Hacker News Reader

Comment by dana-s | Hacker News Reader

If there's no cap on a ceiling, is it fair or humanly okay when someone's wealth is Epstein-enough to own other people's lives? Wealth is a proxy for power, when someone has more power than legal systems or enough to swindle all of it, is that a better world?

There should be a ceiling or we reach the current state where accountability is nothing a million dollars can't buy.

View on HN

Do you seriously believe the by limiting people's wealth, we'll solve problems like this? Humans used to have thousands of times less wealth than we do now, yet people still had power and influence, harems and slaves, cults and gangs.

Solve? Likely not. Improve? Of course. Policies that improve the state of problems even if they remain unsolved are good.

More than one million people die of TB annually. We have a cure for it. Elon Musk could pay for testing and treatment distribution for the entire world without noticing a change in his wealth.

A million people a year.

I feel like you should read about systems thinking. You're ignoring so many potential side effects, so much history, so many statistics, incentives, human psychology. The idea of capping wealth in order to try to prevent certain power imbalances like sex trafficking, is similar to firebombing your house to fix a leaky pipe. Not only would it mess up a ton of stuff, but it wouldn't even fix the problem.

The idea of capping wealth is to cap power imbalance, without power imbalance many things would not be able to happen within a system, alas there are as you say many potential side effects, implementations of how a cap could work would have to be discussed by society, right now I do feel people are very mad about inequality as is, what solutions are there for it?

Of course there are side effects. The question is whether those side effects are worth the benefits we'd get.

Millions dead every year from TB. A curable disease.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com