Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
fortune.com
fortune.com
It could be an interesting thought experiment to consider the second and third order consequences, even if, from first principles this is a non-starter in a democratic society.
First off all, what percent of people do not pay any taxes on income? What portion of them are poor vs. hedge fund managers or other super wealthy people who have structured their income in a way as to pay zero or near-zero income taxes? Would the latter be disincentivized from continuing those regimes?
Regardless, if you work at Shopify, you should consider quitting. You do not have to work for a crazy person like that.
[1] https://financialpost.com/personal-finance/high-net-worth/wh...
(assuming that he's not paid a salary by anyone else)
But, yes, under the proposed scheme, Lütke doesn’t get to vote. One may rest assured that this was a simple mistake. In fact, I’m sure he meant that only those pay capital gains tax get to vote, not income tax.
This is all very beneficial for big business including Shopify: businesses can pay lower wages since the government steps in with benefits, including food, cash, housing, energy, medical care, and so on, for people with lower incomes, and then that means they have more money to spend as consumers (relevant to Shopify).
Someone with 3 kids earning $26k gets about $10,000 in cash back per year (wiping out $2k in payroll taxes) and $12k of food stamps. Assuming they spend 100% of their cash on either taxable items with 8% sales tax or rent with comparable property tax, that’s still net minus -$5,280.
If we include food stamps and the value of Medicaid at $500 per head per month it’s net minus -$40k. And that doesn’t include things like housing assistance and energy assistance.
Such a person DOES pay gross taxes… they just don’t owe on net.
Even more interesting (and less deliberately manipulative): The government could make it voluntary. Below $X tax liability, you can choose a total refund - but you can't vote. That would be voting by those who actually care about the vote (or who owe more than $X).
Oh, you know if something like this was implemented, those people would re-structure their income so they pay $1 in income tax.
Or they wouldn't bother, because they have far more effective ways of influencing the political process than voting. This would be purely about disenfranchising weaker people who could get in the way of them getting even more power.
This is a strange phrase - initially you had to either own land (therefore pay tax) or else if you lived in a city and didn't own land but paid sufficient tax[1], to vote in the early United States. Only taxpayers voting was our first principles! We only changed it later.
[1] I'm simplifying slightly because different states handled this differently
The end-game to stripping voting rights from people is to surely enslave them or kill them as otherwise they will end up using violence to effect change. Personally, I don't understand how most people don't see how evil and twisted some of these "industry leaders" are.
I think it'd be interesting to only allow people a vote if they are jobless and/or poor i.e. the bottom rung of society. That would tilt society so that we would put much more attention on raising the living standards at the bottom rather than aiming to give more power to sociopathic CEOs.
There's some revisionism going on here. Women did not want to vote. It was the feminism/communism movement that brought on women suffrage. Had the USSR not succeeded in planting this, we likely wouldn't have ever gotten it.
If you modify this slightly to the percent of people who are not net taxpayers, meaning you subtract transfer payments (including social security, medicare, medicaid) to them from the taxes they pay (including social security, medicare, and medicaid), it's about 60% of the country, which tracks quite closely to the percentage of Americans who could not afford an unexpected $1000 expense.
Most of the country is on a constant financial cliff.
Your 60% figure is reasonable, though, as the gap between 28% and 60% is people who are paying a very, very small net amount, mostly via sales taxes or other taxes that exist like taxes on airplane tickets or hotels.
It would be interesting to see the class of doctors, lawyers and small business owners fighting against the class of large cap c-suite and the billionaires.
If you want to get rich, you need an healthy, educated, rich and secure customer and employee base. You don't get that with <~2% of GDP spent on health, education, roads, police, courts et cetera.
Most corporates, for starters.
Seen in that light, it might not be such a bad idea.
Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system. Every part of the system has trade-offs that must be evaluated. You can make a logical argument that any other policy is open to abuse, etc. But why do you have to accuse other people of being “crazy” for having ideas about how to engineer a system?
