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Your needs and wants are not a claim on my life. My life is my own. If you want to feed your money into whatever you define good as, go ahead. Dont expect anyon

Your needs and wants are not a claim on my life. My life is my own. If you want to feed your money into whatever you define good as, go ahead. Dont expect anyone to cater to your whims with the fruits of their labors though. this is the fundamental problem with society today. Everyone thinks they have a claim to goods and services they did not earn and hate people that earned them, rather than pushing for antitrust enforcement to break up market power that allows incompetent offspring to stay rich rather than lose their wealth and return to average wealth where their capability says they belong.

chpatrick 3y ago
This attitude leads to the state of society today in the US.
_factor 3y ago
It’s not the fruit of their labor. It’s a combined effort they’re disproportionately benefiting from due to the aforementioned policy failures/corruption.
dwb 3y ago
A lot of us would dispute that anyone that rich "earned" their money. $1bn is an absurdly disproportionate compensation for any one person's work, whatever they do. It may be legal, but it isn't right.
- missedthecue 3y ago
  Did JK Rowling sell too many books? Should they have banned the purchase of Harry Potter books after her net worth hit $999mm? What exactly is your policy prescription here.
  - Epa095 3y ago
    Taxes
    - pakitan 3y ago
      What kind of tax structure? 100% for all income over $1B?
      - whatshisface 3y ago
        If it wasn't totally impossible to implement, you could replace all taxes with low single digit percent per year service fee on your total assets for protecting them from criminals and foreign dictators. (Piketty invented that. It was tried, and didn't work out well for pragmatic reasons like jurisdiction shopping.) The service fee would be set so that the return on capital was equal to the overall growth rate of the economy. Naturally, it's higher, which makes it mathematically inevitable for a few family offices to end up owning everything. (Also from Piketty.) If the risk-free rate was 3% this year and the GDP grew by 2%, your service fee would be 1%.
        Closi 3y ago
        Alternatively/in addition, significant inheritance taxes for the ultra-rich. A lot of wealth is multi-generational and nepotistic (i.e. do we really think Jim Walton would have got the job if he wasn't the son of the founder, and even if he did, would he have earned as much as he has?).
        snapplebobapple 3y ago
        Inheritance taxes don't work in a world where one can jurisdiction shop/utilize multiple different trust and other setups. What inheritance tax does accomplish is keeping the newly rich from becoming multi generational while protecting the old wealth, which is the worst possible outcome. On top of that, to enforce them requires a level of privacy and personal liberty abuse that is counterproductive. A better solution is much more effective antitrust enforcement through both breaking up monopolies/oligpolies and outlawing contract abuses by oligoplies as we see them (i.e. the myriad of things amazon puts in their seller contracts to ensure the prices elsewhere are always near amazon's price). You asked the wrong question about Jim Walton. You should ask would Jim be able to pull off the same level of wealth accumulation if walmart had been broken up so that it could not have abused its market power for the last 30-40 years? Probably not, because he's probably not great at creating businesses people want to spend money at. You could say the same thing about guys like Bill gates (he would be worth at least 10X what he is currently worth if he had just kept his microsoft stock instead of diversifying bit by bit each year). When you look at it, it's almost always the market power abuse that is the problem, not the wealth per se (notable exception is Elon Musk, who has knocked it out of the park on multiple companies in starkly different fields, kind of impressive).
- marnett 3y ago
  This is a cute myth, but it is not true. There are plenty of billionaires who inherited their wealth [0]. One thing to note is this list (as most wealth lists often do) focuses on USA billionaires whose wealth is largely from industry, and their children who inherited it; it does not include the more internationally observed phenomenon of children of royalty or similar heirs of great wealth. [0] https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/visualizations/which-of-the-worlds-richest-people-inherited-their-wealth/ https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/visualizatio...
  - dwb 3y ago
    Cool, yep, I'm also in favour of a 100% inheritance tax and abolishing monarchies.
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  Seconding this, stratospheric wealth is a side effect of long-standing race condition bugs in the way we generate and route value through society. At some point there is absolutely no additional contribution made by one's own personal merits toward the amount of wealth that they generate, it's just a snowball effect with the same little pebble in the center of the ball that started it, sucking up and bashing through everything in its path.
- snapplebobapple 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dwb 3y ago
    You’re getting angry standing up for Elon Musk, of all people? I really don’t think an alternate timeline without his “ideas” would be any worse off. As for “implementation”, even if you do value the companies he’s headed or invested in, the bulk of the actual work will invariably have been done by others.
    - kortilla 3y ago
      The private space industry would still be dead and electric cars would be set back a decade along with all of the environmental damage that comes from that. Elon derangement syndrome has made you delusional.
      - dwb 3y ago
        I don't care about the private space industry, and Elon Musk didn't found Tesla or contribute any "ideas". It's a shame that you seem to have to resort to childish insults like "Elon derangement syndrome".
        kortilla 3y ago
