I was at the Pro-Billionaire march, unironically. Here’s why, what happened there, and how I think it went.
Me on the far left. From WSJ.
I. Why?
There’s a genre of horror movie where a normal protagonist is going through a normal day in a normal life. Ten minutes into the movie his friends bring out a struggling kidnap victim to slaughter, and they look at him like this is just a normal Tuesday and he slowly realizes that either he’s surrounded by complete psychopaths or the world is absolutely fucked up in some way he never imagined, and somehow this has been lost on him up until this point in his life. This kinda thing happens to me more than I’d like to admit, but normally it’s in a metaphorical way. Normally.
Sometimes I’m at the goth club, fighting back The Depression (and winning tyvm), and I’ll be involved in a conversation that veers into:
Goth 1: Man, life’s tough right now.
Goth 2: I can’t believe we’re still letting billionaires live.
Goth 3: Seriously, how corrupt is our government that we haven’t rounded them all up yet?
Goth 1: Maybe we should kill them ourselves.
Goth 2: Haha… for real, for real, if only. We’ll kill them soon enough. Just need a few more Luigi’s.
Everyone In Earshot: Yup, yup. /nodding
I am sad that this is not an exaggeration. Every bit is literally things I’ve heard people say and witnessed myself. It’s horrifying to see normal people you dance with turn into nazis so easily.
Me at Milk Bar in Denver, last year
I know why it happens. I don’t blame people for not understanding the complexities of a global economy that makes it possible to buy a nearly-magic artifact that no human alive can create on their own for just 16 cents.[1] It feels like there is a certain amount of Stuff in the world, and so if some people have a lot of Stuff that’s only possible because others have much less Stuff, and that’s unfair. If life is hard, it’s the fault of the people who took all the Stuff.
What shocks me is how socially acceptable it is to openly say that good people should support lynching strangers based on their wealth. Everyone expects that saying this will get you approval. The most racist nationalists keep their slurs to their friend groups, or behind an online buffer, unless they’re looking to start a fight. Proclaiming your hatreds among strangers is risky. Even the ICE cowards wear masks. But when it comes to revulsion for billionaires, everyone expects to be cheered.
I want this to change. I want people to think at least a tiny bit “this might be slightly socially costly to say.” In theory, one way to do that is to be public about the fact that real people exist that find that sort of unthinking hatred repugnant. A group demonstration of this could be one way to do that. I signed up for the Pro-Billionaire march in hopes that it could advance this sentiment.
II. You Get About Five Words
The previous section is aprox 500 words. As we all know, when trying to convince a lot of people of something You Get About Five Words. How the hell do I encapsulate all that in Five Words?
I want to point at the hate directly. My first sign attempt included “Hate is Ugly.” But that is cliche and doesn’t really communicate anything. Anyone could say it. More importantly, I don’t believe that hate is always wrong. It’s good to hate certain things. Nazis. Criminals. Two-Boxers. If you don’t hate anything then you don’t love anything either. The problem is that blanket hate of billionaires is bad. I want to point at the fact that the hate is destructive and stupid rather than appropriately defensive.
I did end up putting it on the back of my sign anyway
III. The Code of Honorable Wealth
The thing I want everyone to internalize, the thing that could let us talk about the future together, is the sentiment behind Paul Graham’s essay How To Make Wealth, which in my memory will always be remembered as Let Nerds Keep Their Stuff
For most of the world’s history, if you did somehow accumulate a fortune, the ruler or his henchmen would find a way to steal it. But in medieval Europe something new happened. A new class of merchants and manufacturers began to collect in towns. [10] Together they were able to withstand the local feudal lord. So for the first time in our history, the bullies stopped stealing the nerds’ lunch money. This was naturally a great incentive, and possibly indeed the main cause of the second big change, industrialization.
[…] the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it. Once you’re allowed to do that, people who want to get rich can do it by generating wealth instead of stealing it.
You need to read the whole essay to get the emotional payload that makes this summary deeply salient. But that essay is nearly 9000 words! Not good for a marching sign.
The closest I can distill it to is this:
Our society has a Code we live by. The Code says that if you make the world better by creating things for your fellow man that she values, you can sell the thing you made for a price she’s happy to pay. If you create enough value that you get very rich by doing this, then that is Honorable Wealth. You can keep it. You still pay taxes, but we recognize you did an honorable thing and won’t come after you for it.
This Code has led to many people pursuing Honorable Wealth rather than the old methods of Conquest, Slavery, and Theft. Because of this Code DIRECTLY, we have immense amounts of wealth. We get infinite hot water in our homes by turning a tap. We get antibiotics, and limitless music, and elastic pants. We can work forty hours a week rather than grinding our bodies to death before our 50th birthday.
Following this Code means that, in a global economy of 8 Billion people, some people can and will become billionaires by completely Honorable means. Yes, some will also use conquest or corruption or theft. Those people are evil and should be stopped. But in the USA, the majority of our billionaires have made their wealth by Honorable means.
Coming after those billionaires isn’t just bad for those billionaires. It is revoking the Code of Honorable Wealth. It is returning to Rule of the Violent, and slave economies, and grinding global poverty. Protecting the Code is incredibly important NOT because it serves some billionaires, but because it serves every single person in our society that lives above the level of a 16th century peasant.
