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I do believe that -- in fact, I have no problem with a relatively modest income and wealth inequality. However, the wealth and income inequality that exists in

by door5 7y ago

I do believe that -- in fact, I have no problem with a relatively modest income and wealth inequality. However, the wealth and income inequality that exists in the United States is far beyond that. In the United States, the top 1% controls 35% of the wealth in this country, while the bottom 40% controls less than 1%. This isn't just a difference in skills, effort, and risk-taking. This is flagrant exploitation and domination by the rich and powerful. Furthermore, I don't believe that Jeff Bezos or any CEO has a claim to their billions. I agree that "billionaires are a policy failure" -- no one person has any right to that much wealth. Amazon's success is not solely attributable to Jeff Bezos, it was the work of thousands of employees and built upon publicly-funded technology research. That wealth should be distributed to society at large, not controlled by one man. If you find yourself defending billionaires, I wonder, why? Do you think you will someday be a billionaire? If not, then billionaires are not your friend. Their money is money that is taken from your pocket, and the collective pockets of our society. The traditional argument for wealth inequality is "a rising tide lifts all boats", but that has been empirically false since the 70s -- despite a massive increase in wealth, most of it has gone to a very tiny portion of our population. And if you're not part of that population, what on earth do you have to gain from defending them?

pdonis 7y ago
> That wealth should be distributed to society at large Ok, let's say we do that--a 100% wealth tax on any personal wealth over $999,999,999. So Bezos forks over everything he has over that, and we distribute it. First, how do we distribute it? Let's say we just divide it up equally among all 325 million Americans. That's about $370 per person. Wow. But second, what happens once we finish distributing? What are most people going to do with that $370? Spend it on something. How many people are going to make that $370 grow? Not many. Which means, in practice, all that wealth will just concentrate again. If most of the people spend the $370 buying something on Amazon, a lot of that wealth will just end up back in Bezos' pocket. In other words, redistributing wealth can temporarily make things more equal, but they won't stay that way.
- door5 7y ago
  First off, Jeff Bezos is not the only billionaire, so your $370 number is off. Second off, there's more that the government can do other than cash payments to individuals, they can invest in infrastructure (like education, housing, public transit, etc.) which pays long-term dividends to society. The wealth from this tax could be used to fund a public bank, which re-invests it and pays dividends back to the community. I'm not advocating for a specific policy proposal -- there exist many -- I'm defending the general principle that concentration of wealth is unethical and ought to be redistributed. Once you agree with that principle, you can work out exactly how best to do it, but that principle is necessarily an ideological one -- one that says that money and capital should serve the needs of the people, not the wealthiest corporations.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > Jeff Bezos is not the only billionaire True. You might get it up to a few thousand per American if you counted all billionaires. > there's more that the government can do other than cash payments to individuals, they can invest in infrastructure (like education, housing, public transit, etc.) which pays long-term dividends to society Sure, spend the $1T or so you would get from all the US billionaires on infrastructure. That's a decent fraction of US federal spending--for one year. Then it's gone. Now what do you do? What all of this leaves out is that wealth is not a zero sum game. Wealth gets created. If you want to reduce wealth inequality, you need to help more people create wealth, not try to take it away from people who have already created it. > I'm defending the general principle that concentration of wealth is unethical and ought to be redistributed I don't agree with this principle. But I might if you added a qualifier; see below. > money and capital should serve the needs of the people, not the wealthiest corporations Jeff Bezos made his billions by serving the needs of the people; that's what Amazon does. Lots of people shop there because it gets them the stuff they need, when they need it, for an affordable price. Another way of putting what I've just said is that Bezos, in creating