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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

I think 100% is too high, but I'd consider 80%-90% reasonable.

There comes a point at which marginal wealth stops having much utility, other than as a metric to compare yourself to others.

Steve Jobs's behavior provides a decent demonstration of this. He was okay taking a $1 salary because it cast him as the great CEO taking a hit for his company. But when the board insisted on paying him, he told them their offer was too low. He wanted to be _either_ the great sacrificing CEO or the great CEO who is equally well-compensated, because he didn't actually need the money, but he wanted the reputation from it.

If it's just being used as a yardstick anyway, we might as well tax most of it.

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There comes a point at which marginal wealth stops having any utility

No there doesn't. Whatever you can't spend goes towards making sure your descendants are taken care of. Or you can donate it to the various charitable organizations of your choosing.

Only to the extent that the disutility to other people isn't too high. Imagine, say, the CEO of Foxconn pushing their staff to the extent that an unusually high number commit suicide, then dying and choosing to give it all to a cat charity. Are we really saying that's the best we can possibly achieve in terms of human social organisation?

Fuck that. Leave your descendants no more than 10M each and anything over goes into a social dividend. It's the "you got to be incredibly wealthy for decades and leave a fortune to your family and now you can repay the society that gave you all that wealth" tax.

If we make it as easy as we do to become incredibly wealthy, we should make it just as hard to stay wealthy.

Lol. If it were easy to become wealthy then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion. Besides, a social dividend implies that somebody else decides how to spend my hard-earned money. Fuck that!

> Lol. If it were easy to become wealthy then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion.

That doesn't logically follow. I think that a great portion of what makes wealthy people wealthy is blind luck. That's not to say that Jeff Bazos isn't a great businessman or a hard worker, but I'm not convinced he's the greatest businessman there is.

> If we make it as easy as we do to become incredibly wealthy, we should make it just as hard to stay wealthy.

What possible reason could one have for making it “hard” to stay wealthy, other than pure spite and jealousy? How does it benefit society in any way?

Circulating money is a good thing. Stagnant money not so much.

Wealthy people invest their money. It doesn’t “stagnate”.

Extreme concentration of wealth is detrimental to society as a whole.

How exactly are you measuring “concentration of wealth”? And why do you think high values of that measure are “detrimental to society as a whole”? Take note of the difference between cause and effect.

You can also start projects that mere mortals can only dream of, and hedge your bets against amazing technology being available only to the wealthiest people in the future.

I think that it is great that Jeff Bezos was able to grow his wealth by owning a good part of the company he started and now is in the position to spend about $1 billion a year on developing rockets and spacecraft.

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