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> 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 yo

> 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.
  - octopoc 2y ago
somewhat_drunk 2y ago
Is money tantamount to power? Is the centralization of power bad? If yes to both, then the centralization of money is bad. You have no argument against this. The best you can do is to attempt to refute the notion that money is tantamount to power, which will be laughable. But please do try.
- logicchains 2y ago
  Expropriation of wealth from the rich just centralises it more by giving it to the government (and in particular whoever is in charge of the government), as happened with every single communist revolution.
  - petersellers 2y ago
    No? We aren't a communist country, so bringing up communist revolutions is irrelevant here. We used to tax the rich much more than we do now, and government bureaucrats were not obscenely wealthy then as you seem to be implying. Also, the US government spends more money than it accrues every year, so there isn't any consolidation of money happening in the government (nor will there be if taxes go up).
    - 00_hum 2y ago
      false. effective tax rate was lower not higher
      - petersellers 2y ago
        That is false, at least for the top tax bracket (which is what I'm referring to). Even the Tax Foundation, which is a biased source that is anti-tax in general states that the effective rate for the top bracket was 6% higher then than it is today (https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high/ https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/taxes-on-the-rich...)
        2y ago
amrocha 2y ago
You have what I refer to as “root cause syndrome”. It happens a lot to engineers and tech adjacent people. You see a problem and you refuse to fix it, and instead look for a root cause that should be addressed instead, that will then fix the problem itself. The problem with that kind of thinking is that that’s not how the real world works. The problem of homelessness is that people don’t have homes. It’s not something else. Give people homes and you solve it. But people with RCS try to solve it through jobs, training, education, etc. All those things are nice but they won’t fix the problem, which is that people are homeless. Likewise, the problem of wealth inequality can only be solved by reducing wealth inequality. There is no other solution. Just tax rich people until they’re not rich anymore.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > The problem of homelessness is that people don’t have homes. It’s not something else. Give people homes and you solve it. Have you considered how this is supposed to work? If being homeless means you get a free home, millions of people would purposely become "homeless" so they could eliminate their housing costs. Also, homes are quite expensive, especially in areas with high homelessness, so where does the money come from? Meanwhile one of the primary actual causes of homelessness is zoning that prevents new housing from being built, causing people to be unable to afford it. If you just have the government buy up existing housing stock for the homeless, the scarcity is not resolved at all, you just cause new people to become homeless because you remove the housing they'd have bought from the market. To actually solve it you can't just do the naive "have the government pay for it" thing, you have to understand the root cause, which is that you have to not just give housing to the homeless but build new housing across the overall market so it isn't in undersupply. > Likewise, the problem of wealth inequality can only be solved by reducing wealth inequality. There is no other solution. Just tax rich people until they’re not rich anymore. This is exactly the same level of not thinking it through. Mark Zuckerberg has billions and it gives him control over Facebook. But if you take his money and leave Facebook, someone will still be the CEO and that person will still have all of that power. The problem is not the money, it's the size of the company.
  - amrocha 2y ago
dangus 2y ago
Imagine if you saw someone who ate so much food they weighed 10,000 pounds. I come over and tell you, “this isn’t healthy! Nobody should weigh 10,000 pounds, we weren’t designed to exist that way!” You come back to me and tell me that I’m making an emotional argument that isn’t backed up by facts. But, the problem with that is that this is common sense, and it’s even backed by a bunch of science and observed reality. Someone who weighs 10,000 pounds basically can’t exist, and if they did it would be so ridiculous it’s almost incomprehensible. I think it actually should be on you and not me to prove that people owning that much wealth is something that should be considered to be okay, not the other way around. You counter my “emotional pleading” with your own emotional “nuh uh, you are wrong” argument. Who do you know that has over $100 million in net worth that you feel would be hurt by a proposal to tax unearned gains on people with $100 million net worth and above? I don’t know anyone like that. What I do know is that I