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> Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive. This is emotional pleading, not a serious argument

> Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive. This is emotional pleading, not a serious argument of any sort, based on the core premise of "this person has more money than me, and I don't like that, therefore I should get some".

dangus 2y ago
It's a very serious argument, and it's somewhat insulting that you consider it to be emotional and meritless. Wealth and income inequality has well-studied negative effects on society. The ability for a single person to own over $100m in assets is not a human right. It's not a protected class or status. It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake. And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth. This completely insane $100 million figure is so small to those men that you would have to earn $100 million every single year for over 30 lifetimes to get to their level of wealth. It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy. That's a shallow way to think about it. It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this. Think for a second what would happen to you if Jeff Bezos banned you from using all Amazon products. Would the Internet even work anymore for you? You know, every company has the right to refuse service to anyone. This one man can basically cut you off from television, e-commerce, Internet, employment (if you do engineering work on AWS), even Thursday Night Football.
- throw10920 2y ago
  > It's a very serious argument, and it's somewhat insulting that you consider it to be emotional and meritless. Because, factually, the statement "Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive." is emotional and meritless. There's literally zero value here. It's an opinion. In fact, you doubled down on this throughout your response. > It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake. This is also factless, meritless, emotional pleading. > And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth... As is all of this. > It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy. That's literally what you're doing. > It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this. It's clearly not about the power imbalance and exploitation, because someone genuinely interested in curbing those effects would address them directly. The fact that everyone who claims to care about the destabilizing effects of concentrated wealth immediately goes to "we should take the wealth away" instead of "we should try to figure out why concentrated wealth is destabilizing and address that" is extremely strong evidence that the goal is, actually, to take money from the wealthy. If you consider pointing out that you're not making logical arguments, and instead engaging in emotional pleading, to be insulting (especially when, upon that being pointed out, you can't make a rational argument and instead continue pleading), then you should take a step back, because there's a good chance you're engaging in advocacy and emotional manipulation as opposed to genuine, rational arguments in good faith.
  - petersellers 2y ago
    > It's clearly not about the power imbalance and exploitation, because someone genuinely interested in curbing those effects would address them directly. The fact that everyone who claims to care about the destabilizing effects of concentrated wealth immediately goes to "we should take the wealth away" instead of "we should try to figure out why concentrated wealth is destabilizing and address that" is extremely strong evidence that the goal is, actually, to take money from the wealthy. As someone who thinks wealth inequality is a huge problem in the US - I'm genuinely curious as to what you would propose to address this problem "directly". Because to me, this tax proposal is addressing it directly.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      The underlying problem is not "the owners of large companies have too much money", it's "large companies are too large". If you take ownership of the company away from Jeff Bezos and give it to Wall St, whoever they make the CEO can still ruin your life by denying service to you etc. It solves nothing and plausibly makes the problem worse because founders generally run companies less extractively than MBAs. What you need is to remove barriers to competition and enforce antitrust laws.
    - throw10920 2y ago
      Finally, honest discussion! Wealth inequality doesn't have any direct effects - merely having more money than someone else doesn't do anything. It's only after the money gets spent that you see negative effects, and the magnitude and type of spending determine the effects. It's more accurate to call this "spending inequality". This proposal doesn't address the problem because it doesn't affect spending - only wealth. (a capital gains tax is actually a deceitfully name wealth tax) Wealth doesn't do anything until it's spent. That's the main problem with this proposal - it doesn't even try to address the problem it pretends to address. As to how to actually address the problem: there's two types of wealth inequality that most people are concerned about - that between the super-rich and everyone else (discussed here), and that between the poor and everyone else (not discussed). Thank you for engaging honestly, it's a breath of fresh air in this thread. The ~wealth~ spending inequality problems of the super-rich seem to be mainly manifested in corruption - donating large amounts to political groups, and lobbying. You want to regulate/outlaw those specific things. However, aside from corruption (which is a huge problem) most of the spending inequality problems seem to come from the middle and lower class. For instance, cost of housing and living - I think that that's being driven by the middle class having more access to capital in a supply-constrained environment (which is partially caused by big hedge funds buying up housing to rent it out - which again is a separate problem that can be addressed separately and isn't fixed by the capital gains tax). People like Zuckerberg aren't personally buying up housing all over the US on their own - this problem isn't at their level and this tax wouldn't help.
- logicchains 2y ago
  By the philosophy under which the human right to property is defined, someone has just as much right to own a billion dollars without it being stolen as they do to have ten dollars. >It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources It's not a misappropriation; for a company founder, they _created_ those resources. Without them, the resource wouldn't exist. And if you punish them a lot, such people will all go somewhere else, and then you'll have no businesses or jobs and everyone's standard of living will be worse. This has been demonstrated historically countless times, every single case of the government mass-appropriating the wealth of the wealth led to extreme poverty; Maoist China, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia. >Wealth and income inequality has well-studied negative effects on society. Negative as defined by some left-leaning social scientists. Conversely, punitive taxation has been overwhelmingly shown by economists to lead to reduced growth in people's standard of living as measured by income and GDP.
  - kaba0 2y ago
    > It's not a misappropriation; for a company founder, they _created_ those resources Created, or taken the fruits of others’ labor? Obviously, no Amazon-sized company is the work of a single person. Was the pharaoh, sitting in luxury, more responsible for the creation of the pyramid as the architect or the common slave building it?
kjkjadksj 2y ago
Its more a question of if the best way to allocate our resources is to allow the bulk of the population to struggle while a lucky few have more money than they could reasonably spend on themselves in several lifetimes.
- throw10920 2y ago
  > Its more a question of if the best way to allocate our resources is to allow the bulk of the population to struggle while a lucky few have more money than they could reasonably spend on themselves in several lifetimes. This is emotional pleading, dishonest framing, and a false dichotomy. Are you going to make a real argument, or continue to engage in emotional manipulation?