However, I would describe the idea itself as being "crazy" as it seems like something that could very easily be abused. There's a long history of voting laws being twisted to deny certain groups of people (e.g. slaves, women) and of course, there's the old U.S. intelligence tests that they used to give to black people to validate whether they would be allowed to vote (spoiler: the tests were ambiguous enough to invalidate everyone subjected to them).
Imagine if this was implemented and then some bright spark announces that Starbucks workers no longer have to pay income tax. Then, following the election, an immediate decree is made that Starbucks workers are now the property of Starbucks and are not considered to have individual rights.
God, tech people should have stayed in basements.
If I'm a civil engineer designing a bridge, I think it's perfectly reasonable to call someone crazy if their plan is to build it out of Popsicle sticks and unicorn tears. Or more appropriate for this discussion, from the bones of poor people. Wasting time on their nonsense not only makes it harder to reach our actual goal of building a bridge, but reinforces the nonsense notion that all ideas are equally valid or worthy of consideration just because someone voiced them.
So you're coming at this from the wrong end. The goal is explicitly to keep the poors from having a voice in politics. The exact policy and enforcement of the system will reflect that. Unintended consequences, like the rich being disenfranchised would not occur.
Right, because the tax system (generally) taxes income, not wealth. Not taking this into account is like asking "you're millionaire, yet you don't have any income, how come?" to a retiree. According to the new york times article that broke this story, most of it seems to be from his loss making businesses elsewhere. Moreover in recent years he has been paying tax, as those losses have stopped.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-tru...
The distasteful thing is people refusing to contribute to society, especially for long periods of time. I know many people who have various mental and physical disabilities (some severe) who insist on working. Some able-bodied people can't even match some with severe disabilities. It's sick.
Any collectivist commune would kick you out for this.
It's also interesting you use the McJob angle, because when you consider the price of a Big Mac, labor is by far the largest contributor of cost, not profit.
A Big Mac's cost is 30% labor, 25% ingredients and only 5% net profit. The remainder is operating costs. Seems like a pretty good deal for the people making the Big Mac, they're getting 6x more than the franchisee gets.
hell yeah, dude, I LOVE that I can lose my health insurance if my manager's manager decides he doesn't like the cut of my jib. Why shouldn't I lose my right to vote, too?
I'm not married to that number, if people think it should be half a billion, or 100 million, or whatever, I'll go along with it.
They are egotists. It’s one of the biggest parts of who they are.
Tax and "money paid to the system" is a red herring only an entitled super rich person would think is relevant.
The best definition of democracy that I've ever heard is that democracy is war by other means.
When you take away someone's right to vote, or make their vote less important than someone else's, you take away the only non-violent means they have to affect change.
Democracy is an agreement to put aside our weapons and resolve conflict peacefully. Take that away and you end up with violent revolution.
They have forgotten that they also live in the very same physical world as the poor. Most of them don't even live that far from the poor.
Perhaps they don't consider the implications that nobody can fight a mob.
If they were as smart as they want people to think, they would think about these things and perhaps shut up (at least in public!) about making things worse for the poor.
Second fun point is that he and his oligarch colleagues would find themselves with no votes: I guarantee I pay more income tax than this guy and anyone else in the multiple airplane owning class. Marvelous.
It is of course a fairly revolting idea but one which has some interesting unintended consequences, not least that we might suddenly find the rentier class figuring out how to declare income of $500,001 instead of a loss every year.
I will add that voting blocs do shift. In fact, in the last two US presidential elections, retirees actually broke for the Democrat. That could have something to do with Trump or be an actual trend.
Additionally, these rich people do pay a lot of tax, they just do it through different parts of the tax code and at a lower overall rate (by avoiding social security and Medicare taxes by way of earning through long-term capital gains). On the other hand they also own more real estate than you (probably) in desirable locations and pay a lot of property tax they can't avoid.
All that notwithstanding I sense that the root of this discussion that this guy's getting excoriated for, was exploring how to short-circuit the phenomenon wherein older people, voting at higher rates (and holding office long into their old age), secure for themselves preferential benefits at the expense of struggling younger generations. The thread took off in a strange way from there, but... I guess I like where it was trying to go at the outset.
I believe there was a very interesting conversation happening here.
It occurs when an expert in one field passes judgment or makes confident claims in another field where they lack true competence or formal training.
