9 ms·

Tech billionaires who donate millions are just “bribing society at large.”

75 points by howard941 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
writepub 7y ago
So so evil! What we really need is a total government takeover of private, legally gotten wealth, a la wealth-tax plans of Warren and AOC. Because AOC and Warren know how to spend someone else's money just right enough to stay in power for eternity.
- tzakrajs 7y ago
  We already have had a government takeover of private, legally gotten wealth in the form of Republican tax legislation that continues the transfer of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the top 0.1% of families through relaxation of corporate tax rates. Edit: Censored parts of my comment that dang would probably call unsubstantive
  - zajd 7y ago
    When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.
  - averros 7y ago
    I don't think you know what "capitalist" means. Hint: this is not the same as cronies at government's trough. "Crony capitalism" or corporatism is the current economic system in US, and not capitalism, by very long far. Mainstream republican politicians (and mainstream democrat politicians, too) are representatives of that, not of capitalism or socialism.
  - CWuestefeld 7y ago
    Republican tax legislation that continues the transfer of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the top 0.1% of families. Ahem. The top 0.1% of earners pay more than 20% of the total taxes collected. The bottom 43.8% of earners pay only 1.4% of the taxes. If the rich are making money off the backs of the poor, it's certainly not through our income tax system. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/06/a-closer-look-at-who-does-and-doesnt-pay-u-s-income-tax/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/06/a-closer-lo...
    - tzakrajs 7y ago
      You make it seem like corporate tax rates have nothing to do with the earnings of the wealthiest families.
      - CWuestefeld 7y ago
        Yup. Set aside the fact that our baseline corporate income tax rates are some of the highest in the world. The income of corporations doesn't go directly into the pockets of the shareholders. Rather, the shareholders are getting income from them either as dividends or as capital gains. Either way, that's accounted for in the income of those shareholders. So corporate profits are already built into the numbers I quoted above.
        tzakrajs 7y ago
        Right and long term capital gains are the lowest tax rate. Rich get their money from income sources with inherently low tax rates and then have holding corporations to own all of their shit so they don’t have to claim personal income. Poor people basically never do these things because it takes time, opportunity and/or and education they probably don’t have.
  - conanbatt 7y ago
    Taxes are transfers. Elimination of taxes are reducing transfers.
    - CWuestefeld 7y ago
      Your explanation was a lot clearer than mine.
      - tzakrajs 7y ago
        And it was facile and therefore incorrect.
    - tzakrajs 7y ago
      I can’t tell if your attempt at oversimplifying was done in good faith, but if you paid attention to recent tax legislation you would see that the elimination of taxes is only permanent for corporations and not low income families. If the elimination of taxes isn’t happening fairly then the transfer of wealth is unsustainable. That is a problem. Im surprised that people are so eager to protect their overlords when our friends and family finances are getting destroyed by the federal governments policy. Glad everything is hunky dory wherever it is you live but my culture and nation is heading towards revolution.
      - conanbatt 7y ago
        > Im surprised that people are so eager to protect their overlords when our friends and family finances are getting destroyed by the federal governments policy. All the better reason to reduce taxes and reduce spending. Then the federal government can't be destroying your friends and family.
        tzakrajs 7y ago
        Except "reduce taxes" on corporations is not helping anything. In fact its causing the nations deficit to grow and programs are being cut that help the poorest people. The federal government is still destroying our friends and family. We've become an oligarchy, a corporate welfare state
- devoply 7y ago
  > private, legally gotten wealth Much of even that is illegitimately gotten, even if it's legal. Good examples include the Bush family or even Trump. Regulatory capture. Illegitimate wars. Sanctions. Insider trading. Tax avoidance. etc. Super rich are a major political risk. That needs to be quashed. No single human needs to hold a billion dollars or more. There is no good reason to allow this sort of thing. At all. Period. If the wealthiest at most had at most 100x of the poorest that would be progress... and would force lifting of everyone's standard of living.
  - writepub 7y ago
    > No single human needs to hold a billion dollars or more. There is no good reason to allow this sort of thing Just utter totalitarian garbage. What make you, or anyone else the arbiter of someone else's legally obtained property. Right to property and ownership is enshrined in the constitution for this exact kind of demagoguery. It's another thing if you called for stopping wealth accumulation by illegal means, and those laws already exist. But what you want is the ability to thwart someone else's basic human right to property - modulate it with populist moral sounding immoralities of upper-limits. FYI, YC's portfolio has a net worth of $80B [1]. Do you want to pitchfork against the YC folks now - who are enabling HN? [1]: https://qz.com/987043/y-combinator-will-back-10000-startups-to-prove-theres-nothing-magical-about-silicon-valley/ https://qz.com/987043/y-combinator-will-back-10000-startups-...
    - devoply 7y ago
      > Right to property and ownership is enshrined in the constitution for this exact kind of demagoguery. Yea that 200 and some year old document written by God himself... or was it rich white slave owners that wanted to keep all of the wealth to themselves rather than share it with the British who financed its creation?
      - Fins 7y ago
