> affordability, but growing anger over inequality
When it comes to wealth, the ceiling should be unlimited AND the floor should be high.
When it comes to wealth, the ceiling should be unlimited AND the floor should be high.
If you have a gap of over 10,000x, then the most likely cause is that the system is broken rather than some humans make the world way better than other ones.
I don't follow what point you're trying to make here.
> If anything it should be deflationary because the rich mostly don't spend their money, else they wouldn't be rich.
The exact opposite is the case. "The rich", like all people who are able to put money aside for retirement/savings, seek to secure their wealth by diversifying their portfolio. In other words, they buy assets.
The other part is that ultra wealthy people will pay far above market value for basically everything, which creates inflationary pressure.
To make it concrete, hHow do you think SpaceX should spend its resources differently than it does?
That's silly.
You are advocating for either:
a) SpaceX should not have been started in the first place
OR
b) Now that it has made so much possible and is so large, it should be disbanded and the assets distributed to these hundreds of thousands of small businesses? You do realize that if you disband it, the shares would not be worth much, right? They only have value because they represent future profits from the SpaceX business.
Wouldn't be bad.
Also, without SpaceX we would now be entirely dependent on that disgusting despot Putin for all space launches, but maybe that doesn’t matter to some people, the “we don’t deserve to go to space” set who feel that all the money spent on any space program is better used on welfare programs? I suspect those people would still be pissed when their GPS stops working because the satellites failed, or were destroyed by an even more emboldened Russia that doesn’t share their values or their pacifism.
At least get your facts straight. A quick search will reveal that SPCX P/E ratio is no where close to the absurd number of 5,000 that you're throwing around.
I was being generous remembering the not so distance past.. its earnings are actually negative this quarter EPS = -0.68 did you notice the negative number that means negative P/E way worse than that 5000
Of course, that statement sounds reasonable. However, to make it concrete, who do you think bought which election?
I'd be very curious to see your example demonstrate what you mean by "buy".
The funniest part is that Musk is a Democrat who was driven out of that party with pitchforks due to not swerving hard with the party elites at the time of Woke 1.0. (Personally, it took me a few more years to realize the bandwagon I was on was no longer doing anything for people like me who work and play by the rules. But I left too.)
Owned in the end by the very same dentists, no?
But sure, keep imagining PE is pumping money into the industry to buy nothing.
"The percentage of dentists affiliated with private equity has nearly doubled over the course of six years"
I'm asking seriously. I've done this exercise for myself on what I want for my life, and the answer is that I can already afford it, and if we weren't so wasteful with our surplus of food, weren't so corrupted by regulatory capture as to allow companies to charge whatever for essentials, then most people would probably be able to achieve that same level of comfort.
What is it that you or anyone else needs an infinite amount of wealth for?
You allocate it to productive means, you don't consume it.
Do you see billionaires doing that right now? Are they the most efficient resource allocators? Is the $250 million that Elon is spending to influence the election the best use of that $250 million that he could've achieved?
I would like some more serious answers from you, otherwise don't bother allocating your effort to responding. I'm sure you, as an excellent allocator, will come to the same conclusion.
The person, our group of people, who have built the specific heap of wealth (e.g. a company) are the best stewards in my opinion. It does not mean that they WILL increase the wealth even more, they might run it into the ground, but they are the only ones who have the moral right and probably the experience.
Then consumption isn't the dispute, and the yachts are a distraction. So the question is what unbounded accumulation buys that bounded accumulation can't. Not welfare, since you've just said it's all reinvested.
What's left is control: over which projects get capital, which technologies get built, which politicians get funded. $250M toward an election is the same capital, doing the same "allocation." Is concentrated control over allocation a good we should maximize? And is "they built this heap" a sufficient moral title to it, including when the heap was inherited rather than built (which is the majority of the time)?
Without that you will always run into these sort of issues. The problem isn't wealth inequality, the problem is that wealth buys political power.
Many people spend a portion of their wealth in elections. Even middle class voters.
According to the data I could find, on average the middle class donate <$100. At least 55% donate <$100, with most being small donations.
Let's be generous and use $100. That means one person exerted the equivalent pressure of 5 million people.
What the fuck are you on about at this point. What is this stupid technically correct "but many people spend on elections" nonsense? Are you being purposefully obtuse?
Yes, I am.
It is a policy failure to allow ANYONE to spend money to influence / support elected officials. Your only influence should be voting.
It feels odd that you would point out the little guy when there is kind of this elephant in the room.
You could have just said we need to get money out of politics.
It’s funny because a decade ago nobody cared that the Silicon Valley and Hollywood rich sets consistently poured money into the Democratic Party.
Then when they took the party far to the left in the 2016-2020 era, and Silicon Valley noped out and started supporting the GOP just to block them, then suddenly it became a big problem where their donations were going.
The zillionaires buy thinktanks to push their agenda by claiming this nonsense. Infinite wealth = erosion of democracy when few people try to change the world to their liking.