You should have skin in the game to vote (citizenship as a minimum in national elections, for example). It used to be that owning property was that gate (land, specifically, not income). So how do you get an electorate that isn't just interested in voting themselves free stuff?
I honestly don't know. Raising children properly is a sign you're invested in the future, but holy cow would I not want a government test for that. Let's stick with citizenship... If you really want to fix the electorate, you need to fix education, and re-socialize values of merit (individual responsibility, liberty over ease...). Not an easy or simple proposition.
A principled society is superior to a ruled society, we just don't like to pay what's needed for the former and land in the latter as a local minima.
How times have changed.
2. We already have a gerontocracy. Tying income to vote-weight just solidifies the problem since most people earn more as their career progresses.
3. An alternative: grant voting rights to all under 18, proxied by their parent/legal guardian. This provides better alignment to the interests of the future than good fortune.
Charging people for their fundamental rights.
It happens in many different ways. Look at all these people that just want to live and they can't even do that without having to pay to exists.
It is getting to be like that movie "In Time" where there is a clock you have to keep funding or you expire.
And by that I mean people who "earn" their wealth through mechanisms that aren't direct income. Heck, give an exception to the tax on the first million of non-income based wealth. But something has to change because their money is their power and they deserve less of it.
But like pretty much everywhere, Canada does not tax unrealized gains. At least they don't have the silly loop-hole that the US does of the step-up in basis on death.
There are some "reasonable" exceptions one could argue for, but as soon as you start making exceptions, you open yourself to abuse of the system. For example, using the tax code to enact social policy. I think it would be more honest for the government to take in all the money as taxes and then turn around and distribute money for socially beneficial programs such as green energy, schools, public health, et cetera. If you look at who screams about this, you'll probably find that most of them are opportunistic people who are afraid somebody will cheat the system better than they do.
This would also be a good opportunity to create an independent, transparent organization that audits where the money goes and provides raw data they use to justify their actions to the public so that others can double-check their conclusions.
#IfIWereKing
I’m only half joking.
Obviously this asshole does not mean it like that. What he means is that only rich assholes like him should get to vote.
If we are in the phase of just spitballing shit that should be considered unacceptable in a society where we are meant to coexist, I would spitball the idea that the time for his neck to meet the guillotine is long overdue.
Moreover, everyone who gains any amount of power becomes protective of it.
That's basic human nature. As a conservative, I under this.
It's just fundamentally a stupid thing to say, and the fact he says it in public strongly indicates that he's lost contact with anyone who will challenge him on this stuff.
The biggest con they ever pulled off is making working class people (and yes, that includes you, fellow tech workers!) hate unions.
Unions are the only way workers can fight back - they may be able to tell individuals what to do, but they can't control the collective.
This is also why they're so feverishly trying to build AI - they finally want to have workers that have no way of organizing.
Or Thiel saying that "democracy and freedom are no longer compatible". I wonder who's freedom to do what he's talking about? Surely he's concerned about the little man? [1]
Or Elon Musk cutting USAID and causing all sorts of death and destruction around the world [2] while enriching himself from government coffers. [3]
Or Marc Andreessen calling the concept of "social responsibility" an "enemy of progress". [4] Sure wonder what his idea of progress is! I'm sure it's great for everyone given that it's opposed to even the notion of social responsibility!
And that's just in our little tech world! If you venture out a bit further, you'll find many more gems, like Tim Gurner complaining that workers have gotten "arrogant" and continuing to say: "We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around." [5]
Sure, it's all just one rich dude making an offhand comment. Or maybe all of them making offhand comments all the time?
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/16/oracle-ceo-larry-ellison-s...
[1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/07/elon-musk...
[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/13/business/musk-trillionair...
[4] https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
[5] https://x.com/kenklippenstein/status/1701658625280704599
Hasn't affected the bottom line one whit.
Everyone gets screwed in this system but especially those paying a good amount of taxes and getting fewer votes like the 200-400k range. Or maybe not especially. This just an outright terrible idea.
They have failed again and again. There is no reason to believe Lutke's worthless dreams will go unchallenged if they are ever attempted in the first place.
