Right, because confiscating wealth from those that earned it, has worked so well across the civilizations and societies that tried it.
The more you tax, the closer you get to banning or stopping activity. If a government sets a tax rate of 100% at say a certain threshold, it would be a poor planner that would be earning anything in that category no?
If someone gives you a cake, and I take the whole cake it's clearly confiscation no? You got no cake at the end.
If someone gives you a cake and I take a slice (say 25%), then it is clearly not confiscation, since you got cake correct? Not only that, you got most of it.
Do you think groups of people spontaneously collect in ways that produce more value than they cost to exist? Even if there is no way to benefit from it individually at scale?
If you do, I can understand where you are coming from - it doesn't line up at all with my experience or extensive datasets I have, but I'd understand it.
If that can't just happen, then how did he not earn it?
Something else very similar would probably exist. And in that universe, people would probably go "Do you think DeNile would just exist if Ben Jeffries didn't do what he did?".
And since discussion about compensation on this site usually centers around the ubiquity of potential fillers of roles -- "Amazon warehouse workers are paid shit because anyone can be an Amazon warehouse worker!" -- it also shows that Bezos' humongous windfall for more or less at random fulfilling this not so much more unique role is monumentally inequitable.
Hopefully that was what you set out to highlight?
How much would be appropriate for the person who had the vision (back before Amazon existed) to build it, pulled the right folks together, hired and fired who it took to make it work, and structured them and the work they were doing to produce that over a decade - including all the reviews and direction through good times and bad? 1%? 5%? 25%? Even 1% is 16 billion dollars. Most people would argue it should be a lot more than 5% if you stripped out the dollar amounts and the names.
> How much would be appropriate... 1%? 5%? 25%?
I would argue that a flat percentage isn't the appropriate way to apportion. It should be something like 100% (spread amongst shareholders) of the first $1 million, then progressively less as you jump up in orders of magnitude such that by the time you're looking at 100's of billions it's less than 1%.
This models two things:
- The greater the value of the company, the more likely it is that this is attributable to a market flaw rather the providing of genuine societal value.
- There is a societal cost to wealth disparity (aside from political issues, it actually undermines the market mechanism). Thus as your wealth level becomes more extreme, you should have to provide more to society in order to earn the same marginal wealth gain to compensate for this cost.
> Most people would argue
That isn't an argument.