Who do you think got that $100m spend? Didn't it go to all the service providers? The caterers, the people who worked the function, hotels, food distributors, the musicians, the travel agencies, cab drivers, coffee shops, etc.?
Or do you think it was just thrown into the water?
Heck, I know middle class people who spend $50k on a wedding and I think that's obscene, but their right.
Monies from infinite wealth can not be spent on services in totality. It is mostly accumulated slowing down the velocity of money. In fact there don't use their own money to grow their business. The wedding was expensive because it was for a VIP and they charged more. All those guests would have eaten dinner if they didn't eat the food in the wedding.
If you want to ensure you have maximum power and control over others, there is likely no limit to the wealth you will be satisfied with.
Imagine for instance if you were a massive deca-billionaire, you could just pick a random person off the street and make them a multi-millionaire with the same ease that someone fills up their gas tank. In a society where money runs through everything, this is a god like power.
As your post implies, upper middle class Americans have already hit the point of marginal returns for most aspects of life. You don't get much better than an iPhone, a PS5, a standard dishwasher, standard fridge, a reliable car, et cetera.
But there are a few out of reach. The most expensive significant upgrade is a private jet. That's available to centi-millionaires. Nothing available to billionaires is a significant improvement, just a marginal one.
Except for power.
Is this a global cap? If so, can we just have a global world peace treaty first, just to prove you can get 200+ states to all agree on something easy, before trying one where it’s in their extreme economic interest to not agree? If not global, it’s just a game where the wealthy will hire lawyers to move money around and structure it in ways that escape the trap.
And the level at which it triggers will be subject to constant fuckery by politicians, depending on their budgetary needs. Once it’s low enough, and it will be eventually, it’ll hit normal people who just own a couple of McDonalds franchises. And they won’t be able to do the fancy maneuvers that Bezos, Musk, Zuck will do. In the end you’ve solved nothing and driven a ton of tax revenue out of your country.
If we're going to tax wealth, then we should probably tax it to just below the level of growth, so that it doesn't spiral towards a singularity.
Unlimited wealth means political power and means to further it.
The floor should also be comfortably high but not to the detriment of the environment for example.
The problem with inequality isn't just that extremely wealthy people exist or that they live really comfortable lives. It's that they use their power to try to control us all. If Elon Musk was just a trillionaire who messed around with cars and rockets and women, there wouldn't be a problem. But he got into politics, and his wealth means his political opinions count for far more than yours or mine, and that is a serious problem. You or I can't destroy a federal agency we don't like or make major foreign policy decisions as a private citizen, but he can.
Technically, thanks to thermodynamics, the pie is constantly shrinking. We haven’t dug up or exploited all the useful stuff yet, so from our limited perspective there is still room to grow the pie. But we’re probably getting close to the limit, as the rate of consuming useful stuff is beginning to exceed the rate of digging it up or otherwise capturing it.
Yes, there's been a fixed amount of money since the beginning of time!
You’ve then got efficiencies. If you have 5 slaves like the new feudal lords (and wannabe sycophants) want and the them to dig a ditch, if you provide a jcb you will get more ditches done more quickly. Work done per person you control increases which is good for you as you own the output.
what do you mean?
So the idea that the wealth is going to workers (and using Mark Zuckerberg as an example) is extremely contrary to the facts on the ground and the cited reality.
Unlike central bank printing or even loan creation, this method of wealth creation is not zero-sum and not inflationary.
have you thought through how you would even operationalize a ceiling on the amount of wealth that someone might control or have?
even a rough heuristic from you would be interesting to consider.
There are only two operational challenges, but if the political will is there, they really aren't rocket science. One is having enough auditors to enforce the tax. The second is liquidity, which can be solved by allowing the tax to be paid in kind, i.e. by allowing it to be paid by transferring ownership to a social wealth fund instead of cash.
So you would take that wealth away from productive application?
Building high speed rail, hospitals and schools. Paying teachers more, universal healthcare, better roads and airports and less free pipes.
Those are all fantastic things that benefit everyone while also creating jobs and spreading the wealth around.
Even Bill Gates has said his taxes should be higher [1]
https://www.investopedia.com/news/bill-gates-says-he-should-...
If you have above a certain amount of wealth, it is usually tied up in investments, sometimes money you have lent to the government (bonds, treasuries) and other times equity. Those are productive applications.
More generally, I'd say the burden is on you to demonstrate the exact mechanism by which productivity would be affected.
Closing up loopholes on realizing wealth like by taking loans continuously using your unsold stocks as collateral.
We don't even have to immediately jump to more extreme ideas like a straight wealth tax. We could try doing _anything_ instead of just shrugging our shoulders as we watch people like Musk and other oligarchs take us down the path Russia went in the 90s.
I mean, we can put you in the matrix and you can have that be true if you care zero about the rest of reality. Cypher.
also, social economics has demonstrated what most people care about is their wealth relative to their neighbors so you're going to create poverty whether you like it or not if there's no ceiling.
That's just not accurate. What people care most about is not losing what they already have. That will cause extreme reactions.
Sounds a bit like taxation.