healthcare for everyone. They’d much rather blow money on military spending and stupid unnecessary wars and funding genocide.

The richest nation in world history and we can’t spend any of it for the betterment of our citizens. It’s disgraceful.

We gotta end citizens united, corporations and weapons manufacturers are incentivized to lobby congress and enable wars and starvation abroad. Billionaires need to be taxed out of existence so we can stop spending our collective wealth on dumb shit contracts for palantir and elon musks dogshit companies.

They should absolutely pay for it through higher corporate taxation which is how businesses are incentivized to grow their business instead of stashing away wealth. Get rid of citizens united corporations are not people and they have stolen our democracy.

The question is not how much they have, but how much they will have once all the replaceable jobs are replaced.

If I understand what you're saying it's that as rich as they are, the amount of money the ultra-wealthy own just doesn't add up to nearly enough to give everyone a quality of life that they deserve / once had?

Perhaps what's happening is that in their attempts to reach a personal all-time high in their bank accounts the ultra-wealthy are destroying value and economic systems en mass with little regard to the efficiency of their money siphoning process?

It's kind of like a drug dealer selling brain burning addictive substances to a few people on a street. Sure they're going to extract a person's life savings to date and whatever money that person can steal once they're addicted but that value pales in comparison to what that person could have made over their career, what it could have made if properly invested, the cost of law enforcement to deal with these addicts, the cost of the stuff that they destroy in their quest to get money to buy drugs, the opportunity cost of them not raising their kids to be productive members of society... like it all just snow balls all so some asshole can make a few bucks...

The ultra-wealthy are doing that shit where people burn acres of pristine forests to get some biochar -- but to the entire world.

  Isn’t it strange
  That princes and kings,
  And clowns that caper
  In sawdust rings,
  And common people
  Like you and me
  Are builders for eternity?

  Each is given a bag of tools,
  A shapeless mass,
  A book of rules;
  And each must make-
  Ere life is flown-
  A stumbling block
  Or a stepping stone.

What is a stumbling block? Who are they made for?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stumbling_block

Turns out it's a fictional object created in the translation of the Koine Greek for "obstacle".

Generalize "people with billions of dollars" to all Americans - and then this logic will start to work fully.

"Until people with salaries of many dollars per hour behind them do something with that money to offset the financial hardship that they're knowingly - and gleefully - bringing to others 90% of the world that live on less than 2 dollars per day... The distinction has no practical use."

Moreover, these people do not simply lobby the government, but directly elect it, and actually have many times more money at their disposal than the rest of the world.

Yes, a billionaire and substitute teacher have the same political power in America. Couldn’t have put it better myself.

>>Until people with salaries

Salary (income) is a horrible choice to serve as the marker to determine a person's (family's) fair share contribution to the burden of paying the costs to operate a society. Not everyone is so poor that working for a living is a matter of survival.

I can think of only one universal marker that would assure every citizen shares the burden of paying for society's costs equally: wealth.

Adjusted in a manner that the financial impact of one thousand dollars to a full-time MacDonald's counter worker is transformed into a dollar amount that causes the same relative financial impact to everyone, all the way up to the wealthiest family in America.

Ownership of the economy is split roughly 30/30/30 between the top 10%/1%/.1% with the bottom 90% of people making an entrance as the rounding error. If you picture "the owners" by drawing a representative sample of 10 people:

    1 Normal person
    3 Doctors / Lawyers / Engineers ($1M+ net worth)
    3 Successful Entrepreneurs ($10M+ net worth)
    3 Ultrawealthy ($50M+ net worth)

It's worth putting these through the fundamental theorem of capitalism (rich people get paid for being rich in proportion to how rich they are) to solve for passive income from asset appreciation. Plugging in the crude figure of 10%/yr (feel free to bring your own rate):

    1 Normal person 
    3 Professional ($100k+/yr passive)
    3 Successful   ($1M+/yr passive)
    3 Wealthy      ($5M+/yr passive)

You get your incentives where you get your money. Most people get most of their money from working, but the wealthy get most of their money and incentives from the assets they own. In between it's in between.

