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Comment by _edo | Hacker News Reader

And what happens to society as a whole when we abandon a person's right to own the products of their labor? What happens when highly productive people decide they have better things to do than go to work and get taxed at 70%?

A lot of people like a carbon tax because it will lower carbon emissions, if you tax productivity it has the same effect. A lot of people like clean energy subsidies because it makes clean energy more common, unfortunately subsidizing poverty often has the same effect.

I'm not saying you're wrong to care, I'm saying it's not a simple problem.

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> And what happens to society as a whole when we abandon a person's right to own the products of their labor?

You don't acquire a $100 million fortune by performing 1000x the labor of a person with $100k, you get it by skimming the fruits of a lot of other people's labor.

No, you add value to their labor and in return get to keep some of it.

Or you can solve some previously unsolved problems which allow you to produce better products for lower costs than your competitors. This is how Carnegie, Rockefeller, Walton, Bernard Kroger, Aaron Montgomery Ward, Richard Warren Sears, etc. all made their fortunes. Even modern tycoons like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, etc.

Can they get too much market power and start stealing from society? Absolutely, that's why we have anti-trust laws. But to see a fortune and assume a theft is to fundamentally misunderstand economics.

> No, you add value to their labor and in return get to keep some of it.

How much value? Who determines how much you get to keep of it? These are highly charged political questions that have driven a lot of economic history!

> But to see a fortune and assume a theft...

I never said theft. I responded directly to the idea that people vast wealth is merely "the fruits of one's labor." And I stand by this statement: it is not, it is the fruit of many people's labor.

> ...is to fundamentally misunderstand economics.

I suppose I should tell my economics professors.

>A lot of people like a carbon tax because it will lower carbon emissions, if you tax productivity it has the same effect.

It's not the same situation, so there's no reason to think it'd have the same effect.

A carbon tax's effect would come from opportunity cost. A company stops a behavior because of a carbon tax when they've found something more profitable. The tax just shifts the line of "more profitable."

But what's somebody going to do if you tax their wealth more? They only "other opportunities" are leaving the country or having more free time. The first is definitely a risk to consider, but the second seems unlikely for the class whose income comes from just investing their wealth. Why not invest, even if the profits are smaller?

Taxing something makes it less common. Doesn't matter if it's carbon, cigarettes, sugar, productivity, or investing.

Tax investing and that shifts the line just like a carbon tax, except in this case the people investing are more likely to start buying politicians or sending their money overseas. Those things don't benefit society like having them fund the research and diligence necessary to find and invest in the next Google, the next Target, or the next energy revolution.

Here you begin to sound like you’re equating productivity to income.

There are many companies that produce little real world value, yet tons of income.

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