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Until there's a wealth floor -- until everyone is fed, sheltered and has access to education, there needs to be a wealth cap. We, as a collective humanity, sho

Until there's a wealth floor -- until everyone is fed, sheltered and has access to education, there needs to be a wealth cap. We, as a collective humanity, should not allow anyone to have more than, say, $20 million, until the basic needs of others have been met.

randomhodler84 5y ago
The problem is that inflation destroys the value of money quicker than you realize. Nice houses can cost $30M in alpha cities. $20M is a goal post that will need to be moved regularly. It’s too difficult to say what is “enough”.
- tclancy 5y ago
  This is a common response but who's problem are you solving? How many people are affected by this? And it seems modern state banks aren't as scared as inflation at the macro level, why do we need to be concerned?
- onion2k 5y ago
  So a wealth cap would also help to fix the insane inflation of house prices? Is there a downside?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jayjader 5y ago
  Then don't pin to a dollar amount, pin to relative wealth available in the world/country/region. Something like estimated total accumulated wealth / total pop. Inflation destroys the value of money, not the underlying goods or services. Whether there are 100 dollars to go around or 10 billion, for the same "physical context"/material reality a rule along the lines of "no more than %5 of total wealth accumulated in 1 person's account" seems inflation-resistant.
- randomhodler84 5y ago
  How about this — we all agree that the entirety of wealth in the universe is made up of 21 Million bitcoin. Then the wealth cap is 21 million bitcoin. Of course, nobody can have it all, in fact, if they try they will only drive up the relative cost per unit. If this seems insane to you, consider the insanity of trying to define a fixed container size with an infinite flow of water.
bboylen 5y ago
What would this policy look like? Government seizing shares of companies from people if their valuation rises too much?
- amelius 5y ago
  A progressive tax.
  - sp332 5y ago
    Taxes usually only apply to income, not assets.
    - tshaddox 5y ago
      Income taxes are the ones that apply to income. Other taxes apply to other things, e.g. property taxes apply to property and sales taxes apply to sales.
    - rtpg 5y ago
      So wealth tax then! It’s really just a question of finding metrics and then sending people bills to force them to liquidate or whatever
      - bboylen 5y ago
        And what if the stock valuation crashes before they can pay the bill? On hook for money they don't have? Seems almost impossible to implement
        rtpg 5y ago
        There are already things in tax law for this kind of stuff. You can write off the losses. If you're rich enough to be hit by this stuff, you're rich enough for an accountant and lawyer to help out with this kind of thing.
- david927 5y ago
prakhar897 5y ago
Few more steps and you"ll reach communism.
- Fauntleroy 5y ago
  Why think of ways to improve society when we could just keep suffering through what we have now?
  - dantheman 5y ago
    Do you not think society is improving? Over the past 20 years we had the greatest drop of poverty ever seen. Everyday society is improving.
    - tclancy 5y ago
      For whom? In the US, we just had four years of people saying their lives were not improving and they had been left behind. So they voted for an administration that would keep things that way. The world is weird.
      - ben_w 5y ago
        95% of us aren’t American. And while I would never blame Americans for voting for an American government specifically on the basis of what they promise do for American citizens and without regard for the consequences for the rest of us, the overall effect on the world to which rich Americans can flee has been more up than down.
  - tclancy 5y ago
    It reminds me of Mark Fisher's line that the problem with capitalism is it leaves no room to imagine alternatives.
- david927 5y ago
  Right now, in America, you have more people suffering from poverty than you have people with wealth. You also have taxation which is regressive, not progressive -- which was what brought on the French Revolution. We can have empathy now, or we can be surprised later.
ksec 5y ago
Most basic needs are or could be met already. Apart from Housing / Shelter. Which some how no government plans to tackle because the world economy is quite literally built or based on land and property prices. Even talks about UBI completely neglect housing prices. Which I came to the sad conclusion, those that understand housing wont talk about it, those that dont understand will never talk about it.
- sp332 5y ago
  A single child-tax-credit payment decreased the number of families with children who were having trouble affording food by 3%. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/economic-hardship-declined-in-households-with-children-as-child-tax-credit-payments-arrived.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/economic-hard... There's room for improvement.
- hindsightbias 5y ago
  ~700M people live in extreme poverty today (<$2 a day) while there is more than $12 trillion in 401k and IRAs. Homes are a luxury.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    That number has been trending downwards for ages even though we’re not capping income: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-population-poverty-thresholds https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
  - ksec 5y ago
    We were on course to completely eradicate extreme poverty by 2030 if it wasn't for COVID. But then I would argue even today most of the extreme poverty are partly a results of politics in their region.
hotz 5y ago
That's a little authoritarian.
- david927 5y ago
  What we have now, with billionaires with toy rockets who pay no taxes and a voting system that allows you to choose between two candidates who will both perpetuate that, all while homelessness and destitute poverty are rampant -- that's a little authoritarian.
