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Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

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Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#621

Post by gwbas1c »

jimbokun wrote: post #224
gwbas1c wrote: post #209

I've always believed that ever higher degrees of wealth come with an obligation to manage people in better and better ways. Otherwise, wealth should be taxed so that "idle rich" end up having to live like the upper-middle-class. IE: If you get very wealthy because you start a company, and manage your company in a way to improve other peoples' lives, that's a great thing. (Now, does Elon Musk deserve 50+ billion dolla…

> I'll just handwave and say that I think he could still live the same kind of life, and make a better contribution to society, with a fraction of that money. Elon's an interesting case because he very passionately and sincerely spends his money on what he believes are the most pressing problems facing humanity. Almost all of his wealth is invested towards those goals. He's an asshole and treats people terribly. But…

Part of the handwaving is that reinvesting profits into other businesses is something I agree in. For example, compare how Musk invests his money and runs his companies to how the Beatles invested their money and ran "Apple Core."

The Beatles were horrible business operators and were essentially being taxed back to the upper middle class. I always chuckle when I listen to "Taxman."

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#622

Post by [deleted] »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #415
Supermancho wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To world power with a much MORE equal society, This statement relies heavily on how one might want to measure an equal society.

Basically the only way you can achieve the metric you desire is by ignoring slavery. Understood.

[deleted]

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#623

Post by vonjuice »

latency-guy2 wrote: post #608
vonjuice wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the one with the power to stop that evidence from being gathered.

Right, so, no way for you to be wrong, ever. Just your assertions that are always true, in every universe.

What assertion have I made?

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#624

Post by inemesitaffia »

vacuity wrote: post #553
FredPret wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But clearly "economic growth" doesn't lift everyone up equally That’s right there in my premise! So what? It lifts up everyone a little bit; most people a lot; and one or two get boosted to orbit for a generation or so. Your arguments against Starlink are so silly I struggle to believe someone typed them into this site. Don’t you think one more internet option for most of the globe is a good thing? And yes, it dire…

> It lifts up everyone a little bit; most people a lot; No, it doesn't. It helps the people who are lucky enough to already have one foot in the race. But that's not remotely everyone. > directly addresses both hunger and cancer through better internet, more research, a bigger economy, connected tractors. Perhaps, although that's not really "directly". But then you're saying that we need to allow multi-billionaires i…

Please go back to Reddit.

Apart from land, Inheritance and seizing power, individual and community wealth comes from what you create and invest in

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#625

Post by tdullien »

roenxi wrote: post #603
tdullien wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which just-so story without evidence do you mean? Are you saying a liquidity trap does not exist? ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidity_trap )

It probably exists. I don't see any reason that it should always be a good idea to lend money. But the link between "it is a bad idea to lend money" and "therefore we should cause prices to rise exponentially" is absurd on its face. The obvious alternative is people shouldn't lend out money until someone figures out a good use for the borrowings. I've never heard an argument that justifies a policy response. There ar…

Can you explain what you mean when you say "it transfers wealth to asset owners"? My understanding of wealth is assets, so the phrasing doesn't make sense to me.

I think you mean to say imply that wages don't increase, so relatively speaking wage-earners are poorer if assets become more expensive and wages don't rise?

The counterpoint is: Wages are at level X1 relative to price level Y1 because labor can demand these wages. If the price level rises to cY1, there is no reason to think wages won't rise to cX1, so the ratio stays the same?

Who got poorer?

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#627

Post by Draiken »

frabjoused wrote: post #482
Draiken wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an outrageous analogy. Let's compare a competitive game to a complex system that rules the lives of basically all humans.

Life is a game. If basketball rules sucked, far less would play and definitely not at its current scale. If you block the game of capitalism you stunt all of the growth and innovation that comes with it. It’s how people tick.

Sure you have similarities with a competitive game and life, but that's simply not enough to say that they're the same. People can and will do things in games that you don't do in life because... it's just a game.

> If you block the game of capitalism you stunt all of the growth and innovation that comes with it. It’s how people tick.

Where's the evidence for that? People help each other much more than they hurt each other, despite the common perception. What kind of sucker helps his adversaries?

Because a few people with power want to exploit everyone else, we somehow assume that everyone is like that. It's simply not true.

When we keep reinforcing these "winner takes all" scenarios we're playing into the hands of those few that truly believe that's how the world works. People cooperate and we only got here in the first place was through cooperation. If this capitalism mentality existed back then, our species would have simply died. Now we survived, thrived and forgot that our real strength is in communities, not individuals.

