Oh wow, the inferential gap here is much greater than I expected. I cannot bridge this in the breadth of one comment. I recommend staying active on Less Wrong and ACX, and over time youâll be exposed to all the standard evidence for the destructiveness of unchecked government interference. Economists (and by extension, rationalists) are well aware of the problems of negative externalities and how governments can correct for them, and the market failures to provide public goods and how the government can provide them. So itâs not an âall government badâ position. But the govt being what it is, all power given to it is exploited to the maximum extent to favor the powerful and the population now is utterly strangled by the tools that were meant to protect it. OSHA and the EPA are IMO pretty good examples of good ideas that now do more harm than good! There are entire books written about these things if you want me to recommend them. If you prefer bite-size chunks over time maybe follow Noahpinion or Reason Magazine?
The world got along just fine without them prior to 1919.
Ah yes, the golden age of pre-1919. Returning to the economic conditions of pre-1919 in exchange for eliminating billionaires seems like just hurting everyone alive so some people can be hurt even more. If material prosperity nowadays is greater than 1919, maybe the existence of billionaires is a part of that?
I do think every dollar a person gets that pushes their bank account balance past, say, $10 million USD constitutes an obscene amount of personal wealth and should be automatically taken from them
Siiiiigh.
OK. Say the average founder can capture 10% of the value he creates. Thatâs a preposterously high amount, but weâll use it to make the math easier. This means that once he creates $100M of value there is no reason for him to use his various gifts to create more. Any additional value he creates will get him a reputation of obscenity, and heâll be ritually stripped of his portion of it by a spiteful populace. Why would anyone do that? I would make sure to keep my contributions to humanity very small and local, only benefiting myself and my community at most, so that I wouldnât be in danger of helping too many people and becoming obscene.
If they canât get by on $10 million, boo hoo, I donât know what to tell them.
That isnât what money is for once we get out of the realm of personal finances. People with wealth of that level donât use money to âget by.â
Thereâs no excuse for letting them hoard that much wealth and evade taxes when the money is so desperately needed in the economy. Powering the economy is what money is for.
OK, yeah, this definitely says you are new to the world of economic thinking. Thatâs fine, itâs not intuitive. When someone is worth billions of dollars itâs not because they took a billion gold coins and buried them and now no one else can use those coins. Itâs because they own a large fraction of a company that is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. They arenât âhoardingâ anythingâthe company is right there, doing what it does every day! Delivering products or providing services or whatever. Powering the economy is ALREADY what they are doing. In fact, the reason they are so wealthy is BECAUSE they are powering the economy in exactly the way you say you want to encourage! The reward for having powered the economy by hundreds of billions of dollars a year is getting to own a small fraction of what they built.
Thatâs why we advocate for NOT destroying the people who do this. It would be destroying the system that created these engines that power the economy. Powering the economy is indeed what money is for, and this is a major component of how money does that. đ
Youâre talking down to this person (far too much, IMO; just make your arguments or donât, and to the extent that youâre unwilling to engage, donât fill the gap with status games), while also failing to demonstrate that youâve taken critiques of free market capitalism at all seriously.
OK. Say the average founder can capture 10% of the value he creates. Thatâs a preposterously high amount, but weâll use it to make the math easier. This means that once he creates $100M of value there is no reason for him to use his various gifts to create more. Any additional value he creates will get him a reputation of obscenity, and heâll be ritually stripped of his portion of it by a spiteful populace. Why would anyone do that? I would make sure to keep my contributions to humanity very small and local, only benefiting myself and my community at most, so that I wouldnât be in danger of helping too many people and becoming obscene.
The idea that wealth earned in a capitalist economy reliably represents âvalue createdâ, in the sense we actually care about, is one of the main points of contention here! Itâs something to be argued for, not taken as an axiom and used to dismiss their concerns as if theyâre stupid.
Ok, thank you for the feedback. I feel I was at least no more out of line than âif they canât get by on 10M boo hoo I donât know what to tell them,â but Iâll try to adjust a bit away from talking down going forward.
