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Just Be Rich (2021)

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Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#71

Post by feedforward »

It's not that complex - there are workers who work and spend their hours creating wealth, and there are heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from those who do work. It's a parasitism of a class of parasitic heirs on those of us who work and create wealth.

Nothing could make that more clear than the past year and a half. For tech workers we had FAANG layoffs, hiring freezes, lowball offers if any offers at all etc. Contrast this to the tech stock market since the beginning of last year - a FAANG index like IGN doubled, NVDA up 800%. Like Shakespeare said - the leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is an inventory to particularize their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them.

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#72

Post by WalterBright »

chr1 wrote: post #15
toomuchtodo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wealth is unelected power, a bug. It’s reasonable to say there should be limits on wealth, considering most wealthy people were lucky (either by birth or “right place right time”) but attempt to post rationalize it as anything else. Would you want someone who won a lottery ticket to have power over your life at scale? Because that’s what excess wealth is, a power dynamic powered by a suboptimal system masquerading as…

How many people who win lottery tickets become wealthy? Most of them squander the money they win, so your point about simply being lucky is not true. As for your question lottery winner having the power proportional to his money, is much better than bureaucrats having power to take anyone's money.

Netflix ran a documentary recently about what happens to the zillions paid to football players.

Spoiler Alert: they spend it like it was water, and when their short career is over, they have nothing.

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#73

Post by the_real_cher »

nojs wrote: post #60

> You would think, after having been on the side of labor in its fight with capital for almost two centuries, that the far left would be happy that labor has finally prevailed. PG does make a reasonable point here. Capital is much less of a barrier than in the past for starting a business. A small group of people with no outside investment can do a lot of damage.

what industry?

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#74

Post by pseudocomposer »

WalterBright wrote: post #63
TrackerFF wrote: post #56

I live in a country with wealth tax (Norway), and I'm a bit conflicted on it. On one side, it is effectively the only real tax a many in the "ownership class" are paying - relative to their wealth. On the other side, it is a really problematic tax for entrepreneurs. It is downright horrible for startups and scaleups - critical funds that should be used to grow your company, has to be given out in dividends to founder…

Sweden, France, California, Washington state and NYC have discovered once again that taxing the heck out of rich people causes them to leave. And when they leave, they take their spend/invest/hire money with them.

Would this not be easily solved with a one-time 50-90% wealth tax when they exfiltrate their money from the place where others earned it for them, rather than the ~1% annual wealth tax they want to leave over?

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#75

Post by infinitezest »

WalterBright wrote: post #63
TrackerFF wrote: post #56

I live in a country with wealth tax (Norway), and I'm a bit conflicted on it. On one side, it is effectively the only real tax a many in the "ownership class" are paying - relative to their wealth. On the other side, it is a really problematic tax for entrepreneurs. It is downright horrible for startups and scaleups - critical funds that should be used to grow your company, has to be given out in dividends to founder…

Sweden, France, California, Washington state and NYC have discovered once again that taxing the heck out of rich people causes them to leave. And when they leave, they take their spend/invest/hire money with them.

There is also the upside of them taking their lobbying dollars with them.

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#76

Post by toomuchtodo »

ethagnawl wrote: post #65
toomuchtodo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wealth is unelected power, a bug. It’s reasonable to say there should be limits on wealth, considering most wealthy people were lucky (either by birth or “right place right time”) but attempt to post rationalize it as anything else. Would you want someone who won a lottery ticket to have power over your life at scale? Because that’s what excess wealth is, a power dynamic powered by a suboptimal system masquerading as…

That's such a simple, yet profound analogy. It's a great bit of framing for these types of conversations.

Appreciate the kind words. Any fool can know, the point is to understand.

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#77

Post by Mathnerd314 »

ericjmorey wrote: post #25
xrd wrote: post #4

Noahopinion has a very recent interesting article on wealth and taxation. It makes me mad because it contradicts a lot of cherished ideas I have about the rich and taxation, but probably makes sense in this conversation: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/theres-not-that-much-wealth-in...

Noah is a smart person and that's why I'm surprised that his essay is so transparently dumb. "I think income is a lot more important than wealth." If you keep receiving all the income you want and I'll get exclusive rights to all of your wealth, surely you got the better side of this deal then? Or is there more nuance at play and blankets statements about the relative importance of income and wealth are simply pointl…

> If you keep receiving all the income you want and I'll get exclusive rights to all of your wealth, surely you got the better side of this deal then?

I think so, because you can use the income on consumables. Like say you got a no-limit credit card. You go on exotic vacations at tropical resorts. All you have are some (economically worthless) photos of yourself having a great time. When the credit card company comes calling, you turn out your pockets and say "sorry, I'm broke", and walk away to your next plane flight. Definitely seems like a good deal to me, not so much for the credit card company.

The simple fact is that most people are wealth-neutral or even wealth-destroying in that e.g. they wreck their car and just buy another.

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#78

Post by slwvx »

TrackerFF wrote: post #56

I live in a country with wealth tax (Norway), and I'm a bit conflicted on it. On one side, it is effectively the only real tax a many in the "ownership class" are paying - relative to their wealth. On the other side, it is a really problematic tax for entrepreneurs. It is downright horrible for startups and scaleups - critical funds that should be used to grow your company, has to be given out in dividends to founder…

It looks like the Norwegian wealth tax is for wealth above $170M, which seems pretty aggressive to me. Gabriel Zucman and others made a website [2] in 2020 aimed at the US that included a wealth tax; the lowest bracket it had was for wealth above $1M. I like wealth taxes, and prefer Zucman's model over that of Norway.

Progressive income taxes and wealth taxes seem to me like great mechanisms to build a middle class and to increase social stability. I.e. stabilize the wealth and income distributions (in the statistical sense) so that they do not become bimodal.

[1] https://www.lifeinnorway.net/wealth-tax/

[2] https://triumphofinjustice.org/

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#79

Post by WalterBright »

feedforward wrote: post #71

It's not that complex - there are workers who work and spend their hours creating wealth, and there are heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from those who do work. It's a parasitism of a class of parasitic heirs on those of us who work and create wealth. Nothing could make that more clear than the past year and a half. For tech workers we had FAANG layoffs, hiring freezes, lowball offers if any offers at all etc…

On the other hand, I know a low level person at Nvidia who has made somewhere near $100m on his stock options.

And if the workers aren't getting stock options, they can still buy stocks on the open market. How much would $10,000 invested into AMZN at the IPO be worth today?

$13,000,000

Re: Just Be Rich (2021)

#80

Post by rvrs »

WalterBright wrote: post #63
TrackerFF wrote: post #56

I live in a country with wealth tax (Norway), and I'm a bit conflicted on it. On one side, it is effectively the only real tax a many in the "ownership class" are paying - relative to their wealth. On the other side, it is a really problematic tax for entrepreneurs. It is downright horrible for startups and scaleups - critical funds that should be used to grow your company, has to be given out in dividends to founder…

Sweden, France, California, Washington state and NYC have discovered once again that taxing the heck out of rich people causes them to leave. And when they leave, they take their spend/invest/hire money with them.

Ah yes California, Washington, NYC — places where rich people famously do not live
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