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Comment by rpiguy | Hacker News Reader

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...

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> 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.

> 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.

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