That’s less than 9000 words, but STILL won’t fit on a sign. ARGH.
IV. Stone Age Billionaire
Maybe a single vivid image can get across what I mean. From Paul Graham’s essay:
A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world. […] I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else.
This isn’t just a “surprising number of people,” this is the default. The world is full of Stuff. When you do work for someone they give you some of their Stuff, and when you want something from someone else you give them some of your Stuff. The nature of specialization and global supply chains is such that almost no one sees new Stuff being built in a way that noticeably grows the pool of all Stuff, so it feels constant. For most people their labor adds to the global pool of Stuff the same amount their sweating changes the local humidity level. Technically non-zero, but not so’s you’d notice.
But if you take a longer view it’s obvious that humans have created a TON of stuff. By the standards of our ancestors, we are all absolutely billionaires. We are drowning in wealth, our lives are joyous and easy compared to our forebearers struggling in their caves. Every single one of us is a Stone Age Billionaire. If people stop to think about why we are billionaires compared to our stone-age grandparents, maybe they’ll remember the importance of the Code that created this world. Is there an image that sparks that? Can I convey this image with a sign?
Turns out that no, I cannot. My words not good! There is way too much of an inferential gap. No one got it, and to be totally honest I kinda knew this wasn’t gonna do it. But it was 10am on Saturday, 30 minutes before I was meeting my friends to carpool to the protest, and I was out of ideas. At best I could hope that someone would ask me about the sign. (Very few people did.)
V. At The Protest
Including myself and my friends, there were aprox 25 Pro-Billionaire protestors. Journalists seemed to be about 15? I don’t know if a ratio this extreme is good or bad. It was quite a sight seeing a gaggle of them rushing up around the side of the protest to get photos of us from the front.
What we saw
What they saw.
I believe these two photos were taken at the same place, less than a minute apart. The kneeling guy with the crown is a counter-protestor.
I counted 12 counter-protestors at the initial gathering point. It was hard to tell at first if someone was a counter protestor because the counter protestors didn’t seem to understand why one would be Pro-Billionaire and thus their signs were welcome among the protestors. For example the “Poor and Proud” and “March 4 Hundredaires” signs are sentiments that literally every Pro-Billionaire protestor would gladly endorse. But they (and a couple others) didn’t bother marching to the capital, dropping out once we started moving, which makes me think they were probably not actually there in support of the march. I think eight counter-protestors followed us the entire way, which made the march look a fair bit bigger in photos.
VI. Building Bridges
The best part of the march was the occasional opportunities to talk to the counter-protestors. Over the course of a forty-minute walk it’s hard to stay completely alienated from those you’re walking with unless you retain strong distance-discipline. One counter-protestor commented to me “I bet you can’t wait to accelerate the AIs down onto us.”2 I told him no, actually, I want them to pause all development immediately so we don’t all die. He was surprised that we agreed, saying that he didn’t expect long-sighted opinions like that from someone who was so short-term focused that he wanted to protect billionaires. This is exactly the sort of thing my Jehovah’s Witness upbringing had prepared me for! (I cannot believe that training actually came in useful!!!)
I began with “I think we agree on a lot, actually. We both want to protect the long-term future, and we think the other side is being very short-sighted and destroying the long-term future for short-term gain.” Then I launched into my opinion on The Code that has created the society we have today, and how that Code means that we will have billionaires who came by their fortunes Honorably, and that we must stand true to the Code and allow those billionaires to retain the wealth if we want to remain a Just and Wealthy society. I drew attention to the fact that we are all Stone Age Billionaires (and pointed out my sign) and that this is because we have kept faith with the Code. Our descendants can all be billionaires by today’s reckoning, if we don’t destroy the thing that let us create this level of cooperation and coordination in the first place.
He listened, and seemed to be contemplating. When he nodded and walked away, I felt like I’d managed to actually bring this idea into his consideration. Maybe there’s a seed that’s been planted there, which will grow over time.
Equally importantly, two of the highly-costumed counter-protestors were directly behind us as we talked. I believe they overheard us, because they stayed quiet the entire time, which was unusual for them. Likewise, later in the march I saw the crown-wearing counter-protestor talking with Aella, and having a similarly open-exchange discussion. I am hopeful that they all will have new perspectives on why good people might really care about property rights.
VII. The Counter-Protestors
There were about 8 counter-protestors, to roughly 25 protestors. However at least some initial media outlets tweeted that the protest was “swamped” by the counter-protestors. I’m not surprised, because the counter-protestors had a VERY outsized presence.
For starters, most of them were in elaborate costume. Fancy suits & crowns, or royal garb. One had the Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show on her back as a giant marionette, and was dancing the whole time while feeding mock human flesh to anyone who would take it. This sounds horrific in text but her vibes were great, she absolutely had the air of someone you’d love to party with. Next time I’m gonna wear something far more visually interesting. Maybe full goth gear.
More importantly, they were extremely energized. They stayed together near the front and shouted at the top of their lungs at every stoplight. The Pro-Billionaire protestors were rarely able to drown them out. The counter-protestors had fury and righteousness on their side, they were here to Smash Evil, and the rest of us were struggling to figure out how to fit Paul Graham’s nine-thousand-word essay on the Code that gave us modern society into a five-word chant.
