Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by UncleMeat | Hacker News Reader

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> So if I read right, you think being a billionaire is unethical.

I did not intend to say this in my post. I said that a billionaire's capacity for harm is greater than that of other people, so it is worse to be a hypocrite. But I also do believe that simply having a billion dollars is unethical as well, or at the very least antisocial.

> Say you’re right, how do we prevent people being billionaires?

This is hard. But I do not believe that "enforcing a policy that prevents billionaires is hard" is a reason for believing that being a billionaire is pro-social behavior. It would be both difficult and probably unwise to create a policy that punished people for cheating on their spouse or (less seriously) flaking on a social engagement without notice. But I think it is thoroughly reasonable to still say that those things are unethical.

I think that the challenges of policy preventing billionaires are largely related to enforcement and management of illiquid assets. I do not think that such a policy would disincentivize entrepreneurs. I believe that few entrepreneurs get into the business for the purpose of becoming a billionaire. Ending up with 900M is not going to cause anybody any tears. And if it is the case that such a policy disincentivizes entrepreneurship, then it sure as hell proves that the claimed incentives like personal satisfaction, self determination, job creation, and providing value to customers are all bullshit.

Thanks for engaging in sensible discussion.

I think it’s self evident that very rich people have more capacity for both good and bad, as they have more power in a capitalist society. To debate further there is a debate about capitalism, and whilst I’d like to see more social democracy and less laissez faire, going beyond capitalism is not something I want to jump into…

So I think ideally you’d like to see billionaires give up their wealth voluntarily, right? That seems internally consistent.

I think your last point is a good one, particularly a good response to those on the right who are always against progressive taxation: the cash should not be the only or perhaps even primary incentive. At least for entrepreneurship.

One issue with saying “900m enough” etc. is that often billionaires (or rich folk) are really just rich on paper. If your company is private it’s not necessarily easy to liquidate, for example. And maybe sometimes you want people to “own” lots of money in the sense that they need to steward it (maybe you want them to be an Angel investor, for example).

I guess I took you away a bit from “unethical” to “how do we solve it?” And it is still valuable to have ethics that cannot be enforced, because you want to be ethical yourself and be able to advise others.

I'd like an actual policy that prevents people from accumulating (or at the very least, leveraging) $1b in wealth. But I won't let the complexity of said policy affect my opinion about the ethics of accumulating so much wealth. Those are completely independent topics.

There are logistical issues with illiquid assets. Everybody knows this. This is not, in my opinion, an interesting concern.

One way to help solve it is to call billionaires shitheads whenever possible.

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