would personally benefit from my government having more income to fix potholes and pay teacher salaries. And that’s the other double standard: when the wealthy people advocate for policy that hurts the majority like tax cuts for the wealthy, they are seen as smart businessmen. But as soon as I advocate for something that hurts the wealthy, I’m being emotional and unreasonable. Sorry dude, I’m just advocating for what’s in my best interest. It’s in my best interest as an average person who isn’t a billionaire or millionaire for these wealthy people to not exist. They’ve done nothing positive for me and everything negative. Every penny or nickel or dime that goes to their extravagant pay package is a penny or nickel that could have gone back to me, their customer. It would be better for me if my company CEO made $200,000 a year instead of $20,000,000 a year. That could at least buy us a solid pizza patty.
- throw10920 2y ago
  > Imagine No, I won't. This is a logical fallacy, that of the false allegory. It's not an argument in general, and in this particular case it's an extremely bad allegory that's also trivially inapplicable to this situation. There's plenty of scientific evidence that being physically overweight is directly unhealthy for you. Meanwhile, there's zero evidence that having a lot of money is the sole cause of any negative societal phenomenon. Think I'm wrong? Drop a link right here. Correlation isn't causal, by the way - if you show me a study that merely demonstrates correlation without causality (and sole causality, as opposed to multiple factors), then it's invalid. > You come back to me and tell me that I’m making an emotional argument that isn’t backed up by facts. In the case of your actual comments (as opposed to this irrelevant story you're spinning), this is true, because you are repeatedly making emotional non-arguments without providing any facts whatsoever: "very serious argument", "somewhat insulting", "abhorrent misappropriation", "societal mistake", "multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth", "completely insane $100 million figure", etc. These are purely manipulative, emotional, non-arguments that are meritless and valueless, and are a symptom of someone actively trying to manipulate others. Repeatedly pointing out how much money someone has is not a valid argument. You're inventing a completely fictional, irrelevant world because you're unwilling to or incapable of either providing a single rational argument, or a single piece of evidence. > I think it actually should be on you and not me to prove that people owning that much wealth is something that should be considered to be okay Over a hundred million people in the US, where I live, disagree with you. I have nothing to prove, because it's an extremely popular belief that it's ok to be rich. Additionally, you have it exactly backwards: in almost every country in the world (and especially the US), things are assumed to be OK to do unless people explicitly decide otherwise. You can invent a new sport, make a new game, write a new book, and do whatever, and that's OK unless it violates established laws, or people decide that your specific thing is bad. This idea of "things are bad to do by default unless you prove otherwise" is completely hypocritical, because you have absolutely done novel things in your life that nobody else has done before, and felt not a shred of guilt, because you do not hold the internal belief that your actions are bad by default unless you explicitly justify them to others. > You counter my “emotional pleading” with your own emotional “nuh uh, you are wrong” argument. False. I've made extremely rational and detached counter-arguments to your fallacies. You are the one making objectively emotionally pleading statements like "very serious argument", "somewhat insulting", "abhorrent misappropriation", "societal mistake", "multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth", "completely insane $100 million figure", and fallacies like the false allegory, the appeal to pity, and the red herring. I've pointed out your fallacies - you've continued to make more of them. You've shown that you don't even know the difference between arguments and emotional pleading. > And that’s the other double standard: when the wealthy people advocate for policy that hurts the majority like tax cuts for the wealthy, they are seen as smart businessmen. But as soon as I advocate for something that hurts the wealthy, I’m being emotional and unreasonable. This is a red herring. Nobody else brought up this double standard, nor did I mention it, nor is it relevant to this argument. It's just another way for you to emotionally manipulate. > Sorry dude, I’m just advocating for what’s in my best interest This can be used to justify every single kind of evil. Someone can make this argument to justify why they can murder, rape, steal, lie, and cheat, and it works exactly the same way, because they're just doing "what's in their best interest". Your comments demonstrate an inability to differentiate between opinions and facts, and between emotions and logic. You should stop confidently conflating those things.

