As a committed market-socialist, the extent that the HN commentariat has turned into a reflexively nihilistic anti-free-enterprise is a fairly astonishing turn. It’s like my belief system turned into the maximally idiotic version of itself.
“Externality” is thrown about as a term almost completely disconnected from any economic grounding of the term. If you make externality mean “anything I find aesthetically displeasing”, then yeah, sure, billionaires create and benefit from externalities, if your aesthetic is egalitarian comity.
But if you mean “legitimate societal goals, legislated and agreed on by a representative body” are being violated left and right by billionaires, gimme a break.
Go ahead and tax capital gains way more. Ending the estate step up in basis sounds great. Break up the “borrow” part of buy-borrow-die, while you’re at it, and treat encumbrance on capital as a taxable event, we could probably make that work, too, although the middle class might foam at the mouth if that was applied broadly.
But, man. The cynicism, confiscatory and controlling instincts on display are enough to make me upgrade Ayn Rand from “hypocritical nut” to “maybe she was on to something when the general population gets tall poppy syndrome.”
Markets work. There are externalities, but we can, and should, legislate fixes for social goals that we actually agree on. But stiflingly heavy regulation is really bad for incentivizing creation of new knowledge and wealth. You can still believe in caring about people, and building (incentive aligned) social safety nets without destroying people’s incentive, and thus, because intellectual capital formation depends heavily on network effects, people’s ability, to create many kinds of value in the world.
Actual socialists recognize that capital is incredibly useful, and incredibly valuable. Leveraging capital is incredibly beneficial to the world. Pretending that the people leveraging that capital are somehow guilty of an original sin just by leveraging capital markets, which is really what these screeds against anyone holding controlling interests in companies they were instrumental in creating, seem to be about, leads down a terrible path.
Demonizing people creating things is petty and unbecoming for a political movement.