        There is nobody in any leadership position at Tesla that doesn't credit Musk for making Tesla viable. An idea without that execution is completely useless. There have been and are thousands of ideas for electric cars that never made it or will make it past a prototype because they lack the leadership skill Elon has motivating people into making a viable product. > I don't care about the private space industry This just means you don’t have much foresight or you don’t care about humanity. The private space industry is what lets us launch satellites to do things like observe the climate (macro and micro), find and prevent people from getting lost at sea, get people to the space station, launch telescopes, etc. Saying you don’t care about the private space industry is as dumb as saying, “I don’t care about the private computer industry” 50 years ago. > like "Elon derangement syndrome". There isn’t really any other way to describe the willful disregard of two huge influential companies led by the same person.
Aerbil313 3y ago
The essence of your argument is "I don't believe in the same moral values you do."
lumost 3y ago
The definition of "Earn" is what most genuine observers would debate. By definition, any interest/dividend bearing asset is a claim on a portion of societal output. As the majority of wealth in the US is now inherited, a rational individual might challenge whether such assets were "Earned". It's easy to take the opposite claim that those "Earnings" are the property of those who produced via income, or even those who consume via net savings. The fine balance between income and savings are well understood through inflation/deflationary cycles - however there are less understood profit cycles. There are many historic examples of the political problems which emerge from too large of a profit burden - such as the French Revolution, Shogunate, Bolshevik's, and arguably the US revolution and Soviet Dissolution.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mercutio2 3y ago
  Where did you get the idea “the majority of wealth is now inherited”? I’m curious about your assessment of what fraction of wealth was inherited one and two centuries ago, and how you’re measuring the total stock of wealth. Holding legal title to a thing is one extremely culture specific subset of wealth; being healthy, consuming goods and services is another, having status in your communities of choice is yet another, and control of the levers of societal power is yet another. I am deeply skeptical of the claim that a larger fraction of titled wealth is now inherited than it was centuries ago, and I don’t see how you’d measure these other forms of wealth in a meaningful way.
  - lumost 3y ago
    I'm using a simplistic and quantifiable measure of wealth - capital assets. I'd also admit to using a short-hand of wealthy people as equal to billionaires. I don't see the purpose in comparing billionaires quantifiable wealth to other forms of wealth considering the high probability that billionaires are wealthy in all other forms as well. https://www.investopedia.com/more-billionaire-wealth-achieved-through-inheritance-overtaking-entrepreneurship-8409800 https://www.investopedia.com/more-billionaire-wealth-achieve..."
eganist 3y ago
> Your needs and wants are not a claim on my life. My life is my own. If you want to feed your money into whatever you define good as, go ahead. Dont expect anyone to cater to your whims with the fruits of their labors though. This quote is interesting, as it supposes that you'll ever be in this position (and you may be. It's HN and I haven't opened your bio). Many people think the same way, which leads into my point: A lot of policy failures arise from voters being wooed away from the certainty of a social safety net by the idea of obscene wealth. And therefore we end up overborrowing for infrastructure when we should be taxing based on how someone benefits from it. > Everyone thinks they have a claim to goods and services they did not earn and hate people that earned them Not everyone, only the people who recognize that the infrastructure that enabled someone's success still needs to be paid for, and that many of those who thrive on such underlying infrastructure refuse to pay for it.
- snapplebobapple 3y ago
  I turned a very middle class upbringing into a fortune in the low tens of millions. I'm not in software or a traditional HN industry, I just enjoy technology. I don't plan on leaving much of it to my children, but that is and should be my choice and my choice alone. That quote doesn't suppose I'll be in any position, it supposes I am an individual and should be free to make my own choices regardless of your position (self inflicted or otherwise). That you are in some real or perceived negative situation does not mean I should be obligated to help you. Whether I help you or not is my own decision. That being said, because I enjoy helping people (and I enjoy the positive network effects of many policies indirectly) I am often willing and happy to help and/or pay taxes to provide services I don't get the full direct benefit of. I don't think you are right about a lot of policy failures stemming from people misjudging their ability to make lots of money. I think many policy failures come from idiotic first principles driving ideas around maximizing social welfare without taking into account who is paying for those policies because policy that has no/minimal direct or indirect benefit to the tax payer will be something the tax payer actively tries to avoid and often that avoidance comes in shitty political forms that only partly avoids the bad spending while also negating most of the benefit to the people not paying the taxes. Instead we should be making some reasonably conservative assumptions about what the benefit flow to each tax payer looks like, targeting a net positive benefit to every tax payer and maximizing social welfare along that indifference curve
whatshisface 3y ago
Your life is your own if you're on a remote island somewhere, but as long as we're living with you, please don't replace a middle class family in the city with your dogs...

chpatrick 3y ago

This attitude leads to the state of society today in the US.