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.
- octopoc 2y ago

somewhat_drunk 2y ago

Is money tantamount to power? Is the centralization of power bad? If yes to both, then the centralization of money is bad. You have no argument against this. The best you can do is to attempt to refute the notion that money is tantamount to power, which will be laughable. But please do try.

logicchains 2y ago
Expropriation of wealth from the rich just centralises it more by giving it to the government (and in particular whoever is in charge of the government), as happened with every single communist revolution.
- petersellers 2y ago
  No? We aren't a communist country, so bringing up communist revolutions is irrelevant here. We used to tax the rich much more than we do now, and government bureaucrats were not obscenely wealthy then as you seem to be implying. Also, the US government spends more money than it accrues every year, so there isn't any consolidation of money happening in the government (nor will there be if taxes go up).
  - 00_hum 2y ago
    false. effective tax rate was lower not higher
    - petersellers 2y ago
      That is false, at least for the top tax bracket (which is what I'm referring to). Even the Tax Foundation, which is a biased source that is anti-tax in general states that the effective rate for the top bracket was 6% higher then than it is today (https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high/ https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/taxes-on-the-rich...)
      - 2y ago

amrocha 2y ago

You have what I refer to as “root cause syndrome”. It happens a lot to engineers and tech adjacent people. You see a problem and you refuse to fix it, and instead look for a root cause that should be addressed instead, that will then fix the problem itself. The problem with that kind of thinking is that that’s not how the real world works. The problem of homelessness is that people don’t have homes. It’s not something else. Give people homes and you solve it. But people with RCS try to solve it through jobs, training, education, etc. All those things are nice but they won’t fix the problem, which is that people are homeless. Likewise, the problem of wealth inequality can only be solved by reducing wealth inequality. There is no other solution. Just tax rich people until they’re not rich anymore.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> The problem of homelessness is that people don’t have homes. It’s not something else. Give people homes and you solve it. Have you considered how this is supposed to work? If being homeless means you get a free home, millions of people would purposely become "homeless" so they could eliminate their housing costs. Also, homes are quite expensive, especially in areas with high homelessness, so where does the money come from? Meanwhile one of the primary actual causes of homelessness is zoning that prevents new housing from being built, causing people to be unable to afford it. If you just have the government buy up existing housing stock for the homeless, the scarcity is not resolved at all, you just cause new people to become homeless because you remove the housing they'd have bought from the market. To actually solve it you can't just do the naive "have the government pay for it" thing, you have to understand the root cause, which is that you have to not just give housing to the homeless but build new housing across the overall market so it isn't in undersupply. > Likewise, the problem of wealth inequality can only be solved by reducing wealth inequality. There is no other solution. Just tax rich people until they’re not rich anymore. This is exactly the same level of not thinking it through. Mark Zuckerberg has billions and it gives him control over Facebook. But if you take his money and leave Facebook, someone will still be the CEO and that person will still have all of that power. The problem is not the money, it's the size of the company.
- amrocha 2y ago

dangus 2y ago

Imagine if you saw someone who ate so much food they weighed 10,000 pounds. I come over and tell you, “this isn’t healthy! Nobody should weigh 10,000 pounds, we weren’t designed to exist that way!” You come back to me and tell me that I’m making an emotional argument that isn’t backed up by facts. But, the problem with that is that this is common sense, and it’s even backed by a bunch of science and observed reality. Someone who weighs 10,000 pounds basically can’t exist, and if they did it would be so ridiculous it’s almost incomprehensible. I think it actually should be on you and not me to prove that people owning that much wealth is something that should be considered to be okay, not the other way around. You counter my “emotional pleading” with your own emotional “nuh uh, you are wrong” argument. Who do you know that has over $100 million in net worth that you feel would be hurt by a proposal to tax unearned gains on people with $100 million net worth and above? I don’t know anyone like that. What I do know is that I would personally benefit from my government having more income to fix potholes and pay teacher salaries. And that’s the other double standard: when the wealthy people advocate for policy that hurts the majority like tax cuts for the wealthy, they are seen as smart businessmen. But as soon as I advocate for something that hurts the wealthy, I’m being emotional and unreasonable. Sorry dude, I’m just advocating for what’s in my best interest. It’s in my best interest as an average person who isn’t a billionaire or millionaire for these wealthy people to not exist. They’ve done nothing positive for me and everything negative. Every penny or nickel or dime that goes to their extravagant pay package is a penny or nickel that could have gone back to me, their customer. It would be better for me if my company CEO made $200,000 a year instead of $20,000,000 a year. That could at least buy us a solid pizza patty.

