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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> it is we have billionaires at all.

This line of thinking always makes me laugh. You don't complain when a doctors makes money by serving hundreds of patients every month right? Then, when someone builds a product/service that is used by hundreds of millions, or billions of people, the natural conclusion is that they will become millionaires and billionaires.

It's very natural, and very logical.

> we are talking about people who control more assets than some nation

How about folks who centralize powers like politicians in high level functions, who have not even been elected but appointed? How do you feel about that? They also can have massive influence on the world's affairs, even if they are not billionaires. I'd be way more concerned about that.

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> It's very natural, and very logical.

Being natural and logical doesn't make it moral or ethical. I think you're only kidding yourself if you believe that people deserve that much money and power.

> How about folks who centralize powers like politicians in high level functions, who have not even been elected but appointed? How do you feel about that? They also can have massive influence on the world's affairs, even if they are not billionaires. I'd be way more concerned about that.

Nice use of whataboutism. We can protest, resit, or vote for politicians and bureaucrats. A billionaire will be a billionaire unless the economy collapses or they decide to become a philanthropist.

Ideologies and violence caused so many disasters in history. At least money does not directly terrify us like that. Billionaires usually became victims of such disasters. In the end, money is not the ultimate power. It's violence that matters most on this planet.

And money grants control of violence. Either direct, as a drug lord in Mexico in the absence of a strong central state monopoly on violence, or indirect by simply being above the law in the US if you have enough zeroes in your bank account to afford the lawyers to make any accusations go away when there is a strong central monopoly on violence. Or on the reciprocal, you can use money to inflict violence through frivolous lawsuits or even worse the kind of patent trolling used by heinous groups to ruin ventures.

Turns out people want money, and will offer you violence in return for it if you offer enough to justify it.

> I think you're only kidding yourself if you believe that people deserve that much money and power.

And who is it to decide? What organization? Money is simply a proxy for utility in society (at least for salaries) based on demand and offer. Do you want to replace that by divine birth rights? Casts? Or cancel private property altogether? So far that's the "less worse" system we have found that does not make people live in abject poverty. And you know what, it's working. Look at WHO poverty reports: poverty is decreasing progressively around the world.

I guess they should feel lucky you don't get to decide how much money they are allowed to have.

I wouldn't want to personally decide or have a government which decides limits on wealth. I just hope one day American culture will be driven more by compassion, kindness and duty to common a good, rather than endless accumulation of material goods. At some point maybe cultural shame could embarrass the super rich to become more philanthropic. But that is quite wishful thinking.

Controlling enourmous amounts of assets makes humans extremely powerful, and that's the problem. Being good at making money is not a particularily wise way of assigning power to people, who not atypically go on using it to accumulate and preserve said power and become tyrannical.

There's no problem with someone having a billion dollars, the problem comes from those billion dollars being diverted into rent producing assets

Rented assets allow people to take advantage of resources without the hassle and expense of owning them.

If there is a demand for the use of certain assets without the hassle of owning them, why shouldn't some billionaire invest into that to meet the need.

Would you be OK if one person controlled 99% of the world's wealth? If so then what percent of the world's wealth concentrated in one person would make you uncomfortable? Why this percentage and not a lower one?

As it stands now there is a huge disparity in the distribution of wealth. Shouldn't there be a cap on how much one person can have and floor on how little a person can have? I think so.

My wife is a doctor in the U.S. Her salary is large. I think it should be less. But let's be clear that there is a huge difference between my wealth and the wealth of a billionaire. The delta between me and Bill Gates is quite a bit larger than between me and a poor person.

So let's accept as a hypothetical we do cap wealth. We all get to vote how much people are allowed to have. Yay. The people who have more have to do what exactly?

They have to leave the country with the fear of extradition at some point? They have to give away their excess, but who gets/takes the money? They go to jail? Who enforces/regulates that people are only earning/saving what they are allowed?

It's sounds virtuous to say "Things would be better with less wealth inequality" and I agree that it would be a better situation, but any means to actually move towards that situation gets ugly fast.

You're right, it's just too hard. We'll leave it to the billionaires to solve - I know one who says he's the only one who can fix it.

Sorry, my cynicism is showing. But we already have the organisation (IRS) in place to regulate people's income, and they already do exactly this job. Yes, we do need to find an impartial way to redistribute the wealth, but we have working models of an array of options around the world. With functioning government, this is really not that difficult.

This hints at the ideological chicken and egg problem here - wealth centralization breeds power centralization which breeds state corruption. The corruption of power through centralized wealth is presented as defenders of such wealth as an indicator of the states inability to impartially control such corruption.

The trick is the corruption already happened. The money was already too centralized, and has already done damage to the integrity of public institutions. That however is not a reason to abandon such institutions in favor of the monied interests that brought about the corruption, it is a reason to more seriously pursue means to purge the corruption and restore democracy. When that centralization of wealth causes that corruption, that means you need to address that vector in your ideology and policy goals as a citizen.

Ignoring it is just a long term means to eventually collapse the society as a self sustaining growth of both inequality and corruption consumes all prosperity and growth.

Reducing power centralization is the key issue. Lobbying is cost-effective, and it shouldn't be.

> who gets/takes the money?

The default option is putting it in the government budget. Seems obvious to me.

If we reach the point where this cap-tax is able to pay for the entire government by itself, and we still have extra, then we can worry about where the rest goes.

> Who enforces/regulates that people are only earning/saving what they are allowed?

The IRS.

We don't have a tax on wealth in the US at the moment. Implement a tax on wealth with a 100% take over say 1 million? This would just be basically the nationalization of most of the companies and much of the real estate in the US. We could try communism/socialism at this scale, but it has not worked out well in other places it was tried.

> This would just be basically the nationalization of most of the companies and much of the real estate in the US. We could try communism/socialism at this scale, but it has not worked out well in other places it was tried.

That's the "ugly" part. And it gets really ugly.

Yeah, nationalizing all companies would be ugly.

And has nothing to do with taxing personal wealth over 10 million (or other arbitrary big number).

It doesn't get ugly fast. The tax rate for the wealthy used to be 90%. There was a time in the country where it was recognized that robber barons were not in our collective interest. This is not an unsolvable problem.

90% tax on income not wealth. Our current system already punishes income earning over wealth growth and much gaming goes on by the rich to keep wealth growing while keeping taxable income low.

Generally when talking about tax rates in this context it's about the income tax. There is no wealth tax in the U.S. I don't think there ever has been one either. Reagan believed the tax on labor should be less than the tax on capital. I agree with him on this but the current Republican party has deviated quite far from where even Reagan stood.

> Shouldn't there be a cap on how much one person can have and floor on how little a person can have? I think so.

Why fix a cap? As long as you have a free market, people will compete and the fortunes of yesterday does not mean the fortunes will be there tomorrow. Plus, people die, so whoever was powerful 50 years ago is progressively replaced by the normal order of things, their wealth heavily taxed and split among their descendants.

> Would you be OK if one person controlled 99% of the world's wealth?

It would be great to stop drawing caricatures in order to have serious discussions. Otherwise anyone can make grossly inaccurate assumptions and reach extremely nonsensical conclusions anytime.

I wasn't drawing a caricature. I asked a question about wealth concentration. How about answering it? Is there a level of wealth concentration that is immoral or unfair? I believe so. I think it is the case that 500 people control more wealth than the bottom 3.5 billion. That seems absurd to me. The free market is not a great mechanism for controlling such an outcome given that we are in a situation of extreme wealth inequality. The distribution of wealth in the world is grossly unfair. And yes I'm in the part where my wealth is grossly unfair in comparison to the bottom 50%.

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