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This type of opinion getting any kind of popularity in society is a scary thought to me. I really hope this continues to stay a fringe opinion. It would lead to

This type of opinion getting any kind of popularity in society is a scary thought to me. I really hope this continues to stay a fringe opinion. It would lead to tremendous abuses to the general public and a destruction of stability. There seems built into it some kind of strange assumption that anyone who has money got it in an unjust fashion.

woodruffw 4y ago
> There seems built into it some kind of strange assumption that anyone who has money got it in an unjust fashion. I don't think that's the assumption. Rather, the assumption is that you can't make $100 billion dollars without some kind of grave injustice occurring. And this makes intuitive sense to most people: a healthy society shouldn't allow people to become so fantastically rich (or, correspondingly, so fantastically poor that they die of homelessness and exposure.) This doesn't justify massive wealth confiscation as much as it explains why it's an extremely reasonable reaction to the wealth amassing behavior we're expected to explain away as "normal."
- davidguetta 4y ago
  Reasonable or not the reaction is just a conséquence of poor being too poor in america, and having NO POLITICAL PARTY at all defendign them. They dont realize it most ofbthem, but they really have 0 prospect, 0 hope. Some go on reddit thinikg other people will sympathize on rant subreddits like r antiwork.. but at the end of the day they have 0 power and 0 prospect of having some in the future if thet stay in ze country. Just move. For your own sake
- cloutchaser 4y ago
  So one persons intuition works better at working out exactly what too much wealth or a healthy society means, than a feedback system of about 7bn independent entities kind of trading freely and making decisions, and for example awarding Jeff bezos 100bn for making almost all products available within 24 hours at the lowest possible margins, almost never making a profit, and employing 400k people extra during Covid. Yes I’m sure these independent “experts” like yourself have a much better grasp at “fairness” and we should all believe that 100bn is too much. Could you just scientifically deduce for me where the limit is? If I have 100m is that ok? In your expert opinion? Or is that too much? Should we cap at 1m? I’d love to see your maths on what constitutes a fair amount of wealth.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    I didn't call myself an expert, or say that it was fair.
    - cloutchaser 4y ago
      So you’re not even an expert but you think you know what too much wealth is. The intellectual arrogance of your comment is staggering. And unfortunately it’s a common opinion.
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        You found my charitable interpretation of what someone else said arrogant?
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Someone who co-founded a company that literally became the verb for “search for shit on the entire internet” and helped connect billions of customers with tens of millions of companies could easily have created a significant multiple of that value for the world (literally well over a trillion dollars of value that Google has created) and kept a fraction of that value created for themselves. I don’t see the grave injustice in that part of the story. If others are capable to create a trillion dollars of value, I want them to be enjoy a significant share of that.
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    What part of that value helped someone who is homeless?
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      If they want to search for services or help at the library (or maybe on their Android phone), Google can help with that.
    - imgabe 4y ago
      Hundreds of thousands of Google employees who aren't homeless. Millions of people who make a living with AdSense, preventing them from becoming homeless. Millions more who make a living consulting on SEO, optimizing ad campaigns who aren't homeless. Millions more whose businesses were helped to succeed by Google search and ads, preventing them and their employees from becoming homeless.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    It's not clear to me, in a hedonic treadmill sense, that someone with a net value of $100B is meaningfully enjoying any amount of money past, say, the first billion.
    - imgabe 4y ago
      The cool thing about property rights is that when you legally obtain something it belongs to you and you don't have to justify your ownership of it to random strangers in order to continue owning it.
- imgabe 4y ago
  Many things that make intuitive sense to most people are wildly wrong. Reorganizing society to accommodate the grab bag of misunderstandings and prejudices that make up the intuitive sense of most people is usually a mistake. Indeed, every society that used their "intuitive sense" to confiscate wealth from private citizens ended up collapsing.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    > Indeed, every society that used their "intuitive sense" to confiscate wealth from private citizens ended up collapsing. Not ours[1]! Edit: At least, not yet. I, for one, welcome the application of this logic to our current scheme. [1]: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021/ https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021/
    - imgabe 4y ago
      No, not ours, not yet, unless the faction that thinks stealing someone else's stuff will solve all our problems gets their way.
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        So much of this conversation is breathless: who said anything about "solving all our problems"?
        imgabe 4y ago
        Then you just want to take people's stuff for fun, not to solve any problem? Is that supposed to be better?
        woodruffw 4y ago
        No, I think I'd be happy with somewhere between "all" and "any."
        4y ago
- lo_zamoyski 4y ago
  > the assumption is that you can't make $100 billion dollars without some kind of grave injustice occurring No one's hands are clean, rich or poor, to be sure, but the assumption is unwarranted and aggressive in its broadness. One does not assume particular guilt based on broad assumptions. Besides, these aren't liquid assets. Do people think these guys have a $100 billion dollars just laying around in a Scrooge McDuck-style Money Bin? That's not how net worth works. > a healthy society shouldn't allow people to become so fantastically rich Allow? > (or, correspondingly, so fantastically poor that they die of homelessness and exposure.) This is unrelated. It construes wealth as a zero sum game. There is no such tension between wealth and poverty unless some kind of injustice was involved in robbing the poor.
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    Tax codes, medical bankruptcy, loan sharks, and student loans sure have shades of injustice that rob or turn people poor.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    A clean moral record has nothing to do with it: I'm saying that, on a basic civic level, gross inequality is perceived as bad. It doesn't matter that said gross inequality is mostly in illiquid assets, because illiquid assets are just collateral for liquid ones (and people who aren't worth $100B understand this just fine.) And yes, "allow" is correct. Healthy societies don't allow their members to throw knives at each other in public places, or blow cigarette smoke in premature babies' faces, or do any number of basically antisocial things. The intuitive belief is that amassing wealth to the degree of hundreds of billions of dollars is essentially antisocial in the same way that being Mr. Marlboro in the NICU is.