_factor 3y ago

It’s not the fruit of their labor. It’s a combined effort they’re disproportionately benefiting from due to the aforementioned policy failures/corruption.

dwb 3y ago

A lot of us would dispute that anyone that rich "earned" their money. $1bn is an absurdly disproportionate compensation for any one person's work, whatever they do. It may be legal, but it isn't right.

missedthecue 3y ago
Did JK Rowling sell too many books? Should they have banned the purchase of Harry Potter books after her net worth hit $999mm? What exactly is your policy prescription here.
- Epa095 3y ago
  Taxes
  - pakitan 3y ago
    What kind of tax structure? 100% for all income over $1B?
    - whatshisface 3y ago
      If it wasn't totally impossible to implement, you could replace all taxes with low single digit percent per year service fee on your total assets for protecting them from criminals and foreign dictators. (Piketty invented that. It was tried, and didn't work out well for pragmatic reasons like jurisdiction shopping.) The service fee would be set so that the return on capital was equal to the overall growth rate of the economy. Naturally, it's higher, which makes it mathematically inevitable for a few family offices to end up owning everything. (Also from Piketty.) If the risk-free rate was 3% this year and the GDP grew by 2%, your service fee would be 1%.
      - Closi 3y ago
        Alternatively/in addition, significant inheritance taxes for the ultra-rich. A lot of wealth is multi-generational and nepotistic (i.e. do we really think Jim Walton would have got the job if he wasn't the son of the founder, and even if he did, would he have earned as much as he has?).
        snapplebobapple 3y ago
        Inheritance taxes don't work in a world where one can jurisdiction shop/utilize multiple different trust and other setups. What inheritance tax does accomplish is keeping the newly rich from becoming multi generational while protecting the old wealth, which is the worst possible outcome. On top of that, to enforce them requires a level of privacy and personal liberty abuse that is counterproductive. A better solution is much more effective antitrust enforcement through both breaking up monopolies/oligpolies and outlawing contract abuses by oligoplies as we see them (i.e. the myriad of things amazon puts in their seller contracts to ensure the prices elsewhere are always near amazon's price). You asked the wrong question about Jim Walton. You should ask would Jim be able to pull off the same level of wealth accumulation if walmart had been broken up so that it could not have abused its market power for the last 30-40 years? Probably not, because he's probably not great at creating businesses people want to spend money at. You could say the same thing about guys like Bill gates (he would be worth at least 10X what he is currently worth if he had just kept his microsoft stock instead of diversifying bit by bit each year). When you look at it, it's almost always the market power abuse that is the problem, not the wealth per se (notable exception is Elon Musk, who has knocked it out of the park on multiple companies in starkly different fields, kind of impressive).
marnett 3y ago
This is a cute myth, but it is not true. There are plenty of billionaires who inherited their wealth [0]. One thing to note is this list (as most wealth lists often do) focuses on USA billionaires whose wealth is largely from industry, and their children who inherited it; it does not include the more internationally observed phenomenon of children of royalty or similar heirs of great wealth. [0] https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/visualizations/which-of-the-worlds-richest-people-inherited-their-wealth/ https://www.madisontrust.com/information-center/visualizatio...
- dwb 3y ago
  Cool, yep, I'm also in favour of a 100% inheritance tax and abolishing monarchies.
ChainOfFools 3y ago
Seconding this, stratospheric wealth is a side effect of long-standing race condition bugs in the way we generate and route value through society. At some point there is absolutely no additional contribution made by one's own personal merits toward the amount of wealth that they generate, it's just a snowball effect with the same little pebble in the center of the ball that started it, sucking up and bashing through everything in its path.
snapplebobapple 3y ago
[flagged]
- dwb 3y ago
  You’re getting angry standing up for Elon Musk, of all people? I really don’t think an alternate timeline without his “ideas” would be any worse off. As for “implementation”, even if you do value the companies he’s headed or invested in, the bulk of the actual work will invariably have been done by others.
  - kortilla 3y ago
    The private space industry would still be dead and electric cars would be set back a decade along with all of the environmental damage that comes from that. Elon derangement syndrome has made you delusional.
    - dwb 3y ago
      I don't care about the private space industry, and Elon Musk didn't found Tesla or contribute any "ideas". It's a shame that you seem to have to resort to childish insults like "Elon derangement syndrome".
      - kortilla 3y ago
        There is nobody in any leadership position at Tesla that doesn't credit Musk for making Tesla viable. An idea without that execution is completely useless. There have been and are thousands of ideas for electric cars that never made it or will make it past a prototype because they lack the leadership skill Elon has motivating people into making a viable product. > I don't care about the private space industry This just means you don’t have much foresight or you don’t care about humanity. The private space industry is what lets us launch satellites to do things like observe the climate (macro and micro), find and prevent people from getting lost at sea, get people to the space station, launch telescopes, etc. Saying you don’t care about the private space industry is as dumb as saying, “I don’t care about the private computer industry” 50 years ago. > like "Elon derangement syndrome". There isn’t really any other way to describe the willful disregard of two huge influential companies led by the same person.

