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So if a very capable, a hard working, effective person is able to increase their wealth by 20x, and in so doing increases my wealth by 2x without my doing anyth

So if a very capable, a hard working, effective person is able to increase their wealth by 20x, and in so doing increases my wealth by 2x without my doing anything, you'd be in favor of using the power of the state to prevent this from happening because it would increase inequality?

sooheon 8y ago
Not OP, but my take on that is this: if that industrious 20x / 2x value creator could exist in a vacuum there's no reason to stop them. Im fine even with a 1000x / 1.1x split, ceteris paribus. My problem with aggregation of wealth and power is not with numerical inequality, but with the "evil" that can follow--rent seeking, externalization of costs, monopolization. If the externalities end up 0.5x-ing everyone else's wealth, this is a problem.
nabla9 8y ago
You should think in the terms of opportunity cost. The alternative to what you suggest is not zero growth of wealth. It can be even larger growth of wealth when the markets work better. The type of anti-markets and pro business approach where big corporations are shielded from the markets and monopoly powers are allowed as long as antitrust felony crimes don't happen is perversion of capitalism. The ideological foundation for this tinking was laid out in Robert Bork's book 'The Antitrust Paradox' (1978) that Reagan administration used as their bible.
geofft 8y ago
Yes, that's what being anticapitalist means. I'm good at what I do and I work for a hedge fund because they'll compensate me well for it. I increase the productivity of other people at my company, without them doing anything, by giving them better platforms for their work. Chasing salary is the obvious locally rational action for me, but it's inefficient for the world. I could be making life better for the world if I could be funded to work on, say, Debian instead of our in-house build system. And I probably could be funded at about 1/20 of my current salary to do it, and provide 2x productivity benefits for you personally, but the incentives of a capitalist society mean that isn't the right decision for me. However - you say "using the power of the state to prevent." I am not in favor of that. I am in favor of ceasing using the power of the state to enable. The government could stop recognizing the right of corporations to property and to the labor of individuals at any time.
quadrangle 8y ago
If you think the debate is purely about relative wealth, you are misunderstanding most of it. But even still: relative wealth distribution getting too extremely unequal has negative ramifications for any society, regardless of the absolute wealth. But again: that is NOT the issue in this case. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/antitrust-3-big-tech https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/anti... for more perspective, a bunch of discussion about antitrust issues in big tech and NONE, ZERO, NADA of it is about wealth and money in itself.
- StreamBright 8y ago
  >>> relative wealth distribution getting too extremely unequal has negative ramifications for any society, regardless of the absolute wealth Like what exactly? I do not understand why people are upset over extreme wealth. I think Jeff Bezos deserves to be a billionaire and I would not want to live in a society that does not allow people like him succeed and accumulate this sort of money. The quetion is what happens with his wealth in the second and third generation. Historically in fedualism this was passed down to the next generation and the family would keep it until end of the feudalism era. In a capitalistic society it deisappears within 2-3 egenerations, especially with people like Bill Gates. Not sure what is the problem here.
  - CamperBob2 8y ago
    There's this weird notion that you can improve your lot in life by worrying more about the contents of other peoples' bank accounts than you do your own. I don't get it either.
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    I don't have time to answer your specific claim about why relative wealth inequality is a problem even if the poor aren't miserably poor. It's a complex and deep subject. There's resources out there if you are curious. And yes, there's a good share of BAD arguments against wealth inequity (lots of people who are just resentful and superficial and believe even factually wrong things) — so you could spend your time convincing yourself that everyone you disagree with is an idiot. There's no shortage of idiocy. But you can also find the real stuff from smart and expressive people discussing these things better, and that's what you should try to find. Sorry for not picking out citations, I'm already procrastinating too much by writing this. Now, Jeff Bezos is absolutely a remarkable and unique person who worked very hard and intelligently to get to where he is. But on just the pure matter of "deserve" it's so much more complex than the way you are looking at it. We don't live in a fair world. Look up "just world fallacy". In a world that is quite out of alignment from what we'd have if everyone got what they "deserve", it's simplistic to look at select cases like Bezos and judge from there. But that's not what this is about AT ALL. The concept of anti-trust and of managing this stuff is about power. The question is whether it's okay for Bezos and the whole company really to not only be wealthy but have monopoly-like power in the market. I have no reason to believe you checked out the link I posted earlier because you went on and repeated arguments about wealth — and this is NOT about that, not philosophically or legally. It's not even about taking away Bezos' wealth! Anti-trust is not about wealth redistribution, it's only about stopping anti-competitive threats to market competition. > In a capitalistic society it deisappears within 2-3 generations Well, that's just factually wrong. Capitalism doesn't just automatically do that, and the evidence doesn't support that claim either. And we don't have any sort of "pure" capitalism in existence to even study anyway. You need to get beyond these superficial specious ideas if you want to understand the reality. Start by treating your presumptions as hypotheses and figure out what evidence would be scientifically strong enough to validate or invalidate them and see how they hold up.