You can be biased. I, for one, am biased towards democracy and am comfortable telling people to fuck off when they question it. I don't need to debate it. Just fuck right off.
Social contract is a difficult subject, and people don't think about it enough.
But thanks to this clickbait headline, thousands of readers may come upon an articulation of why current enfranchisement is more desirable than arrangements that preceded it. In other words, it's a chance to learn what's worth defending and how our current situation might be improved.
Why don't we tax stocks like we do homes with a property tax? Why am I paying property tax on the majority of my net worth, but billionaires are not?
Also, I know all about the buy/borrow/die strategy and I have an idea for that too. Let's tax all loans as income. They are, in fact, income. "B-but they have to be paid back!" That's income again, the bank should pay tax on it.
> [they] have filled their skulls with a sense of moral and intellectual superiority - that because they have succeeded at work, they understand society better than others, and can only perceive the world through that lens of privilege
When was the last time you saw Craig Silverstein or Steve Wozniak or Urs Hoelzle or David Cheriton or Jan Koum or Jawed Karim in the news? You don't, because they don't seek fame. At most you might see them on the donor list of local museums or cultural attractions (which they are, abundantly). Even Marissa Mayer, who was very much seeking the spotlight until she got the Yahoo CEO job, has basically fucked off to the sunset and now just runs some extravagant haunted houses in Palo Alto and helps fund the Junior Museum.
There's plenty of tech wealth that's very quiet, basically keeps to itself, and limits itself to some quiet local philanthropy. But by definition, you don't hear about quiet wealth.
They have the money and power, but tech people in particualr lack the social graces and awareness that previous generations of rich people needed to operate. They think very highly of themselves, but all that "intelligence" doesn't prevent them from acting stupidly.
They just didn’t all have instantaneous global reach while sitting on the crapper, like Henry Ford with a Twitter account.
Even the Hearst type ones usually had time and human machinery between the formation of idiotic notions and it reaching other people.
I'm not saying they were great. I'm just saying they probably spent more of their formative years interacting with real people than messing around with machines, so the tech lords are probably even worse.
-maxxing, "mogging", "NGMI", I'm literally going nuts waiting for Gavin to start asking trump "DYEL"?
You can trace a lot of what is wrong with 2026 back to the right-wing countercultural movement on 4chan, probably along with meme culture in general.
The left rots from them and the right becomes more extreme and everyone is losing all the time. Meme-banning sites like HN and stackoverflow look brilliant in hindsight, to me, with them knowing what they were doing all along; and now there are so few havens from them.
I know this is also a trope, but id always hoped the human race would be consumed by something more sophisticated. But it seems like memes was all is took.
angry young men will vote to abolish democracy -- and have, in Europe circa 1930s -- if you can convince them it'll benefit them.
step 1 is to start speaking to them in ways they connect with.
put another way, with the boomers dying rapidly, the largest source of MAGA is young men...
There is no place for a young man who views masculinity through a traditional lens on the left.
It's simple. I think a large percentage of the population (maybe even most) are truly, innately bad. By "bad" I mean that they would always choose to benefit themselves over the wellbeing of others. Social constructs and the need for social acceptance keeps most of those tendencies at bay, but when a person gets enough money and power, they're able to express/project all of that badness and with little consequence to boot. There are endless examples of this throughout history. Right now, tech is giving a small percentage of the population outsized power and influence. We shouldn't be surprised with the result. Humanity is what it is.
But many of the wealthiest people I have known were also the least happy, driven by an insatiable urge to be great, and despite achieving vast success, were never able to feel or accept that they had already achieved it. It was never enough.
Remember how a few years back, all these billionaires and corporations were all talking about DEI and taking the knee and George Floyd, and (insincerely) shoving it all down everyone's throats?
It just became socially more acceptable for them to show their true colors.
Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior
This is just because the latest people to have gotten crazy-rich came from tech. IMHO, the same can be said of all people who became emperors in a minute. (which is a whole new thing)
We are all just humans, and none of us are evolved for this. This could happen to anyone of us... could it not?
