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. 🙂
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.