Their chants did a good job of demonstrating (and spreading?) the mental hellscape they live in. Their favorite one was “Eat The Poor,” showing the “there’s only X amount of Stuff” fear. I tried “Don’t Eat Humans!” for a while, which was OK I guess, but not catchy.
In comparison to their chants, ours were pathetic. “Grow The Pie” just doesn’t have any emotional heft to it. It feels made-up. “Build More Housing” was good, but not directly relevant. “Property Rights Are Human Rights” requires an essay of context to understand and isn’t Inspiring out of the box. We didn’t have any unified rallying cry to respond with.
But most important of all, they had the power of social approval on their side. Maybe there were three times as many of “us” as there were of “them” marching down the street, but they had every single resident of the city on their side. The media was on their side. The cops were on their side. On any given day on any given street corner, if someone were to stand up and yell “Fuck the billionaires, kill them all!” they would get cheers from at least half the people around, and no dissent. The amount of intimidative power this gives you is impressive to watch in action. It felt like most of the protestors didn’t have the willingness to rise against that. It obviously felt very good for the counter-protestors to get to exercise that power.
VIII. Final Speeches
The worst part of the march was the period of final speeches outside the capital building. The speeches themselves were OK, the second one in particular was exceptionally well delivered. The counter-protestors, however, got to demonstrate who owned the streets and what this really means.
Initially the Pro-Billionaire protestors attempted to unfurl the large banner and give a few quick speeches in front of it. The five most zealous counter-protestors pushed their way in front of it to take up the space and prevent anyone from speaking. When the banner moved they just moved with it. At this point the protestors were kinda stuck, because what exactly are you supposed to do? Whatever in-roads we may have made chatting during the march, the counter-protestors weren’t going to listen to words right now, they were just here for maximum physical disruption. In theory we could push them aside, but by the rules of polite society that would make us the aggressors. It would give them exactly the media attention they want. It seemed that either they could just shut down the final speeches indefinitely with heckling, or they get media coverage of being assaulted by violent billionaire-lovers, and either way they win. NGL—it was legit embarrassing.
Then my friend Ben realized that this is a giant game of “I’m not touching you” for adults. Which is the stupidest dang thing IMO, but is pretty symetrical. A few of us just stood close together in a line, and we moved the speeches to the other side of that line. The counter-protestors would have to walk through us to block that speech, and we just didn’t move. When they tried to go around us we shifted to be in front of them. And they couldn’t actually touch us because that was against the rules, so this worked?? It was bizarre. It made me feel again like I have absolutely no social awareness or acumen. This is a stupid way to win a stupid game.
It didn’t work perfectly. We didn’t have any structure or leadership, no one had foreseen this, so there wasn’t any way to actually coordinate the cordon. Only like four of us actually did this, entirely ad hoc. I’m frankly surprised it was enough. Also we were actually interested in the speeches, so we didn’t keep a sharp eye on the hecklers and a couple of them edged around to get close to the speech-givers. They continued to shout heckles between lines of the speeches. At least once I turned around to nudge someone back again, and I heard the ominous line of “Don’t touch me.” There’s a small spike of adrenaline that comes with those words when you realize they are a warning that we’re on the verge of an escalation that can only benefit them. All in all it was poorly executed, like if a gay pride march had Fred Phelps with a “god hates fags” sign edging into every photo of the final speech, while yelling slurs between lines from ten feet away.
IX. How’d It Go?
IMO the march had a couple problems.
The first was that there was no unified message. Ostensibly it was about the California Billionaire Tax Act confiscating 5% of billionaire net worth. And yes, that’s fucking nuts.
But that’s a symptom of the real problem, which is breakdown of the social code. I didn’t come here because of that one Act, I came here because, as outlined in Section 1, I’m horrified by how much of the population talks about lynching people to take their stuff, and that this is viewed as normal or good! I refused to repeat Derik’s words when he said “Thank you Billionaires.” I’m thankful to the social code that created this, not to individual men. There was a lack of unified message that made it much harder for everyone to be enthusiastic together.
On the one hand, maybe this helped. The march was thrown together with just one week’s notice and it needed to gather the biggest tent possible. If the march was just about the California Billionaire Tax Act, I probably wouldn’t have come. Since it was about the right for billionaires to exist honorably, I did.
On the other hand, the ambiguity meant that when opposition showed up there wasn’t a central unifying core that everyone could rally around. We were easy to overwhelm with just a third of our numbers.
The second was that there was no preparation. It would have been good to have everyone ready with a few chants that we could all practice before we left and really get behind. Some thought of what to do if hecklers showed up would’ve been good. Ideally there should be several people picked out beforehand, who had gathered the day before to practice linking arms to create a cordon, and were instructed in whatever is best practices when running into this sort of harassment. People that the march-leader could look to when in need of back up. Things turned out surprisingly well given that no one had any idea what they were doing!
All that being said, this was all thrown together in a week over a group chat and got a surprising amount of media coverage. I’m very pro-people-doing-things. The default is that nothing happens, and for someone to actually try something and get this going on such short notice is amazing! The world is better than it was the day before, even just a tiny bit, because a few people were willing to risk failing publicly at something hard. They cared enough to do it anyway, and maybe now a few people are a little more interested in how it is we’re so much better off today than our ancestors ever were.
