You know, we should just drop the other shoe and reduce all taxes on rich people to zero. It's what they pay anyway. It would save us the money of pretending to tax them.
I find it strange to see such animosity against "the rich" on an forum dedicated to startups from a company that has helped created billions in market cap and mint several new billionaires in the process.
There is a huge difference between someone becoming so wealthy that they and the next 5 generations of their heirs don't need to do any real work for the rest of their lives, and someone figuring out a way to create a sustainable organization that provides real value to lots of people.
It is more than reasonable to want to encourage society to favor the latter over the former.
These ranks change all the time as wealth is created and lost. Very few stay rich through generations, but even then it's always invested in something, like businesses that benefit others.
These same wealthy people are the LPs that fund the VCs that fund the SV startups. It's a cycle.
Actually, accumulated wealth to that extent is almost always connected to anti-competitive practices and monopolizing a space to such an extent that people have no other choice then to do business with you.
Are you suggesting that there be some perfect steady state of companies that are neither too big nor too small and nobody can ever gain or lose in life?
I find that hard to believe, honestly. It seems like the biggest gains are to be made in rent-seeking, milking your customers, monopolising and forming cartels and just outright fraud.
Facebook is Facebook. I find their business model, their dark patterns, and their lies to people and politicians to be an example of what I'm talking about.
Uber basically skirted the laws of every city they operated in as if they had immunity. Not to mention all the other scandals the compan has been involved in or responsible for.
As for the other companies I don't know enough of their inner workings over the years, but I'm not convinced they are squeaky clean at all.
I've already said previously that companies tend toward monopolies and that's when problems begin, but that's on govt antitrust to handle properly. Whether it does is another issue, but it doesn't erase the fact that people have gone from 0 to B by creating companies from nothing and making a large impact of society.
It always seems to be someone else's problem when it comes to wealth adhering to the codified norms of a society.
>it doesn't erase the fact that people have gone from 0 to B by creating companies from nothing and making a large impact of society
How does the adage go? "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."
>> How does the adage go? "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."
And there we go. Not sure how that's rational or productive. I guess you'll be first to tell every startup that exits successfully that they're now criminals for what they've done.
Now you're just being ridiculous and I'm guessing you know it.
That doesn't invalidate anything I said and it doesn't support what you were saying very well at all.
Hitmen, heroin dealers and elephant poachers provide value to some people as well, but to say we should encourage those things simply because they provided 'value' is sociopathic.
Those things you mentioned are illegal. Nobody is saying you should do illegal things. But wealth generation is tied to value creation, and your stance seems to be that all wealth generation is from criminal means when that's clearly not true in the slightest. What else is there to say here?
No, I didn't.
You're just struggling to comprehend what I'm saying because in your free-market fundamentalist world view, companies are benign entities of wealth creation and nothing more.
I believe many of the things these companies do should be illegal. Many of them already are, they are just not fined/punished appropriately for them. It just becomes absorbed as a cost of doing business.
Lot of what Google, Amazon, Facebook Uber, Microsoft, Intel etc. have done to stay on top has been illegal but the fines pathetic. Other stuff should have bene illegal and people are slowly coming round to the fact. They all even colluded on keeping wages low, remember?
Of course you can expand out beyond tech as well. Enron fraud, HSBC drug-money laundering, DeBeers atificially limiting the supply of diamonds, Nestle claiming water is not a human right and fucking over Africans with their milk formula. I could honestly sit here all day and reel off instances legal violation after ethical violation after outright greed and exploitation from companies all over the world.
But it's too late now. Even making these things illegal now doesn't strip the companies of the wealth they accrued beforehand. They are entrenched, because the system encourages this with pitiful consequences.
I'm not naive enough to belive legal == moral and illegal == immoral. A lot of laws are lobbied by the entrenched to cement their own positions.
That and the constant attempts at reverting certain policies or actions that would make my QoL demonstrably worse.
These are all facts solidly backed up through studies over the years.
Mobility might have decreased in this country relatively (although without considering the cause) but absolute quality of life has increased with iphones in every pocket, on-demand services for everything imaginable, and white collar tech jobs paying mid-6-figures in one of the strongest currencies.
I have to again bring up the fact that this is on YC forums which have witnessed many people from many countries start with nothing but a few comments and build incredibly successful companies. Compared to the wars, depressions and struggle of prior generations, folks today are at a height of comfort and opportunity never seen before.
If you're not content to remain a crab in a bucket, it might be a good idea to meet some successful and/or wealthy people and learn from them.
Part of improving your situation is observing where the unfairness in the system lies and addressing it accordingly.
Legally preferably.
Of course, by the time you figure it out you'll realize that most wealthy people are not the evil sleaze we expect them to be and you'll take the same actions they do to protect yourself against destructive governments and financial regulations. It's sad that the perspective of those with scarcity mentality regarding wealth are often their own worst enemies.
The reality is that I'm doing fine in my career and managed to escape poverty for many reasons I've illustrated in the past. However what I saw and what I was trying to explain is that I saw my parents destroy their body (and in one case, lose their life) trying to improve their situation in a country that hardly gave a shit. I recall vividly the troubles my family had after my mother had a stroke because insurance companies decided that a stroke was a pre-existing condition despite her being in otherwise good condition.
Maybe you should stop making assumptions about people based on our animosity towards people that have actively made our lives worse in the past.
Of course a toxic environment makes life harder.
Glad you're doing well.
Because they have more money than I will probably make in my entire lifetime.
They are supposed to pay most of the taxes. They own most of the wealth.
It's pretty fucking straight forward.