Are the in-betweeners part of the problem? Sure, but we have a foot on either side of the problem. We could get hype for many of the plausible solutions to aggregate labor oversupply (e.g. shorter workweeks) even if it meant our stocks went down. Not so for 6/10 people in that sample. The core problem is still that the economy is mostly inhabited by people who work for a living but mostly owned by people who own things for a living and all of the good solutions to the problem require rolling that back a little against a backdrop that, absent intervention, stands to accelerate it a lot.

EDIT: one more thing, but it's a big one: the higher ends of the wealth ladder have the enormous privilege of being able to engage in politics for profit rather than charity/obligation. A 10% chance of lobbying into place a policy that changes asset values by 10% is worth $1k to a "Professional", $50k to a "Wealthy", but $8B to Elon Musk. The fact that at increasing net worths politics becomes net profitable and then so net profitable as to allow hiring organizations of people to pursue means the upper edge of the distribution punches above its already-outsized weight in terms of political influence. It goes without saying that their brand of politics is all about pumping assets.

America only has the shallowest appearance of a democracy where voters get to control who is elected.

The electoral college system, coupled with it's winner-takes-all implementation in most states, means that voting is a sham for 80% of the population. The other 20% live in a swing state and their vote can at least potentially affect the outcome of an election, but even there "your vote" will literally be cast opposite to what you put on the ballet unless you end up being part of the winning majority.

The wealthiest group in the US is the 70-95%, they have over double the wealth of "the billionaires".

But we can't talk about this because it includes a large tract of the white collar everyday man workforce.

This is why the focus is so heavy on billionaires, so heavy on increasing minimum wage, so heavy on protecting immigrants. Those are all virtuous values that also bolster the value of the 70-95%, while piling all the blame (and responsibility) on the 1%.

The wealthiest group in America is doing an excellent job at protecting (and growing) their wealth.

(for those wondering, the "back breaker" of this class is zoning laws and new housing, everyone is aware how intense NIMBYism is in the middle/upper middle class hives).

The top 5% of the country have around 60% of its wealth. It is logical to bring that number down.

It's only logical when you view that wealth as a Scrooge Mcduck style vault of gold to raid, and are ignorant to the fact that it's almost entirely mark-to-market assets that have zero ability to buy food or pay for housing.

The middle class has the gold vault (well the closest thing), and that's where the redistribution would happen.

If you don't believe me, look at Europe. You can be a baker and make $35k yr, an SWE and make $65k yr, or a doctor and make $100k/yr.

You may say "Yeah, that's great, they live happy lives!"

But then convince American engineers they need to take a $140k paycut and the doctors a $220k paycut so that we can pay bakers $10k more a year. They'll just tell you the billionaires are the problem, and you'll believe them.

The top 1% own 31% and the top 10% own 68% of household wealth.

The group you’re talking about, 70-95 percentile, are often people that just own a house near a big city or a farm/small business.

Tbf many of them are nimbys who made it impossible to build more homes in or near that city

Yeah, and those people will be forced to liquidate their holdings (aka sell their houses in a market where most of the houses are for sale) to pay their share of the “wealth tax 2.0” after the “Billionaires” version fails to bring in enough money to pay for all the things promised.

Exactly. This is why I don’t support all the current wave of Democrats’ “wealth tax” policy ideas. There isn’t anywhere near enough money in billionaires pockets to keep the promises they’re making - especially once you account for them simply fleeing overseas, and also for even if you “catch” them, the downward pressure on their assets’ value that forced liquidation would have.

Once the Democrats who are elected on the fantasy of making Musk and Bezos pay for everyone’s past and future college/student loans, Medicare for all, UBI, high speed rail, while simultaneously closing every fossil fuel plant and subsidizing clean energy to replace it at the same cost — once they’ve failed to raise enough to pay for 1/10 of those promises, they’ll be coming for everyone more “wealthy” than $100k net worth.

You can just look how successful the USSR was, or China before they sold out their own Communist ideals. Most people were just subsistence farmers, or factory workers living in crowded minimalist apartments if they were lucky.

Well, the top 10% richest people control 67% of the wealth, and top 1% richest have 30% of the wealth in the US. The top half has > 97% of the wealth.