and growing Amazon as a corporation, created lots of wealth. A huge, efficient distribution system for lots of goods people want now exists that didn't exist before; that's a huge creation of wealth. But lots of billionaires didn't get their billions that way. Lots of them did so by not creating any wealth at all, just transferring wealth from other people to themselves. For example, investment banks transfer wealth to themselves by taking advantage of asymmetric information to get other parties to accept the wrong end of zero sum trades. (For that matter, the entire US banking and financial system transfer wealth to itself by getting the Federal Reserve to print money that they use for loans.) So if you were to modify your principle to say that concentration of wealth that does not involve wealth creation is unethical, I would agree with you. But that wouldn't be fixed by redistributing Jeff Bezos' wealth. It wouldn't even be fixed by redistributing the wealth of all the investment banker billionaires. You would have to shut down the Federal Reserve and re-engineer the entire US monetary, financial, and banking systems.
icelancer 7y ago
>> That wealth should be distributed to society at large, not controlled by one man. It is distributed to society via jobs, construction, technology, and so forth. >> And if you're not part of that population, what on earth do you have to gain from defending them? Some of us do not believe the leftist alternatives being proposed are better. This does not mean we actually like the status quo. You are knocking down a giant strawman here.
- door5 7y ago
  >Some of us do not believe the leftist alternatives being proposed are better. This does not mean we actually like the status quo. You are knocking down a giant strawman here. I'm trying to be fair here, what alternatives are you defending? I want a world where billionaires have less wealth and power, do you disagree?
- danaris 7y ago
  > It is distributed to society via jobs, construction, technology, and so forth. No...it's not. A fraction of the revenue of Amazon is distributed in that way. Jeff Bezos' wealth is, by definition, controlled by one man.
maxhedrome 7y ago
A lot of amazons success was based on the fact that they sued the living shit out of anyone else who had a “buy now” button. If for whatever reason, you don’t think that’s not the dumbest shit ever, you should watch the most recent game of thrones episode.
vixen99 7y ago
One small point: 'their money is money that is taken from your pocket'. I wonder how you work that out. We buy from Amazon (if we do) because after consideration we reckon on getting more value, in its broader sense, from that supplier than from elsewhere. We have a choice. Amazon would go bust in short order if that value was not perceived to exist. And of course the same (with exceptions mostly due to government interference) happens with all other businesses. Wealth creation is not a zero sum game.
- door5 7y ago
  You're talking about one aspect of businesses -- their relationship with their consumers, which generally is not exploitative (although there are obvious exceptions). However, Jeff Bezos's relationship with his employees is exploitative (especially warehouse employees). Consider also his relationship with publicly-funded research. We as taxpayers pay for public research, we helped pay to build the internet, and yet we don't see any dividends for that money. Also, the mere fact that one person controls that much wealth is problematic politically. Jeff Bezos owns one of the largest newspapers in the world, which concerns me greatly. He has tremendous political influence in Seattle, and has been able to bully other cities into giving into his demands for HQ2. Massive amounts of wealth comes with it massive amounts of power, and power is a zero sum game.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Indeed, the only contribution we see is a tiny bit of corporate taxes for the billions of dollars of public research Amazon and especially others use. This is, depending on point of view, either a failure of the patent system (government cannot directly patent nor license) or of taxation, or both. Oh the low level, additional failure of laws promoting economic growth such that employees are evaluated by the company and paid any low offer with no recourse. This could be either fixed by unions (though these like dramatic not everyday negotiations and tend to produce fiefdoms) or again government, not necessarily directly central, setting and overseeing wage standards based on their globally agreed policies. In short, introducing an intermediary who can negotiate with clout and is not easy to buy. (As seen in the past, union leaders and politicians are easy to buy.)