We’re all Stone Age Billionaires, and it’s not because any one of us works a billion times harder at picking berries and hunting deer than our ancestors. They all worked far harder than we did, and they would weep with joy to see how rich we are. To see how few hours we need to work to feed ourselves, how we don’t wear out our bodies from grinding labor and harsh environments. We can weep with joy at how wealthy and happy our great-grandchildren will be. If we keep true to the Code of Honorable Wealth that makes this cooperation and creation possible, our great-grandchildren can all (yes all) live life as 20th Century Billionaires.
- ^
Which includes the cost of having it brought to your door within two days! But you gotta buy 2 dozen at once.
Heh.
Did billionaires give us these?
I mean, in a haha only serious way. Scientific curiosity gave us some nice stuff (like antibiotics). Government spending gave us some nice stuff (like running water). Even military spending gave us some nice stuff (like the internet). But the gifts of the rich, when I think of them, are a more mixed affair. Zuckerberg could retire today and have more money than he could ever spend, yet he keeps working, making Facebook more and more soul-destroying for regular people. What’s his motive? Lots of people at AI labs could retire today as deca-millionaires, yet they keep working, trying to make sure that their company in particular gets to kill humanity first. Etc.
That’s what people mean when they speak against the rich. You’ve set up a game where people who are really into “number go up” get to the top, and make the number go up more and more, without minding the effects on everyone else. Turn the internet into brain rot; fight a war to keep selling drugs (like the East India Company did in China); use child slave labor (like Nestle); or kill humanity.
Now, the argument PG and others make is that in real life you don’t get to choose between first and second best. The first best is always out of reach, and the true choice is between second and third best. If you don’t want billionaires getting what they want via the money mechanism, you’ll get strongmen getting what they want via the power mechanism. You’ll be oppressed and won’t even have iphones. And there’s truth to that.
But it suggests a reframing that might be helpful. For practical purposes, there’s a maximum amount of money you can spend on personal consumption: if you have tens or hundreds of millions, you should be all set. And there’s a minimum amount of money that makes you a danger to society, able to buy laws, screw over communities and so on; that number is also maybe around hundreds of millions, or single digit billions. The second number seems higher than the first. So we can allow people to essentially max out their personal consumption, thus maxing out their selfish incentive to do good things for society, while still stopping them from becoming a danger. This would also mean mandatory dilution of corporate control: when a company gets big enough to push on society, the public should get a bigger and bigger say in how it’s run, with founders and investors keeping enough control to be ultra rich but not enough to run their bulldozer over society. How’s that sound?
I have goals that benefit from having hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. So do other people. Money is for steering the world. I can use money to hire other people and get them to do things I want. “Personal consumption” is not the reason why almost anyone tries to get rich!
That’s fair: you want to have billions of dollars’ worth of “steering influence”. But you are human. Humans have not only noble motives, but base ones too. Empirically, humans who get billions of dollars’ worth of “steering influence” usually end up using most of it to get more billions. In my comment I gave examples.
Maybe you’re a special human, and going through the process of getting a billion dollars will keep you noble and uncorrupted. I don’t know; nobody knows until they actually go through it. But on base rates, I’m against any person getting billions of dollars’ worth of unchecked steering influence. Including me and including you. Hope that makes sense.
EDIT: Rereading my reply, I see it’s a bit off target. I won’t delete it, because deleting comments is a bad habit that I really should get rid of; but just saying that now I see the descriptive part of your argument too. It’s true that if people can’t satisfy their world-changing goals (or just power-hungry goals) by starting a business, they’ll go into other avenues and who knows what’ll happen. I’ll need to think about that.
The way I see it, society is basically a big ultimatum game: the rich get to steer it in whatever way they choose, and the masses can either accept what they do or smash everything and go back to the “stone age”. So that sets the terms of the ongoing negotiation. It’s hard to have something like a wealth ceiling because it’s hard for millions of people to commit to being okay with someone having $100,000,000 but blowing up the world if someone has $100,000,001.
The way I see it, life is like a game of monopoly. Those who have more power (money being one form of power) gradually have their advantage increase. The have-nots must forever spend effort and coordination to have a share of the pie at all, or see it regress to the haves by default.
But that said, I don’t agree with the “smash everything and go back to stone age” fearmongering. Communist countries, for all their terrible record on human rights, haven’t been especially backwards on science and engineering. Nor have countries with strong progressive taxation regressed to barbarism. When the weak join forces to win themselves a chunk of the pie, that can sometimes be nasty, but it isn’t necessarily, definitionally nasty. I’m convinced it can be done in a good way.
Sorry, I didn’t intend to fearmonger. I agree with pretty much everything else in this comment. European social democracies seem pretty nice, and communism isn’t necessarily always the worst thing in the world (although I usually avoid saying that on LW because it gets me downvoted). However, communism didn’t end up working out anything like the way early communists envisioned, and countries that ended up communist or social democratic had to go through specific historical events that ended up making them that way. Right now billionaires seem unwilling to make concessions because they think under the current circumstances they will win in a showdown with the public, and I don’t really see why they’re wrong. Why do you think they’re wrong?