I think many of us have seen the changes that occur when this happens. Again, we are just not evolved for this. How could we be? The number of people that this happens to is a tiny fraction of the species, and so those who experience this, get really weird.
The asymptotic equivalent of $20 "burning a hole in your pocket"
Here's to hoping for more batmans and less lex luthors
I am good at solving X and Y, and have deep knowledge in those areas, therefore I'm good at solving problems everywhere.
it's like how people says scientists should run the world but have never seen how utterly tribal and often brutal researchers can be.
I can't imagine many aerospace manufacturers turning down a contract with SpaceX because Elon said something politically incorrect. James Damore, on the other hand...
This isn't hate towards these rich guys (I think everyone should be able to say shit like this), just pointing out that we as a society hold them to different standards than we do regular people.
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
We’re at the point where Musk (and others) are regurgitating literal Klansman rhetoric, in addition to the usual anti-democratic stuff. This is extremely far from normal.
And before anyone claims it's selection bias from within my left-leaning circle, I was well involved within the Tory circus until recently (a couple of years back).
Silicon Valley is very far from all that. More broadly I think it's a reflection of the isolation (physical, cultural, etc) of SV.
all I see is "scam, BS, slop"
Maybe I'm trying to rationalise their behaviour too much but it feels like techbros have gotten a scarcity mindset.
You don't get to shift it without raising questions about your motives.
Down vote me all you want, how does that billionaire taste sliding down your throat?
Billionaires can do what they what without real consequences, this would hurt even if it has no real effect. More psychological
Got it.
From the article:
"Pension recipients should have their financial futures “locked in and guaranteed,” but in return would be reclassified as “dependents” and lose the right to vote—the same way minors can’t vote. A reply from “Eric Thor,” who claimed to be a retired banking executive as well as “armchair economist and policy wonk,” proposed a sliding scale: zero votes for anyone who pays no income tax, one vote for those earning $1–100K, two votes for $100–200K, scaling up in that pattern to a hard cap of five votes for anyone earning $500K or more. The pitch was framed as fairness—reward “representation” for those who “foot the bill” through taxation."
"That was the good system that Lütke endorsed."
Most of the commenters here seem to be responding to...something other than this?
Another way to express the general disgust: that proposal is saying, "we're going to take away your power, but we'll still look after you, pinky promise!"
This is a relatively recent innovation; most democracies throughout history have not had this property, so it's hardly the "entire basis" of the concept.
It is, however, an interesting and possibly worth goal. The obvious problem (which has been noted by many previously) is that when the people making the decisions are not the ones paying for it the system is unstable (e.g. "three wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner", also "eventually you run out of other people's money").
This is a serious issue and possibly the biggest present threat to our current system. It's worth considering various possible solutions and thinking about what might work and what would likely lead to ruin.
If discussing these issue triggers "disgust" you may want to question if you are actually thinking about what is being said or just reacting emotionally.
> This is a serious issue and possibly the biggest present threat to our current system
Is it?
This would allow them to air their dumb opinions in private to normal people, where they could be gently mocked like the rest of us.
Currently there seems to be a dangerously quick pipeline for them between a thought passing through their minds, and millions being made aware. God help me if you all knew the things I've said over the years..
Prior generations understood more clearly that the physical security that underwrites great financial successes is all underwritten in blood. A better heuristic is everyone gets the number of votes equivalent to how many of their lives they could give in a conflict.
Handy side effect would be that if Jeff wants to buy some influence for Amazon, he could do it by paying all his warehouse and delivery employees better.
The only correct POV is theirs: there is no middle and lower class (having 1000 or 5000 more wealth than someone categorizes both of them as subordinate anyway), only the elite and the plebes.
Doesn't help when the government isn't maintaining or enforcing guardrails for the ultra wealthy.
This is a war on the middle class. Free and fair elections are the last hope that most have to resolve it peacefully, so of course those are under attack.
> I do not understand why anyone else would go along with this.
I've been asking myself that for 10 years. Through both traditional and social media manipulation, they found a way to get enough people to vote against their best interests, and normalize the behavior, that it doesn't matter if a large portion of the country is still paying attention and asking those questions.
eg the comments here: https://old.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1u8d9mq/olde...