dangus 2y ago

It's a very serious argument, and it's somewhat insulting that you consider it to be emotional and meritless. Wealth and income inequality has well-studied negative effects on society. The ability for a single person to own over $100m in assets is not a human right. It's not a protected class or status. It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake. And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth. This completely insane $100 million figure is so small to those men that you would have to earn $100 million every single year for over 30 lifetimes to get to their level of wealth. It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy. That's a shallow way to think about it. It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this. Think for a second what would happen to you if Jeff Bezos banned you from using all Amazon products. Would the Internet even work anymore for you? You know, every company has the right to refuse service to anyone. This one man can basically cut you off from television, e-commerce, Internet, employment (if you do engineering work on AWS), even Thursday Night Football.

throw10920 2y ago
> It's a very serious argument, and it's somewhat insulting that you consider it to be emotional and meritless. Because, factually, the statement "Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive." is emotional and meritless. There's literally zero value here. It's an opinion. In fact, you doubled down on this throughout your response. > It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake. This is also factless, meritless, emotional pleading. > And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth... As is all of this. > It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy. That's literally what you're doing. > It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this. It's clearly not about the power imbalance and exploitation, because someone genuinely interested in curbing those effects would address them directly. The fact that everyone who claims to care about the destabilizing effects of concentrated wealth immediately goes to "we should take the wealth away" instead of "we should try to figure out why concentrated wealth is destabilizing and address that" is extremely strong evidence that the goal is, actually, to take money from the wealthy. If you consider pointing out that you're not making logical arguments, and instead engaging in emotional pleading, to be insulting (especially when, upon that being pointed out, you can't make a rational argument and instead continue pleading), then you should take a step back, because there's a good chance you're engaging in advocacy and emotional manipulation as opposed to genuine, rational arguments in good faith.
- petersellers 2y ago
  > It's clearly not about the power imbalance and exploitation, because someone genuinely interested in curbing those effects would address them directly. The fact that everyone who claims to care about the destabilizing effects of concentrated wealth immediately goes to "we should take the wealth away" instead of "we should try to figure out why concentrated wealth is destabilizing and address that" is extremely strong evidence that the goal is, actually, to take money from the wealthy. As someone who thinks wealth inequality is a huge problem in the US - I'm genuinely curious as to what you would propose to address this problem "directly". Because to me, this tax proposal is addressing it directly.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    The underlying problem is not "the owners of large companies have too much money", it's "large companies are too large". If you take ownership of the company away from Jeff Bezos and give it to Wall St, whoever they make the CEO can still ruin your life by denying service to you etc. It solves nothing and plausibly makes the problem worse because founders generally run companies less extractively than MBAs. What you need is to remove barriers to competition and enforce antitrust laws.
  - throw10920 2y ago
    Finally, honest discussion! Wealth inequality doesn't have any direct effects - merely having more money than someone else doesn't do anything. It's only after the money gets spent that you see negative effects, and the magnitude and type of spending determine the effects. It's more accurate to call this "spending inequality". This proposal doesn't address the problem because it doesn't affect spending - only wealth. (a capital gains tax is actually a deceitfully name wealth tax) Wealth doesn't do anything until it's spent. That's the main problem with this proposal - it doesn't even try to address the problem it pretends to address. As to how to actually address the problem: there's two types of wealth inequality that most people are concerned about - that between the super-rich and everyone else (discussed here), and that between the poor and everyone else (not discussed). Thank you for engaging honestly, it's a breath of fresh air in this thread. The ~wealth~ spending inequality problems of the super-rich seem to be mainly manifested in corruption - donating large amounts to political groups, and lobbying. You want to regulate/outlaw those specific things. However, aside from corruption (which is a huge problem) most of the spending inequality problems seem to come from the middle and lower class. For instance, cost of housing and living - I think that that's being driven by the middle class having more access to capital in a supply-constrained environment (which is partially caused by big hedge funds buying up housing to rent it out - which again is a separate problem that can be addressed separately and isn't fixed by the capital gains tax). People like Zuckerberg aren't personally buying up housing all over the US on their own - this problem isn't at their level and this tax wouldn't help.
logicchains 2y ago
By the philosophy under which the human right to property is defined, someone has just as much right to own a billion dollars without it being stolen as they do to have ten dollars. >It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources It's not a misappropriation; for a company founder, they _created_ those resources. Without them, the resource wouldn't exist. And if you punish them a lot, such people will all go somewhere else, and then you'll have no businesses or jobs and everyone's standard of living will be worse. This has been demonstrated historically countless times, every single case of the government mass-appropriating the wealth of the wealth led to extreme poverty; Maoist China, Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot's Cambodia. >Wealth and income inequality has well-studied negative effects on society. Negative as defined by some left-leaning social scientists. Conversely, punitive taxation has been overwhelmingly shown by economists to lead to reduced growth in people's standard of living as measured by income and GDP.
- kaba0 2y ago
  > It's not a misappropriation; for a company founder, they _created_ those resources Created, or taken the fruits of others’ labor? Obviously, no Amazon-sized company is the work of a single person. Was the pharaoh, sitting in luxury, more responsible for the creation of the pyramid as the architect or the common slave building it?

kjkjadksj 2y ago

Its more a question of if the best way to allocate our resources is to allow the bulk of the population to struggle while a lucky few have more money than they could reasonably spend on themselves in several lifetimes.

throw10920 2y ago
> Its more a question of if the best way to allocate our resources is to allow the bulk of the population to struggle while a lucky few have more money than they could reasonably spend on themselves in several lifetimes. This is emotional pleading, dishonest framing, and a false dichotomy. Are you going to make a real argument, or continue to engage in emotional manipulation?