Maybe they’ll just win. Or maybe the public can get more coordinated and get a better bargaining position; moving the needle toward that seems good.
In particular, a lot of billionaires choose to “spend” their wealth on continuing to control the company they founded. Almost all of Jeff Bezos’ wealth is “spent” on owning Amazon, for example.
How do you stand towards pluralism or democracy? There is some tension there with people having billions of dollars of steering influence but of course there is with taking peoples money away as well. Money could also be used to steer towards a more pluralistic society etc. …
Anything to read which approximately describes you view there?
seems like a job for Pigouvian taxes
The bottleneck isn’t figuring out what measures would solve any given problem of the have-nots (Pigovian taxes, YIMBY, free healthcare, trains!!) The bottleneck is politically getting these measures implemented, when the haves who control most of everything (including most media and most political donations) will fight back every step of the way. At least if they stand to lose massively from the measures, which in the case of Pigovian taxes is certainly true.
The biggest issue I see with Pigouvian taxes is that they’re computationally tricky to estimate. Who knows what downstream effect in the big chain of causality this particular person/action had! Pollution/carbon taxes are an easy exception.
Aside, a bit off topic: Even if we could compute Shapley values, Shapley values suffer from combinatorial explosion. (Things other than Shapley values or approximating them might work.)
I can’t think of spending more money than this personally, but that’s merely a failure of imagination and associated skill issues.
If you have higher ambitions — like making humanity an interplanetary species — then you’ll want more. So much more.
I think this right here is the crux of it. I doubt anyone who supports a wealth tax believes we live in a just society, and I expect them all to believe that the behavior of billionaires actively suppresses our wealth in the sense that you mean it. It looks, to them, like our current crop of billionaires are not honorably wealthy men, but trying very hard to become the new feudal lords themselves.
I think there’s a shorter path to this conclusion that the people supporting the wealth tax will find more understandable, I bet: if we pass a law to take billionaire’s stuff, they’ll use the same law to take our stuff.
I think this isn’t particularly true in the medium term, and I think most people know that. That billionaires are unpopular is what makes expropriating their stuff politically feasible.
I agree on all three counts, but what I am talking about is the rhetorical strategy for trying to communicate the belief that it is very important in the long term to let people keep their stuff, to people who are proposing to take some people’s stuff right now.
I don’t think bad long term consequences would be hard to communicate in this instance (though it would not be easy in the middle of a protest). For example, I expect almost everyone who supports a wealth tax to also oppose the idea of corporate personhood; but these rulings started showing up in the 1800s, and the Citizens United decision showed up in 2010.
There’s a bit of line to walk so as to not misrepresent what OP is believes, but I feel like establishing a link between longer-term bad effects that billionaire tax supporters understand might be as simple as saying “Citizens United was in 2010 and. . .” gestures at things in general
Something like “They said income tax would only be for the 1%”
and the alternative minimum tax… and whatever the new thing is...
“Stone Age Billionaire” is confusing, but I might have understood “We’re All Stone Age Billionaires.” It’s still under the five-word limit
Why did this get downvoted? I was initially confused by the meaning of “Stone Age Billionaire”
Why did this get downvoted??
Neither Items nor I are downvoted anymore, but why did this get downvoted?
(Serious answer: some people just have a lot of voting power, and sometimes one downvote from such a person makes it look like there’s a consensus of multiple people downvoting. I’ve learned not to read too much into it.)
This seems false to me. I have made some conscious effort to not feel hateful towards anyone or anything, and did not experience diminished feelings of love as a result of this. If anything, my impression is that it might have made me love more intensely.
I have tried out various attitudes to billionaires over the years.
In my early twenties, as I was coming to grips with the fact that the mass of people spent a third of their lives in activities (“working”) that they don’t really want to do, I was aware that somewhere there were rich people with large amounts of money. I seem to remember that just taking their money did not cross my mind, but I thought instead of what we would now call printing money and handing it out to people, so that their choices would not be dominated by economics of survival. This would have been combined with a belief that there must be a way to organize society so that necessary things still get done, but not because someone was forced to do it.
In my early thirties, I suppose I had developed a more pragmatic attitude towards the existence of a society organized around working for money, a more nuanced attitude towards the psychology of work (e.g. that careers, or just earning money, can be psychologically fulfilling as well as actually constructive in their output), and so on, and so while I was still a transhumanist who believed in the liberation of humanity from survival-work as well as from death, it made sense to have opinions about how society should be organized under pre-singularity conditions; and I saw the logic of libertarian capitalism: people should be allowed to keep what they have earned, without arbitrary limits on how much.
However, some time after that, I noticed the idea (somewhere among Curtis Yarvin’s long essays) that property rights ultimately rely on the state to defend them, and so a philosophy which thinks solely in interpersonal terms (one citizen shouldn’t take from another), is not thinking deeply enough. If you have a state, there is a Leviathan in your society which you are relying upon in various ways, and which also in principle has very open-ended powers to reshape human affairs. A political philosophy needs to address the nature of the state and not just individual wealth, and without convincing me of any particular setup as the right one, it opened my mind to the idea that something other than 100% rights to the fruits of your labor might actually make sense.