        45 thousand should be enough for everyone. You can send the excess to me.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't do ideological flamewar on HN. It's boring and leads to nastiness.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Are we surprised? We are effectively in another gilded age. The wealthy are acting much like they did in the last one. Tech is an irrelevance here.
- zajd 7y ago
  What's more surprising is how eagerly the petite bourgeois (most of the people on this board) eat this shit up. If I have to hear another moron defend the "philanthropy" (tax-evasion) of Gates/Zuckerberg I'm going to lose it.
- blub 7y ago
  Tech is an enabler and a power multiplier.
crispy_function 7y ago
Far Left Publication Insists We Need To Seize The Means Of Production
crispy_function 7y ago
Fuck off, communist scum.
ggm 7y ago
Felt a little like he's made a grab bag of billionaires and is belabouring them with one big stick. I don't think they form a cohesive set. Zuck is not Gates. On several levels. Gates may be a bit of an ass but $70b in vaccines and reproductive health worldwide is huge. And Melinda Gates is not just lobbying for corporate, she's confronting the Republican agenda on contraception. Zuck is just masturbating in his money pool. It's possible the core argument: buying access and influence is true. I don't know, I don't hang around with billionaires. I just think they probably disaggregate as much as they form a consistent set. (I used to hate MS but I have a more nuanced set of views of the gates now. Unlike ford, it's not going to be a perpetual foundation. It's winding up after some period of time after they die. I don't like the insistence on MS ICT in their interventions but stripped back, the core is good. Amazing upsides to simple public health initiatives and access to contraception)
LarryDarrell 7y ago
While inequality is not inherently a bad thing, we are starting to see the corrosive effects letting a few have too much. I've gotten to the point where it feels like we need a Net Worth Limit. Cap it at $250 million let's say. The rich still get to enjoy a post-scarcity lifestyle, and the rest of society doesn't hang in the balance of whether our billionaire gods are benevolent or not. I doubt Jobs, Zuck and Gates would have said "Forget it" if they knew they only had the opportunity to acquire a quarter of a billion dollars. And if they did, they are probably not the sort you want to have more money than that anyway.
- AstroChimpHam 7y ago
  I've had this thought before, but always come back to what happens after they hit that limit?
- maerF0x0 7y ago
  The concept that one has to contend with is the assumption is order to get $N in compensation one has to provide >$N value back to society. Ex: I make $100k as a engineer, I am actually building >$100k in software per year... By restricting ultra productive people to a capped return we're effectively disincentivizing these people from providing additional value once they've hit their cap. additionally you can forsee the fixed per capita cap will be gamed. $250M for me, and for my spouse, and each next of kin, and each parent / uncle aunt etc. Suddenly neopotism is all over the place.
  - freewilly1040 7y ago
    The productivity is coming from the capital, not the people.
  - chii 7y ago
    > disincentivizing these people from providing additional value ... but the question i have is whether these people who are ultra rich really did provide the value to society that their wealth suggests. Did bezos or zuckerberg create value? Or did they just extracted the residual value from their employees? May be instead of a wealth cap, the cap needs to be applied at income (and also make capital gains into income). Your wealth total is uncapped, but you as a person, could not possibly have created more value than $X per year. Where X is set can be debated, but i would expect it to be less than $10mil.
AstroChimpHam 7y ago
> but, he asked, why should they be treated as sagacious experts when they come from a completely different arena Because they have a history of getting impressive shit done. Not complained about, but actually done. And they have the will to get it done, and a bunch of capital to put behind that will, even if they were taxed at whatever ridiculously high rate Giridharadas wants them taxed at. Giridharadas is welcome to disagree with successful people, but they've at this point proven their opinions do tend to matter when it comes to shaping the country whether we want to pay attention or not.
- blub 7y ago
  I'm sure everyone would be all ears if Zuckerberg were asked for advice on how to best violate people's privacy, or Bezos were asked how to abuse warehouse workers, but there's no reason why the opinions of those two regarding e.g. medicine would be worth more than those of actual specialists and experts. Just because someone's successful it doesn't mean they're wise. Looking at Zuckerberg fumble from scandal to scandal certainly doesn't give one that impression. He's just another ruthless rich businessman.
  - AstroChimpHam 7y ago
    Snarky comments aside, Zuckerberg built a massive ads business from scratch, not previously knowing anything about ads. He built a massive social network from scratch, not knowing anything previously about social. Bezos built the biggest e-commerce business in the world, never having worked in e-commerce or retail before. And seems to be doing some impressive stuff at Blue Origin, not knowing anything about space travel. That's all not to mention Musk, who goes from new industry to new industry, building successful businesses that fundamentally change those industries, without previously knowing anything about those industries. These are incredibly impressive accomplishments. They've proven their bonafides for solving general problems in fields they weren't previously familiar with, probably more than just about anyone else in the world.
    - Konnstann 7y ago
      The fact that they have built those businesses doesn't mean that they can draw informed conclusions on whatever they want. I doubt that Bezos has his think-tank of domain experts giving him background on every question he gets asked during interviews. Sure, if Bezos shifted his attention to healthcare, a month after the announcement I would give his opinions weight, because he's proven adept at analyzing situations quickly, given motivation. What's the motivation to learn about X problem in the world at any given time?

