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Comment by nfw2 | Hacker News Reader

So you're saying the obvious solution is to force founders to liquidate all shares necessary every year to keep their wealth under 100M? How to keep short sellers from feasting on this? Who will the buyers be if everyone is selling around tax season? If the stock crashes because there is government-mandated short interest and no long interest are they off the hook?

On the point of democracy, none of the candidates who spend the most on major elections seem to be winning much lately, Bloomberg, Harris, Cuomo, Steyer, etc.

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> On the point of democracy, none of the candidates who spend the most on major elections seem to be winning much lately,

Thomas Massie was just ousted in the most expensive house primary in US history.

The difference between 1-2 mil that is normally spent and the $30+ million spent on that election alone.

Tom steyer spent half a billion to not even make it onto the final ca ballot

I think you'd find more examples of people spending much much less money to influence elections, or buy certain positions than you will people spending money to make the public vote for them. The money influences policies, regulations, wars, etc.

The problem isn’t necessarily that some one can buy a seat for themselves (though some people out there could spend 1000x as much as half a billion and still have 500 billion to spend), it's that for less than half a billion, someone can buy 20 house or senate seats for more conventional candidates that are willing to vote the way the financier wants.

Buying senate seats is for chumps. For $300 million, Musk got his own executive branch agency, a pseudo cabinet level position, and carte blanche to take a machete to all the programs he personally disliked including investigations into himself and his companies.

How about the doesn't need to be paid in cash? The government claims a percentage of the company over time...as always only above some level of valuation

No, the shares can be directly transferred to a government-held portfolio. Come on, think for 2 seconds, my god. If you're going to rage like this at least don't come up with strawman issues that can be trivially resolved in 2 seconds of thinking.

Of course the government should own everything! How stupid of us for assuming that's a bad idea.

How stupid of you for assuming they'd have to keep it, rather than slowly selling it off, indeed exactly like Mackenzie Bezos might do. You could easily mandate this.

Not to mention that the Norwegian Pension Funds holds $2 trillion in assets. UAE and KSA have ones over $1 trillion each.

And that's ignoring that currently an even smaller group of people owns everything, who don't even represent the public on paper. Quite stupid to assume that this is a better idea.

Maybe if you suck them off hard enough they will give you a few crumbs after you are done.

Beats sucking off a communist in order to not starve when there is a food shortage

Speaking of hunger, capitalist utopia is worse than a global pandemic: https://www.npr.org/2026/05/27/nx-s1-5836441/food-insecurity...

ok now compare it to food insecurity in north korea or venezuela

No one is advocating America to be more like North Korea or Venezuela. Democratic Socialism is what young people are asking for today. These cold war era dichotomies will die with the boomer generation.

It's so weird that taxing my property is straightforward but taxing the property of the capital class is so incredibly Byzantine and unexplainably impossible

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