The "if you contribute more, your vote should be worth more" sentiment would change a lot, because many actually rich people don't really pay a lot of taxes compared to higher middle class (engineers, doctors,..). If your vote was worth eg "log10(your-income-taxes + 1)" (to make buying a lot of votes impossible), more power would go to higher educated and higher paid people and less to people who don't contribute to society (at least not financially). Again, i'm talking about a society where pretty much everyone who works also pays income tax, and you're not cutting out the majority of poor people.
Would it work? Probably not, but i understand the sentiment.
Thus it feels like breaking that contract to have a substantial block of voters who will not only be recipients of increased benefits without ever having to pay more, but can run benefits programs into the ground and kill them without worry because they’ll die before that happens.
They don’t have any skin in the game. They stand to benefit, but never really lose.
I’ve not really worked that into a functional idea, though. The gist of my thought process is that you shouldn’t be able to vote on things where the delay on systemic issues occurring is beyond your life expectancy. So I could vote to change social security today, but probably not when I retire.
I have no idea how to quantify that delay in any reasonably objective way, though, and that’s where my idea falls apart.
It seems likely to become another political dog and pony show where the parties try to get arbitrary age cutoffs to get a demographic advantage. The idea that it would force parties to cater to younger voters more is interesting but I’m not sure a net positive. The impacts are too wide for me to gauge any kind of third order effects.
it has always been like this, has it not? almost by definition the more resources you have the more power you have. this is how the universe works.
Once upon a time only landowners were able to vote. Eventually that changed as the powerful realized that it was in their interest to share power, because they are vastly outnumbered and can have their riches taken away from them. It feels like we're getting closer and closer to today's rich classes having to learn that lesson again.
A huge pile of gold isn’t inherently powerful, you need someone willing to accept gold to do what you want. They would also generally be intimately involved in doing the thing, so you paid premiums for dangerous or unpalatable work.
These days technology lets you turn resources into planes, tanks, drones, etc in a way where 100 soldiers with limitless resources probably beat 1000 with a constrained supply line pretty consistently.
You see the same with domestic conflict. Once upon a time, finding and tracking down revolutionaries was a tedious, labor-intensive process that usually resulted in failure. Now those resources can be converted into surveillance that is much more effective, and much less reliant on another human being willing to help.
Now, it's not a complete overlap between the government and the rich, and there are points where the two sides may disagree - some oligarchs have been imprisoned and killed before. But if you as an oligarch know how to say the right things and associate with the right people, you'll be allowed to do almost anything you want with impunity. It's an incredibly corrupt might-makes-right society where the hierarchies of political and economic power have already settled and aligned with one another. Most oligarchs don't get to dictate what happens in the government, but their arguments are basically the only ones that they even listen to.
Aspirations.
We should “listen” to these people with the same attitude as we do”listen” to gas station lottery addicts, instead we give them WAY too much credibility.
In democracy, power comes from demos. In capitalism, power comes from capital. Demos doesn't have concentrated capital.
Try starting a new party without capital and backing from people tied to mainstream media.
People never had power. Whenever they've thought they have power (revolutions), they fought for one new power hungry scumbag to replace old power hungry scumbag.
Because, as Plato argued, the best rulers are the ones that don’t want to rule, as ruling is a very heavy duty, if not burden.
If you strip corruption, it has no rewards. Instead you have to put up with “scambags” accusing for the things the corruption they would do if they had the power.
Why does this sound familiar?
The word does have meaning. But underlying that meaning is a philosophy that there is an in group that should have power and many out groups from which power should be stripped. There is a long history of industrial leaders supporting fascist ideology.
Fascist political philosophy is about racial purity, militarism, autarky, and suppression of dissent through political violence. In fact, one of their methods of enacting such worldview was by appropriating the wealth of rich people to advance their own purposes.
Please educate yourself, it's free: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
It's not a statement that people shouldn't see fruits of their labor, but that past a certain point, its no longer about the fruits or even the tree, but the power that comes with it. In a democracy, those who get lucky in business are not owed power.