throw10920 2y ago
> Imagine No, I won't. This is a logical fallacy, that of the false allegory. It's not an argument in general, and in this particular case it's an extremely bad allegory that's also trivially inapplicable to this situation. There's plenty of scientific evidence that being physically overweight is directly unhealthy for you. Meanwhile, there's zero evidence that having a lot of money is the sole cause of any negative societal phenomenon. Think I'm wrong? Drop a link right here. Correlation isn't causal, by the way - if you show me a study that merely demonstrates correlation without causality (and sole causality, as opposed to multiple factors), then it's invalid. > You come back to me and tell me that I’m making an emotional argument that isn’t backed up by facts. In the case of your actual comments (as opposed to this irrelevant story you're spinning), this is true, because you are repeatedly making emotional non-arguments without providing any facts whatsoever: "very serious argument", "somewhat insulting", "abhorrent misappropriation", "societal mistake", "multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth", "completely insane $100 million figure", etc. These are purely manipulative, emotional, non-arguments that are meritless and valueless, and are a symptom of someone actively trying to manipulate others. Repeatedly pointing out how much money someone has is not a valid argument. You're inventing a completely fictional, irrelevant world because you're unwilling to or incapable of either providing a single rational argument, or a single piece of evidence. > I think it actually should be on you and not me to prove that people owning that much wealth is something that should be considered to be okay Over a hundred million people in the US, where I live, disagree with you. I have nothing to prove, because it's an extremely popular belief that it's ok to be rich. Additionally, you have it exactly backwards: in almost every country in the world (and especially the US), things are assumed to be OK to do unless people explicitly decide otherwise. You can invent a new sport, make a new game, write a new book, and do whatever, and that's OK unless it violates established laws, or people decide that your specific thing is bad. This idea of "things are bad to do by default unless you prove otherwise" is completely hypocritical, because you have absolutely done novel things in your life that nobody else has done before, and felt not a shred of guilt, because you do not hold the internal belief that your actions are bad by default unless you explicitly justify them to others. > You counter my “emotional pleading” with your own emotional “nuh uh, you are wrong” argument. False. I've made extremely rational and detached counter-arguments to your fallacies. You are the one making objectively emotionally pleading statements like "very serious argument", "somewhat insulting", "abhorrent misappropriation", "societal mistake", "multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth", "completely insane $100 million figure", and fallacies like the false allegory, the appeal to pity, and the red herring. I've pointed out your fallacies - you've continued to make more of them. You've shown that you don't even know the difference between arguments and emotional pleading. > And that’s the other double standard: when the wealthy people advocate for policy that hurts the majority like tax cuts for the wealthy, they are seen as smart businessmen. But as soon as I advocate for something that hurts the wealthy, I’m being emotional and unreasonable. This is a red herring. Nobody else brought up this double standard, nor did I mention it, nor is it relevant to this argument. It's just another way for you to emotionally manipulate. > Sorry dude, I’m just advocating for what’s in my best interest This can be used to justify every single kind of evil. Someone can make this argument to justify why they can murder, rape, steal, lie, and cheat, and it works exactly the same way, because they're just doing "what's in their best interest". Your comments demonstrate an inability to differentiate between opinions and facts, and between emotions and logic. You should stop confidently conflating those things.