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Comment by MisterMunchkin | Hacker News Reader

The person who wrote this is themself a rich person. But of course they would never give up their own money.

So to generalise their policy, it is: if(theirMoney > myMoney) {stealMoney()}

The problem is, you’ll very quickly run out of money to steal. A billion dollars over an entire country is a few dollars each. And you’ve just shot a billionaire in their house in order to get that tiny amount of money. You’re going to have to run extermination camps just to milk out enough for people to buy a new car. And then what do you do next year? You’ve already liquidated everyone. Everyone has spent their money. Now they want more. Expand the programme? Liquidate the doctors?

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> The person who wrote this is themself a rich person. But of course they would never give up their own money.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/stay-gold-america/

You're extrapolating quite a bit, I think. There is a pretty wide range of policy decisions between the status quo and 'kill everyone with some wealth' in terms of dealing with the negative consequences of extreme wealth inequality.

(I do agree that there is a tendency to overestimate just how much wealth is available, though. People often get the idea that if there were no billionaires that everyone would be comfortably well off, and the maths doesn't quite check out on that, though you could probably improve the lives of a lot of people at the lower end of the spectrum. There's also a tendency to over-estimate what being in the 1% of wealth gets you: this is rich, for sure, but it's not 'private jet and luxury yacht' wealth by a long way)

I think rich people are good for the society, but ultrarich are a symptom of a broken system. The scale is absurd, no man should have that amount of wealth.

I think the problem is actually 100% the reverse of what you've come up with, the ultra-rich are stealing from the poor essentially all the time. It never stops, there's never really that much pushback and it leads to in the millions of deaths a year. Look up the DOGE cuts for a really obvious, simple, not really arguable example of this.

This is why societies across the world but particularly hyper-capitalist societies are all suffering a similar set of ills.

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