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WHY do we have an economic system that allows an individual to own almost an entire Hawaiian island, by virtue of owning majority share of an advertising platfo

WHY do we have an economic system that allows an individual to own almost an entire Hawaiian island, by virtue of owning majority share of an advertising platform?? The employees certainly don’t get an island of their own, nor the owners or workers at any vendor data centers, or the power plant workers, or the crew that laid fiber or built the routers and wifi access points that get FB onto your screen? This giant funnel that plows billions of dollara into the pockets of a tiny number of people, because they have the piece of paper that says “I own this” and everyone down the line was just ok with it. We should not allow billionaires.

leggomylibro 9y ago
Ideally, we really shouldn't allow any individual to gain too large a share of any kind of power, whether financial or political or whatever. Of course, that's probably also a good way to get systems and things which are...well, designed by committee.
- colechristensen 9y ago
  The United States was designed to harness competition. It is what was supposed to keep us successful. It has done a very good job. If there are 20 burger restaurants, the best burger isn't designed by committee. Each will try to improve to stay in the market and the people who decide who survives and who dies is determined by the people choosing which burger to eat. It works as long as there is competition. One burger restaurant winning all of the business with a great burger, and then using scale to make competition impossible followed by lowering the quality to find minimum cost with maximum profit... that's another outcome of capitalism, and one we're suffering now. To make it work you need centralized authority that resists corruption and can put it's finger on the scale to encourage the appropriate amount of diversity.
colechristensen 9y ago
Remember to compare what you don't like about one system with what you wouldn't like about the other. Socialist societies aren't without centralized extreme power, and how you get and keep that power is arguably much worse. You also don't need to be socialist to fix the inequality problems. And simply, there are too many mathematical power laws in any society to prevent the few from having a lot. The intensity is what you need to change. It's difficult.
- bamboozled 9y ago
  “Socialist societies aren't without centralized extreme power“ Assuming you’re not living in a socialist democracy but rather a dictatorship, I feel they often become confused and just wanted to point that out.
  - colechristensen 9y ago
    Socialist democracies are still capitalist. Norway has more billionaires per capita than the US.
    - WaxProlix 9y ago
      It's also not a socialist democracy.
    - bamboozled 9y ago
      I like the irony in this answer.
- khazhou 9y ago
  Totally agree and I shouldn’t invoke socialism because that introduces a huge number of other issues which I’m not referring to. My target is the outrageous inequality of wealth and ownership.
  - colechristensen 9y ago
    The thing is, when you take away "ownership" in the capitalist sense, de facto ownership and wealth still exists, just with different names. Societies that aren't hierarchical don't really exist on any but the tiniest scales excluding some situations where individual units are nearly self-sufficient.
- Asooka 9y ago
  > Socialist societies Please make a difference between a socialist-leaning societal culture and an actual totalitarian government necessary to force everyone to follow socialist policies. The socialism you're thinking of starts when you abolish elections (or make it the law that you have to vote for The Party) and merge the three branches of government. Simply enacting socialist policies for the benefit of the community within the established democratic framework of checks and balances on the power of governing bodies, is not a slippery slope and does not end with actual socialism.
deepsun 9y ago
I grew up in socialistic country, and I can tell you, man, I definitely prefer living in US now, where some people got outrageously richer than me by chance. I just don't envy them.
- mcbruiser4 9y ago
  you should speak at campuses, people need to hear this message
simonh 9y ago
On the other hand all those other people at Facebook have those jobs because Zuckerberg built the company and hired them. How do you prevent Zuckerberg from profiting from doing that without also choking off the funding and investment he needed to grow that company so rapidly in just a few years? If anyone deserves that kind of compensation, isn’t it someone who built a business that provides 20,000 jobs and a free service used by over a billion people every day? Isn’t that the kind of person that, perhaps above most others, knows how to use billions of dollars to do something worthwhile? How do we make sure he has the resources to build and fund that business, while denying him the funds and resources to do other legal activities as well? Who gets to decide yes you can spend billions on building Facebook, but no you can’t spend it on real estate that’s legal for other people to buy? How do we restrict that by law and ensure the people enforcing those restrictions don’t kill off the next Facebook, or the next holiday resort company, etc? Command economies don’t have much of a track record of economic success. I say all that without even liking Facebook, I barely use it and am annoyed by a lot of their business practices, but I have no right to tell people which company they should work for or which social network they should use or what company or project allowed by the law that they should or should not fund. Capitalism is ultimately about the individual freedom of citizens to spend or invest their money as they see fit. How do you justify taking away those freedoms and how to you do so without choking off innovation and growth?
