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| ▲ | imgabe 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| Who is going to cap how much a company is allowed to be worth? Or how much of the company you start you are allowed to own? Why should anyone have the power to do that? That is a far more evil power than any billionaire has. |
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| ▲ | photon_lines an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There is an alternative: 1) limit how much descendants can inherit. Allow them only a maximum amount of let's say: 10 million and make sure that either the founder finds a way to redistribute his/her wealth to the rest of the world, or make the government find ways of redistributing this money. 2) make it mandatory for corporations to share their wealth (income) with the employees -- as an example make it mandatory to redistribute 50% of the income generated to the employees working for the company rather than paying CEOs insane amounts of money to return 'shareholder value'. The whole motto of maximising shareholder value has poisoned capitalism: the goal of a company should not be to become a cancerous growth -- but to serve as a net good for humanity. 3) seal the tax loopholes that make it easy for the rich to avoid paying taxes. There is no reason why the poor and middle class pay a disproportionate amount in taxes compared to the rich. |
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| ▲ | hparadiz an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Hundred million is not enough. It's only one hundred houses like mine. I think folks on here forget that what they consider unimaginable wealth is actually not that much and readily spendable quickly. Try building a product line these days and see how fast that 100 million is pissed into the wind. |
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| ▲ | calgoo 41 minutes ago | parent [-] | | what are you talking about????????? 100 million is a fortune, and only people in the SF bubble could even consider that a drop that is pissed into the wind. I would say that you need to take a serious step back and actually contemplate life around you. 100 million is a fortune, and no one actually NEED that much money, if they do, then they have lost touch with reality. | | |
| ▲ | hparadiz 38 minutes ago | parent [-] | | In California that's only 100 homes. That's what's normal for us. Increased market efficiency should actually be lowering taxes, not increasing them just to make you feel good about yourself. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 36 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It's normal for someone to want 100 homes? | | |
| ▲ | hparadiz 29 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Elon spent less than that to fund SpaceX and Tesla which are now bringing in money from abroad and therefore paying a lot more in taxes than whatever you would have collected from that 100 million. Now you can be a commie and seize more or of it to fund your healthcare or whatever but that person that is capable of earning 100 million will simply exit your tax jurisdiction and then you'll be poor. See Europe for the example. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 27 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Elon spent less than that to fund SpaceX and Tesla... So 100 million is enough to do quite a bit with? > that person that is capable of earning 100 million will simply exit your tax jurisdiction There are plenty of lower tax jurisdictions than Silicon Valley. Is it possible there's more to a jurisdiction than the raw marginal tax percentage it applies to one's paycheck? | | |
| ▲ | hparadiz 22 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It's not enough to build a data center these days. Or even run the government for a day these days it seems. Or are you saying salaries need to come down? | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 21 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The amount it costs to build a datacenter or run the government for a day is an unimaginable level of personal wealth to virtually every person on the planet. | | |
| ▲ | hparadiz 17 minutes ago | parent [-] | | My own wealth now would be unimaginable to myself when I lived in the USSR. Maybe don't look at the bottom for what should be. There's never any imagination there. I know better than most. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 16 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Maybe don't look at the bottom for what should be. The people at the top should look at the bottom for what should not be. > My own wealth now would be unimaginable to myself when I lived in the USSR. Good! But apparently $100M isn't enough? |
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| ▲ | Geniuzz an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > But those founders be content with merely making a hundred million? What does this mean? Without some insane wealth tax this is literally impossible. No founder chooses to become a billionaire. They just keep growing a business that is solving a billion dollar problem. The only other was is if after 100M they start turning down customers or restricting services. |
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| ▲ | jrajav an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | This is conflating businesses that solve billion dollar problems with people who individually contribute so much to a business that they solved the billion dollar problem all on their own. The latter is probably possible, but it's not necessarily the case that all billionaires and up today were such individuals. It might be that if personal wealth alone were (effectively, by taxation) capped to $100m, we would still have exactly as much collective wealth, innovation, and value creation as we do today. Possibly more, because of more wealth distributed onto shared infrastructure and into the fluid economy. | |
| ▲ | therealdrag0 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | They can continue growing the business while giving other employees a larger share of the asset. One person doesn’t create a billion dollar company, dozens or thousands do. After founding, other people who don’t become billionaires work similarly hard and are similarly smart as the founder. This is why people dispute “earning” a billion dollars. |
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| ▲ | sillysaurusx 26 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| pg has an essay addressing exactly that: https://paulgraham.com/inequality.html The problem is that when you cap earnings to $100m, most investors lose motivation to invest in startups, because their investment isn’t likely to yield a reward. Unless you think all investments should be less than $100m, this kills large investment rounds. That would have killed OpenAI, for example, since their recent round was larger. In other words, it’s fine to say “you can only earn a hundred million dollars.” The hard part is implementing it without killing the investment ecosystem. Every investor is chasing the big return that covers the 20 investments that didn’t pan out. If that big return is capped, there won’t be investment, and hence no startups. |
