4 ms·

Do we need billionaires?

71 points by speckx 5mo ago

dm_ 5mo ago
The book "Limitarianism" seems relevant: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/21/limitarianism-the-case-against-extreme-wealth-ingrid-robeyns-extract https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/21/limitarianism-...
throwaway742 5mo ago
No.
- 0123456789ABCDE 5mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
  - shrubby 5mo ago
    Correct once again it seems.
joncrane 5mo ago
We need intensely ambitious and competitive people. We shouldn't use money to keep score.
- shrubby 5mo ago
  In the times of metacrisis and power concentrated in the hands of few who actively try to fry the world I think what we need is the exact opposite of that. That is what we've had mostly for the last fifty years and look where it has gotten us? And US. I'm not from US
- folkrav 5mo ago
  Money pays the bills, not ambition and competition. Every freaking thing out there uses money to keep score. There's no reason we should not use money to keep score of the people hoarding more and more of the money bags, and actively using their money towards leaving the rest fighting over am ever shrinking pot.
- weeznerps 5mo ago
  What do you propose as the alternative? Whuffie?
- dqv 5mo ago
  "Competition" is too ambiguous a term to be something to strive for. It needs to be qualified further to remove the domination mindset that many competitors have. I just don't get the mindset of living in a society where you know you have to cooperate with others because they have skills you do not have, but also of the mindset that, if push comes to shove, they must be homeless so that you don't have to be. "Why aren't there any clothesmakers?" the person who made the clothesmakers homeless asks. I wish billionaires were competing on how many people they've lifted out of homelessness or how many people they've fed without making a profit (with the additional caveat that it is a carbon negative, sustainable production). And not in the fake way where they use creative language to obfuscate the harms they've done, but in an actual tangible way where when you look at it, it actually shows a genuine desire to be participant in society, not a dominator of it. All the "good" that billionaires do these days comes with caveats or over representation. Of course, this stuff all gets rationalized away by people. They will ask stupid questions like "why don't you open your home up to homeless people then" or the classic "do you know what capitalism has done for you you ungrateful little shit? you better do 5 hail Bezos prayers right now before I report this to Palantir", because why would you try to understand a metaphor? Things have to be this way! There are no other options. We have to fuck people over to survive.
shrubby 5mo ago
I was just gathering a list of global top hundred with their influence relevant spending and boy that was not a pretty sight. At least in terms of normal people.
lucamark 5mo ago
> risk-takers who are badly needed But at what point does marginal private incentive stop helping innovation and start damaging democracy? For sure risk-taking deserves reward but the size of the reward matters
- alpinisme 5mo ago
  Totally. Those conversations often also overlook the fact that some people are just driven and curious and risk taking by personality (especially after they’ve made it to adulthood and have entrenched work habits that may have been partly the result of economic incentives along the way). Even if you start having diminishing (personal financial) returns on added effort at some point, or even hit a ceiling, there are plenty of people who will keep pushing just because it’s all they know how to/want to do. Or because they get a thrill out of knowing that they’re on top of a still growing product (how much bigger can I make this?). Or because they are vying for non-financial social status.
  - lucamark 5mo ago
    Exactly. Many people - e.g., founders, scientists and artists - keep pushing because of curiosity and mission. Money matters, especially early, but after some extreme level it is hard to believe that the next $50B - just to say a number - is what causes the useful work to happen.
- sschueller 5mo ago
  But when they fail, they fail upwards. These risks are always on the backs of everyone else. For example, they take risks by using chemicals (that they know) can kill people, by the time people get cancer they are retired, there are no claw-backs. More recently you commit actual fraud, get convicted but then get a pardon and somehow end up with money again running the next "scam". These people never take real risks. DOGE resulted in the death of over 100k people [1] and will result in many people dying of Ebola. It was a huge failure yet the "risk" Elon took is not his. [1] https://healthpolicy-watch.news/the-human-cost-one-year-after-the-us-took-a-chainsaw-to-global-health/ https://healthpolicy-watch.news/the-human-cost-one-year-afte...
mccoyb 5mo ago
[flagged]
ggm 5mo ago
It's very unlikely any mainstream political class is going to take serious action anywhere to forbid them, but a few take action to limit them. Too few I think. The (mis-attributed to Lenin and Stalin) quote "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." is quite big in this. A little humility and a lot more tax-paying could save the trillionaire classes from the tumbrils but they lack the emotional intelligence to see it and as long as they make a few thousand millionaires below them they have useful idiots to decry any changes. On the plus side, workers are in short supply. The future needs more people who can do things other than thinkers, and robots (bless their hearts) don't spend money as consumers so the other side of the billionaire equation demands new people to come into spending class: this means Africa, Asia and South America levelling up.
