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Comment by speff | Hacker News Reader

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...

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> 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.

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%.

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.

> 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 $$$.

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.

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.

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!

One can only dream.

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.

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

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