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Comment by ndsipa_pomu | Hacker News Reader

I think we need to start treating extreme wealth hoarding as a mental illness. If someone has a net worth of more than a $billion for an appreciable amount of time, then they should be locked up to protect the world from their malfeasance and prevent them exploiting yet more people. A possible exception would be when someone inherits a vast fortune, and maybe they should be allowed some time to demonstrate that they are giving away wealth, though obviously a billion dollars is such an obscene amount of money that giving it away is going to take years.

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I think we need to start treating indiscriminate internet commenting as a mental illness.

That is: You state that we should treat extreme wealth hoarding as a mental illness. Well, who are you? A mental health expert? Someone with input to the diagnostic manual? Do you actually have a basis for why we should take your opinion seriously? Or are you just some random person pontificating on the net, the same as I would be if I seriously proposed my first paragraph?

Then you advocate, not just treating it as mental illness, but committing them. Why? To protect the world from them. Um, not all fortunes come from malfeasance and exploitation. Save your outrage for the outrageous actions, not for the mere financial success. (Who did Warren Buffet exploit? What malfeasance did he do?)

But you have given us no reason to agree with your overheated characterization of the rich, let alone to agree with your proposed solution.

> I think we need to start treating indiscriminate internet commenting as a mental illness.

The damage caused by indiscriminate internet commenting is negligible (excepting the click-bait magnifying effects of certain social media networks). The damage caused by wealth hoarding is tangible and leads to corporations acting against the welfare of humanity in their pursuit of greed.

> You state that we should treat extreme wealth hoarding as a mental illness. Well, who are you? A mental health expert?

It's concerning that when posed with an opinion, you jump to an Ad Hominem point of view. Who I am is not important, and you should judge my comment on whether it raises an interesting point worthy of discussion or further consideration.

> Who did Warren Buffet exploit? What malfeasance did he do?

I don't know about him apart from what I just saw on Wikipedia, so I can't help dissect which people have been disadvantaged to gain him massive profits. There is mention of him being a philanthropist, but he is shown as sitting on a net worth of $117billion which can surely be put to better use than just him hoarding it.

However, your language indicates that you are trying to pick an argument, despite not actually providing any counter-argument, so I shall say "Good Day to you"

> The damage caused by indiscriminate internet commenting is negligible...

So that was an attempt to point out that, when you make claims like you did, with no supporting evidence, others can also make claims with no supporting evidence. Why should we take your claim seriously, and not mine?

But apparently that was a mistake, because you answered my "claim" as if it were a serious one, instead of a random thing thrown out there with the same structure as your claim.

My point was that anyone can claim that anything is a mental illness. Without something more to back it up, it's just someone pontificating on the internet.

The rest of my post was an attempt to get you to supply something to back up your position, because I didn't get it in your initial post.

> The damage caused by wealth hoarding is tangible...

Yeah? Then state what it is, and demonstrate that the damage is actual rather than theoretical. Don't assume that we all agree with you that it is.

> It's concerning that when posed with an opinion, you jump to an Ad Hominem point of view. Who I am is not important, and you should judge my comment on whether it raises an interesting point worthy of discussion or further consideration.

You're stating that something should be considered a mental illness. My evaluation of that claim depends a great deal on whether you know anything about what is or is not mental illness. So far, it looks like you are labeling <thing you don't like> as <other thing you expect your readers not to like>, with no actual connection beyond that. And that would have just been a bad rhetorical device, except that you went on to advocate locking them up. If you're going to advocate locking up people for mental illness, it matters a great deal whether you are a competent mental health professional.

> I don't know about him apart from what I just saw on Wikipedia, so I can't help dissect which people have been disadvantaged to gain him massive profits.

But, by saying "which people", you seem to be assuming that there are some. But again, you provide no evidence whatsoever, nor even an argument - you just state it as if it must be so.

> However, your language indicates that you are trying to pick an argument, despite not actually providing any counter-argument...

Well, see, my problem with your post was that you didn't provide an argument. You made a massive claim that was completely unsupported. The burden of proof was on you to demonstrate why we should take your claim seriously. You didn't even attempt to do that. My reply was an attempt (apparently a bad one) to point that out, and to try to get you to meet that burden of proof, so that we could have something of substance to talk about.

>such an obscene amount of money that giving it away is going to take years.

If you earned, untaxed, one dollar EVERY SECOND (non-stop) it would still take you over thirty years to "earn" a billion dollars.

A million seconds is only (just-over) eleven days, for comparison.

I think having stronger employee rights such that a company's leadership can't increase their own compensation disproportionately to that of the average employee. A CEO earning 350x the average worker in their company suggests that the worker isn't benefitting from the company's success the same way the boss is, despite them driving the company's value through their labour.

There's nothing inherently being wrong with a billionare, it's the gulf between the median income and their own that is a problem, so making an effort to prevent such people enriching themselves at the expense of increasing their staff's pay might help with that.

As it stands, workers don't have as much rights as they require, so the balance is skewed heavily away from them and towards an absolute minority of wealthy people.

> There's nothing inherently being wrong with a billionare

I disagree. The amount of money that a person can effectively use (or need) during their lifetime is likely to be less than half a billion. The people who have any kind of social conscience would reach their desired amount of wealth and wouldn't want to continue accumulating it as they know it's purely at the expense of other people and invariably the rich person has an extreme advantage in any negotiations. For someone to reach half a billion and then continue to exploit others to build their wealth higher and higher is clearly some kind of sociopath. Therefore, having a billion dollars is a clear sign that millions of people have been exploited by that billionaire.

> I think having stronger employee rights such that a company's leadership can't increase their own compensation disproportionately to that of the average employee

I like that idea, but it would need a way to count non-income benefits too. Also, using a mean average can be greatly skewed by the CEO's package, so maybe a median average would be more suitable.

> wouldn't want to continue accumulating it as they know it's purely at the expense of other people

> Therefore, having a billion dollars is a clear sign that millions of people have been exploited by that billionaire.

When two people enter a trade freely, they both come out richer. How is that at the expense of other people?

You sound like a communist.

> When two people enter a trade freely, they both come out richer. How is that at the expense of other people?

Firstly, there's the myth of a "free trade" - that requires both parties to have sufficient knowledge about the deal/product and to have equal bargaining power. That's a very rare thing with Capitalism as the richer party will have much better access to information (and also the influence to bury certain information) and will have a much better bargaining position in any negotiation.

Secondly - even though two parties trading with each other can both obtain an advantage from the deal, that's often at the expense of parties not involved with the deal e.g. I can go and buy cheap groceries at a discount supermarket, and would consider that both the supermarket and I benefit, but that will often be at the expense (or due to the exploitation) of the food producers and workers.

> You sound like a communist.

Thank you, but maybe "socialist" is a more acceptable political term

That’s the thing, though, labor isn’t entering into an agreement “freely”, they are entering into an agreement under economic duress.

You can’t freely consent if someone has power over you, and in a Capitalist system Capital has power over labor. Capitalism is therefore abusive and exploitative, by design.

For the record, I am not, nor have I ever been, a Communist.

That is just plain stupid rhetoric as a talking point. When are we going to start splitting up nations to prevent them from compromising their sanity for reaching multi-billion dollar budgets? Arbitrary caps inevitably run into problems, especially when they aren't inflation indexed.

Clearly there's a substantial difference between an individual and a nation of people.

So, what would you suggest instead of an arbitrary cap? Just carry on and let these individuals continue to destroy the world so that they can continue hoarding more wealth than they can ever use?

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