Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

hive.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 660 posts

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#311

Post by DrNosferatu »

rockemsockem wrote: post #262
DrNosferatu wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the government is (in principle) elected democratically.

That doesn't mean it always makes the best decisions. It seems valuable to have those who are so inclined with enough resources to try things that the government can't or won't try. We've gotten so many good things through this process. I'm not saying the government shouldn't do stuff, it very much should.

A strong Democracy safeguards the interests and priorities of the majority of a society - say, like the Brenton Woods system.

Whereas our recent Pax Neoliberalia only caters for the interests and priorities of the richest. Thomas Piketty wrote a whole book demonstrating this: r > g.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#312

Post by deepsquirrelnet »

missedthecue wrote: post #179
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…

Wealth isn't zero-sum. Your earnings aren't extracted at a cost to someone else.

Clearly wealth can be zero sum, and it can be varying shades of grey.

When employees of a small business see their company tank while being forced to hold their shares for a year under a SPAC acquisition, while the founders and SPAC sell at a overvalued projected cost — nothing productive results and who holds the sum? I’d wager a number of people here have experienced that personally.

And when Bezos wants diapers.com…?

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#313

Post by jryan49 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #264
tomoyoirl wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

(I see you edited your post to add the last line). Elon is not "ruining his own money". He gained control over large quantities of economic and financial resources, and because of the way our society works, he gets to "ruin" those resources by choosing to direct them to the purchase of an asset followed by its degradation. But there's an opportunity cost to all that: what might have happened in Elon was not in a posi…

You could make the opposite argument about all the innovations, are and science, rich people have funded throughout history. Like what if Boeing didn't have all that money to dump into airplanes.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#314

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

WalterBright wrote: post #280
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so people who are good at managing their money are ... drum roll, please ... better at managing their money. This is a tautology. The question is not whether rich people are better at running their own finances, it is whether they are the best people to be making resource allocation decisions. In US capitalism, the argument for coupling the two normally consists of "well, they want to make money, so they will do…

> This is just so absurd that it's really not worth deconstructing. Do you believe Bezos got rich by not giving people what they wanted?

The age old conundrum: do people want what they get, or want what they get?

Bezos got rich by buying labor from people for less it was worth, buying products for less than he could sell them, and using them both to create a new retail possibility that had some distinct benefits for a lot of us in our role as consumers.

Oh, and AWS.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#315

Post by kagakuninja »

asadotzler wrote: post #300
askafriend wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is stopping you from contributing more. In fact, contributions to charity are tax exempt. But if you want to contribute more to the government directly, others here have pointed you to some good resources.

The individual wants his class to be taxed. Telling the individual they can simply pay more does nothing for everyone else in the class. Your reply is unserious.

Not only do I want everyone in my "class" to contribute more to society, everyone significantly above me should be contributing a larger share. This is the basis of progressive taxation.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#316

Post by amalcon »

missedthecue wrote: post #165
rsoto2 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"permits the existence of Jeff Bezos" - your mind on capitalism. What things of importance has Bezos done? End world hunger? Or are we celebrating the death of local stores and malls? What about a society that prevents kids from starving instead of making bombs and satellites for world wars?

Society has collectively voted that Amazon massively improves their lives. If they didn't think so, they'd still be choosing to shop at Sears and Kmart and hosting their software on HP enterprise servers in a musty office basement. That's all the clear and evident result of the market system which is very democratic. People vote with their dollars every day. The winners of these billions of daily democratic votes ris…

The meme that the market system is democratic is strange to me. It's not a dictatorship, but it's odd to claim that something is democratic when I (as a moderately well off American) have as many votes as ten less well-off people in my own country. More, if you adjust for the number of votes each person need to use to not die. The difference grows further when you consider that there are people with well over 1,000x my assets, and when you consider the global nature of the modern economy.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#317

Post by kazinator »

dools wrote: post #123
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…

The best interest rate policy is zero, which is the natural rate of interested in a floating exchange rate economy. Fiscal policy is the only tool through which equity can be managed. Monetary policy is pointless.

If the interest rate is zero, what is the incentive for lending money?

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#318

Post by username332211 »

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.

Let's see..

"In 1907 there was a financial crisis. We learned our lessons and created an institution to prevent the next crisis. So, the next time things went south in finance, in 1929 there was no crisis. There was a catastrophe instead."

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#319

Post by yellowapple »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #211
yellowapple wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're actively destroying jobs at this very moment, not creating them. If I had a nickel for every "we're making record profits, oh and we're also laying off 10% of our employees" announcement, I'd be a billionaire.

Unemployment has never been lower, with jobs growing every month of the past year. January 2024 saw the most growth followed closely by December 2023. https://www.axios.com/2024/02/02/us-jobs-report-january-2024

> Unemployment has never been lower

That doesn't measure underemployment, nor does it measure people who've given up on finding work. That's why it needs to be considered alongside things like the labor force participation rate - which has been on a downward trend since 2000 - and alongside wage growth, which has lagged below inflation since the 70's.

> January 2024 saw the most growth followed closely by December 2023.

Which jobs, specifically? At what pay? Destroying a $50k/year job to create two $25k/year jobs ain't progress.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#320

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

rockemsockem wrote: post #287
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it doesn't always make the best decisions" isn't the standard here. No human organization always makes the best decision. The question is: how best to make decisions about resource allocation? Do we favor this being the domain of (primarily) already rich and powerful people? Can we even imagine an alternative?

I agree that no human organization will always make the best decisions. That's why I'm advocating for a larger number of human organizations making decisions independently (as much as is possible in the world today). I was also being somewhat soft in my language, so let me amend it to, sometimes the government makes bad choices and fails to invest in crucial areas. Are you advocating for more organizations created as…

As a thought-experiment, suppose you have a society in year X in which a substantial majority of people are opposed to putting resources into some project.

Time passes, it is now year Y and an individual has managed to amass control over sufficient resources to at least begin this project.

More time passes, it is now year Z and the project requires further investment. The individual who initiated it seeks public funding to continue the work?

1. is it appropriate in a democratic society that an individual can direct resources on a large scale into projects rejected by most people in that society?

2. should the society consider funding the continuation of the project?

If the answer to (1) seems immediately clear to you, consider your answer in the case that the project is "Invade our largest neighboring country" or "Develop new bioweapons that will only affect people of a certain genetic makeup" or even, somewhat realistically, "Develop ways to burn fossil fuels on sufficient scale to alter the composition of the atmosphere".

What is the qualification possessed by the very rich, other than "well, they're rich", that should entitle them to make such decisions?

Post reply on HN