The broader consequence of reading Yarvin, who is best known as a critic or even opponent of democracy, was not that I became an anti-democrat, but that I could tolerate societies that aren’t organized around democracy. I saw that a variety of cultures of power are possible, and that a non-democracy or limited democracy can still have its own ways of upholding rights, delivering justice, dealing with bad rulers, and so forth. This proved timely when the unipolar world order was breaking down in the mid-2010s and the universalization of western democratic forms began to look unlikely.
Returning to the BQ (the Billionaire Question), I remember deciding that one of the many differences between the United States, on the one hand, and Russia and China, on the other, is that in Russia and China, the state dominates the billionaires, whereas in America, so it seemed to me, the billionaires dominate the state. And at that time, the post-2015 right-wing populism, perhaps even in tactical alliance with left-wing populism, seemed like a way that the state might come to dominate billionaires within the West as well.
I thought this was probably a good thing, but there was one major issue that I still had: the existence of immense private wealth means that wealthy individuals can just do things that organized society will never get around to doing. Again, this mattered to me because of my transhumanism. I have seen the human race spend decades wasting the existential opportunity implied by the potentials of technology. But now we have technology billionaires, they can personally just start a space program or fund research into radical longevity. I wondered if that would still happen, if the anti-billionaire forces prevailed.
What are my attitudes now? Billionaire power seems to be a fact of life that has to be understood, if you want to navigate these final moments before superintelligent AI. I spend much more time trying to understand, thinking descriptively, than I do thinking normatively. Social structure is highly contingent, it could have been very different, but this is what we have.
I do think it’s a bit of a joke to think of billionaires as equal fellow citizens of our democracies, who are just playing the game of wealth accumulation as private citizens. Extreme wealth is extremely political, and the super-rich are oligarchs who rule from behind the scenes. The law, the political system, are just another domain in which they seek to advance their interests, like the markets and the media space. Trump’s presidency is a change within the oligarchic “system”, because a low-level billionaire managed to grab direct and visible control of the political apparatus, rather than being a behind-the-scenes donor. It’s not quite clear where that leads. Also, I think my analysis is probably a little lacking in understanding of corporate power, as a phenomenon distinct from personal billionaire power. But the rise of tech billionaires at the level of Gates, Bezos, and Musk means that corporate power itself is evolving to be more personal, anyway.
Since it is intellectually useful to be able to visualize a radical alternative, I’ll point out that the fate of Jeffrey Epstein shows you one path to a society truly without billionaires. (California’s 5% tax would just be an extra cost of doing business, it does not even subordinate the oligarchs to the state, let alone get rid of them.) As we know, Epstein was jailed, and enormous portions of his personal dealings have been made visible to the public. This happened because his non-economic activities were particularly egregious.
But if there was a political regime which decided to make just being a billionaire illegal, one can easily imagine the same thing happening to all of them, or to those who refused to give up their wealth to the new system. Maybe they would be under house arrest rather than in jail, but otherwise a similar story—their assets under new management, and their paper trail and digital communications hung out for public view. I doubt it will happen (maybe it could happen in a small country, or in a big country where billionaires are already politically subordinate), but that’s what it could look like.
From a consequentialist perspective, generalized skepticism of tech billionaires, and punitive taxation of tech profits, seems good from the perspective of passing AI regulation / discouraging AI investment.
I will throw my support toward a related position: Due process for all. Yes, even him.* To the anti-billionaires:
Is Brian Thompson culpable for mass murder? Great, try him in court and you even get the death penalty if you’d like. Is Luigi Mangione the one who shot him? Not yet proven beyond a reasonable doubt, if the state can’t prove it, then I support him walking free.
The system prevents trying rich people for their crimes? Reform the system. You do not want vigilantism. It will not attack only people you hate, the ones you think are the cause of all the world’s problems. Everyone has a different idea of who that is and open vigilantism means a lot of innocent people will die, including people like you!
An estimate of about 4% (1) of people executed by the state may be innocent. And this is after years of trials, appeals, and investigation! Do you think you can do better?
Love billionaires or hate them, fine, whatever, you can hate whoever you like. But flat-out advocacy for murder is not a door you want to open.
*what’s great about a non-specific “him” is that there’s so many people this applies to! Everyone will fill in their own “him”.
See https://x.com/twocents/status/2020596821228388704
In particular, note the following exchange
> Interviewer: “Is there any ways you would restructure current incentives to make, to allow for, the protestors and the antiprotestors to like see eye-to-eye?”
> Pro-Billionaire Protestor: “I don’t want to see eye to eye with them! I want to destroy them. [cut, apparently to later in the same answer] All manner of socialists and communists that are motivated by jealousy, I want to wipe them off (pause) of the political spectrum. I want to make it (pause) not allowed for you to support this.”
There’s a cut here, perhaps there’s some intervening context that changes the conclusion I should draw from this exchange, but I really very strongly doubt it.
It sounded kind of… rehearsed? Not sure if I should take this is as real position.
Reads more as manic than rehearsed to me, but I’m not sure I see how the distinction matters. Usually I assume that if somebody has thought through what they want to say before they say it, they’re more likely to give their real thoughts as a result, as opposed to some reactively oppositional take. I guess there’s the Andy Kaufman defense?
