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As others have pointed out, your cash in the bank is actual money in a sense that (say) Musk or Bezos' wealth isn't - you can actually buy things with it, where
by makomk 5y ago
As others have pointed out, your cash in the bank is actual money in a sense that (say) Musk or Bezos' wealth isn't - you can actually buy things with it, whereas if they want to sell their shares to buy something else they need to find someone with enough actual money who's willing to trade it for shares which may or may not be worth something down the line.
The really big problem is that regardless of where the money comes from on paper, in an important sense all the big government spending has to be paid for out of that actual money in the form of people's income. Suppose the government carries out a big series of infrastructure projects, or even say AOC's plan for mass upgrading of home insulation. That will use a huge amount of scarce resources like raw materials, workers' time, equipment etc which then cannot be used for other things. Which means that whatever would've otherwise been made with those resources no longer exists to be consumed, and that everyone overall is worse off in terms of stuff they can buy with their income by the amount required to offset this cost. This real tax on the actual real value of everyone's income cannot come out of Bezos and Musk and the other multi-billionaires' wealth, because the amount of stuff they consume is tiny compared to their paper wealth. It has to come from ordinary people. (A similar argument applies to the cost of shuttering all those businesses and paying their workers to sit around doing nothing during the pandemic.)
Now of course, a lot of big companies do themselves use a bunch of resources, but take those away and you lose whatever the company is supplying. No Amazon warehouses? Suddenly a lot less stuff is available to be ordered online. No Tesla factories? Say bye-bye to clean electric cars and hello to more pollution and CO2. Etc, etc.
- akiselev 5y ago> As others have pointed out, your cash in the bank is actual money in a sense that (say) Musk or Bezos' wealth isn't - you can actually buy things with it Your cash in the bank is actual money in the sense that... > No Amazon warehouses? Suddenly a lot less stuff is available to be ordered online. No Tesla factories? Say bye-bye to clean electric cars and hello to more pollution and CO2. Etc, etc. ...you can buy stuff from Musk and Bezos.
- makomk 5y agoNo. The problem here isn't that Musk and Bezos are the only people you can buy stuff from, it's that in order to pay the real resource price of all that government spending using their factories and warehouses those factories and warehouses must not exist at all. They can't simply become Walmart warehouses or Toyota or GM factories, they have to go away altogether - along with whatever they're supplying. Which means a lot less clean electric cars and a lot less capacity to buy stuff online. (The secondary problem is that the big multi-billionaire winners often get that way by figuring out how to satisfy the same consumer demand with less real resources. Which means that if you get rid of those companies, guess what? Everyone is worse off because the overall size of the pie has shrunk, and there's no clever redistribution of slice sizes that'll fix it. For example, without Tesla we'd have to burn more non-renewable oil and use more of our CO2 budget to fill the same transportation demand.)
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoBezos is practically a personal market black hole. His warehouse and delivery workers would certainly not be worse off if he was forced to pay them a decent wage. His customers would not be worse off if he was forced to operate an ethical search system on Amazon and remove scams. If Amazon hadn't been invented, how long do you think it would have taken someone - probably a HN reader - to build a multisite search aggregator and bargain hunter? Apple and Google's customers would not be worse off if all scams were removed from their respective app stores. Web users would not be worse off if Google search and ad tech didn't distort search rankings by promoting clickbait at the expense of high quality content. YouTube's small content creators would not be worse off if the copyright strike system wasn't biased towards big corporate at the expense of small creators. The electric car market would have happened without Musk. It may or may not have happened as well - that's up for debate - but it's clearly not going to not happen. And the fact that we have a small but growing electric car market in 2021 instead of 2001 - when it was really needed - is entirely due to the political distortions caused by the billions generated in Big Fossil profits. I have no problem with smart talented and driven individuals making money by solving real problems. But I do have a problem with attempts to deify and canonise the individuals who are most prominent just because they become very rich. We need more accurate accounting systems that select for benefit without ignoring social, political, and environmental costs. Otherwise we're just rewarding people for being high-functioning narcissists instead of selecting people who can get shit done cheaply and efficiently without ignoring the social and other externalities that are currently ignored.
- md_ 5y agoEverything you say is equally true for income taxation as wealth taxation. In fact, it's true for all forms of taxation--at a high level, taxation is a way of redirecting the use of resources.