75 points by howard941 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

So so evil! What we really need is a total government takeover of private, legally gotten wealth, a la wealth-tax plans of Warren and AOC. Because AOC and Warren know how to spend someone else's money just right enough to stay in power for eternity.

tzakrajs 7y ago
We already have had a government takeover of private, legally gotten wealth in the form of Republican tax legislation that continues the transfer of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the top 0.1% of families through relaxation of corporate tax rates. Edit: Censored parts of my comment that dang would probably call unsubstantive
- zajd 7y ago
  When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.
- averros 7y ago
  I don't think you know what "capitalist" means. Hint: this is not the same as cronies at government's trough. "Crony capitalism" or corporatism is the current economic system in US, and not capitalism, by very long far. Mainstream republican politicians (and mainstream democrat politicians, too) are representatives of that, not of capitalism or socialism.
- CWuestefeld 7y ago
  Republican tax legislation that continues the transfer of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the top 0.1% of families. Ahem. The top 0.1% of earners pay more than 20% of the total taxes collected. The bottom 43.8% of earners pay only 1.4% of the taxes. If the rich are making money off the backs of the poor, it's certainly not through our income tax system. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/06/a-closer-look-at-who-does-and-doesnt-pay-u-s-income-tax/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/06/a-closer-lo...
  - tzakrajs 7y ago
    You make it seem like corporate tax rates have nothing to do with the earnings of the wealthiest families.
    - CWuestefeld 7y ago
      Yup. Set aside the fact that our baseline corporate income tax rates are some of the highest in the world. The income of corporations doesn't go directly into the pockets of the shareholders. Rather, the shareholders are getting income from them either as dividends or as capital gains. Either way, that's accounted for in the income of those shareholders. So corporate profits are already built into the numbers I quoted above.
      - tzakrajs 7y ago
        Right and long term capital gains are the lowest tax rate. Rich get their money from income sources with inherently low tax rates and then have holding corporations to own all of their shit so they don’t have to claim personal income. Poor people basically never do these things because it takes time, opportunity and/or and education they probably don’t have.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Taxes are transfers. Elimination of taxes are reducing transfers.
  - CWuestefeld 7y ago
    Your explanation was a lot clearer than mine.
    - tzakrajs 7y ago
      And it was facile and therefore incorrect.
  - tzakrajs 7y ago
    I can’t tell if your attempt at oversimplifying was done in good faith, but if you paid attention to recent tax legislation you would see that the elimination of taxes is only permanent for corporations and not low income families. If the elimination of taxes isn’t happening fairly then the transfer of wealth is unsustainable. That is a problem. Im surprised that people are so eager to protect their overlords when our friends and family finances are getting destroyed by the federal governments policy. Glad everything is hunky dory wherever it is you live but my culture and nation is heading towards revolution.
    - conanbatt 7y ago
      > Im surprised that people are so eager to protect their overlords when our friends and family finances are getting destroyed by the federal governments policy. All the better reason to reduce taxes and reduce spending. Then the federal government can't be destroying your friends and family.
      - tzakrajs 7y ago
