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Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

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Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#441

Post by blatzguzzler »

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…

I have to laugh when $15M is considered enough wealth to "live a middle class lifestyle." I live in flyover country in a city of two million where the average household income is $60K. A 4% investment return on $15M would keep ten ordinary middle-class households afloat in my neighborhood forever without anyone ever having to work again (and without ever having to touch the investment principal). It's easy to lose track of what an immense amount of money $15M is.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#442

Post by gottorf »

mynjin wrote: post #365
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a problem with someone being a billionaire per se. Assuming, of course, the wealth was earned without worker exploitation. However, I do take strong offense to politico-economic systems where the billionaire has more political power than a poor person. In the current system in almost every country, both individual super rich people and collectively the top 1-5% have enormously more political power than t…

It seems likely that the only way to become a billionaire is through worker exploitation, collusion, cheating the system through tax evation and asset laundering, etc. I think politico-economic interference is the crux of the problem. For example, someone with $10 million are trying to maintain their lifestyle, they want to know what stocks, bonds, and certificates, and real estate to invest in. Someone with $100 mil…

> It seems likely that the only way to become a billionaire is through worker exploitation, collusion, cheating the system through tax evation and asset laundering, etc.

What workers did J.K. Rowling exploit to become a billionaire? Did Stephen King only cheat half as much to arrive at his half-billion net worth? They produced something that people wanted to buy that previously did not exist, and everyone in the chain got paid what they were willing to work for.

In what world does it "seem likely" that you can only become a billionaire through illicit means?

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#443

Post by gottorf »

vonjuice wrote: post #425
rufus_foreman wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I've thought for years that we should place at hard cap on wealth somewhere around $10 or $15 million Do you think your standard of living under such a system would be lower, the same, or higher than it is now? I think it would be much lower. I think most people will stop working when they stop getting paid. Some I guess would spend money as fast as they make it on experiences and services and other things that do…

> Do you think your standard of living under such a system would be lower, the same, or higher than it is now? that would probably depend on whether you're being exploited by the current system Imagine looking at a group of slave owners and slaves and asking a similar question with regards to ending slavery, and being all like "well let's hear both sides".

I fail to see the relation between people participating in an economy based on a voluntary exchange of goods and services and slavery.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#444

Post by gottorf »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #322
jimbokun wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a difficult problem to reconcile capitalism and sustainability from a technical perspective. Just a question of political will. Carbon taxes. Water prices reflecting scarcity. Compensating people living in rain forests to not cut down their trees. Capitalism is still the best tool we have for setting prices and incentivizing efficiency. Just needs to be guided to place appropriate prices on externalities.

Water prices reflecting scarcity are not a solution for water scarcity. The problem is not enough water . You can't make water by taxing it. All you're doing is making it less accessible for people lower down the hierarchy - which makes it even scarcer, because people at the top of the hierarchy end up hoarding it and/or profiteering. Which is why price signals are one of the dumbest of all possible ways of managing…

> Which is why price signals are one of the dumbest of all possible ways of managing resources. They're a political non-solution to a physical problem.

Au contraire; distorting or ignoring price signals is the dumbest of all possible ways of managing resources, precisely because you let people pretend that the underlying realities don't need to be contended with.

> Water prices reflecting scarcity are not a solution for water scarcity.

I assume the GP is referring to things like how agricultural water is dirt cheap in arid parts of the US. By making those prices better reflect reality (of scarce water in those regions), water-intensive agriculture will need to happen elsewhere, freeing up water for residential consumption, for example.

> why the UK's water companies are currently dumping raw sewage into rivers. Hint: because they can, and because it's more profitable than filtering it first.

So you agree that price signals would fix this problem?

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#445

Post by MightyBuzzard »

yellowapple wrote: post #188
MightyBuzzard wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they are. If they weren't you wouldn't care if someone made more than $15M.

Is watching those around you starve/freeze to death due to having $0 (or less!) not a reason to care about whether some people make more than $15M? How many people could that hoarded wealth have housed and clothed and fed?

[dead]

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#446

Post by ttfkam »

roenxi wrote: post #431
ttfkam wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the wake of the 1929 crash and The Great Depression, a huge swath of regulations were put onto financial institutions so as to limit the riskiest investments with money in personal savings and checking accounts, aka Glass-Steagall. FDIC insurance was also born in this time. Prior to these changes, bank runs and financial crises occurred about every twenty to thirty years. By contrast there were none until the 1980…

> Prior to these changes, bank runs and financial crises occurred about every twenty to thirty years. That isn't in itself a bad thing. There needs to be a mechanism to punish people who give their money to charlatans and to reign in malinvestment. If there aren't occasional bank runs then that suggests an excessively cautious investment environment that is destroying potential wealth. Or a lot off government bailout…

Previous generations learned the hard way that when you lose your life savings, once is too often. A lot of folks never recovered after the first time it happened to them. Identifying a huckster isn't as easy as you say. A lot of folks lost everything in a local savings and loan, not some fly-by-night penny stock broker.