But the dogma that there is no way to create enough value to become a billionaire honorably is exactly what Iâm fighting against, so someone who takes the opposite as an axiom needs to be talked down from that point first.
I apologize profusely for upsetting you. Contrary to what your tone suggests, I have not lived my life in a sensory deprivation tank. So there is no need to lecture me. You are not being misunderstood. You are being disagreed with.
>But the govt being what it is, all power given to it is exploited to the maximum extent to favor the powerful and the population now is utterly strangled by the tools that were meant to protect it.
Yes, indeedâand who, pray tell, do you think âthe powerfulâ are?
>Ah yes, the golden age of pre-1919. Returning to the economic conditions of pre-1919 in exchange for eliminating billionaires seems like just hurting everyone alive so some people can be hurt even more. If material prosperity nowadays is greater than 1919, maybe the existence of billionaires is a part of that?
Youâre strawmanning here. I never suggested the pre-1919 world (i.e. most of history) was a âgolden ageâ of any kindâit wasnât. My point was that it meandered along just fine without billionaires, and the world could do without them today, too. You seem to assume that individual innovation has been the primary source of billionaire wealth, but I donât agree with this and believe the entire premise is flawed. I think itâs a matter of historical record that billionaire wealth has mostly been amassed through extraction, corruption, exploitation of labor, elaborate tax evasion schemes, âinsider trading, political lobbying, aggressive corner-cutting, and regulatory capture. And just think of all the things the public never finds out about.
This is not true in every single case, and people like âChuck Feeney, âYvon Chouinard, and âHamdi Ulukaya deserve credit for setting a good example as billionaires or former billionaires. I am personally indebted to Hamdi Ulukaya for making plain yogurt ubiquitous in the US where it used to be a niche item, because it allows me to drink ayran at home without being subjected to a logistical nightmare, but the difference between these individuals and the average billionaire is that they gave their wealth to other people. Chuck Feeney only kept $2 million USD of his wealth for retirement and is no longer even a billionaire. The others have used their money to take care of their employees and fight the climate crisis.
But they are the exceptions.
Iâm not denying that billionaires are innovative. They are innovative. They are also, by and large, âruthless people. Look at John D. Rockefeller, the first billionaire. He was anything but an honest businessman, and he drove countless small businesses into bankruptcy and families into destitution in his pursuit of absurd wealth, because for the vast majority of billionaires thatâs what it took to become wealthy to such a degree. They may not have always liked it or felt good about it, but thatâs what it took.
Thatâs the difference between a billionaire and a successful person who has good ideas and passion but whose personal ambitions are nevertheless balanced against their inherent concern for the welfare of others. You can be successful and still pay your employees well, pay your fair share of taxes, and limit your political influence to voting like everybody else, but then you probably wonât ever become a billionaire.
Yes, billionaires have shifted economic conditions and not everything they do is negative. They have given us technological innovations that we would not have otherwise had, at least not exactly at that moment. They have created jobs for entire sectors even if they did end up sending them overseas in order to cut costs and escape regulatory oversight here at home. They have donated to charities and built libraries, etc. But at what cost? â
They have also poisoned waterways, given children leukemia, stifled competition and, by extension, innovation. They have degraded manufacturing to the point where the average person is endlessly buying things they already âownedâ because their belongings arenât built to last anymore, contributing to the climate crisis and filling our planet with discarded junk. Industry creates resources but it also uses them and creates insurmountable waste.
I could go on but of course, this is a rather contentious topic even among economists and experts, and our individual opinions are going to be shaped at least in part by experience, so we may have to agree to disagree. My community has been harmed by industry, and there is no recovering from this. People who have lost loved ones to toxic waste poisoning, or gotten ill themselves from pollution, or had their job sent overseas, or lived in hardship because the breadwinner of their family died from faulty safety equipment at work because their employer was cutting corners, etc are not so quick to regard the profiteers of their misery with kindness, because that would be stupid.
Hi, I checked out for a while, but I want to say thank you for writing this. I realize I probably didnât deserve this much charity in reading, and I appreciate it.