The individualist capitalism mentality got people with hook, line and sinker. Most can't even comprehend that there are different ways.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#628

Post by thiagoharry »

germandiago wrote: post #301
yellowapple wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think that is a wrong perspective. Of course many people care about that. The problem is that by looting rich people you will not end up with the problem. In fact, you can make the problem much bigger mid-term by killing incentives and making people into poverty... Cuba or Venezuela were richer than Spain in the 50s just to give you a couple of examples. And Venezuela has natural resources. What happened? Well, yes…

> Cuba or Venezuela were richer than Spain in the 50s just to give you a couple of examples. And Venezuela has natural resources.

Sorry, I checked GDP per capita charts, and it appears that Cuba was not richer than Spain in 50s. It would be implausible that a small country with little natural resources would become richer than the country that colonized it in so little time.

And Venezuela become poorer than Spain in 1982. So it had no relation with "take everything from the others and give to the poor".

Counterpoint for your argument: outside the west, between non-alignment countries, only places where marxist-leninist revolutions happened produced powers that were able to seriously compete with the west. For example, URSS and China.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#629

Post by Draiken »

FredPret wrote: post #552
Draiken wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No there isn't. We simply don't know if a different system could produce the same, because the few attempts we had were either corrupted or actively sabotaged. I'd argue if we look at China we actually can see how something other than capitalism can improve people's lives: hundreds of millions raised out of poverty through basic planning. Another aspect is that many of the issues with previous attempts at something…

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 y…

> they all suck because they all have one thing in common - they are planned

I suggest you read The Republic of Walmart [1]. Every big corporation in existence works with planned systems. Every. Single. One. That argument is a fantasy repeated by people that never truly thought/read about it.

Most people read somewhere that the USSR failed because of their planned economies, therefore it doesn't work. They had so much more going wrong that simplifying why they failed with "planned economy" is preposterous.

Not to mention capitalists conveniently forget all of the failed capitalist experiments. Perhaps because now the bigger capitalist countries benefit from exploiting those same countries.

From all the answers I've seen you give in this thread, it's clear you're very deep into the capitalist mindset. It really seems you don't even attempt to consider alternatives. You have your winner and everything is a confirmation of that. I would earnestly ask you to reconsider your position. Really read up on the subject.

There is no perfect solution, but the current one is absolutely unsustainable by definition. There is no infinite growth, and the pursuit of it has now reached the point where it only harms everyone that is not at the top. We could save the planet, we could house all the homeless, we could end famine, but we choose not to because it's not profitable. I personally can't look at that and think: that looks reasonable.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Republic_of_Wal...

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#630

Post by Draiken »

latency-guy2 wrote: post #472
Draiken wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly, Bezos did nothing. Nothing. He used money he hoarded from another venture to allow the thousands of engineers to build it. Anyone can do that. And I'm 100% sure Bezos was not the one that came up with the idea either. He just benefited from being in a position of power with tons of capital at the right time.

> He used money he hoarded from another venture to allow the thousands of engineers to build it. Anyone can do that. So why didn't they? > And I'm 100% sure Bezos was not the one that came up with the idea either. He just benefited from being in a position of power with tons of capital at the right time. Same question again. What in your opinion, is a bet that you can make right now, today, that will lead to another…

Am I going to be back in those times where that capital was a lot? Where what we have today isn't there? Will I have access to the contacts and his network?

Let me guess: no?

What an odd request. This is such a lazy argument.

> So why didn't they?

The truth of the matter is: they couldn't. Bezos, Musk and Bill Gates were perfectly positioned to do what they did. You don't even hear about the hundreds of others that had the same (or better) ideas, that didn't have the capital, the connections, or even the timing.

This hero worship makes zero sense. If Bezos wasn't already rich, Amazon wouldn't exist. If Bill Gates didn't have contacts inside IBM, Microsoft wouldn't be what it is. If Elon didn't grow up filthy rich, he wouldn't be the world's richest man.

I know it's easier to believe the good old "work hard and you'll be rewarded" adage, but it's a plain lie. We have multiple orders of magnitude more of hard workers compared to billionaires (or even millionaires) to prove that. No, it's not because they were geniuses or hard workers. They might've even been that, it's beyond the point. They were plain lucky.

In today's society, previous capital is the best predictor of success there is. Not intelligence. Not hard work.

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