jonfw 5y ago
Let's say I start a Saas company and it does really well. Somebody offers to invest at a valuation of 25$ million bucks. By most standards of evaluation net worth- I'm worth $25 million bucks now. who seizes ownership of my company? What's to stop me from offering you $10 bucks for .0001% of your company and making you illegally rich? Taxes on net worth won't work because net worth is abstract
- ksdakfasdf 5y ago
  It's abstract until it isn't. Is the offer to invest 25$ million abstract?
  - CodesInChaos 5y ago
    The offer is to invest 2.5M in exchange for 10% of the company. There is no offer to buy all your shares for 25M.
  - jonfw 5y ago
    It's absolutely abstract! Who is this buyer, does he really have the money, is he going to follow through, is this legal?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  The tax could be such that you are forced to turn over shares in the company to the state. The bigger you get, the more shares you have to give to them, the more influence they have on company decisions. In theory, this would act sort of as a general purpose regulation. Instead of using the force of law to make companies comply, it uses the force of its share votes. Of course, there are a bunch of ways this kind of scheme could go wrong too.
  - flyinglizard 5y ago
    What does the government know about managing tech companies?
    - 5y ago
mkotowski 5y ago
Okay, so then people will start to invest in gold. A cap on raw materials? Let’s keep a herd of cattle or two. And ad nauseam. As someone from a post-communist country: when you put a limit on capital, another form of accumulating one will be created. Some people will be more able and motivated to get the new form of the value, others will be less able or simply not interested in it, some will inherit it over time. And we will end almost exactly where we had begun. Limiting ways to accumulate wealth will not get rid of the desire to do so. Such a law will only force it to change the way it is manifesting.
- david927 5y ago
  We have taxes now; this would be a wealth tax.
rvnx 5y ago
Such weird logic; we should level down everyone. I don't live in a nice house, so everyone should be stuck like me in an old flat until everyone can get nice house. I'm not happy -> Everybody should be unhappy
- JofArnold 5y ago
  If a person is unhappy with $20m they are unlikely to be happy with any amount of money, surely?
  - flyinglizard 5y ago
    Not sure if they’ll be unhappy with their measly $20mm as much as they’ll be unhappy with not being allowed to continue playing the game. Imagine that any successful entrepreneur would be forced to sit on the sidelines after hitting $20mm of net worth.
    - jayjader 5y ago
      Guess they'll have to start taking lessons from professional athletes who've had to figure out how to deal with not being able to "continue playing the game" and still be happy.
      - flyinglizard 5y ago
        Speaking of which, why not sideline athletes which are exceedingly successful and leave some room for others? Nobody needs their 6th NBA championship or 10th Grand Slam title or 7th Formula 1 championship while their competitors, similarly talented and hard working, can spend entire careers not winning anything. Heck, it might even be better for the fans!
- david927 5y ago
  You need more than $20 million to be happy? Only having $20 million per person means you need to live in an "old flat?" Such weird logic: I need billions when others have no food.
mdp2021 5y ago
Such idea excludes that progressive taxation can be used for the same purpose - and "wealth cap" is near to being a special case of progressive taxation (0..20%; 0..50%; 0..99% ...)
simonh 5y ago
The problem with that is not really to do with equality, it's to do with who runs companies and where investment in the economy comes from, and how everyone's basic needs are met. This would take the ownership of huge swathes of the companies in the world out of the hands of the people who created them and operate them and into the hands of random executives with little or no track record. You're not going to meet anybody's basic needs to you destroy the economy that provides them. For example, Elon Musk would be forced to sell all but a minuscule sliver of his shares in Tesla, SpaceX, etc and give the proceeds to the tax man. He'd be out on his arse and replaced by an executive hired by whoever bought the shares. It would be the death of Tesla and SpaceX as we know them. That's just a highly visible example, but the effect would be to take tens of thousands of companies out of the hands of the people who currently run them, and into the hands of random investors. It's not clear to me this would actually be any good for those companies, or the economy, or the people working at those companies, or their customers. Finally, if everyone who's currently an investor in these companies, but has more than $20m also get taxed down to $20m, who is going to buy all the shares? You'd also tax out of existence the vast majority of the source of investment and capitalisation in the economy. There's be functionally nobody left capable of making significant investments. These things matter. It's nonsense like this that is why Marxist experiments the world over have caused such havoc and misery on unimaginably vast scales.
- david927 5y ago
  Yes, that's a problem. But it's not as big a problem as the current economic divide. The very wealthiest have superfluous amounts of money -- enough to pay to find loopholes so that they pay no taxes. If there was an island with 100 people and one person had almost all of the coconuts and others were starving, no one will care about details for very long. Fix it now because people won't ask nicely for long.
  - andreilys 5y ago
    Right so instead we should take one of those 100 people and give them the power of violence to take all the coconuts and distribute as they see fit. Likely to their friends and family. So we end up with the same scenario again, inequality persists only this time it’s because of a centralized authority figure that now has a monopoly on violence.
