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Comment by chadash | Hacker News Reader

Since we all know that the wealthy will figure out how to cut the line, I wish we would just own up to it and auction off a certain number of doses and give the money to those affected by the pandemic.

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Agreed. It's the same a "donating a building" vs "bribing admin" to get your kid into an ivy league U.

The former essentially offsets the negative impact by creating positive externalities, unlike the latter.

How about we just have a wealth tax and give the money to those affected by the pandemic.

Too much for people to complain about.

In other words, loss aversion is a strong incentive.

People would rather over-pay to receive something than pay for a general tax (a loss) even when it would provide an absolute equivalent result.

Interesting a younger Donald Trump proposed a wealth tax back in 1999 (of 14.5% on $10M or more). But the 16th Amendment clearly says "income" tax. It doesn't say "wealth" or "assets" or "property", so any wealth tax without an amendment would fail on constitutional grounds.

Yes I remember him proposing that; as I recall, the quid pro quo was a concomitant permanent abolition of the estate tax, which would have a sweet deal for the Trump dynasty.

Because nobody is wealthy. The "wealthy" is always that other person who has more than me.

Truth is that everybody in the US (and Europe) is wealthy. The panhandler on the corner is making more money than the median daily income of the world population.

Until people admit "I am wealthy, and I need to help out" instead of pointing to whoever has more wealth than they do, nothing will change.

Simply not true. Poorer households give a larger proportion of their income.

> It is clear from the graph that when put in the context of their individual budgets, donor households towards the lower end of the expenditure distribution tend to give away more of their money to charity than donor households in the higher expenditure percentiles. On this measure, poorer donor households are more generous than richer donor households, those in the bottom decile donating approximately 3% of their budget compared with those in the top decile donating roughly 1%.

http://www.cgap.org.uk/uploads/Briefing%20Papers/CGAP%20BN7%...

Your argument is completely non-sequiter. My point has nothing to do with who gives what portion of their income. My point is that when defining who is rich, it's almost always somebody else. While taxing the rich more than the poor is a reasonable proposition, it usually will fail when defining who is actually rich, because most of whoever finds themselves defined as rich, will object and point to somebody making more than themselves as the "truly rich".

If a rich person gives $100 and a poor person gives $10, it's still just $10. It might be more of their income in proportion, but it's still only $10. It doesn't magically become $100 just because it was more of the poor person's income.

IMO a wealth tax completely misses an unspoken fact of finance: Tax evasion is illegal; tax avoidance is not. For every "wealth tax" you come up with, there will always be loop holes that the wealthy use to avoid paying it. Eventually the net gain is zero.

The only way for those loop holes not to be would be if the government were entirely staffed from top to bottom by poor people, including (or perhaps especially) everyone who is elected.

Speaking of which, you'd first have to ban all election spending. Campaigning would be done by marching in the street with a bristol board sign colored with crayons, taped to a softwood plank.

I humbly suggest not expecting and tolerating corruption.

How is it corruption if it's the official policy to auction off some of the vaccine to top bidders?

It’s basically a tax on the wealthy.

How is that preferable to a regular tax on the wealthy?

Because a regular tax wouldn't get them vaccines

That's kind of the idea. A regular tax and distribution also wouldn't keep vaccines from people who need them most.

They are not countering each other, do they?

Why not do both? And ATM why not execute a measure that is the one more acceptable to everyone, I.e. auction? I doubt any typical citizens would be mad at auction off 1% and use the fund to increase the total supply by 10% or even 100%.

Because the distribution proposed is taking vaccines away from the people who need them most.

If the problem is funding, then lets raise funds. We don't need to sacrifice our vaccine distribution for that.

Did you see the number I am proposing? How is that getting 110% or even 200% of the planned supply "taking away from the people who need them most"?

I think it's quite easy to setup the logistics of auction in such a way that it would have no impact on the distribution to the normal people. The rich can utilize their own expensive network of operators or let them figure out a way to get their precious vaccines and leave the mass infrastructure for the people needs them most.

"Let's raise funds" auction is rasing funds. And it's perfectly sensible to setup other channels of fund raising as well.

And again, auction is not countering anything else one can propose. It's about getting the rich to shoulder their fair share of running the society. After all their fortune comes from the society, they have more stake in maintaining and keep it running.

You're assuming that more money can increase the supply, but I don't believe that is true.

The supply of vaccine doesn't appear to be constrained by money.

Oh, that's something I don't expect. Then it makes less sense to do auction.

But, I still need evidence that money is not the constraints, or it could not help resolve other constraints. Please enlighten me with what you know.

Did I say it was?

By this, you disagree with the OP?

Mind you, any large system has good and bad parts, and they can change roles under different circumstances, across different time periods; some change fast and some slow; some never come back, and some can hop back and forth.

Auction with small amount of highly daughter after goods is a reasonable approach to demand fair share of social responsibility from the rich. After all, why do we want to grant them the same cheapness that they inevitably are entitled to but are not really fair to others?

Apologize if you meant differently.

Some people see this as corruption, but the correct way to see this is as an opportunity to get rich people to give money to everyone else.

When rich people are trying to give away money, we should try to direct that money to good causes. We have an opportunity to do that here.

What would you prefer: that rich people give away money, or that they keep all of it to themselves? If they want to give it away we should certainly be interested in how to direct it. If they keep it to themselves, nobody benefits except them.

I think the fundamental issue here is that they're not giving their money away for free. They're taking life-saving medication from people who need it more. People will die preventable deaths when we auction off our supply.

That doesn't really make sense. There has to be a point, and likely it's a pretty low figure, at which the life-saving value of getting and using money offsets whatever downside comes with giving a rich person the vaccine. Obviously receiving $100 billion for one vial of vaccine would be an appropriate tradeoff, you can save any number of lives with that money. Once you acknowledge this, it's also obvious that a much smaller amount would also save lives. An auction would likely kick up low to mid five figures, maybe even six figures, and the utility of that money is almost certainly higher than the single vial. This is even before you consider that the vaccine will wind up in the hands of rich people anyway, with no additional utility to anyone.

We expect it because it happens enough that to believe there will come a time it won't happen is foolish.

Tolerating, however isn't something that should happen. Though as people are discussing, maybe in this case turn it from corruption where it'll pad some people's pockets to a legitimate way to fund initiatives to help the less fortunate can be beneficial.

Is it right? No, but humanity rarely follows what's right when its more beneficial to certain people to follow the wrong paths.

Why don't we just sell a very limited quantity of Class A drugs and cut out the street dealers?

It's a nice idea, but barely skims the problem. Everybody else still wants it, and now they think it's okay to throw money around.

The problem we're really describing is too much money turning people into psychopaths. You'd let them spend it, I think it's easier to just make that a punishable offense. You can't be grotesque with money if you don't have it anymore.

The best thing to do would be to plow this money back into vaccine production and distribution, since that's the reason that the wealthy shouldn't be able to shortcut the process in the first place—it needing to work well for everyone.

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