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Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

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Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#401

Post by rockemsockem »

kagakuninja wrote: post #326
rockemsockem wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Needing more people for funding just adds friction to an already hard problem and will reduce the number of such things that get started. I fundamentally agree with your arguments, but not your conclusion. IMO we need a greater number of rich folks and fewer ultra rich ones. Those with over 100 billion dollars simply cannot spend it, which means capital is not being allocated at all! Bill Gates has so many employees…

>Needing more people for funding just adds friction to an already hard problem and will reduce the number of such things that get started. Because governments can't fund projects? Not sure what you are arguing for, but IMO there is this idea of the "great men" who build cool things like Space-X. So we should let the wealthy keep their great wealth so that we get more companies like Space-X. Except what we really get…

I very specifically said that the government should fund projects and personally I think it should fund more. But they can't do everything and they won't always have the foresight to fund everything worth funding.

I am arguing that more-or-less randomly allocating wealth to individuals to then re-allocate will produce better results and the larger number of individuals, above a certain amount of wealth necessary for grand projects, the better. I think we are better off when we have a diversity of directions in funding grand projects. There is a very real cap on how much money is actually necessary for great projects. No one needs 100 billion dollars to do any particular thing. Idk where the line is, probably the high hundred millions or low billions?

We also really need better wealth distribution in the middle too, but the main post's assertion is literally "no rich people" so I'm arguing against that because private investment has created an incredible amount of the good things we enjoy every day. I'm not talking about the "great men" I'm talking about boring people writing checks for new companies that they think sound cool.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#402

Post by ttfkam »

username332211 wrote: post #318
MR4D wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How about we just don’t empower a central planning body to make monetary decisions… For people that might argue with this statement, I’d highly suggest reading the book The Panic of 1907 . And if you’re wondering I’m bringing up a book about 1907 instead of 1929, then that should lead you to go read the book.

Let's see.. "In 1907 there was a financial crisis. We learned our lessons and created an institution to prevent the next crisis. So, the next time things went south in finance, in 1929 there was no crisis. There was a catastrophe instead."

In the wake of the 1929 crash and The Great Depression, a huge swath of regulations were put onto financial institutions so as to limit the riskiest investments with money in personal savings and checking accounts, aka Glass-Steagall. FDIC insurance was also born in this time.

Prior to these changes, bank runs and financial crises occurred about every twenty to thirty years. By contrast there were none until the 1980s S&L crisis following…major deregulation of the financial sector.

Many provisions of Glass-Steagall were repealed by late 1999. Less than ten years later, risky investments using consumer monies mostly in the form of real estate mortgage-backed securities imploded.

Deregulation of the financial sector often brings short term windfalls with near term crises and catastrophes.

When folks trot out the old "government is the problem" canard, I can't help but point out the economic arsons working on Wall Street and/or owning huge buildings in the middle of downtown financial districts. The government sometimes f's things up due to bureaucracy and ineptitude. The financial sector always f's things up because risk means nothing to them when it's someone else's money and they get their bonuses either way.

One makes infuriating mistakes. The other doesn't make mistakes; only self-interested sabotage. I consider the latter a greater evil frankly.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#403

Post by Supermancho »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #394
newzisforsukas wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, 1907 a time of great monetary equity

Whatever you think of 1907, the US went from a highly unequal society (an entire sector of citizens not even owning themselves) followed by being a failed state after an an insane civil war that decimated the population... To world power with a much MORE equal society, in five decades with no centralized financial institution

> To world power with a much MORE equal society,

This statement relies heavily on how one might want to measure an equal society.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#404

Post by rockemsockem »

devbent wrote: post #333
rockemsockem wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. It seems impossible to perfectly allocate capital, of course there will be stupid and actively harmful allocations. But the government does both of those things too. So yes it is legitimately good to have a really large number of actors allocating capital, to in ADDITION to the government.

> I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Kind of. If the premise that government + a few rich people is a better way to spend $ (e.g. our current system !) then how about we also try government + spreading $ around so a lot of people are well off and can "allocate capital". The fact is a rising tide lifts all boats.

I certainly think our current system is better than 0 rich people.

I think a better system would include more money spread around the middle class, fewer people in poverty, and a larger number of rich people with fewer individuals having > 10 billion dollars. That makes it harder for a small group of rich folks to band together to screw up democracy since there should, presumably, be greater diversity of opinions in the group of rich folks.

The main post is literally saying "no rich people" so that's the part I'm focusing on, but yes the middle class in America needs far more help than it's getting.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#405

Post by vonjuice »

samatman wrote: post #297
crotchfire wrote: post #268

Will you cap the wealth of corporations too? Because if not, people with insatiable appetites will simply seek control of those corporations rather than direct control of piles of money. Personally I'm an advocate of the exact opposite of what seems to be proposed here: controls on corporate size rather than individual wealth. Living cells don't grow without bounds; at a certain point they get too big and are forced…

This supposes that there's some naturally-right size for a corporation to be, without bothering to argue why that might be. I don't see why that would be true, and abundant evidence that both large and small corporations add value to the world.