(I guess I should mention, there’s at least one way that the distinction is relevant here. At the first pause I indicated, it seems like they were about to say that they want their political opponents wiped off of the face of the earth, but catch themself in time to moderate to something slightly less evil. I read this as instinctively reaching for the worst thing they can think to say about people they hate but not actually being committed to the content. If I thought this were more rehearsed, I think I would read it as at least some small percentage of desire for political genocide against the left. But this involves a bit too much speculation for my taste, I’m much more concerned with the claim I originally quoted, which strikes me as unsalvageably naive.)
I agree, it looks like a parody skit to me.
Thanks for doing this! I also find it disturbing how socially acceptable it is to call for the death of innocent people (or to actually murder them, if they’re an insurance company CEO).
If you believe that the UHC CEO knowingly pushed a model that had a 90% error rate, being programmed to almost always just (illegally, incorrectly) deny health care coverage to people who were less likely to sue, then “innocent” is a big overstatement. That’s pretty close to murdering people for money.
Similarly, I don’t think you could claim that the executives who knowingly launched the Ford Pinto were innocent.
The UHC nhPredict lawsuit has not resolved yet, and I haven’t done enough research to be confident about it one way or another. But my point is that the crux is more “are current billionaires actively getting people killed for money?”, not “is it ok to kill innocent people because they’re rich?”
“is it ok to kill people (or call for the killing or support the killing) who have not been convicted by any court and the killing does not stop any immediate physical threat to you?”
innocence is not required, it is presumed by our civilization. At question is NOT whether the victim was a bad person who we’re perhaps better off without. At question is whether anyone but a court can decide what to do about it.
It’s disturbing how socially acceptable it is to call for mob action in direct contravention of rule of law.
People call for mob action because they believe the rule of law isn’t working. At the moment the fact that nobody besides Epstein and Maxwell that was involved in their operation got charged with any crimes is a good sign that the rule of law isn’t really working well at charging people at the top.
Nobody at HSBC got into prison for laundering drug money. Facebook getting away with 25% of their profit being facilitating fraud of their customers also seems to me like the rule of law isn’t working.
Are you sure that is true?
The article you links essentially argues a strawman:
You wouldn’t persecute people who are just mentioned in an email, contact list or flight log. You would persecute those accused by the women who told the police they are victims. According to the lawyer for the victims there are at least twenty men against whom victims gave testimony.
Given victim testimony and the files we have I think it’s also would make sense to say that Epstein was running a criminal enterprise that’s subject to the RICO act. That means that plenty of employees like the pilot that was trafficking the girls to the island likely committed crimes. If you start you RICO proceedings you can offer lower level employees immunity for providing more evidence.
They’re not really calling for mob action (in almost all cases). It’s a rhetorical expression of hatred. Cf saying ‘eat the rich’ is not a serious advocacy of cannibalism.
That’s not to say though that it’s ok to call for mob action eg on social media, as it slightly increases the chance that some extremists might take it literally and act on it
When you phrase the question like this, do you think that you’ve identified a set of characteristics that, throughout history, will never lead to the wrong conclusion? Or are you making a heuristic argument?
I think that throughout history, there have probably been many “ok” killings against people who did not present an immediate threat to the killer and had not been convicted by any court. I think that even today there are probably such killings. Do you have an argument against that position or do you think that, by phrasing things in the way you have, you’ve implicitly made a sufficient argument already?
(This is not to say that the UHC CEO killing in particular was justified, of course.)
Not at all. There is no such set of characteristics. Wrong conclusions are inevitable and commonplace. Godel’s Theorems apply to all formalisms.
In the current world, the harm of unsanctioned killing being commonly accepted (and cheered) is generally a LOT higher than the harm of statistically-evil people continuing to live. So, yes, a heuristic argument: this is a loss of civilization and order, even if it might have been justifiable on some dimensions.
A tangent, but Godel’s incompleteness theorems simply show that for sufficiently powerful formal systems:
There are statements which are true, but unprovable
If the system is consistent, “this system is consistent” is such a statement.
Neither of which show that all formal systems are unsound. That is, if a statement is provable in a formal system, the corresponding property is true in all models of that formal system. So this point is not correct because of Godel (though it could be practically correct for other reasons, such as the world being complicated).
They do not apply to all formalisms, morality is not a formal system, and even if it were this is not what either of Godel’s theorems would say about it. I don’t know why this particular bit of math misunderstanding is so popular online, I suspect it’s because it enables moves like the one you’re making here (i.e. of the form “it’s impossible to justify any statement so I can’t be expected to justify my statements”).
Ah, I wouldn’t call this a heuristic argument—by “heuristic argument” I mean something like “I can’t come up with any utilitarian calculation that says the bad outweighs the good here, but I know that human brains are prone to underestimating this sort of bad, so I assume there is a calculation saying it was overall bad even if I don’t know what it is.” (Incidentally this is how I understand this situation.) If you have an argument to this effect, I’d love to see it! But to satisfy me it will need to be the sort of argument that permits killing Stalin or Hitler or Idi Amin with a pretty wide margin for error, and if it’s not I’ll make the same critique I did before.