It appears you are the one very confused about wealth distribution in the US. Maybe you are confusing "income" with "wealth hoarding". The hoarding is happening to a gross amount, and this is why there should be a 1% tax on fortune portions over 100 million and 2% on portions over 1 billion. That and going back to the 70% tax over incomes in the top bracket (eg > 10million / yr)

Those taxes are coming. Trumpty Dumpty and the oligarchs brought it on themselves. Maga grifters are getting f'd in the midterms. Maybe maga should have picked a few dear leaders with some integrity instead of greedy frauds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

Edit: downpout all you want, doesn't change the facts.

I'm more curious who with a NW >$100M is hoarding it? Everyone I have come across is hoarding approximately 0% of it.

Maybe Notch when he sold Minecraft, apparently he had $2B sitting in a bank account, but I'm sure by now he has deployed it.

Bloomberg Billionaires Index publishes daily net worth for the top 500 globally. As of end of 2025, the top 500 totaled $11.9 trillion, with $2.2 trillion added in 2025.

Forbes Real-Time Billionaires covers the full ~3,000-person list. The 2025 annual snapshot: 3,028 billionaires with combined net worth of $16.1 trillion

Forbes 400 (US only): 2025 cutoff was $3.8 billion to make the list. Forbes publishes the aggregate annually and recent years the total net worth was over $5.4T for the 400.

Really? Because GDP vs household income graphed over the last 40 years paints a rather clear picture.

Billionaires have no right to exist, at all.

Well it's not just the money they've also stolen our democracy and have complete control on society, media and now the public lands as a whole.

They've also stolen a good economy. The economy in this country worked best when corporate profits were taxed at a much higher rate and companies were incentivized to grow business and we could create more jobs for people. Through their grip on society they have stolen that wealth and good economic output.

We have plenty of evidence that tax cuts do not fuel economic growth look out our industry right now there are massive layoffs everywhere and it's not because of dogshit LLMs

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policycast/olig...

>consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies

Make lobbying illegal, I don't understand why it's normalized.

Who is going to lobby to make it illegal? Our system is broken and won’t fix itself.

Inequality is going to continue to increase until society collapses. If we want a better world we need to prepare for this eventuality by building avenues of popular action to return power to the people. Once the oligarchs have fucked up enough people’s lives, popular action becomes a realistic way out of this mess.

Legislators elected for that policy, I suppose.

Friend, they choose our legislators. They control the political process. They own the mass media and the social media companies. Denial isn’t a strategy.

You say this literally minutes after Hungarians elected them selves out of a dictatorship.

I know many democracies around the world are in critical failure modes at the moment (particularly in the USA). But there is still hope. With enough pressure democracy can be reformed.

The US was founded upon corruption and continued that tradition throughout history. It's so normalized that almost nobody recognizes it.

isn't it an attempt to give structure to something that surely would have existed illegally otherwise? banning something doesn't automatically stop it.

Lobbying is "directly advocating for or against particular legislation or regulations." Writing your representative is lobbying. Fighting bad legislation is lobbying. Any good faith attempt to argue a position on a government policy is lobbying.

Giving money to politicians or their campaigns is not lobbying, and it is already illegal for lobbyists to do so.

What could and should be made illegal is allowing unlimited political campaign donations via Super PACs. Political donations aren't lobbying.

It's worth being clear about what you actually want to make illegal because you probably don't want to ban anyone from arguing a political position.

It's one thing when a bill on technology is misunderstood by regulators and insiders provide context on unintended consequences, another when checks are written such that the voice of polluting industries outweighs voters' desire for clean air and water.

I was replying to someone who said we should make lobbying illegal and they don't understand why it's accepted.

"Checks are written" is vague. What do you want to make illegal? Super PACs? I had just said they should be made illegal.

America isn’t the only country on earth, it’s just one of hundreds of others. That alone makes me confident about future not being even 1/10 as gloomy as some people think.

We have a lattice of diverse legal and economic systems in the world and it takes just a single one to figure out the solution for others to learn from.

America routinely ranks fairly low on the "happiest countries" rankings. Currently #24 behind most of Europe, with the Scandinavian countries typically at the top.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...

Clearly other countries are doing something to keep their citizens happy that the US is not copying.

Given that US politics and policy is driven by lobbyists and tribal infighting, would you really expect anything different?

> consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies who know the domain best and are agitating for better financial and social safeguards for all.

To hear Marc Andreessen tell it, the US tech industry's rightward turn in the 2024 campaign was specifically intended to head off any attempt to regulate AI [0]. So the blame rebounds to tech CEOs even if you believe that only the government should take a holistic view of a given technology's impact.

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-06-11/marc-andr...

Yes, our tech leaders would rather send america into fascism that have any impediments put in the way of their business plans. It is disgusting, and sad.

I do think there is a good chance that, in the not-so-distant future, universal basic income will become the norm. In previous industrial revolutions, large numbers of jobs were created to offset those that were lost. But there are very few things AI cannot perform faster and cheaper. Best case scenario, we will be in a world with both high productivity and high unemployment. Governments may have no choice but to provide universal income to everyone.

We can’t even deliver on universal healthcare. UBI is an even bigger pipe dream for american politics.

UBI, at best, will only fix one aspect of disruption. Income is not the only reason why people want to be employed.

UBI requires a wealthy elite class to tax from that also does not capture the government and reduce or eliminate the UBI. The status quo shows us that if a wealthy class exists they will capture the government and eliminate benefits for the masses. Thats why minimum wage does not rise and as another commenter said we do not have universal healthcare.

> Until people with billions of dollars behind them do something with that money…

Or until actual people take the billions of dollars sitting behind those weak man-children. The US has fewer than 1000 billionaires now, and more than 300,000,000 people. That seems like a solvable problem.

Concrete examples please

To paraphrase The Donald:

Just wait ... in two weeks ...

The french invented the guillotine. Works wonder.

I suggest you keep going with that math. I'll use the numbers from here [0]. 924 billionaires with an overall wealth of 7.5 trillion. Split among 300 million people, that's about $25k for everyone.

Here are some points of consideration:

1. They don't have $7.5T in liquid. The average american won't be able to use that $25k to pay a hospital bill or eat. Also note that one-time wealth transfer won't even pay in full for one major surgery.

2. You've wiped away the incentive for getting-big mentality which drove some of the billionaires to innovate which advances society to this point. Think - discouraging a future Jobs from making another iPhone-like device.

3. After the one-time transfer, it turns out we need more money for the common folks. "Why is the line at $1B? Isn't $900m enough? The line should be $100m." And so on and so forth.

[0]: https://fortune.com/2025/12/08/how-many-billionaires-does-am...

The power and influence (and damage caused) does not scale linearly with net worth. And you don’t need to have money on hand to be able to use it to harm others, you can e.g. use it as a collateral for loans and funding to build your child crushing machine.

Personally I wager society would be better if the excess wealth of billionaires was simply deleted, or burned. It would be better yet if that wealth was used in our shared funds to build common infrastructure and services. Leaving such wealth in such few hands is really the worst you could possibly do for society.

Why not just force them to to build the common infrastructure and services, and in exchange they get to keep the money? e.g. Jeff Bezos has to build some subway stations in NYC or something.

That way you get somebody with a proven track record of building big projects who is also motivated by money, so the common infrastructure and services is handled competently.

Ah yes. Let's trust civic engineering to a man who ran a company that had front-line workers using piss bottles to keep up with quotas. This cannot possibly end badly.

> Why not just force them to to build the common infrastructure and services, and in exchange they get to keep the money?

Because it is undemocratic, ripe for corruption and abuse, will never work in practice (as the rich will inevitably find ways to game the system). What you are describing is basically just aristocracy, where the rich get to decide what is best for the rest of us.

Hm, wouldn't it be better to just have proper labour laws so that people are not worked to exhaustion in Amazon warehouses, for miserable pay?

Similarly properly regulate the gig economy.

And actually pay servers properly so that they don't have to rely on tips?

The today's life is enshittified by thousand cuts ... why not fix them?

All that is required is a legislative body that is not bought by big $$$.

Uh-huh. It brings clarity to say you'd be happy to have the wealth destroyed. These are two different concepts, and the second one (about redistribution) always muddles these conversations.

1. Billionaires shouldn't wield lots of wealth, because it's scary.

Sticking to that concept makes the discussion a lot clearer. Never mind concept 2, it's haunted by the futile spirit of Marx and he's throwing crockery around.

