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Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

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Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#201

Post by missedthecue »

megaman821 wrote: post #23
quirkot wrote: post #8

Hell yeah. You accumulate $100m (or whatever the limit is) and we throw a parade for you. You get an award and your name on a plaque. You won capitalism! and you're not allowed to make another cent

To what end? Innovative companies are literally creating money that did not exist before. Do you think there is a fixed pie of money?

There are usually two reasons people advocate for a cap on earnings. Either they think that every dollar earned makes another person a dollar poorer, therefore a cap limits poverty, or they have some deep seated burning fire of envy. I saw it in university, activists enraged for the sake of being enraged that someone else had done well for themselves.

Bizarre isn't it? If I were to commit one of the seven deadly sins, I'd choose a funner one than envy.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#202

Post by MacsHeadroom »

jdiff wrote: post #89
Dalewyn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These arguments nearly always come back to the fundamental desire (greed) for "Giev moniez pl0x.", as you say the limit is above their own wealth as to not be an inconvenience to themselves while siphoning monies from those around (and presumably above) them. It would make for better discussion if these social justice warriors were at least honest about what they actually want.

Most people in this thread aren't making 6-7 figures. The boogeyman you're railing against isn't here.

Very few people on HN are making less than 6 figures.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#203

Post by jimbokun »

rsoto2 wrote: post #157
simonh wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He built a company employing over a million people, created novel goods and services, including services my job depends on (AWS). The wealth of a man like Bezos isn't a pile of gold he wallows in like Scrooge McDuck, it exists in his shareholder control of a vast set of companies full of employees and doing productive work. These companies would not exist without his ability to identify new markets, build efficient c…

Workers created all those things not Jeff Bezos. A lot of the services and technologies leveraged by AWS are created via open source projects for example PostGres.

Managing and growing companies is a distinct skill.

Open source software is wonderful and amazing. But it's not a replacement for Amazon and other companies.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#204

Post by guhidalg »

WalterBright wrote: post #168
guhidalg wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but I think what most people fail at is applying higher-order logic. Yes it is nice that private citizens have Jeff Bezos levels of wealth instead of monarchies or plutocrats, but at what cost? Most people are just unwilling to keep thinking about opportunity costs beyond the obvious.

What cost is allowing Bezos to exist?

Search for “pee in bottles” in this thread.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#205

Post by Exoristos »

anon291 wrote: post #144
dbingham wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have to. The point isn't a perfect society, the point is to prevent resource hoarding and the accumulation of totalitarian power. When we allow wealth to accumulate we are also allowing power to accumulate.

> When we allow wealth to accumulate we are also allowing power to accumulate. Like the power of JD Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, which was much greater than any rich man today.... oh wait.. those went defunct too. Honestly, the fact that their heirs, despite having untold wealth were unable to keep the business going actually shows that individuals sometimes do have merits on their own, independent of the amount…

It would be more accurate to look at the foundations they left behind.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#206

Post by rockemsockem »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #112
cosmojg wrote: post #75

Productive wealth is a good thing. It's what made our current society possible. Unproductive wealth is the real devil, the hoarding of inelastic goods like land, gold, and oil. I strongly prefer a society which permits the existence of Jeff Bezos over one which does not. Of course, more strongly than that, I prefer a society which taxes inelastic goods and negative externalities and returns that wealth to the public…

> Productive wealth is a good thing You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some metric) than an arbitrary political process. I don't mind if Jeff Bezos the person exists, but I have no reason whatsoever to want him to have control over the scale of resources and decision-making that he does.

Much better to have a large number of wealthy actors deciding how to allocate capital than just one (the government). Certainly we can do with higher taxes for the ultra wealthy though. It's hard to imagine what one can do with 100 billion dollars that you can't do with 10 billion.....

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#207

Post by poncho_romero »

lostlogin wrote: post #20
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…

> 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. Wouldn’t a tax system that steeply ramps up, includes property and tends to it’s loopholes (family trusts, property etc) achieve most of this?

Yes I think so. I’m not the original commenter, but I’ve also landed on the idea of limiting wealth to the ballpark of $10-15 million, primarily using progressive taxation. The point is to prevent any one person or small group of people from accruing too much power within our democratic society or reaching levels where they stop using their wealth to contribute to the economy (by e.g. offshoring money).

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#208

Post by jimbokun »

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've thought for years that we should place at hard cap on wealth somewhere around $10 or $15 million.

Where's the empirical evidence that such a cutoff benefits society as a whole?

> I've argued we should combine this with a move towards a worker owned economy - in which businesses are democratic institutions governed by the people who do the work involved.

I like the German system of giving labor a board seat. We should try that first before burning our entire economic model to the ground and starting over, based on a gut feeling with no hard evidence to support it.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#209

Post by gwbas1c »

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 dollars? 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.)

But, if Elon's kids all inherit many billions each, they either have to manage it in a way that improves other peoples' lives, or they need to be taxed back to the upper middle class.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#210

Post by devbent »

rockemsockem wrote: post #206
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Productive wealth is a good thing You have a lot of faith, it seems, in the ability of the already rich to somehow make better decisions (by some metric) than an arbitrary political process. I don't mind if Jeff Bezos the person exists, but I have no reason whatsoever to want him to have control over the scale of resources and decision-making that he does.

Much better to have a large number of wealthy actors deciding how to allocate capital than just one (the government). Certainly we can do with higher taxes for the ultra wealthy though. It's hard to imagine what one can do with 100 billion dollars that you can't do with 10 billion.....

Let's just have a really large number of reasonably well to do actors deciding how to allocate capital.

After all, wisdom of the crowds and all that!

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