ben_w 5y ago
I wonder how many have e.g. $1bn in cash, rather than in the form of owning shares they have no interest in selling in businesses that other people reckon they could squeeze that much out of? It isn’t zero, but the same reasoning that put a previous boss of mine on a rich list would (falsely!) turn me into a millionaire if I turned myself into a privately traded corporation. The other question is: why $20 million? Looking at the rates on teleport.org, software developers in Nairobi look at the average Silicon Valley software engineer’s pay the same way the latter looks at someone who can earn $1-2 million per year, and I can’t think of any reason why the USA might care to limit its own salaries while other countries catch up.
bigyikes 5y ago
Policies like this will cause the rich, who have extreme mobility, to leave your country. Maybe to some people this sounds nice, but generally it will lead to worse companies and less innovation.
- arrosenberg 5y ago
  Does it though? It seems to me that if the rich fled, the vacuum would probably be filled by smarter, more ambitious people who were being suppressed by incumbent wealth.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    It won't be just the rich. It will be people like me who are upper middle class and see the writing on the wall - who strongly suspect that, when taking wealth from the billionaires didn't give you enough money, you're going to start on the millionaires and then the hundred-thousandaires.
    - arrosenberg 5y ago
      I generally take that as an empty threat for the following reasons: (1) Strongly suspect based on what? There's 0 precedent for the scenario you suggested, but plenty of examples of right-wingers using this idea to scaremonger. (2) Where are you actually going to go? European countries already take higher taxes, and most other countries have higher inequality and lower general standards of living than the US. I don't doubt that some of the wealthy consider themselves "global citizens", but the majority of people aren't going to leave their home country over marginally higher taxes - especially at today's pitifully low rates. (3) Most of the upper middle class people I know will stop being hysterical about paying higher taxes after a moment, and recognize that a billion is 1,000x more than a million, and 10,000x more than 100K. American's don't hate wealth, they hate aristocrats, which is what the billionaire class has become. The same logic does not apply to people with "mere" eight-figure wealth.
      - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
OscarCunningham 5y ago
That would incent people to spend on consumption when their wealth approached the cap, while not actually paying any of the tax. Thus more of the world's productive capabilities would be redirected towards rich people consuming luxuries that they otherwise wouldn't have bothered with.
- smhenderson 5y ago
  Not saying I disagree but to play devil's advocate here - wouldn't them spending on luxury items still benefit society overall rather than them keeping it locked up somewhere? Working class people are the one's making and selling the luxury items and once injected into the economy the money they spent on said items would be taxed further and spread around as others spent it.
  - OscarCunningham 5y ago
    Wealth being 'locked up' doesn't matter. If we're at near full employment and our tools and machines aren't sitting idle, then we're producing at full capacity.
dcolkitt 5y ago
Imposing a wealth cap like that is a fantastic way to assure that those basic needs will never be met. Over the past two centuries, billions of humans have been lifted out of poverty. Approximately zero percent of that came from the redistribution of existing wealth. All of it came from raising economic productivity. And that vast majority of those productivity gains had foundations built by entrepreneurs seeking great fortunes.
- protoman3000 5y ago
  > Over the past two centuries, billions of humans have been lifted out of poverty > by entrepreneurs seeking great fortunes No. It was technological innovation, made by the brightest heads of our species that did science themselves or at publicly funded institutions. The private sector took these innovations to manufacture and accumulate, while the innovators were criminally underpaid.
  - dcolkitt 5y ago
    Honest question: have you ever successfully created and released a new product? Innovation isolated in a lab is all well and good, but ultimately does nothing to directly improve lives. It's only the first step in a long journey. Now you need to figure out how do scale up production? How do we control costs to keep it affordable to the average person? How do we get people aware of the product? Who do we target as early adopters? How do we incorporate feedback from real usage back into the engineering of the product? How do we design the product so it's intuitive and appealing to use? How can we convince investors to take the risk and give us the capital needed to get this process under way? How do we plan and budget for production to accommodate projected growth? Are there legal or regulatory considerations? How do we coordinate all the people that need to work together to make this happen? Ask anyone who's actually successfully launched a product how far the gap is between "works in a lab" to "widespread distribution and adoption". Engineers are part of the equation, but they often arrogantly assume they're the only ones that matter. That's why there's no such thing as a company that's only engineers. Entrepreneurs are the ones responsible for coordinating all the complex work that needs to come together to actually get a product into the hands of consumers.
augstein 5y ago