        Except "reduce taxes" on corporations is not helping anything. In fact its causing the nations deficit to grow and programs are being cut that help the poorest people. The federal government is still destroying our friends and family. We've become an oligarchy, a corporate welfare state
devoply 7y ago
> private, legally gotten wealth Much of even that is illegitimately gotten, even if it's legal. Good examples include the Bush family or even Trump. Regulatory capture. Illegitimate wars. Sanctions. Insider trading. Tax avoidance. etc. Super rich are a major political risk. That needs to be quashed. No single human needs to hold a billion dollars or more. There is no good reason to allow this sort of thing. At all. Period. If the wealthiest at most had at most 100x of the poorest that would be progress... and would force lifting of everyone's standard of living.
- writepub 7y ago
  > No single human needs to hold a billion dollars or more. There is no good reason to allow this sort of thing Just utter totalitarian garbage. What make you, or anyone else the arbiter of someone else's legally obtained property. Right to property and ownership is enshrined in the constitution for this exact kind of demagoguery. It's another thing if you called for stopping wealth accumulation by illegal means, and those laws already exist. But what you want is the ability to thwart someone else's basic human right to property - modulate it with populist moral sounding immoralities of upper-limits. FYI, YC's portfolio has a net worth of $80B [1]. Do you want to pitchfork against the YC folks now - who are enabling HN? [1]: https://qz.com/987043/y-combinator-will-back-10000-startups-to-prove-theres-nothing-magical-about-silicon-valley/ https://qz.com/987043/y-combinator-will-back-10000-startups-...
  - devoply 7y ago
    > Right to property and ownership is enshrined in the constitution for this exact kind of demagoguery. Yea that 200 and some year old document written by God himself... or was it rich white slave owners that wanted to keep all of the wealth to themselves rather than share it with the British who financed its creation?
    - Fins 7y ago
      45 thousand should be enough for everyone. You can send the excess to me.
dang 7y ago
Please don't do ideological flamewar on HN. It's boring and leads to nastiness.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

Are we surprised? We are effectively in another gilded age. The wealthy are acting much like they did in the last one. Tech is an irrelevance here.

zajd 7y ago
What's more surprising is how eagerly the petite bourgeois (most of the people on this board) eat this shit up. If I have to hear another moron defend the "philanthropy" (tax-evasion) of Gates/Zuckerberg I'm going to lose it.
blub 7y ago
Tech is an enabler and a power multiplier.

crispy_function 7y ago

Far Left Publication Insists We Need To Seize The Means Of Production

crispy_function 7y ago

Fuck off, communist scum.

ggm 7y ago

Felt a little like he's made a grab bag of billionaires and is belabouring them with one big stick. I don't think they form a cohesive set. Zuck is not Gates. On several levels. Gates may be a bit of an ass but $70b in vaccines and reproductive health worldwide is huge. And Melinda Gates is not just lobbying for corporate, she's confronting the Republican agenda on contraception. Zuck is just masturbating in his money pool. It's possible the core argument: buying access and influence is true. I don't know, I don't hang around with billionaires. I just think they probably disaggregate as much as they form a consistent set. (I used to hate MS but I have a more nuanced set of views of the gates now. Unlike ford, it's not going to be a perpetual foundation. It's winding up after some period of time after they die. I don't like the insistence on MS ICT in their interventions but stripped back, the core is good. Amazing upsides to simple public health initiatives and access to contraception)

