Comment by FussyZeus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FussyZeus | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not saying Bezos isn't entitled to the fruit of his labor, and he should certainly be wealthy. But what does he do at Amazon that is worth $45,000 a SECOND. Not per year, or per month or even per day, but per SECOND!? I put forth no single human being is capable of generating that much value for anything, at any time, ever, and certainly not the guy who made it so I can remotely order Tide with 2 day shipping.

As a concept, I don't hate the rich. Some people will inevitably have more than others and I believe it's a solid carrot to dangle from a stick to get people to put in their best. But there comes a point where people are making so much money, to the detriment of the economy as a whole, and it's not doing anything. It's just running up a score for the person involved.

What on Earth can you even DO with 112 billion dollars? There's nothing you can't buy. You could buy everything a few times over and still have enough money to never work again.

And in and of itself, I wouldn't really care, except we have millions of people who can barely afford food, let alone the other necessities. We have diabetics dying because they can't afford insulin. We have combat veterans killing themselves because we broke their brains and don't take care of them afterwards. It should be a source of national embarrassment for us.

He doesn't have 112 billion dollars, he owns shares in a company worth that much, which have to be sold to be converted into dollars.

If the government seized 75% of it, the government would be left holding 80 billion dollars worth of stock, which they can't really do anything with.

The problem with stocks is that when you sell it you have to have buyers on the other end. This is called liquidity. I doubt there are enough buyers of Amazon out there to sell 80 billion worth, so what is the government to do, just hold onto it? They could try to sell it all at once, causing the stock to crash. Or they could sell a little over time.

I suppose you could create a sovereign wealth fund with the seized assets, sort of like what other countries do with oil reserves (Norway, etc.) But all that does is create a giant, government run investment fund, which will invest in businesses, etc. Not exactly redistribution...

> If the government seized 75% of it, the government would be left holding 80 billion dollars worth of stock, which they can't really do anything with.

You're thinking very narrowly on the current set of rules of the financial system. That system was created by people, capitalism is not some immutable truth that we've slowly learned over the years. It's a set of systems built by people, and so it can be changed.

That being said, I don't think we necessarily need asset seizure (at least, not yet.) I think just simple taxation would suffice. It seems insane to me that Amazon paid no taxes at all. And on the personal end for Bezos himself, I think a good first step would be capping the amount that can be deducted for philanthropy, not just for Bezos, but for all the wealthy of the country; charity is nice and all, but it's a little odd that we let you deduct it from taxes, no? It's not like 5 million to the Metropolitan Museum is going to benefit society the same as 5 million in tax revenue.

I think you're missing the point. The idea that Jeff Bezos is worth $112 billion is itself an arbitrary construct of the current set of rules, almost entirely based on current estimates of how much Amazon is worth and current understandings of what claims stockholders have on a company. It has very little to do with the amount of wealth he has in any concrete sense. If we wanted to get $50 billion from him within a year, no matter how much we're willing to change the rules, we could not do it because he doesn't actually have that much money.

> the government would be left holding 80 billion dollars worth of stock, which they can't really do anything with.

The government seizes securities all the time and sells them with no problem. They probably couldn't sell all 80,000,000,000USD of stock all at once but neither can anyone else.

You are conflating money and wealth which are not always the same.

Money is a medium of exchange and price is the subjective measure of how the market values wealth.

As some comments stated, most of the money Jeff owns come in the form of stocks which is priced at a certain amount, paper wealth, and is not spendable until it is sold and turned into cash.

The real wealth is Jeff’s ownership of all the things that actually produce goods and services for the economy.

Examples are the distribution centers, data centers that run the site, and the army of engineers who produce software and hardware for the company. Arguably, he and his company have contributed a lot to the economy.

Yes, he is obscenely rich but saying it’s not possible to make X amount of money a second is naive because monetary value is a subjective measure.

In Zimbabwe dollars, Jeff makes like a trillion a second.

Remember when the stock market lost trillions of dollars or whatever during the 2007 depression?

That was paper wealth, monetary value that was reflected in the price of actual assets until it all evaporated during the housing bubble.

Borrowers and stock owners lost a lot of paper wealth but lost their dignity more than they lost real assets as borrowers never owned anything and stock owners owned absurdly price stocks that were bound for a correction.

Some rich people killed themselves over this too, which is funny.

The federal budget is $4 trillion per year. Bezos has $100 billion once. Whatever problems we have, Jeff Bezos having $100 billion isn't what's stopping them from being fixed.

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