- khazhou 9y ago
  On the other hand it WAS NOT Zuckerberg who built the company and hired 20000 people. Zuckerberg hired the first few, those all built the first stage and hired the next round of prople, who built and hired more. The success of FB or any company is due to their combined efforts. And, it’s built over the efforts of hundreds of thousands more who built the critical infrastructure outside FB. Of course Zuck should reap more rewards for his founding and leadership role. But not to the tune of 75 billion dollars. And it should not require billion-dollar paydays to incentivize people to build companies.
  - thatswrong0 9y ago
    If Zuckerberg didn’t exist, Facebook as it stands would not exist. Everyone he hired agreed to be compensated with the terms he decreed. Every person he gave equity, every person whose salary he directly determined, they all agreed to the terms of their employment. No one was forced to work for him or Facebook. Why should he be forced to relinquish control or equity in his company if literally everyone he worked with agreed to the terms of their employment at his company? Who is the person that should decide “oh, at this point he has enough, he doesn’t deserve more”? You? Some other corrupt government individual? I just don’t understand why you think that random people should be able to determine the fate of a fortune that someone amassed when they had nothing to do with it. He pays his taxes. Facebook pays their taxes as required by law. Why do you think that’s not enough? I understand closing loopholes, but you apparently think we should go further? You think that we should set a hard cap on wealth? How would that not create adverse economic incentives?
AndrewKemendo 9y ago
It seems you have concerns with the idea of trade or labor specializations having different labor prices. So for your example you call out trench diggers, hardware engineers, assemblers, electrical engineers etc... Each of these groups is getting paid for their services based on market competition. As far as I know, a good portion of those are unionized and the rest are in competitive industries that supply multiple different partners. Eg. very few of those laborers work as direct employees of Facebook - they take relatively short term contracts to execute those tasks and then move on to other customers. I'm not sure how you see equity being distributed in those cases such that it would be considered fair. The "modern economic" argument is that the price they are being paid - arguably negotiated against other competitors is market clearing.
Asooka 9y ago
Your anger is legitimate, but your line of thinking is misplaced. Going "we should not allow billionaires" leads directly to "we need an authority to limit and redistribute gains". So you make The Authority which has ultimate authority over all political power and economic capital and now you're in a totalitarian state. If there is a singular group that is the only group allowed to have meaningful power, it won't be long before that group has all the power. Everybody is equal, but members of The Party are ten times as equal... Instead you should be thinking "how do I/we get these obviously capable and motivated people to act in a way that benefits all of us". Zuckerberg didn't steal the money by overt force (what the socialist government used to do to us in East Europe), there was a long line of economic exchanges that benefited both parties in some way, that let him get to where he is. He started high, yes, and he reached even higher. The fact he's now acting churlish should not be cause for you to ask for the abolishment of basic human rights and liberties.
- khazhou 9y ago
  Your line of thinking is misplaced. The Authority is the US Govt and the mechanism is taxation. Explain to me how a drastic increase in taxes on a small number of individuals (effectively capping their income) brings us to a Totalitarian state? Amassing $75B is not a basic human right or liberty. And this has nothing at all do with someone acting churlish, or conversely with their potential to do wonderful things with that money. The question is just: as a society, do we allow a roomful of people to own more than half the nation combined? And how does this benefit the country? I say No — the disparity must be reined in.
somecontext 9y ago
> allows an individual to own almost an entire Hawaiian island I have collected some context about the largest private landowner on each of the Hawaiian islands, which I believe people may find interesting. They are sorted in (decreasing) order by size of the island. Kamehameha Schools owns ~12% of the ~10,000 square kilometers of (the big island of) Hawai`i. Alexander & Baldwin owns ~20% of the ~1,900 square kilometers of Maui. Kamehameha Schools (same as above) owns ~12% of the ~1,500 square kilometers of O`ahu. The Robinson family owns ~15% of the ~1,400 square kilometers of Kaua`i. (This is probably the island intended by my parent comment, as Mark Zuckerberg owns ~3 square kilometers there, or 1/500th of the island.) Molokai Ranch owns ~35% of the ~700 square kilometers of Moloka`i. It is currently for sale for $260 million: http://www.businessinsider.com/hawaiian-island-for-sale-molokai-ranch-2017-9/ http://www.businessinsider.com/hawaiian-island-for-sale-molo... Larry Ellison owns ~97% of the ~360 square kilometers of Lana`i (under the name "Pulama Lanai"). The Robinson family (same as above) owns ~99% of the 180 square kilometers of Ni`ihau. There are no private landowners on the ~115 square kilometers of the smallest of the eight traditional Hawaiian islands, Kaho`olawe.