Aerbil313 3y ago

The essence of your argument is "I don't believe in the same moral values you do."

lumost 3y ago

The definition of "Earn" is what most genuine observers would debate. By definition, any interest/dividend bearing asset is a claim on a portion of societal output. As the majority of wealth in the US is now inherited, a rational individual might challenge whether such assets were "Earned". It's easy to take the opposite claim that those "Earnings" are the property of those who produced via income, or even those who consume via net savings. The fine balance between income and savings are well understood through inflation/deflationary cycles - however there are less understood profit cycles. There are many historic examples of the political problems which emerge from too large of a profit burden - such as the French Revolution, Shogunate, Bolshevik's, and arguably the US revolution and Soviet Dissolution.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mercutio2 3y ago
Where did you get the idea “the majority of wealth is now inherited”? I’m curious about your assessment of what fraction of wealth was inherited one and two centuries ago, and how you’re measuring the total stock of wealth. Holding legal title to a thing is one extremely culture specific subset of wealth; being healthy, consuming goods and services is another, having status in your communities of choice is yet another, and control of the levers of societal power is yet another. I am deeply skeptical of the claim that a larger fraction of titled wealth is now inherited than it was centuries ago, and I don’t see how you’d measure these other forms of wealth in a meaningful way.
- lumost 3y ago
  I'm using a simplistic and quantifiable measure of wealth - capital assets. I'd also admit to using a short-hand of wealthy people as equal to billionaires. I don't see the purpose in comparing billionaires quantifiable wealth to other forms of wealth considering the high probability that billionaires are wealthy in all other forms as well. https://www.investopedia.com/more-billionaire-wealth-achieved-through-inheritance-overtaking-entrepreneurship-8409800 https://www.investopedia.com/more-billionaire-wealth-achieve..."

eganist 3y ago

> Your needs and wants are not a claim on my life. My life is my own. If you want to feed your money into whatever you define good as, go ahead. Dont expect anyone to cater to your whims with the fruits of their labors though. This quote is interesting, as it supposes that you'll ever be in this position (and you may be. It's HN and I haven't opened your bio). Many people think the same way, which leads into my point: A lot of policy failures arise from voters being wooed away from the certainty of a social safety net by the idea of obscene wealth. And therefore we end up overborrowing for infrastructure when we should be taxing based on how someone benefits from it. > Everyone thinks they have a claim to goods and services they did not earn and hate people that earned them Not everyone, only the people who recognize that the infrastructure that enabled someone's success still needs to be paid for, and that many of those who thrive on such underlying infrastructure refuse to pay for it.

snapplebobapple 3y ago
I turned a very middle class upbringing into a fortune in the low tens of millions. I'm not in software or a traditional HN industry, I just enjoy technology. I don't plan on leaving much of it to my children, but that is and should be my choice and my choice alone. That quote doesn't suppose I'll be in any position, it supposes I am an individual and should be free to make my own choices regardless of your position (self inflicted or otherwise). That you are in some real or perceived negative situation does not mean I should be obligated to help you. Whether I help you or not is my own decision. That being said, because I enjoy helping people (and I enjoy the positive network effects of many policies indirectly) I am often willing and happy to help and/or pay taxes to provide services I don't get the full direct benefit of. I don't think you are right about a lot of policy failures stemming from people misjudging their ability to make lots of money. I think many policy failures come from idiotic first principles driving ideas around maximizing social welfare without taking into account who is paying for those policies because policy that has no/minimal direct or indirect benefit to the tax payer will be something the tax payer actively tries to avoid and often that avoidance comes in shitty political forms that only partly avoids the bad spending while also negating most of the benefit to the people not paying the taxes. Instead we should be making some reasonably conservative assumptions about what the benefit flow to each tax payer looks like, targeting a net positive benefit to every tax payer and maximizing social welfare along that indifference curve

whatshisface 3y ago

Your life is your own if you're on a remote island somewhere, but as long as we're living with you, please don't replace a middle class family in the city with your dogs...