At times it seems perverse that people indulge themselves in the most extravagant activities this planet has ever seen, wasting resources per person and day that could help thousands of people. All while millions of humans go hungry and die from poverty. It’s about time this issue is discussed more publicly. Don‘t get me wrong, I‘m no socialist whatsoever and have nothing against a decent lavish lifestyle. I just don‘t think the world needs more megayachts, shipping around the world to be near wherever the owner is, in case he/she might want to use it for a day or two. Or 15+ megamansions around the world per billionaire, stockpiled at all times with the most expensive and rare food money can buy. At some point society has to think about a fair allocation of scarce resources.
antaviana 5y ago
The point I believe you are missing is that this will not meet basic needs of others. If you distribute the excess wealth, you will create a lot of inflation because if people have twice the money they will be prone to pay a twice bigger rent or a twice bigger restaurant check, or twice the money for the same land plot. If you decide to somehow destroy the excess wealth (for example, burning cash or the houses they don't need), you will shrink a bit the economy by creating some job losses for those today working on superfluous activities of the rich such as yatch cleaning.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  > If you distribute the excess wealth, you will create a lot of inflation because if people have twice the money they will be prone to pay a twice bigger rent or a twice bigger restaurant check, or twice the money for the same land plot. Ah, I see! So what you're saying is, if we tax the poor instead, that'll deflate the currency and make everyone richer!
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  That's such a simplistic view of economics, as to not bear the slightest examination. E.g. the free market depends entirely upon the amount of money people have? And nothing to do with supply/demand and the elasticity of the market? In a more nuanced view demand creates supply, efficiencies of scale reduce cost, and everything is cheaper. Folks love to throw out the "More money means prices go up!" as if it's a truism.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    Most people, at least on this site, seem to have a severe Dunning-Kruger effect going on when it comes to economics. It's like they took Econ 101 and didn't realize it's an intro course with simplified models.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
But once you get $20M, why would you continue working? You've got $20M, and enough passive income from those $20M to cover your expenses... why would you continue growing your business, employing more people, and doing more? I mean.. a $20M bakery is a huge bakery with a lot of people... but a $20M car factory is basically nothing.
- david927 5y ago
  No one owns a car factory; it's divided into shares. And anyone now with $20M can retire. And I don't think the problem would be that so many people hit $20M that everyone retired.
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    But people did own a $20M car factory. And it grew and grew. Once it hits $20M, you're basically forced to sell a part of it, and once those parts grow over, you have to sell another part, and another part...
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      You don't have to sell any physical piece of it, only shares in it. The company can still grow, but individuals would not be able to hoard the wealth it creates.
      - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
        So let's say i have 1000 bitcoins... bought them for $0.01 a piece, and held them... now the price is around 40k.. so I have to sell half of them to keep only the $20M? Tomorrow the price will be $15k, so i'll be below again... what do I do now? The day after tomorrow they might be 100k.. sell more? I create a bakery... it's successfull, it grows to 21M... now I have to sell a part of it... and it grows.. sell another part.. it grows.. sell another part.. what then? What if the second coowner bought a half of it, and the price has gone over 41M, do we now both have to sell a part of it? What if it loses value? What if you own a farm somewhere, with many hectares of nice land, and someone decides to build a railway and a highway there, and that land becomes worth many millions overnight? Hard limits on wealth are not practical. Taxing private persons for taking out and using that wealth is the solution.
mostertoaster 5y ago
The interesting thing is if you tried that you’d find less people fed, less people sheltered and less education. I mean the politicians would love this because they understand it is not about owning things but about having control. And then they could control the most. The scary part to me is the amount of people who think this same way as you. If we as humanity just confiscate others wealth, then the world will be better. Forgetting there has to be those in charge of confiscating it. No, the problems in our society will not be solved that way. People get a president like trump because they deserved it, and then they got a president like Biden, because the people still haven’t learned and still get what th wet deserve.
- david927 5y ago
  We already "confiscate others' wealth." It's called taxation. There's nothing new or wrong with it. > you’d find less people fed, less people sheltered and less education Countries with higher and progressive tax rates have better success in all of these issues.
  - ghostwriter 5y ago
    > We already "confiscate others' wealth." It's called taxation. There's nothing new or wrong with it. what a "wonderful" principle, in the spirit of "people are already being raped, carry on, there's nothing wrong to see here"
captainredbeard 5y ago
What qualifies you to make pronouncements about how the world should work?
_greim_ 5y ago
> should not allow anyone to have more than, say, $20 million We need to define "have." "Have" as in have X$ as personally owned liquid assets? Or "have" as in having X$ invested in economic development? I'd agree with you in the former case, but not so much the latter.