Crypto will not stop this. Crypto has no intrinsic value. A car has intrinsic value. A house has intrinsic value. Farmland has intrinsic value.

If everyone decided all these things had zero currency value, you can still transport using the car. You can still keep the rain out in a house. Crypto leaves you with electron patterns in a box.

When the US dollar has dipped (and gold has gotten stronger), has the measured value of any crypto "currency" increased proportionally? No. Often it dips along with the dollar. When folks feel the crunch, they sell their crypto to pay bills. The reduced demand lowers the value of crypto. When the dollar is strongest and employment is robust, folks buy more crypto with their increased disposable income, raising demand and proportionally the price.

It's a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme with a much higher fraudster-to-legit ratio than other financial options. There ain't no FDIC for Bitcoin. Be prepared for crypto's 1929 moment.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#447

Post by gottorf »

pdonis wrote: post #241
jimbokun wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are countless programs that redistribute wealth. Welfare payments. Public education. Public health insurance programs. Retirement programs. Recently there has been a down swing in willingness to fund new programs that redistribute wealth. But that could change.

> There are countless programs that redistribute wealth. They purport to, yes, but for most of them, when you dig into the details, you find that what redistribution actually occurs is not from richer to poorer, but the opposite. And much of the money spent on the programs doesn't go to the purported recipients of redistribution at all, but to third parties. (For example, you cite public schools as redistributing wea…

> They purport to, yes, but for most of them, when you dig into the details

In other words: POSIWID, or "the purpose of a system is what it does" (and not what it purports to do, because anyone can purport to do anything).

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#448

Post by gottorf »

vacuity wrote: post #377
rsoto2 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS would not be possible without the contribution of hundreds of thousands of people and projects from the inception of the internet. It really is just a software on some redundant servers running open source software... it's not that incredible.

Aside from that, it's not obvious to me why we need a Bezos to achieve this. If people were capped to $5 billion (which seems absurdly high to me), would AWS never come into existence?

> If people were capped to $5 billion

Bezos's net worth is basically just the number of shares of Amazon he holds times the price per share that the market arrived at (and continues to arrive at, changing every minute of every day). How would you cap him at $5B?

Would you force him to divest his shares as that equation approaches $5B, even though he's not the one setting the price per share? That hardly seems fair, like an old widower whose home's value arbitrarily fluctuates with the real estate market, and who may no longer be able to afford the property taxes at a higher valuation. Would you force the market to not value each share above that which would place his stake at $5B, even though each buyer and seller (neither of which is Bezos) agrees that it's a fair price for them to transact at? That doesn't seem right, either.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#449

Post by roenxi »

ttfkam wrote: post #446
roenxi wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Prior to these changes, bank runs and financial crises occurred about every twenty to thirty years. That isn't in itself a bad thing. There needs to be a mechanism to punish people who give their money to charlatans and to reign in malinvestment. If there aren't occasional bank runs then that suggests an excessively cautious investment environment that is destroying potential wealth. Or a lot off government bailout…

Previous generations learned the hard way that when you lose your life savings, once is too often. A lot of folks never recovered after the first time it happened to them. Identifying a huckster isn't as easy as you say. A lot of folks lost everything in a local savings and loan, not some fly-by-night penny stock broker. Crypto will not stop this. Crypto has no intrinsic value. A car has intrinsic value. A house has…

If you add all the pieces in your first paragraph together, the obvious answer is people need to stop giving all their money to 1 institution that they can't assess the creditworthiness of. It is a bad idea. Even if the money is then backstopped. The current system encourages them to do this.

And you say "lost their life savings" as though the current system doesn't do that. Anyone who has attempted to hold their life savings in a bank is being gently wiped out by inflation. We traded "might happen" for "government policy that this will happen". They're losing most of the value in their cash every 25 years. The official policies are consistently inflation combined with low interest rates.

> Be prepared for crypto's 1929 moment.

Hasn't it has already lost 80% of its value more than once? I'd hope people are prepared with a history like that.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#450

Post by rockemsockem »

vonjuice wrote: post #430
rockemsockem wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment said: > are you open to the possibility of the answer being "Despite the apparent potential benefits, it isn't beneficial overall to society or humanity to have extremely rich individuals starting research projects, and perhaps not beneficial overall to even have extremely rich individuals at all" ? That seems to me to say "maybe no one should be rich enough to fund a major project on their own". I…

I do see a fair reasoning in not allowing the possibility for a lone mad man to start a big project without needing to like, check up with other people on whether what he's doing is right. In regards to fame, Adam Savage recently said: "When there’s no one around you that can tell you ‘no,’ you’re in deep trouble, and you’re also going to traumatize the people around you.”

We have that though, they're called laws. I'm not advocating for getting rid of them.
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