Personally I am a fan of logistical taxation, where the mean income (including capital gains) pays 50% in tax and every standard deviation σ above (or below) pays extra (or less) according to 1 / (1 + e^-σ).

What will happen with this taxation is that if everybody makes the same income, then everybody pays 50% in tax. If some rich dude is making a lot more money then everybody else, they will lower the tax for everybody else while paying a lot more them selves. At some point (say 3 standard deviations above the mean) you end up getting less after taxes then had your income been lower (say 2 SD above), in other words, the limit is 100% tax for extremely high incomes (and 0% for extremely low incomes). That is, I favor a system that has maximum income, and you are actively punished for making more.

Suppose it's 1999, and I'm planning to expand my online bookstore into a worldwide network of distribution centers and logistics, that can deliver anything at all to anybody, very quickly, though a unified web interface. How can I carry out this major business enterprise without getting very poor?

I guess the board would have to vote to keep my income at the optimum level, or just below, to prevent me from jumping ship to run a competing company that offers to pay less.

One can only dream.

I would rather you did not do that. You would create a shit tone more global transfer of goods accelerating global warming, and make societies dependant on unsustainable dirt cheap production practices.

Even if yourself could argue that you’ve done a good thing overall, I’d rather not take your word on that and would rather not have you decide something so extremely impactful.

Tough, I'm gonna do it anyway, but through some kind of non-profit org. Because my vision is beautiful!

The problem with billionaires is they have a vastly disproportionate voice in the political system, which leads to ineffective politicians and policies not aligned with a thriving society.

eg: cutting funding to the IRS and advanced science, both of which have long proven positive dividends… or advancing new wars abroad to directly blow up money.

Plus wbillionaires are nothing special. Right time, right place.

Steve Jobs is a perfect example of someone who was in it for the love of the game. He wouldn’t have been any different if his income was taxed at 90%.

Literal money transfer is not the point. It's about power and concentration of it to insulate future consolidation of power.

Money is made up system to provide a relatively stable society; if that stops working it's not good; violence becomes what's left.

Maria Sam Antoinette and brethren saying let them eat cake (or everyone will just build new things with (our) AI) without a sense of what is happening / about to happen to the broader populous is on a similar track.

The "billionaires" should use their influence to help with this transition invest figuring out how these new system will work.

No one should care if that means more "millionaires" vs less billionaires these numbers as social constructs; the point is power and self determination. History shows lacking that for too many will breakdown to broad violence and or dystopic robot overloads guarding a diminishing small and isolated elite.

The time to course correct is now.

> 2. You've wiped away the incentive for getting-big mentality which drove some of the billionaires to innovate which advances society to this point. Think - discouraging a future Jobs from making another iPhone-like device.

Am I meant to believe that we wouldn't have iPhone-level innovation if inventors couldn't become billionaires?

This makes no sense. We have so much more innovation than we have billionaires, always have. Ability to become a member of the 0.001% is not a barrier to innovation, not in America, not anywhere, and never has been.

No one serious is claiming there should be zero wealth inequality. Inequality is ineradicable. The claim is that wealth inequality can reach a degree that becomes corrosive to society as a whole and severs the link between innovation and profit, because it becomes more profitable to hoard wealth and collect capital gains and interest than it does to innovate and create things in the real world.

It's entirely possible to preserve (and in fact would actually strengthen) the profit motive if we changed incentives to get rid of the wild capital hoarding we see today.

In general, this is total bullshit. But in the particular, Job made his first billions from selling Pixar to Disney, not from Apple.

The distinction matters.

For example, the people fighting inequality can use AI to their advantage, and focus criticism on billionaires (and general bad AI usage, like slop PRs) instead of ordinary AI users.

Yes a slop arms race between the disenfranchised and the inordinatly wealthy will solve things /s.

If this was actually a threat to entrenched inequity, we simply would lose access to the necessary memory, GPUs and matching fields of server fleets. Oh wait

Keeping lid on boiling peasants rage have always been chief qualification of aristocracy.

Plus I don't believe in violence from tech bros and white collar workers - they have been raised too docile...

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