randomhodler84 5y ago

The problem is that inflation destroys the value of money quicker than you realize. Nice houses can cost $30M in alpha cities. $20M is a goal post that will need to be moved regularly. It’s too difficult to say what is “enough”.

tclancy 5y ago
This is a common response but who's problem are you solving? How many people are affected by this? And it seems modern state banks aren't as scared as inflation at the macro level, why do we need to be concerned?
onion2k 5y ago
So a wealth cap would also help to fix the insane inflation of house prices? Is there a downside?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jayjader 5y ago
Then don't pin to a dollar amount, pin to relative wealth available in the world/country/region. Something like estimated total accumulated wealth / total pop. Inflation destroys the value of money, not the underlying goods or services. Whether there are 100 dollars to go around or 10 billion, for the same "physical context"/material reality a rule along the lines of "no more than %5 of total wealth accumulated in 1 person's account" seems inflation-resistant.
randomhodler84 5y ago
How about this — we all agree that the entirety of wealth in the universe is made up of 21 Million bitcoin. Then the wealth cap is 21 million bitcoin. Of course, nobody can have it all, in fact, if they try they will only drive up the relative cost per unit. If this seems insane to you, consider the insanity of trying to define a fixed container size with an infinite flow of water.

bboylen 5y ago

What would this policy look like? Government seizing shares of companies from people if their valuation rises too much?

amelius 5y ago
A progressive tax.
- sp332 5y ago
  Taxes usually only apply to income, not assets.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    Income taxes are the ones that apply to income. Other taxes apply to other things, e.g. property taxes apply to property and sales taxes apply to sales.
  - rtpg 5y ago
    So wealth tax then! It’s really just a question of finding metrics and then sending people bills to force them to liquidate or whatever
    - bboylen 5y ago
      And what if the stock valuation crashes before they can pay the bill? On hook for money they don't have? Seems almost impossible to implement
      - rtpg 5y ago
        There are already things in tax law for this kind of stuff. You can write off the losses. If you're rich enough to be hit by this stuff, you're rich enough for an accountant and lawyer to help out with this kind of thing.
david927 5y ago

prakhar897 5y ago

Few more steps and you"ll reach communism.

Fauntleroy 5y ago
Why think of ways to improve society when we could just keep suffering through what we have now?
- dantheman 5y ago
  Do you not think society is improving? Over the past 20 years we had the greatest drop of poverty ever seen. Everyday society is improving.
  - tclancy 5y ago
    For whom? In the US, we just had four years of people saying their lives were not improving and they had been left behind. So they voted for an administration that would keep things that way. The world is weird.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      95% of us aren’t American. And while I would never blame Americans for voting for an American government specifically on the basis of what they promise do for American citizens and without regard for the consequences for the rest of us, the overall effect on the world to which rich Americans can flee has been more up than down.
- tclancy 5y ago
  It reminds me of Mark Fisher's line that the problem with capitalism is it leaves no room to imagine alternatives.
david927 5y ago
Right now, in America, you have more people suffering from poverty than you have people with wealth. You also have taxation which is regressive, not progressive -- which was what brought on the French Revolution. We can have empathy now, or we can be surprised later.

ksec 5y ago

Most basic needs are or could be met already. Apart from Housing / Shelter. Which some how no government plans to tackle because the world economy is quite literally built or based on land and property prices. Even talks about UBI completely neglect housing prices. Which I came to the sad conclusion, those that understand housing wont talk about it, those that dont understand will never talk about it.

sp332 5y ago
A single child-tax-credit payment decreased the number of families with children who were having trouble affording food by 3%. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/economic-hardship-declined-in-households-with-children-as-child-tax-credit-payments-arrived.html https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/economic-hard... There's room for improvement.
hindsightbias 5y ago
~700M people live in extreme poverty today (<$2 a day) while there is more than $12 trillion in 401k and IRAs. Homes are a luxury.
- ben_w 5y ago
  That number has been trending downwards for ages even though we’re not capping income: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-population-poverty-thresholds https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-populatio...
- ksec 5y ago
  We were on course to completely eradicate extreme poverty by 2030 if it wasn't for COVID. But then I would argue even today most of the extreme poverty are partly a results of politics in their region.

hotz 5y ago

That's a little authoritarian.

david927 5y ago
What we have now, with billionaires with toy rockets who pay no taxes and a voting system that allows you to choose between two candidates who will both perpetuate that, all while homelessness and destitute poverty are rampant -- that's a little authoritarian.

