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This essay makes me uneasy. I feel PG builds a straw man. He takes, in his own words, the most naive take on inequality and ends up concluding that "Eliminating
by cuchoi 7y ago
This essay makes me uneasy. I feel PG builds a straw man. He takes, in his own words, the most naive take on inequality and ends up concluding that "Eliminating great variations in wealth would mean eliminating startups".
A simple example, would a tax on wealth above 100 million USD discourage startup founders? I don't think so.
- meow_mix 7y agoRight? This reads someone who's lying to themselves
- caseysoftware 7y ago$100 million, probably not. But that begs the questions: Is that the real number and would it stay there? The AMT was put together to hit the top ~150 people in the 1960s. Because of how the underlying system changed and it hasn't, the AMT now regularly hits people under $100k and is only likely to drift lower. Congress has a bad track record here.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- closeparen 7y agoSuppose we identify some policy that discourages startups unintentionally, and for no direct public benefit. For example, a bureaucratic snafu in the process of opening a business bank account. Should we fix it? If we do, then more startups will get off the ground. Some of them will make it big, and their founders will get rich. Our action will have made society more unequal. So clearly we should leave it, right? But that doesn't seem right. So maybe inequality is not exactly the right framing of what we care about. We've had progressive taxes for a long time, and that's good, but they have not prevented inequality. So again, is it really the measure of goodness?
- Kaiyou 7y agoWhy do you want to steal money from wealthy people through taxes? Isn't the problem poor people and shouldn't solutions aim to get them to create wealth?