LarryDarrell 7y ago

While inequality is not inherently a bad thing, we are starting to see the corrosive effects letting a few have too much. I've gotten to the point where it feels like we need a Net Worth Limit. Cap it at $250 million let's say. The rich still get to enjoy a post-scarcity lifestyle, and the rest of society doesn't hang in the balance of whether our billionaire gods are benevolent or not. I doubt Jobs, Zuck and Gates would have said "Forget it" if they knew they only had the opportunity to acquire a quarter of a billion dollars. And if they did, they are probably not the sort you want to have more money than that anyway.

AstroChimpHam 7y ago
I've had this thought before, but always come back to what happens after they hit that limit?
maerF0x0 7y ago
The concept that one has to contend with is the assumption is order to get $N in compensation one has to provide >$N value back to society. Ex: I make $100k as a engineer, I am actually building >$100k in software per year... By restricting ultra productive people to a capped return we're effectively disincentivizing these people from providing additional value once they've hit their cap. additionally you can forsee the fixed per capita cap will be gamed. $250M for me, and for my spouse, and each next of kin, and each parent / uncle aunt etc. Suddenly neopotism is all over the place.
- freewilly1040 7y ago
  The productivity is coming from the capital, not the people.
- chii 7y ago
  > disincentivizing these people from providing additional value ... but the question i have is whether these people who are ultra rich really did provide the value to society that their wealth suggests. Did bezos or zuckerberg create value? Or did they just extracted the residual value from their employees? May be instead of a wealth cap, the cap needs to be applied at income (and also make capital gains into income). Your wealth total is uncapped, but you as a person, could not possibly have created more value than $X per year. Where X is set can be debated, but i would expect it to be less than $10mil.

AstroChimpHam 7y ago

> but, he asked, why should they be treated as sagacious experts when they come from a completely different arena Because they have a history of getting impressive shit done. Not complained about, but actually done. And they have the will to get it done, and a bunch of capital to put behind that will, even if they were taxed at whatever ridiculously high rate Giridharadas wants them taxed at. Giridharadas is welcome to disagree with successful people, but they've at this point proven their opinions do tend to matter when it comes to shaping the country whether we want to pay attention or not.

blub 7y ago
I'm sure everyone would be all ears if Zuckerberg were asked for advice on how to best violate people's privacy, or Bezos were asked how to abuse warehouse workers, but there's no reason why the opinions of those two regarding e.g. medicine would be worth more than those of actual specialists and experts. Just because someone's successful it doesn't mean they're wise. Looking at Zuckerberg fumble from scandal to scandal certainly doesn't give one that impression. He's just another ruthless rich businessman.
- AstroChimpHam 7y ago
  Snarky comments aside, Zuckerberg built a massive ads business from scratch, not previously knowing anything about ads. He built a massive social network from scratch, not knowing anything previously about social. Bezos built the biggest e-commerce business in the world, never having worked in e-commerce or retail before. And seems to be doing some impressive stuff at Blue Origin, not knowing anything about space travel. That's all not to mention Musk, who goes from new industry to new industry, building successful businesses that fundamentally change those industries, without previously knowing anything about those industries. These are incredibly impressive accomplishments. They've proven their bonafides for solving general problems in fields they weren't previously familiar with, probably more than just about anyone else in the world.
  - Konnstann 7y ago
    The fact that they have built those businesses doesn't mean that they can draw informed conclusions on whatever they want. I doubt that Bezos has his think-tank of domain experts giving him background on every question he gets asked during interviews. Sure, if Bezos shifted his attention to healthcare, a month after the announcement I would give his opinions weight, because he's proven adept at analyzing situations quickly, given motivation. What's the motivation to learn about X problem in the world at any given time?