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Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

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Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#71

Post by MeImCounting »

eej71 wrote: post #36
tehjoker wrote: post #7

What about having a rationally planned democratic society instead of people chasing dollars at the expense of everything? No rich people, just democratic processes accessible to all incl. in production.

I think you'd have to be very clear about how this is different than the previous attempts at such "rationally planned democratic societies".

I am not in favor of a planned economy, but I do believe our society faces a significant issue with certain individuals hoarding money and resources. If we are to employ a group that uses violence to enforce the will of the majority under the threat of violence, then we should at least utilize this forceful approach to prevent some individuals from becoming entrenched in power and wealth. As they exist now, mechanisms of state violence exist primarily to suppress the uneducated and poor of our society. We should not allow people to hoard wealth. I dont know where that cutoff is or how it should be decided. Maybe increasingly aggressive taxes with no loopholes? It does need to happen

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#72

Post by smeeth »

jayd16 wrote: post #49
kuratkull wrote: post #4

I'm wondering if people understand that almost all the pleasures/comforts in modern life were created by people who wouldn't exist in this system.

How do you figure? Its not like Edison was born hyper rich.

Are you suggesting Edison would have invented everything he did if he wasn't allowed to get rich? You chose an extremely funny example if that's what you're trying to say.

Edison was famous for caring about money more than other inventors. One of his most famous quotes was “Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.” The guy helped found some of the largest companies of his era and died as one of the richest men in the world.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#73

Post by FredPret »

lostlogin wrote: post #62
FredPret wrote: post #9

We should place a hard cap on political ambitions like these. These utopians will be the end of us with their ridiculous schemes involving always what other people should do.

What other ideas should we ban?

I didn't say "ban the idea". I said "ban the ambition to control the lives of others".

The best counter to these jumped-up mini-Mao's is to spread the power far and wide; to have lots of little decision-makers rather than a few grand ones; to have those little decision-makers make tons of small but important decisions every day, rather than trusting everything to one election every few years.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#75

Post by cosmojg »

Productive wealth is a good thing. It's what made our current society possible. Unproductive wealth is the real devil, the hoarding of inelastic goods like land, gold, and oil.

I strongly prefer a society which permits the existence of Jeff Bezos over one which does not. Of course, more strongly than that, I prefer a society which taxes inelastic goods and negative externalities and returns that wealth to the public over one which does not.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#77

Post by imtringued »

megaman821 wrote: post #23
quirkot wrote: post #8

Hell yeah. You accumulate $100m (or whatever the limit is) and we throw a parade for you. You get an award and your name on a plaque. You won capitalism! and you're not allowed to make another cent

To what end? Innovative companies are literally creating money that did not exist before. Do you think there is a fixed pie of money?

If you mean the net worth of money, which is zero, yes it is fixed. For one person to have a dollar, another needs to be in debt.

Also, for one person to make profit, they need to spend more than they earn, which inherently means the rest of the economy is in debt. Now you might say the profit will be spent, but then it isn't profit anymore.

Oh and if you want to talk about the real economy, entropy always rises, so no free lunch there either. When the economy grows, all that happens is that the human domain expands and humanity exerts more authority over the processes that occur within its domain. This by definition results in a loss of agency of the non human domain.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#78

Post by kuratkull »

avgcorrection wrote: post #27
kuratkull wrote: post #4

I'm wondering if people understand that almost all the pleasures/comforts in modern life were created by people who wouldn't exist in this system.

Those things were created by working people, most of whom are not wealthy.

Look at each valuable item that you use often, now look up the salary of the leader of the company that made it.

Edit: You wouldn't have that item without that compensation. This should be more traumatic than people make it out to be. You wouldn't have your iphones, twitters, facebooks, vr goggles, steams, ikea tables, etc.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#79

Post by jszymborski »

bluescrn wrote: post #59
dbingham wrote: post #6

Adding this to my reading list. I've thought for years that we should place at hard cap on wealth somewhere around $10 or $15 million. Because that's the point at which you have enough wealth to live a comfortably middle class lifestyle for the rest of your life, still pass down a substantial chunk to your children, and never have to earn another cent. I've argued we should combine this with a move towards a worker o…

It's just not practical to enforce a cap though. Even with a very authoritarian world government to stop people moving assets elsewhere, there'll be too many ways around it. So you can only have $15mil of assets? But your partner can have $15mil too, as can your kids, and parents. And if that's not enough, you can still try to hoard extra wealth in easier-to-hide forms - whether it's physical gold, bitcoin, art, fine…

But even in your family hypothetical, the overall inequality is still much less than between billionaires and the middle-class (nothing said of the truly destitute).

> Or worse still, the super-rich will realise that they can spend many times the wealth cap per year consumable/disposable items (so long as they stay under the cap, or get back there by year-end), and become more wasteful. "Might as well spend a few million on a private jet, if I don't, I'll hit the wealth cap!".

This is a very interesting point! I'd worry less about rich folks spending to be below the cap (that money re-enters the economy), but rather evasion by sending money back and forth between a small set. Clearly evasion would need to be monitored.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#80

Post by avgcorrection »

thinkski wrote: post #68
avgcorrection wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those things were created by working people, most of whom are not wealthy.

Organized by an employer, capital, and management. The orchestration, decision making, done well, is the difference between a highly valuable well functioning company, and dysfunctional paralysis. There are now multiple examples in history (pre-1989 Poland, Soviet Union, DPRK, etc.) that show the communal ownership of industry by labor does not create a high standard of living, enabled by plentiful goods, services, a…

I mean the value leeches are also present.
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