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?
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.