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Comment by jmcgough | Hacker News Reader

Sure, wealth isn't zero-sum, but when it's built on top of people making $7.25 an hour with no benefits (or less than that as a contractor), it may as well be.

And yes, there are other options for solving problems like that beyond just a wealth tax, but maybe a wealth tax is part of the solution.

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> but when it's built on top of people making $7.25 an hour with no benefits, it may as well be.

But...it's not? The only person who has concentrated an unimaginable amount of wealth for which this might be true is Jeff Bezos's Amazon, except Amazon workers all earn a $15 minimum wage, 401k matching, and are part of the same group health insurance plan as the engineers and product managers. They happen to enjoy some of the best health insurance available to an entry level job that requires no college education.

Outside of Bezos, the vast majority of the wealthy pay their workers handsomely (Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Page/Brin/Pichai).

And even if this was somehow a pervasive truth, the solution to that is a basic income, not a wealth tax. A wealth tax wouldn't even come remotely close to funding a basic income. If you were to seize 100% of all wealth of the top Forbes 500, you would get enough money to run the current Federal government for 8 months. Not 8 months per year, 8 months ONE TIME.

Jobs don't just grow out of thin air. That $7.25 job is self-evidently better for the worker than whatever other opportunities they had available, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. Taking away that opportunity won't make their life any better, just means they end up on a worse job.

Well when we have lots of labor, and seemingly not enough jobs for people, even when they could be doing productive things that build their own wealth and others' wealth (like building homes), then that $7.25 wage being the "best" option is a failure of the system, because too few people I society have been empowered with the option of starting their own businesses, or having the access to the tools that would let them create wealth. Too much inequality, not enough people with money to spend, and not enough capital movement to allow people to create new jobs.

Capitalism is a fantastic means for directing economic forces as long as everybody has enough capital to do the voting, as it were. If only a few people hold all the capital, then only a few people make decisions and will often engage in capital strikes rather than risk the chance that their position may be threatened.

I agree that people lack opportunities and that's a failure of the system, but I think the problem isn't limited capital. I think the problem is the monopoly on land ownership. If there was land freely available, people would happily use it to generate wages, wealth, etc. Obviously land is a limited resource and we can't always just have more "freely available", but a land value tax could remove the monopoly and create new opportunity for development that's otherwise hindered.

I just read Progress and Poverty by Henry George and he makes this point very clearly. I highly recommend giving this book a read if you haven't yet.

> otherwise they wouldn't be doing it

This feels like a fallacy

Well one could always starve more quickly, or stop paying rent. "There are always options," as they say.

It is a fallacy and ignores the benefit to the economy that having a living wage level of pay for all citizenry vs the artificial corporate welfare support of having government entitlements (food stamps, medicaid, etc) making up the difference so that corporations can pay less. Lassez faire capitalism seems to be a common fallacy promulgated on HN a lot.

> Jobs don't just grow out of thin air

Correct, they grow out of having a middle class with purchasing power, who can buy products and services, thus creating jobs for those who provide those things. But the middle class's effective purchasing has been going down for decades, while the wealth at the top has been increasing. So something needs to be done to balance these flows of capital - the current situation is not sustainable.

This is correct, but a wealth tax is a bit of a non-sequitur, as it's a solution that has almost nothing to do with the problem.

If the problem is middle class purchasing power, then the solution should be to directly improve middle class purchasing power (via a UBI).

And no, a wealth tax will not come remotely close to funding a UBI.

I agree that a UBI will probably be needed in the future, and that a wealth tax alone won't fund it - but it could be part of it. The way I see it a wealth tax is more like a 'catch all' tax - it's a fallback in case the other taxes and regulations that should be in place to counter-act income inequality fail. Those rules are much more important, but we might as well have the wealth tax too.

Jobs also disappear when Amazon competes with other companies and wins which doesn't always leave heaps of choice in the labour market.

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