sooheon 8y ago

Not OP, but my take on that is this: if that industrious 20x / 2x value creator could exist in a vacuum there's no reason to stop them. Im fine even with a 1000x / 1.1x split, ceteris paribus. My problem with aggregation of wealth and power is not with numerical inequality, but with the "evil" that can follow--rent seeking, externalization of costs, monopolization. If the externalities end up 0.5x-ing everyone else's wealth, this is a problem.

nabla9 8y ago

You should think in the terms of opportunity cost. The alternative to what you suggest is not zero growth of wealth. It can be even larger growth of wealth when the markets work better. The type of anti-markets and pro business approach where big corporations are shielded from the markets and monopoly powers are allowed as long as antitrust felony crimes don't happen is perversion of capitalism. The ideological foundation for this tinking was laid out in Robert Bork's book 'The Antitrust Paradox' (1978) that Reagan administration used as their bible.

geofft 8y ago

Yes, that's what being anticapitalist means. I'm good at what I do and I work for a hedge fund because they'll compensate me well for it. I increase the productivity of other people at my company, without them doing anything, by giving them better platforms for their work. Chasing salary is the obvious locally rational action for me, but it's inefficient for the world. I could be making life better for the world if I could be funded to work on, say, Debian instead of our in-house build system. And I probably could be funded at about 1/20 of my current salary to do it, and provide 2x productivity benefits for you personally, but the incentives of a capitalist society mean that isn't the right decision for me. However - you say "using the power of the state to prevent." I am not in favor of that. I am in favor of ceasing using the power of the state to enable. The government could stop recognizing the right of corporations to property and to the labor of individuals at any time.

quadrangle 8y ago

If you think the debate is purely about relative wealth, you are misunderstanding most of it. But even still: relative wealth distribution getting too extremely unequal has negative ramifications for any society, regardless of the absolute wealth. But again: that is NOT the issue in this case. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/antitrust-3-big-tech https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/02/22/697170790/anti... for more perspective, a bunch of discussion about antitrust issues in big tech and NONE, ZERO, NADA of it is about wealth and money in itself.

StreamBright 8y ago
>>> relative wealth distribution getting too extremely unequal has negative ramifications for any society, regardless of the absolute wealth Like what exactly? I do not understand why people are upset over extreme wealth. I think Jeff Bezos deserves to be a billionaire and I would not want to live in a society that does not allow people like him succeed and accumulate this sort of money. The quetion is what happens with his wealth in the second and third generation. Historically in fedualism this was passed down to the next generation and the family would keep it until end of the feudalism era. In a capitalistic society it deisappears within 2-3 egenerations, especially with people like Bill Gates. Not sure what is the problem here.
- CamperBob2 8y ago
  There's this weird notion that you can improve your lot in life by worrying more about the contents of other peoples' bank accounts than you do your own. I don't get it either.
- quadrangle 8y ago
  I don't have time to answer your specific claim about why relative wealth inequality is a problem even if the poor aren't miserably poor. It's a complex and deep subject. There's resources out there if you are curious. And yes, there's a good share of BAD arguments against wealth inequity (lots of people who are just resentful and superficial and believe even factually wrong things) — so you could spend your time convincing yourself that everyone you disagree with is an idiot. There's no shortage of idiocy. But you can also find the real stuff from smart and expressive people discussing these things better, and that's what you should try to find. Sorry for not picking out citations, I'm already procrastinating too much by writing this. Now, Jeff Bezos is absolutely a remarkable and unique person who worked very hard and intelligently to get to where he is. But on just the pure matter of "deserve" it's so much more complex than the way you are looking at it. We don't live in a fair world. Look up "just world fallacy". In a world that is quite out of alignment from what we'd have if everyone got what they "deserve", it's simplistic to look at select cases like Bezos and judge from there. But that's not what this is about AT ALL. The concept of anti-trust and of managing this stuff is about power. The question is whether it's okay for Bezos and the whole company really to not only be wealthy but have monopoly-like power in the market. I have no reason to believe you checked out the link I posted earlier because you went on and repeated arguments about wealth — and this is NOT about that, not philosophically or legally. It's not even about taking away Bezos' wealth! Anti-trust is not about wealth redistribution, it's only about stopping anti-competitive threats to market competition. > In a capitalistic society it deisappears within 2-3 generations Well, that's just factually wrong. Capitalism doesn't just automatically do that, and the evidence doesn't support that claim either. And we don't have any sort of "pure" capitalism in existence to even study anyway. You need to get beyond these superficial specious ideas if you want to understand the reality. Start by treating your presumptions as hypotheses and figure out what evidence would be scientifically strong enough to validate or invalidate them and see how they hold up.