Just want to highlight that the way you phrased it, someone doing 99% harm and providing 1% value can be said to be providing value.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#406

Post by FredPret »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #397
FredPret wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, here come the arguments for "monitoring". Next come regulations about having to "cooperate". Then the question will be raised as to what happens to those rich people who don't cooperate, or middle class / poor people who, god forbid, don't agree with this plan for society. Pretty soon, you've got your jackboots and your re-education camps.

The US used to tax up to 90% or so at the highest brackets. Rich people survived.

No it didn't - there were multitudes of loopholes. Nobody paid that much.

The real way to measure the size of the state is % of GDP. This includes shadow taxes such as printing-induced inflation and deficit spending.

And guess what? The size of the state skyrocketed from a historic baseline of 1-2% to 35% in recent decades. Every now and then there's a war or a crisis and spending pops up like crazy, but it always used to go back down. Not anymore.

The only time it's been higher than this year is in WW2 and during Covid.

https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#407

Post by vonjuice »

FredPret wrote: post #96
jszymborski wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But even in your family hypothetical, the overall inequality is still much less than between billionaires and the middle-class (nothing said of the truly destitute). > Or worse still, the super-rich will realise that they can spend many times the wealth cap per year consumable/disposable items (so long as they stay under the cap, or get back there by year-end), and become more wasteful. "Might as well spend a few mil…

Ah yes, here come the arguments for "monitoring". Next come regulations about having to "cooperate". Then the question will be raised as to what happens to those rich people who don't cooperate, or middle class / poor people who, god forbid, don't agree with this plan for society. Pretty soon, you've got your jackboots and your re-education camps.

I'm trying to parse if this is meant to be an argument against enforcing limits on wealth, and if so, point out the humor that we already reached the road of monitoring through having corporations have uncapped power.

An argument could be made that the big social media companies are also taking care of re-education, although through less overt means.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#408

Post by rockemsockem »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #320
rockemsockem wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that no human organization will always make the best decisions. That's why I'm advocating for a larger number of human organizations making decisions independently (as much as is possible in the world today). I was also being somewhat soft in my language, so let me amend it to, sometimes the government makes bad choices and fails to invest in crucial areas. Are you advocating for more organizations created as…

As a thought-experiment, suppose you have a society in year X in which a substantial majority of people are opposed to putting resources into some project. Time passes, it is now year Y and an individual has managed to amass control over sufficient resources to at least begin this project. More time passes, it is now year Z and the project requires further investment. The individual who initiated it seeks public fund…

Qualifications aren't in play here. It's effectively random capital allocation. So they have been randomly entitled to those decisions. This seems far better than having a single entity to do so.

A majority of Americans disapproved of the Apollo program. So the government does not avoid doing unpopular things.

I whole heartedly agree with 1. Society in aggregate doesn't support all the things that would benefit it. In the case of 2, if society has suddenly decided that in fact it does support the project from 1 now, then yes, it should of course fund it. And this actually really demonstrates the value of private investment. A project can be started that most people don't think is worthwhile and then it can show benefits and the general population can support it further. That's wonderful.

I don't recall proposing no government. Those first two were illegal and the government willingly ignored the third in the past, so IDK why you think the government would have done differently.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#409

Post by FredPret »

vacuity wrote: post #385
FredPret wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

… yes it does? It implies a central authority that has opinions on the wealth of private citizens (inappropriate) that also has the ability to act on it (dangerous) and that goes ahead and implements its utopian visions (has never not ended in utter catastrophe).

First of all, there's already much to be said on how encouraging private citizens to amass wealth at all costs is highly dangerous to society. Clearly, there are massive problems that our current model has. Second, we don't need to go for a utopia right now. Personally, I'm not a "communist" or whatever fan. I think that we can remove the negative impacts of capitalism without a crusade, through borrowing elements of…

No there isn't.

What practical difference is there in your life now that Musk is worth 200B versus when he had 100B or 0B? Probably your life is actually better because there is now Starlink and Tesla and you have more options.

Let's say we can push a button and grow the economy 10% in real terms, but some rich guy like Bill Gates gets his wealth not increased 10%, but 10x. Do we press it? Next time we press it, some other billionaire gets 10x-ed.

The rational thing to do is to smash that button an infinite number of times. That button exists and is called economic growth.

Re: Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth

#410

Post by missedthecue »

ebb_earl_co wrote: post #350
missedthecue wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who did JK Rowling steal her billion from?

*Whom did I suppose some people would say all of the workers who manufactured the glue and binding for the books and harvest the trees that constitute the books, and the truck drivers and ship captains who sent her books around the world. The causality is beyond me, but if I could steel man someone on that side of the argument, I think it’s that

If she made most of her money from ebooks would she be stealing it from Michael Hart, the inventor of .epub file format? Or what? At some point we have to admit this is ridiculous.
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