leggomylibro 9y ago

Ideally, we really shouldn't allow any individual to gain too large a share of any kind of power, whether financial or political or whatever. Of course, that's probably also a good way to get systems and things which are...well, designed by committee.

colechristensen 9y ago
The United States was designed to harness competition. It is what was supposed to keep us successful. It has done a very good job. If there are 20 burger restaurants, the best burger isn't designed by committee. Each will try to improve to stay in the market and the people who decide who survives and who dies is determined by the people choosing which burger to eat. It works as long as there is competition. One burger restaurant winning all of the business with a great burger, and then using scale to make competition impossible followed by lowering the quality to find minimum cost with maximum profit... that's another outcome of capitalism, and one we're suffering now. To make it work you need centralized authority that resists corruption and can put it's finger on the scale to encourage the appropriate amount of diversity.

colechristensen 9y ago

Remember to compare what you don't like about one system with what you wouldn't like about the other. Socialist societies aren't without centralized extreme power, and how you get and keep that power is arguably much worse. You also don't need to be socialist to fix the inequality problems. And simply, there are too many mathematical power laws in any society to prevent the few from having a lot. The intensity is what you need to change. It's difficult.

bamboozled 9y ago
“Socialist societies aren't without centralized extreme power“ Assuming you’re not living in a socialist democracy but rather a dictatorship, I feel they often become confused and just wanted to point that out.
- colechristensen 9y ago
  Socialist democracies are still capitalist. Norway has more billionaires per capita than the US.
  - WaxProlix 9y ago
    It's also not a socialist democracy.
  - bamboozled 9y ago
    I like the irony in this answer.
khazhou 9y ago
Totally agree and I shouldn’t invoke socialism because that introduces a huge number of other issues which I’m not referring to. My target is the outrageous inequality of wealth and ownership.
- colechristensen 9y ago
  The thing is, when you take away "ownership" in the capitalist sense, de facto ownership and wealth still exists, just with different names. Societies that aren't hierarchical don't really exist on any but the tiniest scales excluding some situations where individual units are nearly self-sufficient.
Asooka 9y ago
> Socialist societies Please make a difference between a socialist-leaning societal culture and an actual totalitarian government necessary to force everyone to follow socialist policies. The socialism you're thinking of starts when you abolish elections (or make it the law that you have to vote for The Party) and merge the three branches of government. Simply enacting socialist policies for the benefit of the community within the established democratic framework of checks and balances on the power of governing bodies, is not a slippery slope and does not end with actual socialism.

deepsun 9y ago

I grew up in socialistic country, and I can tell you, man, I definitely prefer living in US now, where some people got outrageously richer than me by chance. I just don't envy them.

mcbruiser4 9y ago
you should speak at campuses, people need to hear this message

simonh 9y ago

On the other hand all those other people at Facebook have those jobs because Zuckerberg built the company and hired them. How do you prevent Zuckerberg from profiting from doing that without also choking off the funding and investment he needed to grow that company so rapidly in just a few years? If anyone deserves that kind of compensation, isn’t it someone who built a business that provides 20,000 jobs and a free service used by over a billion people every day? Isn’t that the kind of person that, perhaps above most others, knows how to use billions of dollars to do something worthwhile? How do we make sure he has the resources to build and fund that business, while denying him the funds and resources to do other legal activities as well? Who gets to decide yes you can spend billions on building Facebook, but no you can’t spend it on real estate that’s legal for other people to buy? How do we restrict that by law and ensure the people enforcing those restrictions don’t kill off the next Facebook, or the next holiday resort company, etc? Command economies don’t have much of a track record of economic success. I say all that without even liking Facebook, I barely use it and am annoyed by a lot of their business practices, but I have no right to tell people which company they should work for or which social network they should use or what company or project allowed by the law that they should or should not fund. Capitalism is ultimately about the individual freedom of citizens to spend or invest their money as they see fit. How do you justify taking away those freedoms and how to you do so without choking off innovation and growth?