I think we will continue to disagree on most points, so I donât want to continue restating where we disagree. But I do agree that faulty safety equipment due to negligence is morally bad, and should be condemned and punished. (and approximately the same goes for pollution, and dishonorable business practices. Roughly a âwhat would Dagny Taggart do?â test would be an ideal that would create a wonderful world). I think the amount of such immoral acts is both claimed to be much higher than it is (they are the exceptions) and used to inflame widespread hatred using basically the genocide-style playbook which I find appalling.
Oh wow, the inferential gap here is much greater than I expected. I cannot bridge this in the breadth of one comment. I recommend staying active on Less Wrong and ACX, and over time youâll be exposed to all the standard evidence for the destructiveness of unchecked government interference. Economists (and by extension, rationalists) are well aware of the problems of negative externalities and how governments can correct for them, and the market failures to provide public goods and how the government can provide them. So itâs not an âall government badâ position. But the govt being what it is, all power given to it is exploited to the maximum extent to favor the powerful and the population now is utterly strangled by the tools that were meant to protect it. OSHA and the EPA are IMO pretty good examples of good ideas that now do more harm than good! There are entire books written about these things if you want me to recommend them. If you prefer bite-size chunks over time maybe follow Noahpinion or Reason Magazine?
Ah yes, the golden age of pre-1919. Returning to the economic conditions of pre-1919 in exchange for eliminating billionaires seems like just hurting everyone alive so some people can be hurt even more. If material prosperity nowadays is greater than 1919, maybe the existence of billionaires is a part of that?
Siiiiigh.
OK. Say the average founder can capture 10% of the value he creates. Thatâs a preposterously high amount, but weâll use it to make the math easier. This means that once he creates $100M of value there is no reason for him to use his various gifts to create more. Any additional value he creates will get him a reputation of obscenity, and heâll be ritually stripped of his portion of it by a spiteful populace. Why would anyone do that? I would make sure to keep my contributions to humanity very small and local, only benefiting myself and my community at most, so that I wouldnât be in danger of helping too many people and becoming obscene.
That isnât what money is for once we get out of the realm of personal finances. People with wealth of that level donât use money to âget by.â
OK, yeah, this definitely says you are new to the world of economic thinking. Thatâs fine, itâs not intuitive. When someone is worth billions of dollars itâs not because they took a billion gold coins and buried them and now no one else can use those coins. Itâs because they own a large fraction of a company that is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. They arenât âhoardingâ anythingâthe company is right there, doing what it does every day! Delivering products or providing services or whatever. Powering the economy is ALREADY what they are doing. In fact, the reason they are so wealthy is BECAUSE they are powering the economy in exactly the way you say you want to encourage! The reward for having powered the economy by hundreds of billions of dollars a year is getting to own a small fraction of what they built.
Thatâs why we advocate for NOT destroying the people who do this. It would be destroying the system that created these engines that power the economy. Powering the economy is indeed what money is for, and this is a major component of how money does that. đ
Youâre talking down to this person (far too much, IMO; just make your arguments or donât, and to the extent that youâre unwilling to engage, donât fill the gap with status games), while also failing to demonstrate that youâve taken critiques of free market capitalism at all seriously.
The idea that wealth earned in a capitalist economy reliably represents âvalue createdâ, in the sense we actually care about, is one of the main points of contention here! Itâs something to be argued for, not taken as an axiom and used to dismiss their concerns as if theyâre stupid.
Ok, thank you for the feedback. I feel I was at least no more out of line than âif they canât get by on 10M boo hoo I donât know what to tell them,â but Iâll try to adjust a bit away from talking down going forward.
But the dogma that there is no way to create enough value to become a billionaire honorably is exactly what Iâm fighting against, so someone who takes the opposite as an axiom needs to be talked down from that point first.
I apologize profusely for upsetting you. Contrary to what your tone suggests, I have not lived my life in a sensory deprivation tank. So there is no need to lecture me. You are not being misunderstood. You are being disagreed with.
>But the govt being what it is, all power given to it is exploited to the maximum extent to favor the powerful and the population now is utterly strangled by the tools that were meant to protect it.