jonfw 5y ago

Let's say I start a Saas company and it does really well. Somebody offers to invest at a valuation of 25$ million bucks. By most standards of evaluation net worth- I'm worth $25 million bucks now. who seizes ownership of my company? What's to stop me from offering you $10 bucks for .0001% of your company and making you illegally rich? Taxes on net worth won't work because net worth is abstract

ksdakfasdf 5y ago
It's abstract until it isn't. Is the offer to invest 25$ million abstract?
- CodesInChaos 5y ago
  The offer is to invest 2.5M in exchange for 10% of the company. There is no offer to buy all your shares for 25M.
- jonfw 5y ago
  It's absolutely abstract! Who is this buyer, does he really have the money, is he going to follow through, is this legal?
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
The tax could be such that you are forced to turn over shares in the company to the state. The bigger you get, the more shares you have to give to them, the more influence they have on company decisions. In theory, this would act sort of as a general purpose regulation. Instead of using the force of law to make companies comply, it uses the force of its share votes. Of course, there are a bunch of ways this kind of scheme could go wrong too.
- flyinglizard 5y ago
  What does the government know about managing tech companies?
  - 5y ago

mkotowski 5y ago

Okay, so then people will start to invest in gold. A cap on raw materials? Let’s keep a herd of cattle or two. And ad nauseam. As someone from a post-communist country: when you put a limit on capital, another form of accumulating one will be created. Some people will be more able and motivated to get the new form of the value, others will be less able or simply not interested in it, some will inherit it over time. And we will end almost exactly where we had begun. Limiting ways to accumulate wealth will not get rid of the desire to do so. Such a law will only force it to change the way it is manifesting.

david927 5y ago
We have taxes now; this would be a wealth tax.

rvnx 5y ago

Such weird logic; we should level down everyone. I don't live in a nice house, so everyone should be stuck like me in an old flat until everyone can get nice house. I'm not happy -> Everybody should be unhappy

JofArnold 5y ago
If a person is unhappy with $20m they are unlikely to be happy with any amount of money, surely?
- flyinglizard 5y ago
  Not sure if they’ll be unhappy with their measly $20mm as much as they’ll be unhappy with not being allowed to continue playing the game. Imagine that any successful entrepreneur would be forced to sit on the sidelines after hitting $20mm of net worth.
  - jayjader 5y ago
    Guess they'll have to start taking lessons from professional athletes who've had to figure out how to deal with not being able to "continue playing the game" and still be happy.
    - flyinglizard 5y ago
      Speaking of which, why not sideline athletes which are exceedingly successful and leave some room for others? Nobody needs their 6th NBA championship or 10th Grand Slam title or 7th Formula 1 championship while their competitors, similarly talented and hard working, can spend entire careers not winning anything. Heck, it might even be better for the fans!
david927 5y ago
You need more than $20 million to be happy? Only having $20 million per person means you need to live in an "old flat?" Such weird logic: I need billions when others have no food.

mdp2021 5y ago

Such idea excludes that progressive taxation can be used for the same purpose - and "wealth cap" is near to being a special case of progressive taxation (0..20%; 0..50%; 0..99% ...)

simonh 5y ago

The problem with that is not really to do with equality, it's to do with who runs companies and where investment in the economy comes from, and how everyone's basic needs are met. This would take the ownership of huge swathes of the companies in the world out of the hands of the people who created them and operate them and into the hands of random executives with little or no track record. You're not going to meet anybody's basic needs to you destroy the economy that provides them. For example, Elon Musk would be forced to sell all but a minuscule sliver of his shares in Tesla, SpaceX, etc and give the proceeds to the tax man. He'd be out on his arse and replaced by an executive hired by whoever bought the shares. It would be the death of Tesla and SpaceX as we know them. That's just a highly visible example, but the effect would be to take tens of thousands of companies out of the hands of the people who currently run them, and into the hands of random investors. It's not clear to me this would actually be any good for those companies, or the economy, or the people working at those companies, or their customers. Finally, if everyone who's currently an investor in these companies, but has more than $20m also get taxed down to $20m, who is going to buy all the shares? You'd also tax out of existence the vast majority of the source of investment and capitalisation in the economy. There's be functionally nobody left capable of making significant investments. These things matter. It's nonsense like this that is why Marxist experiments the world over have caused such havoc and misery on unimaginably vast scales.

