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Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

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Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#141

Post by newzisforsukas »

MR4D wrote: post #117
boppo1 wrote: post #35

How about we just don’t empower a central planning body to make monetary decisions that devalue wages & salaries while inflating asset prices? QE & LIRP have literally been “rich get richer, poor get poorer: the policy”. People educated enough in finance to follow the effect tend to be in the asset-holding camp so there is less complaint. I’m not advocating high rates as good for the poor; I’m championing shaping the…

> How about we just don’t empower a central planning body to make monetary decisions… For people that might argue with this statement, I’d highly suggest reading the book The Panic of 1907 . And if you’re wondering I’m bringing up a book about 1907 instead of 1929, then that should lead you to go read the book.

Ah yes, 1907 a time of great monetary equity

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#142

Post by ThomPete »

The ability to create extreme wealth in a democratic capitalist society is an indicator of the economic freedom.

It is the wealth that gives us the freedom to invest in new knowledge creation to solve problems.

The more wealth the more opportunities, especially when they are in the hands of someone who have proven again and again their ability to create value to society. Elon Musk is of course the obvious example but not the only one, Jeff Bezos, Larry and Sergey and we could go on. These people are excellent capital allocators.

The alternative to extreme wealth is extreme poverty and

Almost no one in western society gets to keep their wealth for more than 3 generations because other have the freedom to outcompete them. Everyone over time gets richer.

The alternative to that is dictatorships where there is no economic freedom, capitalist ownership and the way to make money is governed by the ruler.

Anyone making a case against extreme wealth in a society that is fairly free is spreading extremely bad ideas that if they become popular leads to revolutions.

In modern society the issue is not big corporations or extreme wealth, it's institutional capture by politicians and that entire system.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#143

Post by AndrewKemendo »

yedava wrote: post #103

Extreme wealth is a symptom of an underlying problem - inhumane exploitation. People can get that rich because the economic system says that it is perfectly acceptable for a class of people to pee in bottles/diapers in order to maximize profits. The solution for this doesn't have to target the rich explicitly. We can strengthen labor laws; update anti-monopoly laws. Make human dignity the central argument. This will…

Very well put thank you for writing it out this way

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#144

Post by anon291 »

dbingham wrote: post #3
golemotron wrote: post #2

> The answer to so many of the problems posed by neoliberal capitalism - and the opportunity for a vastly better world - lies in placing a hard limit on the wealth that any one person can accumulate. Because nobody deserves to be a millionaire. Not even you. It won't cure envy. Nearly everyone alive today is a "millionaire" compared to people living a few generations ago in terms of standard of living. Absolute stand…

It doesn't have to. The point isn't a perfect society, the point is to prevent resource hoarding and the accumulation of totalitarian power. When we allow wealth to accumulate we are also allowing power to accumulate.

> When we allow wealth to accumulate we are also allowing power to accumulate.

Like the power of JD Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, which was much greater than any rich man today.... oh wait.. those went defunct too.

Honestly, the fact that their heirs, despite having untold wealth were unable to keep the business going actually shows that individuals sometimes do have merits on their own, independent of the amount of money they were able to collect.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#145

Post by tomoyoirl »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #112
cosmojg wrote: post #75

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…

> Productive wealth is a good thing You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some metric) than an arbitrary political process. I don't mind if Jeff Bezos the person exists, but I have no reason whatsoever to want him to have control over the scale of resources and decision-making that he does.

> You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some metric) than an arbitrary political process

A key advantage of leaving it to the rich is that when rich people fail, they tend to end up losing their wealth and power, hurting mostly themselves — while even a political process that isn’t being corrupted or gamed by someone powerful is badly incentivized to throw buckets and buckets of good money after bad, hurting lots of people.

Elon ruining Twitter is at least his own money. The California bullet train will be an unprofitable multibillion drain on the state for decades to come …

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#147

Post by thefaux »

ch4s3 wrote: post #28
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…

So what is your proposal if you own a company, or if some minerals are discovered on your heretofore low value land? It's not really all that uncommon for a company with a sole owner or a partnership to be worth in excess of $15 Million.

Personally I find private land ownership a kind of ridiculous concept. Our current system provides the convenient and necessary fiction of land ownership but ultimately to the extent there is an owner, it is always the state.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#148

Post by simonh »

laserlight wrote: post #127
cosmojg wrote: post #75

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…

> I strongly prefer a society which permits the existence of Jeff Bezos over one which does not. Can you expand? What did Bezos contribute to society?

He built a company employing over a million people, created novel goods and services, including services my job depends on (AWS).

The wealth of a man like Bezos isn't a pile of gold he wallows in like Scrooge McDuck, it exists in his shareholder control of a vast set of companies full of employees and doing productive work. These companies would not exist without his ability to identify new markets, build efficient companies, and raise capital and deploy it effectively.

Take away the ability to do that, and who is going to found the new companies? Who is going to fund and control them? Who is going to identify the new goods and services of the future, and make them happen?

There is an alternative, and that's run the economy as a bureaucratic extension of government. Run companies as extensions of government departments and place economic planning under political control. It's been tried over and over.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#149

Post by manithree »

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.

Of course they don't know it. They actually believe that the state is better at managing money than the people creating products and jobs.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#150

Post by kelseyfrog »

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?

The Federal Reserve creates money. This is Econ 101. There is a fixed pie of money it's called the M2. Again, Econ 101.

Perhaps you meant "value"? Be careful though, if you start differentiating between money and value, you arrive at communism. This is literally the first and last chapters of Capital vol 1.

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