khazhou 9y ago
On the other hand it WAS NOT Zuckerberg who built the company and hired 20000 people. Zuckerberg hired the first few, those all built the first stage and hired the next round of prople, who built and hired more. The success of FB or any company is due to their combined efforts. And, it’s built over the efforts of hundreds of thousands more who built the critical infrastructure outside FB. Of course Zuck should reap more rewards for his founding and leadership role. But not to the tune of 75 billion dollars. And it should not require billion-dollar paydays to incentivize people to build companies.
- thatswrong0 9y ago
  If Zuckerberg didn’t exist, Facebook as it stands would not exist. Everyone he hired agreed to be compensated with the terms he decreed. Every person he gave equity, every person whose salary he directly determined, they all agreed to the terms of their employment. No one was forced to work for him or Facebook. Why should he be forced to relinquish control or equity in his company if literally everyone he worked with agreed to the terms of their employment at his company? Who is the person that should decide “oh, at this point he has enough, he doesn’t deserve more”? You? Some other corrupt government individual? I just don’t understand why you think that random people should be able to determine the fate of a fortune that someone amassed when they had nothing to do with it. He pays his taxes. Facebook pays their taxes as required by law. Why do you think that’s not enough? I understand closing loopholes, but you apparently think we should go further? You think that we should set a hard cap on wealth? How would that not create adverse economic incentives?

AndrewKemendo 9y ago

It seems you have concerns with the idea of trade or labor specializations having different labor prices. So for your example you call out trench diggers, hardware engineers, assemblers, electrical engineers etc... Each of these groups is getting paid for their services based on market competition. As far as I know, a good portion of those are unionized and the rest are in competitive industries that supply multiple different partners. Eg. very few of those laborers work as direct employees of Facebook - they take relatively short term contracts to execute those tasks and then move on to other customers. I'm not sure how you see equity being distributed in those cases such that it would be considered fair. The "modern economic" argument is that the price they are being paid - arguably negotiated against other competitors is market clearing.

Asooka 9y ago

Your anger is legitimate, but your line of thinking is misplaced. Going "we should not allow billionaires" leads directly to "we need an authority to limit and redistribute gains". So you make The Authority which has ultimate authority over all political power and economic capital and now you're in a totalitarian state. If there is a singular group that is the only group allowed to have meaningful power, it won't be long before that group has all the power. Everybody is equal, but members of The Party are ten times as equal... Instead you should be thinking "how do I/we get these obviously capable and motivated people to act in a way that benefits all of us". Zuckerberg didn't steal the money by overt force (what the socialist government used to do to us in East Europe), there was a long line of economic exchanges that benefited both parties in some way, that let him get to where he is. He started high, yes, and he reached even higher. The fact he's now acting churlish should not be cause for you to ask for the abolishment of basic human rights and liberties.

khazhou 9y ago
Your line of thinking is misplaced. The Authority is the US Govt and the mechanism is taxation. Explain to me how a drastic increase in taxes on a small number of individuals (effectively capping their income) brings us to a Totalitarian state? Amassing $75B is not a basic human right or liberty. And this has nothing at all do with someone acting churlish, or conversely with their potential to do wonderful things with that money. The question is just: as a society, do we allow a roomful of people to own more than half the nation combined? And how does this benefit the country? I say No — the disparity must be reined in.

somecontext 9y ago

> allows an individual to own almost an entire Hawaiian island I have collected some context about the largest private landowner on each of the Hawaiian islands, which I believe people may find interesting. They are sorted in (decreasing) order by size of the island. Kamehameha Schools owns ~12% of the ~10,000 square kilometers of (the big island of) Hawai`i. Alexander & Baldwin owns ~20% of the ~1,900 square kilometers of Maui. Kamehameha Schools (same as above) owns ~12% of the ~1,500 square kilometers of O`ahu. The Robinson family owns ~15% of the ~1,400 square kilometers of Kaua`i. (This is probably the island intended by my parent comment, as Mark Zuckerberg owns ~3 square kilometers there, or 1/500th of the island.) Molokai Ranch owns ~35% of the ~700 square kilometers of Moloka`i. It is currently for sale for $260 million: http://www.businessinsider.com/hawaiian-island-for-sale-molokai-ranch-2017-9/ http://www.businessinsider.com/hawaiian-island-for-sale-molo... Larry Ellison owns ~97% of the ~360 square kilometers of Lana`i (under the name "Pulama Lanai"). The Robinson family (same as above) owns ~99% of the 180 square kilometers of Ni`ihau. There are no private landowners on the ~115 square kilometers of the smallest of the eight traditional Hawaiian islands, Kaho`olawe.