I consider it poor form to disguise a veganism argument as being about something else.
Eneasz
Karma: 3,794
Ok, thank you for the feedback. I feel I was at least no more out of line than “if they can’t get by on 10M boo hoo I don’t know what to tell them,” but I’ll 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 I’m fighting against, so someone who takes the opposite as an axiom needs to be talked down from that point first.
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 you’ll 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 it’s not an “all government bad” 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. That’s a preposterously high amount, but we’ll 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 he’ll 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 wouldn’t be in danger of helping too many people and becoming obscene.
If they can’t get by on $10 million, boo hoo, I don’t know what to tell them.
That isn’t what money is for once we get out of the realm of personal finances. People with wealth of that level don’t use money to “get by.”
There’s 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. That’s fine, it’s not intuitive. When someone is worth billions of dollars it’s not because they took a billion gold coins and buried them and now no one else can use those coins. It’s because they own a large fraction of a company that is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. They aren’t “hoarding” anything—the 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.
That’s 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. 🙂
Thank you for this, I appreciate it. I should clarify that I agree with you completely, and why I do, and what that means about my original point. 🙂
First, I strongly agree that many industries, such as Pharma (and real estate) are incredibly unfair and not a level playing field at all. I think health insurance is the worst of all of these, many people have written about how the US Healthcare system somehow manages to incorporate the absolute worst equilibria of every possible system. In these cases (and nearly all similar cases) the common denominator is how much distortion and interference there is by the government. The worst parts of the economy are the ones most regulated/distorted/corrupted by the government. 🙁
That being said, like you pointed out, a government is required to set the ground rules (What is property? How are contracts enforced?). So the hope is that we can enable a government that creates a strong, well-considered foundation, without trying to take over and directly manage the market. The government needs to create a ground for the market to work on, and then stop trying to geoform it into some alien configurations, because that always just makes the ground incredibly un-level. And then the assumptions about wealth being created honorably don’t apply anymore. Or apply less in proportion to how un-level the ground has become.
That being said, I don’t hold the maximally-naive position that our world is the ideal of “capitalism is somehow producing inordinate wealth via an “Honorable Code” because it supposedly aggregates free choices.” I am pushing that this is DESIRABLE. And that we can have this! And in a number of places, we’ve managed to get pretty close!
The narrative I am horrified by is the very loud, oft-repeated position that there is no such thing as Honorable Wealth. That every Billionaire is a Policy Failure. That such people are by necessity evil and exploitative. This is extremely wrong. In a fair system, the existence if Billionaire is both expected and good. One cannot eliminate billionaires and retain a functional system. So I am pushing very hard that one can, indeed, have Honorable Wealth. And anyone claiming Billionaires Shouldn’t Exist is the evil one, for this reason.
The fact that we have quite a few places where there isn’t a level field and that normal people pay a hefty price for this is not lost on me. Those places should be fixed. And the best way to fix them is to return those landscapes to places where Honorable Wealth is once again possible, rather than requiring corruption and graft. 🙁
The Day After Move 37
I’m a little confused, what do you think is the core assertion that my argument relied on?
This is how people in poor countries view people in rich countries as well. And how people in grievance cultures view the outgroup they hold a grudge against when that outgroup is doing better than them. It’s just incredulity combined with prejudice.
This. “loot the outgroup” is evil behavior.
I don’t care if it can sustain huge amounts, actually. It shouldn’t have this even if it’s sustainable.
No, that misses the core argument. “Letting people keep their stuff if it was earned honorably” is a vital component of the engine. You can’t remove it and keep the engine working.
You hit actual counter argument here—“People are already coordinated around the notion that billionares are not “honorably wealth” and are net negative for society.” I agree that is the case for some billionaires, and where that is the case they should be punished and their wealth confiscated. But that must be demonstrated, it cannot simply be assumed to be true because they are billionaires.
The organizer of the march (Derik) specifically spoke about buy, borrow, die in interviews with the press, and in his closing speech, as a loophole that exists and must be closed. The marchers were not without nuance (except Annie ofc.… >.>) I’m less concerned than most, partly because it requires a low-interest environment (this was a much bigger deal during the era of 0% interest rate) and partly because “die” is a crucial part of it. Seems like a losing strategy to me on it’s face, and one that won’t last much longer as we fix aging. But regardless, this can and probably should be fixed by eliminating the step-up basis on extremely large estates.
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.
Stone Age Billionaire Can’t Words Good
The latest episode of the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast is a discussion of this post (starting at minute 31).
https://www.thebayesianconspiracy.com/2026/01/253-the-seven-vicious-vices-of-rationalists/
Guys who care about openness and honesty should continue to be open and honest; and the women who are turned off by this are best avoided by us, tbh. Unless you (as the guy) are also into non-consent, the sex with someone who isn’t visibly/legibly into you isn’t great.
I’ve done audio for Ben’s HPMoR/Disco Elysium crossover story. It’s here—https://hpmorpodcast.com/?p=3476
It’s not ideal, I think next time I’ll get someone with a voice much closer to the narrator for the game. But here is my shot at an audio version of this. https://hpmorpodcast.com/?p=3476
Hi, I checked out for a while, but I want to say thank you for writing this. I realize I probably didn’t deserve this much charity in reading, and I appreciate it.
I think we will continue to disagree on most points, so I don’t 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 “what would Dagny Taggart do?” 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.