david927 5y ago
Yes, that's a problem. But it's not as big a problem as the current economic divide. The very wealthiest have superfluous amounts of money -- enough to pay to find loopholes so that they pay no taxes. If there was an island with 100 people and one person had almost all of the coconuts and others were starving, no one will care about details for very long. Fix it now because people won't ask nicely for long.
- andreilys 5y ago
  Right so instead we should take one of those 100 people and give them the power of violence to take all the coconuts and distribute as they see fit. Likely to their friends and family. So we end up with the same scenario again, inequality persists only this time it’s because of a centralized authority figure that now has a monopoly on violence.

ben_w 5y ago

I wonder how many have e.g. $1bn in cash, rather than in the form of owning shares they have no interest in selling in businesses that other people reckon they could squeeze that much out of? It isn’t zero, but the same reasoning that put a previous boss of mine on a rich list would (falsely!) turn me into a millionaire if I turned myself into a privately traded corporation. The other question is: why $20 million? Looking at the rates on teleport.org, software developers in Nairobi look at the average Silicon Valley software engineer’s pay the same way the latter looks at someone who can earn $1-2 million per year, and I can’t think of any reason why the USA might care to limit its own salaries while other countries catch up.

bigyikes 5y ago

Policies like this will cause the rich, who have extreme mobility, to leave your country. Maybe to some people this sounds nice, but generally it will lead to worse companies and less innovation.

arrosenberg 5y ago
Does it though? It seems to me that if the rich fled, the vacuum would probably be filled by smarter, more ambitious people who were being suppressed by incumbent wealth.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  It won't be just the rich. It will be people like me who are upper middle class and see the writing on the wall - who strongly suspect that, when taking wealth from the billionaires didn't give you enough money, you're going to start on the millionaires and then the hundred-thousandaires.
  - arrosenberg 5y ago
    I generally take that as an empty threat for the following reasons: (1) Strongly suspect based on what? There's 0 precedent for the scenario you suggested, but plenty of examples of right-wingers using this idea to scaremonger. (2) Where are you actually going to go? European countries already take higher taxes, and most other countries have higher inequality and lower general standards of living than the US. I don't doubt that some of the wealthy consider themselves "global citizens", but the majority of people aren't going to leave their home country over marginally higher taxes - especially at today's pitifully low rates. (3) Most of the upper middle class people I know will stop being hysterical about paying higher taxes after a moment, and recognize that a billion is 1,000x more than a million, and 10,000x more than 100K. American's don't hate wealth, they hate aristocrats, which is what the billionaire class has become. The same logic does not apply to people with "mere" eight-figure wealth.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago

OscarCunningham 5y ago

That would incent people to spend on consumption when their wealth approached the cap, while not actually paying any of the tax. Thus more of the world's productive capabilities would be redirected towards rich people consuming luxuries that they otherwise wouldn't have bothered with.

smhenderson 5y ago
Not saying I disagree but to play devil's advocate here - wouldn't them spending on luxury items still benefit society overall rather than them keeping it locked up somewhere? Working class people are the one's making and selling the luxury items and once injected into the economy the money they spent on said items would be taxed further and spread around as others spent it.
- OscarCunningham 5y ago
  Wealth being 'locked up' doesn't matter. If we're at near full employment and our tools and machines aren't sitting idle, then we're producing at full capacity.

dcolkitt 5y ago

Imposing a wealth cap like that is a fantastic way to assure that those basic needs will never be met. Over the past two centuries, billions of humans have been lifted out of poverty. Approximately zero percent of that came from the redistribution of existing wealth. All of it came from raising economic productivity. And that vast majority of those productivity gains had foundations built by entrepreneurs seeking great fortunes.

protoman3000 5y ago
> Over the past two centuries, billions of humans have been lifted out of poverty > by entrepreneurs seeking great fortunes No. It was technological innovation, made by the brightest heads of our species that did science themselves or at publicly funded institutions. The private sector took these innovations to manufacture and accumulate, while the innovators were criminally underpaid.
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  Honest question: have you ever successfully created and released a new product? Innovation isolated in a lab is all well and good, but ultimately does nothing to directly improve lives. It's only the first step in a long journey. Now you need to figure out how do scale up production? How do we control costs to keep it affordable to the average person? How do we get people aware of the product? Who do we target as early adopters? How do we incorporate feedback from real usage back into the engineering of the product? How do we design the product so it's intuitive and appealing to use? How can we convince investors to take the risk and give us the capital needed to get this process under way? How do we plan and budget for production to accommodate projected growth? Are there legal or regulatory considerations? How do we coordinate all the people that need to work together to make this happen? Ask anyone who's actually successfully launched a product how far the gap is between "works in a lab" to "widespread distribution and adoption". Engineers are part of the equation, but they often arrogantly assume they're the only ones that matter. That's why there's no such thing as a company that's only engineers. Entrepreneurs are the ones responsible for coordinating all the complex work that needs to come together to actually get a product into the hands of consumers.