Yes, indeedâand who, pray tell, do you think âthe powerfulâ are?
>Ah yes, the golden age of pre-1919. Returning to the economic conditions of pre-1919 in exchange for eliminating billionaires seems like just hurting everyone alive so some people can be hurt even more. If material prosperity nowadays is greater than 1919, maybe the existence of billionaires is a part of that?
Youâre strawmanning here. I never suggested the pre-1919 world (i.e. most of history) was a âgolden ageâ of any kindâit wasnât. My point was that it meandered along just fine without billionaires, and the world could do without them today, too. You seem to assume that individual innovation has been the primary source of billionaire wealth, but I donât agree with this and believe the entire premise is flawed. I think itâs a matter of historical record that billionaire wealth has mostly been amassed through extraction, corruption, exploitation of labor, elaborate tax evasion schemes, âinsider trading, political lobbying, aggressive corner-cutting, and regulatory capture. And just think of all the things the public never finds out about.
This is not true in every single case, and people like âChuck Feeney, âYvon Chouinard, and âHamdi Ulukaya deserve credit for setting a good example as billionaires or former billionaires. I am personally indebted to Hamdi Ulukaya for making plain yogurt ubiquitous in the US where it used to be a niche item, because it allows me to drink ayran at home without being subjected to a logistical nightmare, but the difference between these individuals and the average billionaire is that they gave their wealth to other people. Chuck Feeney only kept $2 million USD of his wealth for retirement and is no longer even a billionaire. The others have used their money to take care of their employees and fight the climate crisis.
But they are the exceptions.
Iâm not denying that billionaires are innovative. They are innovative. They are also, by and large, âruthless people. Look at John D. Rockefeller, the first billionaire. He was anything but an honest businessman, and he drove countless small businesses into bankruptcy and families into destitution in his pursuit of absurd wealth, because for the vast majority of billionaires thatâs what it took to become wealthy to such a degree. They may not have always liked it or felt good about it, but thatâs what it took.
Thatâs the difference between a billionaire and a successful person who has good ideas and passion but whose personal ambitions are nevertheless balanced against their inherent concern for the welfare of others. You can be successful and still pay your employees well, pay your fair share of taxes, and limit your political influence to voting like everybody else, but then you probably wonât ever become a billionaire.
Yes, billionaires have shifted economic conditions and not everything they do is negative. They have given us technological innovations that we would not have otherwise had, at least not exactly at that moment. They have created jobs for entire sectors even if they did end up sending them overseas in order to cut costs and escape regulatory oversight here at home. They have donated to charities and built libraries, etc. But at what cost? â
They have also poisoned waterways, given children leukemia, stifled competition and, by extension, innovation. They have degraded manufacturing to the point where the average person is endlessly buying things they already âownedâ because their belongings arenât built to last anymore, contributing to the climate crisis and filling our planet with discarded junk. Industry creates resources but it also uses them and creates insurmountable waste.
I could go on but of course, this is a rather contentious topic even among economists and experts, and our individual opinions are going to be shaped at least in part by experience, so we may have to agree to disagree. My community has been harmed by industry, and there is no recovering from this. People who have lost loved ones to toxic waste poisoning, or gotten ill themselves from pollution, or had their job sent overseas, or lived in hardship because the breadwinner of their family died from faulty safety equipment at work because their employer was cutting corners, etc are not so quick to regard the profiteers of their misery with kindness, because that would be stupid.
Hi, I checked out for a while, but I want to say thank you for writing this. I realize I probably didnât deserve this much charity in reading, and I appreciate it.
I think we will continue to disagree on most points, so I donât want to continue restating where we disagree. But I do agree that faulty safety equipment due to negligence is morally bad, and should be condemned and punished. (and approximately the same goes for pollution, and dishonorable business practices. Roughly a âwhat would Dagny Taggart do?â test would be an ideal that would create a wonderful world). I think the amount of such immoral acts is both claimed to be much higher than it is (they are the exceptions) and used to inflame widespread hatred using basically the genocide-style playbook which I find appalling.