I don’t think that’s true. Picture the average 4chan-tier internet racist who says he wants to shut down all immigration from Africa because they’re destroying Western civilization. What empirical facts do you think you would have to convince him of to get him to accept a policy with high African immigration? I don’t think this is impossible, but man, it’s pretty close.
I have had arguments with both TND 4chan posters and Eat The RIch leftists, and a recurring pattern I have observed is that when they say “I hate ‘em because X”, if you falsify X to their begrudging satisfaction, they won’t hate ’em any less. People often have beliefs that are less than fully factual, especially when vicious monkey-brain tribalism is involved.
Trusting these groups of people about their cruxes here seems naive to the point of apologia. “Oh Hitler didn’t want to kill innocent Jews, surely you agree some drastic action would be necessary if the Jews were plotting the downfall of the Reich.”
Sometimes the only appropriate response to an especially bizarre statement is “On what planet do you spent most of your time?”
Of course calls for violence are bad and counterproductive. Yet for the broader question I highly recommend this video about reasons why existence of billionaires who pay very small (in proportion) amount of taxes is economically and socially really bad.
But billionaires don’t generally pay very small amounts of taxes. They pay a very high effective rate (around 38%) and also pay a substantial portion of total taxes.
This may seem true “on paper” but in reality manipulations with stocks and loans systematically allow to avoid paying taxes on much of operations (through legal loopholes). As I understand it.
I am not ready to give elaborated answer by myself right now, but here is googles AI summary “Based on recent analysis of tax data, U.S. billionaires pay a much lower effective tax rate on their true economic income—often estimated between
3.4% and 8.2%—compared to the average American taxpayer, who pays closer to 13-14%. While they often face high statutory rates on salary, most billionaire wealth comes from unrealized capital gains (the rising value of stocks and assets), which are not taxed unless the assets are sold”
If the 3.4%-8.2% number comes from counting unrealized capital gains, which the phrase “most billionaire wealth comes from unrealized capital gains” leads to me believe is the case, then the 3.4%-8.2% number is simply a lie.
Quoted phrase is just a big simplification.
One loophole seems to be taking a loan against stocks that a billionaire owns. This way one does not receive an income which would be taxed. All while stocks can continue to give dividends and are immune to inflation. This can be googled with public statistics.
Articles like one below also partially describe what goes on with taxes in big companies like Tesla. https://itep.org/tesla-reported-zero-federal-income-tax-in-2025/
This demonstrates that Musk pays a very small amount of income tax, but the whole structure of what he’s doing sort of implies that the feds would take their cut at some other point in the chain
I’m also pretty sure it’s inappropriate to equivocate between loans and income? maybe if we had some reason to believe that musk would never need to pay the loan back, I could see it. but it would be a really bad idea to tax liabilities.
It may initially seem so, but in fact this strategy even gets called “buy, borrow, die”. In the end loan is practically closed without taxes as well, and feds don’t get their cut. Main factor seems to be that value of assets grows overtime, which hacks tax formula.
https://smartasset.com/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-the-rich-avoid-taxes
Or this explanation
One may say that such system is obviously flawed and is unlikely—but most probably it’s just a consequence of the fact that billionaires are heavily involved in law making process. (Lobbying, networking-corruption, etc)
Some musings:
Being a CEO does seem to require skills, commitment, and responsibility that normal professions do not, but it also seems to be rewarding in that it provides people a sense of adventure, fun, and meaning that normal professions do not.
I do think that there are benefits to entrepreneurs, and that most people can’t actually empathize with being a business person. I also think entrepreneurship lends itself to local-maxima-seeking effectual thinking, and that having a class of people (regulators and activists) who regulate billionaires’ sordid behavior is useful.
Per Robert Kuok’s, a Malaysian conglomerate’s, memoirs:
“As I stated, we shall never build ornate hotels, or monuments to perpetuate the memory of anyone. I have always felt that business very quickly tends toward the sordid. It may start with noble ideas, but it quickly descends to the sordid. Maybe it’s because the extremely competitive nature of business renders it so, and for you to survive you gravitate toward the sordid world. But if you are a member of the sordid world, what noble enterprise or calling are you practicing? There is nothing to create a monument about.”
I’m not sure regulation and activism are less sordid than business, though. However, SF does seem to have an unusually positive view of business, possibly due to the nature of VC.
As far as the rage that some people feel towards billionaires, I don’t feel such rage, but I’m also quite fortunate in my life circumstances. I liked Zvi’s post on rising expectations and rising requirements, which felt like it described the high-level forces involved in modern personal finance. One line that I like from the post that touches on the nature of the billionaire complaints here is:
It does seem like, at very least, something is “wrong” with our world. I don’t think people’s dislike of billionaires is empty mimesis. But I also would not endorse the idea that billionaires are the problem. I think, for one, the modern world is very complex, and most people are not equipped to deal with that complexity and rightly feel duped in many aspects of their lives (not having slack, being forced into relationships with institutions that take away their slack, making big life decisions without proper information or education, etc.).
I first thought this is real, then thought this is satire. Then I thought this is real again, then I again thought this is satire, then I stopped thinking. I upvote, but leave no comments on the object-level.
I believe that this is not satire.