augstein 5y ago

At times it seems perverse that people indulge themselves in the most extravagant activities this planet has ever seen, wasting resources per person and day that could help thousands of people. All while millions of humans go hungry and die from poverty. It’s about time this issue is discussed more publicly. Don‘t get me wrong, I‘m no socialist whatsoever and have nothing against a decent lavish lifestyle. I just don‘t think the world needs more megayachts, shipping around the world to be near wherever the owner is, in case he/she might want to use it for a day or two. Or 15+ megamansions around the world per billionaire, stockpiled at all times with the most expensive and rare food money can buy. At some point society has to think about a fair allocation of scarce resources.

antaviana 5y ago

The point I believe you are missing is that this will not meet basic needs of others. If you distribute the excess wealth, you will create a lot of inflation because if people have twice the money they will be prone to pay a twice bigger rent or a twice bigger restaurant check, or twice the money for the same land plot. If you decide to somehow destroy the excess wealth (for example, burning cash or the houses they don't need), you will shrink a bit the economy by creating some job losses for those today working on superfluous activities of the rich such as yatch cleaning.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
> If you distribute the excess wealth, you will create a lot of inflation because if people have twice the money they will be prone to pay a twice bigger rent or a twice bigger restaurant check, or twice the money for the same land plot. Ah, I see! So what you're saying is, if we tax the poor instead, that'll deflate the currency and make everyone richer!
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
That's such a simplistic view of economics, as to not bear the slightest examination. E.g. the free market depends entirely upon the amount of money people have? And nothing to do with supply/demand and the elasticity of the market? In a more nuanced view demand creates supply, efficiencies of scale reduce cost, and everything is cheaper. Folks love to throw out the "More money means prices go up!" as if it's a truism.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Most people, at least on this site, seem to have a severe Dunning-Kruger effect going on when it comes to economics. It's like they took Econ 101 and didn't realize it's an intro course with simplified models.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

But once you get $20M, why would you continue working? You've got $20M, and enough passive income from those $20M to cover your expenses... why would you continue growing your business, employing more people, and doing more? I mean.. a $20M bakery is a huge bakery with a lot of people... but a $20M car factory is basically nothing.

david927 5y ago
No one owns a car factory; it's divided into shares. And anyone now with $20M can retire. And I don't think the problem would be that so many people hit $20M that everyone retired.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  But people did own a $20M car factory. And it grew and grew. Once it hits $20M, you're basically forced to sell a part of it, and once those parts grow over, you have to sell another part, and another part...
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    You don't have to sell any physical piece of it, only shares in it. The company can still grow, but individuals would not be able to hoard the wealth it creates.
    - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
      So let's say i have 1000 bitcoins... bought them for $0.01 a piece, and held them... now the price is around 40k.. so I have to sell half of them to keep only the $20M? Tomorrow the price will be $15k, so i'll be below again... what do I do now? The day after tomorrow they might be 100k.. sell more? I create a bakery... it's successfull, it grows to 21M... now I have to sell a part of it... and it grows.. sell another part.. it grows.. sell another part.. what then? What if the second coowner bought a half of it, and the price has gone over 41M, do we now both have to sell a part of it? What if it loses value? What if you own a farm somewhere, with many hectares of nice land, and someone decides to build a railway and a highway there, and that land becomes worth many millions overnight? Hard limits on wealth are not practical. Taxing private persons for taking out and using that wealth is the solution.

mostertoaster 5y ago

The interesting thing is if you tried that you’d find less people fed, less people sheltered and less education. I mean the politicians would love this because they understand it is not about owning things but about having control. And then they could control the most. The scary part to me is the amount of people who think this same way as you. If we as humanity just confiscate others wealth, then the world will be better. Forgetting there has to be those in charge of confiscating it. No, the problems in our society will not be solved that way. People get a president like trump because they deserved it, and then they got a president like Biden, because the people still haven’t learned and still get what th wet deserve.

david927 5y ago
We already "confiscate others' wealth." It's called taxation. There's nothing new or wrong with it. > you’d find less people fed, less people sheltered and less education Countries with higher and progressive tax rates have better success in all of these issues.
- ghostwriter 5y ago
  > We already "confiscate others' wealth." It's called taxation. There's nothing new or wrong with it. what a "wonderful" principle, in the spirit of "people are already being raped, carry on, there's nothing wrong to see here"

captainredbeard 5y ago

What qualifies you to make pronouncements about how the world should work?

_greim_ 5y ago

> should not allow anyone to have more than, say, $20 million We need to define "have." "Have" as in have X$ as personally owned liquid assets? Or "have" as in having X$ invested in economic development? I'd agree with you in the former case, but not so much the latter.