Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

There is no free lunch, but intelligence comes damn close.

Monkeys living in a cave could drastically improve their lives by banging rocks together and making simple tools. Another big improvement comes from fire. Again when the rocks are stacked into buildings. By having more rocks, and arranging them more intelligently, we can hugely improve life. This is economic growth.

Your arguments against growth fail: first you say “other systems” (they all suck because they all have one thing in common - they are planned) can cause growth just as well as capitalism. Second you say growth is bad because the environment. Third you say that only rich people get the growth anyway. Fourth you say growth comes from siphoning wealth from the poor.

Well, I have news for you. The people who benefit most from growth are the poor. In my native Africa, there are millions of babies who are currently not dead due to economic growth:

- the state left the farmer alone for five whole minutes and it turns out he managed to grow some actual food when he didn’t have to pay so many bribes, taxes, and obey 1000 regulations

- technology improved business and trade, so mom and dad can buy food now

- some guy named Bill Gates donated mosquito nets and medicine and genetically modified crops that have all the vitamins.

Your ideas are rooted in ancient, pre-growth economic models. Poor people simply aren’t a good source of wealth; otherwise why aren’t dictators who do seize their wealth from the poor indredibly rich & celebrated? Why are Bezos and Musk and Gates the richest? They are producers, not seizers.

I can't speak for GP, but I'm not shooting for communism or whatever, just whatever variant of capitalism doesn't have all the horrible effects. So no, deviating from capitalism doesn't mean we will have catastrophic consequences.

> In my native Africa, there are millions of babies who are currently not dead due to economic growth:

And that's great! But it's not a given, and global climate change also has a huge impact on geographies. And clearly, Mr. Beast was actually doing something when he paid for a bunch of wells to be built in Africa. The wells don't just come out from economic growth magically, unless maybe if you wait fifty years and more people die in the meantime. Mr. Beast is rich, which is why he could have wells built.

Saying that capitalism promotes economic growth may be true, and saying that economic growth lifts everyone up may be true, but the timescales and proportions don't match up to what many would consider fair, and our current model of capitalism isn't necessary for economic growth. That economic growth has benefitted them is less a boon of capitalism than of economic growth in general, so don't conflate the two. Also, should we talk about all the people in Africa and elsewhere who are employed at a pittance to make clothes, harvest crops, and sift through AI training data?

> Why are Bezos and Musk and Gates the richest? They are producers, not seizers.

https://scribe.rip/bc-digest/the-xerox-thieves-steve-jobs-bi...

Bill Gates (and Steve Jobs) profitting from the work of people at Xerox. Maybe not outright theft, but they're clearly not tech gods who somehow had everything planned out.

https://investinganswers.com/articles/how-did-bill-gates-bui...

Don't have a source for this right now, but Amazon has used many underhanded business practices involving driving other businesses out of town. It's also a thing Walmart was known for.

https://www.theverge.com/23815634/tesla-elon-musk-origin-fou...

https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/17/elon-musk-emerald-min...

The details emerald mine stuff seem hard to discern, so take that with a grain of salt.

I'm not saying that Bezos, Musk, or Gates have done nothing useful and they're just lucky all the way. At least Bezos and Gates, I acknowledge that they did had an entrepreneurial spirit and could grasp their opportunities well. But people who have a lot of money or are in a wealthier country have an outsized proportion to people who don't, there are numerous instances of unscrupulous business practices, blah blah. To say that they are producers is right, but they aren't the pinnacle of human excellence. People who were oppressed and live in squalor, people whose inventions are taken without due credit, people who are expendable laborers. Bezos, Musk, Gates aren't merely a product of themselves and their wit. They were already placed above most due to the circumstances of society, and as they succeeded more they gained disproportionately more power to continue climbing up.

I’m not extremely wealthy so can’t spend 20 pounds on this but I imagine I would agree with the moral argument for limiting wealth. But the details make the whole discussion seem like an absurd waste of intellect.

Please, just name the people who you want to “wealth limit” and explain how you will go about it. Specifically address the obvious problem: wealth gets distributed across families and other groups in such a way as to make it impossible to even count let alone try to limit. If it could be done, it would have been done. Digital currency shouldn’t be the impetus to relearn governance mistakes of the past.

Once you understand the problem is not a should or shouldn’t problem, but a how is it possible to problem you quickly realize the answer is more individual freedom.

Now that tax rates are lower again compared to the "90%" rates, is the same saying not true for today compared to that time period?

So, surely, you will agree the people who live the easiest and highest quality lives are people today, and lowering tax is actually fully indicative of increasing life expectancy and quality of life.

Be consistent.

Establishing democracy is indeed also a fragile process, but one that has numerous successful implementations (~140 democracies in the world?).

Social democracy has numerous successful implementations (eg Scandinavia).

But the more “hardcore” collectivist -isms have from what I can recall basically zero successes, despite numerous attempts.