3 ms·

> Take away his ownership of Amazon as it increases above 100MM? Yes, that sounds reasonable to me. No single person should have control of a company with th

by coldpie 8mo ago

> Take away his ownership of Amazon as it increases above 100MM? Yes, that sounds reasonable to me. No single person should have control of a company with that much power.

rootusrootus 8mo ago
Alright, but I really would like to hear your solution for the next question ;-).
- coldpie 8mo ago
  Sure. Turn it into a public company with a board, sell the shares to reduce any individual's ownership stake to <$100M.
- ryandrake 8mo ago
  I'm sure there are plenty of creative ways to have the general public reclaim the excess wealth. How about a public mutual fund where every citizen owns 1 share. Every year on tax day, all personal holdings over $100M (or whatever the threshold is) are seized and ownership is transferred to that fund.
AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
> No single person should have control of a company with that much power. Someone is going to have control of it, if it exists. But if you don't want companies of that size to exist then you need antitrust and lower barriers to new entrants rather than taxes.
- coldpie 8mo ago
  I also strongly support enforcing our existing antitrust laws, yes. > Someone is going to have control of it, if it exists Sure, a board, no member of which may be worth more than $100M.
  - AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
    > Sure, a board, no member of which may be worth more than $100M. What does that change when the CEO is still commanding a trillion dollars in capital? Also consider how you're going to choose the board of a trillion dollar company if no natural person owns more than 0.01% of it. It's going to end up being controlled by Wall St funds instead. How do you expect that to go?
    - coldpie 8mo ago
      > What does that change when the CEO is still commanding a trillion dollars in capital? Their incentives. They've already hit the wealth cap, they can't make their high score any higher. The incentive to steal from their workers is gone. > How do you expect that to go? Better than what we have now, hopefully. I'm open to suggestions if you have a better idea for how to reign in these people!
      - AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
        > They've already hit the wealth cap, they can't make their high score any higher. The incentive to steal from their workers is gone. The implication here is that their compensation would then be completely disconnected from their performance. Then their incentive is to go all-in on nepotism or get into the favors business etc. Making "wealth" about soft power is not going to make things better. > Better than what we have now, hopefully. We already have some companies controlled by founders and others controlled by Wall St. The latter have a strong tendency to be worse. > I'm open to suggestions if you have a better idea for how to reign in these people! Again, the problem is the size of the company. The size of the individual's bank account is the consequence rather than the cause. What percentage of people with >$100B got the bulk of it by being an early shareholder of something which is now a megacorp? It's pretty much all of them, right? Set up a regulatory environment where companies don't get that big. Get rid of DMCA 1201 and anything else that can be used to thwart adversarial interoperability. Make blocking interoperability an explicit antitrust violation and let individuals sue over it instead of requiring it to be done by a bought-off government prosecutor. Lower friction to new competitors. We need a digital payments system that doesn't doesn't require the customer to give the merchant a secret number that could be used to make charges at other merchants, without needing a middle man, because it's propping up the middle men and makes it so people are less willing to patronize smaller/newer companies. The risk of making a $5 purchase from a new website you've never heard of should be $5, not having your credit card stolen, without exposing the new company to being suddenly vaporized by Paypal for no apparent reason. There are also a lot of indirect reasons, like the artificial scarcity of mixed-use zoning and housing in general. There are way too many areas where it's illegal to start a business out of your home, but that's the only economically viable way for many of them to get started, so instead people get corporate jobs and we get larger corporations. In general you have to look past the stated reasons for things and ask, what is this policy actually doing? Incumbents love to hide competition-destroying rules behind consumer protection or safety rationalizations because a marginal or purely hypothetical safety improvement generally isn't worth wiping out 80% of smaller competitors, especially when better safety improvements are possible without doing that, but it makes it onto the books if the incumbents pretend the reason is actually safety even though the thing is structured to raise fixed costs and wipe out smaller companies.

by coldpie 8mo ago

> Take away his ownership of Amazon as it increases above 100MM? Yes, that sounds reasonable to me. No single person should have control of a company with that much power.

rootusrootus 8mo ago

Alright, but I really would like to hear your solution for the next question ;-).

coldpie 8mo ago
Sure. Turn it into a public company with a board, sell the shares to reduce any individual's ownership stake to <$100M.
ryandrake 8mo ago
I'm sure there are plenty of creative ways to have the general public reclaim the excess wealth. How about a public mutual fund where every citizen owns 1 share. Every year on tax day, all personal holdings over $100M (or whatever the threshold is) are seized and ownership is transferred to that fund.

AnthonyMouse 8mo ago

> No single person should have control of a company with that much power. Someone is going to have control of it, if it exists. But if you don't want companies of that size to exist then you need antitrust and lower barriers to new entrants rather than taxes.

coldpie 8mo ago
I also strongly support enforcing our existing antitrust laws, yes. > Someone is going to have control of it, if it exists Sure, a board, no member of which may be worth more than $100M.
- AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
  > Sure, a board, no member of which may be worth more than $100M. What does that change when the CEO is still commanding a trillion dollars in capital? Also consider how you're going to choose the board of a trillion dollar company if no natural person owns more than 0.01% of it. It's going to end up being controlled by Wall St funds instead. How do you expect that to go?
  - coldpie 8mo ago
    > What does that change when the CEO is still commanding a trillion dollars in capital? Their incentives. They've already hit the wealth cap, they can't make their high score any higher. The incentive to steal from their workers is gone. > How do you expect that to go? Better than what we have now, hopefully. I'm open to suggestions if you have a better idea for how to reign in these people!
    - AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
      > They've already hit the wealth cap, they can't make their high score any higher. The incentive to steal from their workers is gone. The implication here is that their compensation would then be completely disconnected from their performance. Then their incentive is to go all-in on nepotism or get into the favors business etc. Making "wealth" about soft power is not going to make things better. > Better than what we have now, hopefully. We already have some companies controlled by founders and others controlled by Wall St. The latter have a strong tendency to be worse. > I'm open to suggestions if you have a better idea for how to reign in these people! Again, the problem is the size of the company. The size of the individual's bank account is the consequence rather than the cause. What percentage of people with >$100B got the bulk of it by being an early shareholder of something which is now a megacorp? It's pretty much all of them, right? Set up a regulatory environment where companies don't get that big. Get rid of DMCA 1201 and anything else that can be used to thwart adversarial interoperability. Make blocking interoperability an explicit antitrust violation and let individuals sue over it instead of requiring it to be done by a bought-off government prosecutor. Lower friction to new competitors. We need a digital payments system that doesn't doesn't require the customer to give the merchant a secret number that could be used to make charges at other merchants, without needing a middle man, because it's propping up the middle men and makes it so people are less willing to patronize smaller/newer companies. The risk of making a $5 purchase from a new website you've never heard of should be $5, not having your credit card stolen, without exposing the new company to being suddenly vaporized by Paypal for no apparent reason. There are also a lot of indirect reasons, like the artificial scarcity of mixed-use zoning and housing in general. There are way too many areas where it's illegal to start a business out of your home, but that's the only economically viable way for many of them to get started, so instead people get corporate jobs and we get larger corporations. In general you have to look past the stated reasons for things and ask, what is this policy actually doing? Incumbents love to hide competition-destroying rules behind consumer protection or safety rationalizations because a marginal or purely hypothetical safety improvement generally isn't worth wiping out 80% of smaller competitors, especially when better safety improvements are possible without doing that, but it makes it onto the books if the incumbents pretend the reason is actually safety even though the thing is structured to raise fixed costs and wipe out smaller companies.