So yeah, billionaires and trillionaires shouldn't exist, because their existence is a side-channel attack on society. Pay enough money and rules don't apply. Past a certain point, that wealth should be heavily scrutinized and audited as if it's nuclear fissile material. Similar to the nuclear material, it can be productive for society, or absolute destruction.
And for what it's worth his kids are remarkably well adjusted and nice, if a little bit out of touch about what most people deal with.
Most people would retire with "enough" long before.
like he has literally everything he needs, and there is this massive number -- do something, anything with it. You have unlimited time, so chose to do something
"During Bill Gates’s tenure leading Microsoft, the company paid out an estimated $8.46 billion in publicly known antitrust settlements, competitor payouts, and government fines."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_charitabl...
the US is the most charitable country on earth as a percentage of GDP. There is so much philanthropy that the finance industry is building new businesses just to serve it
https://fintech.global/2026/04/29/the-philtech-revolution-wh...
There's plenty sociopaths that give to charity, because it's a socially accepted display of wealth, and because it is quite convenient for tax purposes.
It’s not a sustainable system. A better solution would be to change tax law so a “payer” can’t receive a larger refund than what they paid. No more credits, only deductions.
Stripping voting rights is a historical leading indicator of a trend to totalitarianism so it has to be nipped in the bud immediately.
In my opinion the real trend towards totalitarianism is inability to talk freely about ideas
It's easy and popular to talk about how important democracy or voting rights are. And that makes it a bit annoying because it deprives the possibility of freely exploring other ideas. There's no possibility of free speech or free exchange of ideas so long as portion of the population thinks we have to immediately nip dangerous ideas in the bud without exploration.
That's the point.
> There's no possibility of free speech or free exchange of ideas so long as portion of the population thinks we have to immediately nip dangerous ideas in the bud without exploration.
The "nipping dangerous ideas in the bud" language relates to those ideas being implemented, not being discussed.
Find us a person who honestly believes there a class of citizens (other than convicted felons, minors, and mentally incompetent) shouldn't have a right to vote who doesn't want to use it for political gains.
Would I rather live in a country run by scientists than deadbeats? Probably. But that's based on the idea that we live in a reasonably free society with social mobility where the difference between scientist and deadbeat is at least partially down to intelligence and work ethic. Hand all the power to the "scientists" though and it's not obvious that distinction would continue to be true past a few generations, because later generations of "scientist" didn't come up through the same free and equal society. I buy that the first generation of all-powerful scientists legitimately will want to turn the grocery store bagger into a future scientist. History suggests later generations will have no such interest.
Total everything up and if you are net payer you get to vote. If not no vote for you.
Even skipping the moral argument, there's a game theory trap here: let's say you run a government and your political enemies are on the poor side and fall into the "no vote" trap more often than your supporters. Obviously the solution to maximizing your share of the vote is to make them even poorer.
Then again I suppose it would be fine too if voters decided to socialise absolutely everything including bodies of other voters. After all that would be democracy. And they chose that no protections are needed and everything is common now.
So why does that principle change when some people are poor or when the tax structure is progressive?
What happens when the federal government passes new tax laws that prevent certain genders, racial groups, etc from having to pay income tax? Are they permanently disenfranchised? This would be a system that I think would rapidly move social progress backwards and concentrate power in the hands of a few groups.
And USA already disallows voting based on age. And somehow lot of people find it acceptable. Surely voting should be right from birth?
Also, surely you don't think a four year old should weigh in on who gets to represent them in Congress? We disallow voting on a minimum age, because children are still developing in all sorts of ways, there is no maximum age that takes away your right to vote when you reach it. You can't equate a minimum age to disenfranchisement.
The constitution still guarantees fundamental human rights.
Another idea - everyone is eligible to vote for the presidency and House of Representatives, but only net taxpayers can vote for the Senate.
The idea that there should be some kind of checks and balances on spending taxpayer money, where the people who actually pay the taxes have a special status, isn’t fundamentally incompatible with any principle that I support.
Obviously the current system - where we collect $5T in taxes each year and spend $7T, creating an enormous and ever-growing debt that the system is clearly not able to control - is not working.