A wealth tax than caps one's inflow to something like a million a year makes a lot of sense. To all the billionaire sympathizers who worry about incentives and technological progress, this here is a perfect (and not the only) example of how intrinsic motivation can beat extrinsic motivation by a huge margin.

There will always be people who value intrinsic incentives and even more so when there is a lack or limitation of extrinsic ones. Society will do well to structure itself primarily around such people. Such people are also less likely to cause damage to others because it's very rare that damage to others fulfills one's intrinsic needs. Linus is arguably a net positive to human society than the top 20 billionaires combined. We need more of him and less of the others.

▲ 9753268996433 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why so greedy?

Cap it to $12k/a, the average global personal income.

▲ xienze 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> A wealth tax than caps one's inflow to something like a million a year makes a lot of sense. To all the billionaire sympathizers

Perhaps the "billionaire sympathizers" are people who can manage to see that the bar for what is considered an unacceptable amount of wealth will keep being revised lower and lower until it affects them. Here you are already proposing that a person shouldn't be allowed to earn more than a total of a million dollars in income every year, which caps one's lifetime wealth accumulation at $40-60M[0]. Which would make anyone able to achieve anywhere close to that sum as wealthy as today's wealthiest persons. After which the next person will suggest that such a thing shouldn't be allowed for the betterment of society.

0: assuming you can start earning that much starting at age 20 and you intend on retiring between 60 to 80, so obviously the range can go up or down a bit.

▲ logicchains 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>There will always be people who value intrinsic incentives and even more so when there is a lack or limitation of extrinsic ones. Society will do well to structure itself primarily around such people.

Europe has developed no new big companies in the past two decades precisely because this isn't true. The vast majority of successful companies and products are developed by people motivated by money, and if you try to prevent them from being rewarded for their hard work then they just go somewhere where their effort is more welcome.

	▲	thomascountz 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		`Europe has developed no new big companies in the past two decades precisely because this isn't true.` This sounds like an oversimplification and assumes "big" is on par with net good.
	▲	krior 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		That implies that the goal is to create big companiea.
	▲	lyu07282 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's always wild to me how people perceive Europe. In left-wing academia there is this term "neoliberal encasement" that discusses in detail how neoliberal capitalism isolates the economy from democracy. The EU is sort of the end stage of this idea, economic policy is detached from democratic comtrol to such a degree that member states submit their draft budgets to unelected technocrats in Brussels for approval before "voting" on it. Imagine if IMF economists were to run the economies of a continent, that's what the EU is. It's staggering how completely the opposite of valuing people's intrinsic incentives this model is, but I get where you are coming from of course everybody thinks that, it's just still wild to me how they managed that narrative so well.