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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 i

• 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.
  • door5 7y ago
    >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? Again, you're interpreting my moral claim (billionaires are a policy failure) as specific advocacy of a one-time wealth tax on billionaires and no other shift of U.S. policy. I believe in a massive shift in U.S. economic policy to the left, which would entail a number of different reforms aimed at reducing wealth inequality over the long-term. >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. You need to do both. I never advocated for merely expropriating billionaires' wealth and making no other policy changes. >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. Jeff Bezos made his billions by exploiting his workers. Despite the fact that they built the company and do almost all of the work that makes Amazon possible, he reaps all the profits. Workers built Amazon, not merely Bezos alone, and you're totally erasing everyone else's contribution. >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. The technology that enabled this massive creation of wealth wasn't created by Bezos though, it was created through publicly-funded research. Why is Jeff Bezos a billionaire but not Tim Barners-Lee, when by any measure he did far more to enable the creation of wealth? And again, like I said earlier, it is a huge creation of wealth, but that wealth goes into Jeff Bezos' pockets, not ours, nor his workers'. >Lots of them did so by not creating any wealth at all, just transferring wealth from other people to themselves. All billionaires get their wealth this way, by exploiting their workers. Furthermore, all the big tech companies participate in anti-competitive behavior (vendor lock-in, etc) which benefits them individually but hurts the wealth of society as a whole. There's no reason, for example, a publicly-owned or worker-owned company could not have accomplished what Amazon did. All they would have needed is sufficient access to capital -- the basic technology already existed & wasn't created by Amazon, they just built the institutional structure.