Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

I agree. But then why would we ever worship the few lucky ones and allow them to have basically unlimited power? We could even claim intelligence is mostly about genetic luck. But if we really wanted to reward people for hard work, then there wouldn't be billionaires, we'd have many, many more millionaires.

Why do they deserve that disproportionate amount of power? I simply cannot believe a system that rewards like that is anything but unfair. If everyone also got much more, that would be fine, but it's always: 9999999 for me, 1 for you.

>Skill alone isn't enough, because there are plenty of people with more skill. Luck alone also isn't enough, because that would give a distribution like lottery winners rather than repeated year-on-year growth.

That would be true, if the fact that monopolies - which are the consequence of competition - didn't allow them to hold their positions indefinitely.

This is late stage capitalism. The opportunities that existed back in those days simply aren't there anymore. The best you can hope for is to find someone to fund you (or bootstrap), then get bought by one of the mega corporations allowing them to keep their monopolies.

>That's a terrible argument. SBF was convicted and is awaiting sentencing, that's not rewarding his misbehaviour;

No? Come on mate, SBF was ONE guy that got arrested. What about all the other ones that are still out there? Did all the cryptobros that cheated people out of billions of dollars get arrested? 5 minutes of googling and you'll find thousands of scammers that got away with it. Not including the ones that won't even show up in searches.

So, yes, that's rewarding misbehavior in my view.

The easiest way to get rich in our system is to lower your scruples. That's exactly what the system was designed to do: reward exploitation. That's the whole premise!

If I can cheat you out your salary, your labor, your working conditions, your naivety, your situation, your health or whatever else I can, capitalism will reward you for it. That's what profit is.

Because hero worship is an evolved instinct that we're trying to confabulate a post-hoc justification for, rather than a coherent predictive framework.

And because our monkey brains, being only numerate by evolutionary luck, have an emotional reaction to "a billion" approximately as if it was "two million" rather than "a thousand million".

When kings ruled, some claimed it was by divine right. Those with power who didn't like the rise of money displacing the old forms of wealth use the term "nouveau riche" as a pejorative — this phrasing may be relatively modern French, but the idea goes back to at least Ancient Greece.

> Why do they deserve that disproportionate amount of power?

For most new-money billionaires — though ironically, not ones who got there "fairly" like JK Rowling or (after actually selling to Microsoft) Markus Persson, but I bet they invested their money in something like this after being paid — the money is predominantly in the form of shares granting the right to a say in the management of, and disbursal of the profits of, some corporation which gained its value through their leadership.

As countries want tax revenue to get stuff done, their governments don't need any complex reasoning to place a high value on people who are competent at making high-value corporations.

> That would be true, if the fact that monopolies - which are the consequence of competition - didn't allow them to hold their positions indefinitely.

Their monopolies don't remain indefinitely. IBM used to be a monopoly, until it wasn't. Internet Explorer triggered a monopoly lawsuit, now even Microsoft doesn't support it. Games consoles was a Sega/Nintendo duopoly when I was a kid, Sega no longer makes hardware. Amazon wasn't allowed to buy up iRobot (nor Adobe, Figma) because governments are bigger than corporations and do actually step into prevent abusive behaviour. Bell Systems was, famously, forcibly broken up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

I won't be at all surprised if in the next decade half of Big Tech is split the same way Bell Systems was split — e.g. Amazon forced to split apart its main storefront, Audible, the Kindle book store, and all the web services.

> Come on mate, SBF was ONE guy that got arrested. What about all the other ones that are still out there?

Then don't use him as the example. Him being arrested is what makes him a bad example. If you want to say people don't get punished, give those other people as your example, not the very obvious example of someone who is getting punished.

> 5 minutes of googling and you'll find thousands of scammers that got away with it.

You clearly have different search results to me; the results I get are "until we arrested them".

> Not including the ones that won't even show up in searches.

Tautologically, but you have to show a reason why some invisible group is of some actual specific size in order to make any argument about them; and in your case you have to also show that the size of this invisible group is due to the economic choices of Capitalism rather than anything else.

> The easiest way to get rich in our system is to lower your scruples.

In any system. You don't get far in a feudal system without being willing to take freemen into debt bondage, or to bow before each of a series of monarchs that take turns flipping between "Catholicism is mandatory" and "Catholicism is forbidden" as the British ones did for a bit.