by door5 7y ago

pdonis 7y ago

> That wealth should be distributed to society at large Ok, let's say we do that--a 100% wealth tax on any personal wealth over $999,999,999. So Bezos forks over everything he has over that, and we distribute it. First, how do we distribute it? Let's say we just divide it up equally among all 325 million Americans. That's about $370 per person. Wow. But second, what happens once we finish distributing? What are most people going to do with that $370? Spend it on something. How many people are going to make that $370 grow? Not many. Which means, in practice, all that wealth will just concentrate again. If most of the people spend the $370 buying something on Amazon, a lot of that wealth will just end up back in Bezos' pocket. In other words, redistributing wealth can temporarily make things more equal, but they won't stay that way.

door5 7y ago
First off, Jeff Bezos is not the only billionaire, so your $370 number is off. Second off, there's more that the government can do other than cash payments to individuals, they can invest in infrastructure (like education, housing, public transit, etc.) which pays long-term dividends to society. The wealth from this tax could be used to fund a public bank, which re-invests it and pays dividends back to the community. I'm not advocating for a specific policy proposal -- there exist many -- I'm defending the general principle that concentration of wealth is unethical and ought to be redistributed. Once you agree with that principle, you can work out exactly how best to do it, but that principle is necessarily an ideological one -- one that says that money and capital should serve the needs of the people, not the wealthiest corporations.
- pdonis 7y ago
  > Jeff Bezos is not the only billionaire True. You might get it up to a few thousand per American if you counted all billionaires. > there's more that the government can do other than cash payments to individuals, they can invest in infrastructure (like education, housing, public transit, etc.) which pays long-term dividends to society Sure, spend the $1T or so you would get from all the US billionaires on infrastructure. That's a decent fraction of US federal spending--for one year. Then it's gone. Now what do you do? What all of this leaves out is that wealth is not a zero sum game. Wealth gets created. If you want to reduce wealth inequality, you need to help more people create wealth, not try to take it away from people who have already created it. > I'm defending the general principle that concentration of wealth is unethical and ought to be redistributed I don't agree with this principle. But I might if you added a qualifier; see below. > money and capital should serve the needs of the people, not the wealthiest corporations Jeff Bezos made his billions by serving the needs of the people; that's what Amazon does. Lots of people shop there because it gets them the stuff they need, when they need it, for an affordable price. Another way of putting what I've just said is that Bezos, in creating and growing Amazon as a corporation, created lots of wealth. A huge, efficient distribution system for lots of goods people want now exists that didn't exist before; that's a huge creation of wealth. But lots of billionaires didn't get their billions that way. Lots of them did so by not creating any wealth at all, just transferring wealth from other people to themselves. For example, investment banks transfer wealth to themselves by taking advantage of asymmetric information to get other parties to accept the wrong end of zero sum trades. (For that matter, the entire US banking and financial system transfer wealth to itself by getting the Federal Reserve to print money that they use for loans.) So if you were to modify your principle to say that concentration of wealth that does not involve wealth creation is unethical, I would agree with you. But that wouldn't be fixed by redistributing Jeff Bezos' wealth. It wouldn't even be fixed by redistributing the wealth of all the investment banker billionaires. You would have to shut down the Federal Reserve and re-engineer the entire US monetary, financial, and banking systems.

icelancer 7y ago

>> That wealth should be distributed to society at large, not controlled by one man. It is distributed to society via jobs, construction, technology, and so forth. >> And if you're not part of that population, what on earth do you have to gain from defending them? Some of us do not believe the leftist alternatives being proposed are better. This does not mean we actually like the status quo. You are knocking down a giant strawman here.

door5 7y ago
>Some of us do not believe the leftist alternatives being proposed are better. This does not mean we actually like the status quo. You are knocking down a giant strawman here. I'm trying to be fair here, what alternatives are you defending? I want a world where billionaires have less wealth and power, do you disagree?
danaris 7y ago
> It is distributed to society via jobs, construction, technology, and so forth. No...it's not. A fraction of the revenue of Amazon is distributed in that way. Jeff Bezos' wealth is, by definition, controlled by one man.

maxhedrome 7y ago

A lot of amazons success was based on the fact that they sued the living shit out of anyone else who had a “buy now” button. If for whatever reason, you don’t think that’s not the dumbest shit ever, you should watch the most recent game of thrones episode.

vixen99 7y ago

One small point: 'their money is money that is taken from your pocket'. I wonder how you work that out. We buy from Amazon (if we do) because after consideration we reckon on getting more value, in its broader sense, from that supplier than from elsewhere. We have a choice. Amazon would go bust in short order if that value was not perceived to exist. And of course the same (with exceptions mostly due to government interference) happens with all other businesses. Wealth creation is not a zero sum game.

door5 7y ago
You're talking about one aspect of businesses -- their relationship with their consumers, which generally is not exploitative (although there are obvious exceptions). However, Jeff Bezos's relationship with his employees is exploitative (especially warehouse employees). Consider also his relationship with publicly-funded research. We as taxpayers pay for public research, we helped pay to build the internet, and yet we don't see any dividends for that money. Also, the mere fact that one person controls that much wealth is problematic politically. Jeff Bezos owns one of the largest newspapers in the world, which concerns me greatly. He has tremendous political influence in Seattle, and has been able to bully other cities into giving into his demands for HQ2. Massive amounts of wealth comes with it massive amounts of power, and power is a zero sum game.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Indeed, the only contribution we see is a tiny bit of corporate taxes for the billions of dollars of public research Amazon and especially others use. This is, depending on point of view, either a failure of the patent system (government cannot directly patent nor license) or of taxation, or both. Oh the low level, additional failure of laws promoting economic growth such that employees are evaluated by the company and paid any low offer with no recourse. This could be either fixed by unions (though these like dramatic not everyday negotiations and tend to produce fiefdoms) or again government, not necessarily directly central, setting and overseeing wage standards based on their globally agreed policies. In short, introducing an intermediary who can negotiate with clout and is not easy to buy. (As seen in the past, union leaders and politicians are easy to buy.)