woodruffw 4y ago

> There seems built into it some kind of strange assumption that anyone who has money got it in an unjust fashion. I don't think that's the assumption. Rather, the assumption is that you can't make $100 billion dollars without some kind of grave injustice occurring. And this makes intuitive sense to most people: a healthy society shouldn't allow people to become so fantastically rich (or, correspondingly, so fantastically poor that they die of homelessness and exposure.) This doesn't justify massive wealth confiscation as much as it explains why it's an extremely reasonable reaction to the wealth amassing behavior we're expected to explain away as "normal."

davidguetta 4y ago
Reasonable or not the reaction is just a conséquence of poor being too poor in america, and having NO POLITICAL PARTY at all defendign them. They dont realize it most ofbthem, but they really have 0 prospect, 0 hope. Some go on reddit thinikg other people will sympathize on rant subreddits like r antiwork.. but at the end of the day they have 0 power and 0 prospect of having some in the future if thet stay in ze country. Just move. For your own sake
cloutchaser 4y ago
So one persons intuition works better at working out exactly what too much wealth or a healthy society means, than a feedback system of about 7bn independent entities kind of trading freely and making decisions, and for example awarding Jeff bezos 100bn for making almost all products available within 24 hours at the lowest possible margins, almost never making a profit, and employing 400k people extra during Covid. Yes I’m sure these independent “experts” like yourself have a much better grasp at “fairness” and we should all believe that 100bn is too much. Could you just scientifically deduce for me where the limit is? If I have 100m is that ok? In your expert opinion? Or is that too much? Should we cap at 1m? I’d love to see your maths on what constitutes a fair amount of wealth.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  I didn't call myself an expert, or say that it was fair.
  - cloutchaser 4y ago
    So you’re not even an expert but you think you know what too much wealth is. The intellectual arrogance of your comment is staggering. And unfortunately it’s a common opinion.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      You found my charitable interpretation of what someone else said arrogant?
sokoloff 4y ago
Someone who co-founded a company that literally became the verb for “search for shit on the entire internet” and helped connect billions of customers with tens of millions of companies could easily have created a significant multiple of that value for the world (literally well over a trillion dollars of value that Google has created) and kept a fraction of that value created for themselves. I don’t see the grave injustice in that part of the story. If others are capable to create a trillion dollars of value, I want them to be enjoy a significant share of that.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  What part of that value helped someone who is homeless?
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    If they want to search for services or help at the library (or maybe on their Android phone), Google can help with that.
  - imgabe 4y ago
    Hundreds of thousands of Google employees who aren't homeless. Millions of people who make a living with AdSense, preventing them from becoming homeless. Millions more who make a living consulting on SEO, optimizing ad campaigns who aren't homeless. Millions more whose businesses were helped to succeed by Google search and ads, preventing them and their employees from becoming homeless.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  It's not clear to me, in a hedonic treadmill sense, that someone with a net value of $100B is meaningfully enjoying any amount of money past, say, the first billion.
  - imgabe 4y ago
    The cool thing about property rights is that when you legally obtain something it belongs to you and you don't have to justify your ownership of it to random strangers in order to continue owning it.
imgabe 4y ago
Many things that make intuitive sense to most people are wildly wrong. Reorganizing society to accommodate the grab bag of misunderstandings and prejudices that make up the intuitive sense of most people is usually a mistake. Indeed, every society that used their "intuitive sense" to confiscate wealth from private citizens ended up collapsing.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  > Indeed, every society that used their "intuitive sense" to confiscate wealth from private citizens ended up collapsing. Not ours[1]! Edit: At least, not yet. I, for one, welcome the application of this logic to our current scheme. [1]: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021/ https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021/
  - imgabe 4y ago
    No, not ours, not yet, unless the faction that thinks stealing someone else's stuff will solve all our problems gets their way.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      So much of this conversation is breathless: who said anything about "solving all our problems"?
      - imgabe 4y ago
        Then you just want to take people's stuff for fun, not to solve any problem? Is that supposed to be better?
        woodruffw 4y ago
        No, I think I'd be happy with somewhere between "all" and "any."
        4y ago
lo_zamoyski 4y ago
> the assumption is that you can't make $100 billion dollars without some kind of grave injustice occurring No one's hands are clean, rich or poor, to be sure, but the assumption is unwarranted and aggressive in its broadness. One does not assume particular guilt based on broad assumptions. Besides, these aren't liquid assets. Do people think these guys have a $100 billion dollars just laying around in a Scrooge McDuck-style Money Bin? That's not how net worth works. > a healthy society shouldn't allow people to become so fantastically rich Allow? > (or, correspondingly, so fantastically poor that they die of homelessness and exposure.) This is unrelated. It construes wealth as a zero sum game. There is no such tension between wealth and poverty unless some kind of injustice was involved in robbing the poor.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  Tax codes, medical bankruptcy, loan sharks, and student loans sure have shades of injustice that rob or turn people poor.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  A clean moral record has nothing to do with it: I'm saying that, on a basic civic level, gross inequality is perceived as bad. It doesn't matter that said gross inequality is mostly in illiquid assets, because illiquid assets are just collateral for liquid ones (and people who aren't worth $100B understand this just fine.) And yes, "allow" is correct. Healthy societies don't allow their members to throw knives at each other in public places, or blow cigarette smoke in premature babies' faces, or do any number of basically antisocial things. The intuitive belief is that amassing wealth to the degree of hundreds of billions of dollars is essentially antisocial in the same way that being Mr. Marlboro in the NICU is.