> That's exactly what the system was designed to do: reward exploitation. That's the whole premise!

No, the premise (which I would argue is flawed for due to "Prisoner's Dilemma"-type scenarios) is that everyone acting in their own self-interest will ultimately reward the collective. It assumes that any worker who is not treated fairly will switch jobs because someone else will want to out-bid their current employer. Etc.

> If I can cheat you out your salary, your labor, your working conditions, your naivety, your situation, your health or whatever else I can, capitalism will reward you for it. That's what profit is.

If.

Under capitalism, a completely free market in a steady state and with perfect information will have no profit, because everyone will try to undercut everyone else until profits disappear. Temporary circumstances, such as floods or famines or whatever, drive up demand, creating a profit opportunity, attracting business to supply more stuff.

Real markets don't have perfect information, and I'm told can't because that's apparently NP-hard. This is part of why I value government intervention, and also why I currently believe that it would be good for governments to directly control (either by owning or commissioning) parts of national production. Not all production in any sector, that would probably fail due to government monopolies having their own weird pathologies, but some production in several sectors.

Proudhon famously deconstructed the concept mathematically: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudho...

(You can ignore the fact that it's on a Marxist site - Proudhon and Marx were not friends and had bitter disagreements - but unfortunately and unsurprisingly Marx's "Communism" got popular)

Plenty of groups through history and even today ban interest as usury - the early Islamists were known for this

On efficiency: Note your arguments. The conceit of a capitalist apologist are that the mechanisms of capitalism, (eg markets as a price clearing mechanism between free agents) according to the efficient market hypothesis should not require a central or other intermediary for allocation. Yet your entire claim is that the purpose of finance is to make that clearing happen efficiently, and to be significantly compensated for such.

How is that not centralized planning only by a different group, then a government? From an information and planning perspective it’s not, so any claims that you need a financial services market in order to make capitalism efficient, argues against the foundational argument of the efficiency of capitalism.

Syndicalism, however, does not require any intermediary, and in fact, any intermediary introduces net losses as I’ve already demonstrated, there is no value created by capital allocation, and therefore the only value if it is taken out of, it comes out of those the value that could be captured by the person creating it.

Finally I’d suggest you read my paper and see what you think:

https://kemendo.com/Myth-of-Scarcity.html

Thanks for the debate

Wage growth has lagged behind inflation and cost of living since the 70's. There have been multiple job market crashes in my lifetime; I entered the workforce in the middle of the 2008 recession. There have been multiple layoff waves since COVID alone, during each of which companies would lay off significant fractions of their workforce despite making record profits for no discernible reason other than "well everyone else is doing it so we'll do it, too". How much longer of a time frame do you expect me to examine?

> Expecting a system to be getting strictly better every second of every day is utopian.

Employers have been increasingly shafting their employees for decades. I expect a system to not spend multiple decades getting worse.

> shutting down legacy industries

My last two jobs were as a cloud infrastructure engineer. If even cloud computing is a "legacy industry" then the vast majority of the users on this website are utterly screwed.

Fortunately, that ain't the case for a land value tax as alluded to above. The government provides landowners a service (enforcement of their land deeds), and any "tax" on it is a payment for that service. As it stands, landowners have successfully lobbied the government such that they only pay a tiny fraction (at most) of the rents due to society at large. And so:

> For a tax to exist, there must be a justification.

And there you have the justification. Landowners owe the full value of the land they own to the society willing to respect and enforce that ownership. Anything short of that full value is theft, and is indeed rather directly responsible for the continued prevalence of socioeconomic inequality both here in the US and worldwide.

I do agree with you that how that tax revenue gets spent is an issue. The maximally fair answer would be to disburse it equally to all citizens as a dividend, and then citizens can put that money toward the things they believe to be worthwhile.

And on that note:

> A person that violently takes territoy in some way should not be the owner. I am not sure it is practical or even possible to fix that, though.

LVT happens to be a maximally fair and practical way to fix that, especially when paired with a citizens' dividend per above; assuming, per above, that land ownership and socioeconomic inequality are causally linked, shifting the tax base away from the products of labor (i.e. abolishing taxes on income, sales, and buildings) and onto land values would satisfy the goals of things like reparations, such that those who materially benefited from such conquest are the ones compensating those who did not.