- js8 5mo ago
  > A little humility and a lot more tax-paying could save the trillionaire classes from the tumbrils but they lack the emotional intelligence to see it I think there is some research which shows that as you get rich, you lose emotional intelligence (empathy towards others). So maybe we should consider being rich a health hazard.
- prawn 5mo ago
  Many people would've seen the tweet: "Ok how about this: No more billionaires. None. After you reach $999 million, every red cent goes to schools and health care. You get a trophy that says, “I won capitalism” and we name a dog park after you." If there isn't the political will to ramp up taxes on extreme wealth, I'd be interested to know how much effort there is in pitching legacy projects (more exciting than dog parks) to those with the means to execute them. Like crowd-funding, but for major developments and with further tax incentives if necessary. It wasn't pitched to him, but in Australia, a wealthy individual put Hobart (more) on the map with a now famous contemporary art gallery complex which is an excellent drawcard for the state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Old_and_New_Art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Old_and_New_Art That is an extraordinary development for sub-$100m. Supposedly Australia has 150+ billionaires. Build us some crazy things.
  - 5mo ago
qaq 5mo ago
We need competent people to remain in control of companies they have created.
- dm_ 5mo ago
  What's ironic about your statement is that it's this exact belief--that founders should remain in control--that has led to the widespread adoption of dual class shares, in which founders maintain control while ceding a majority of equity. And the irony here is, by that same token, founders could maintain in control while not having such large equity stakes, and not becoming so rich. So I do not think this is an argument for billionaires.
  - qaq 5mo ago
    if you look at actual proposals like in CA they focus on taxing based on control %
    - dm_ 5mo ago
      I don't think this is true of "proposals" in the plural. This is arguably true of the California ballot measure due, allegedly, to sloppy drafting. But this isn't a fundamental aspect of wealth taxes; it's a choice. So I don't think it's a meaningful argument against wealth taxes in general. (As an unrelated point, I think dual class shares are sort of bad and it makes sense to me to discourage them as a matter of public policy, but this doesn't seem like necessarily the best way to do it.)
      - qaq 5mo ago
        I don't think it sloppy drafting. They are trying to close "loopholes".
        dm_ 5mo ago
        I'm not a tax lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt, but yes, I think they were trying to close loopholes, but did so sloppily. Read the text (https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/initiatives/pdfs/25-0024A1%20%28Billionaire%20Tax%20%29.pdf https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/initiatives/pdfs/25-0024A1%2...), specifically 50303 section c. It seems to me that the authors were, as you say, trying to close a loophole, namely that where I set up a Nevada LLC to which I hold 99% of voting shares but 1% of outstanding equity, put my assets in it, and just direct the LLC to spend on things I want it to--but in the process, they failed to realize that non-public super-voting shares (like Google class B shares) seem to fall into category (3) of section (c) (i.e. neither sole proprietorships nor publicly traded assets). I don't think that's a great design, though it's still worth noting that it doesn't rule out privileged shares in general--GOOGL, to give an example, are privileged voting shares that trade publicly, and thus are obviously under category (1), and assessed per their FMV. But in any case, I stand by my broader point: this is a specific detail of how the California proposal has been written; it's not a fundamental aspect of wealth taxes. Switzerland has a wealth tax that does not have this aspect, for example.
shrubby 5mo ago
Human being, with very few exceptions, is corrupted by power. And a billion dollars is immense amount power. You can make your opponent's life a living hell with a hundred thousand and buy or figure out a way to frame extortion material from almost any decision maker with a million. See how wars are being started tweeting from the toilet seat by a man who has never known anything but power to harm others. See the many "formerly normal" people ending on a private island, doing horrendous things to children. We tried to figure out examples of people with power who weren't corrupted by it, at least to some extent, and came up with very few. It's a human trait we know very well, but do very little about.
- shevy-java 5mo ago
  > See how wars are being started tweeting from the toilet seat by a man who has never known anything but power to harm others. To be fair: it is not Trump only who is addicted to warfare. You have a whole industry that benefits from war and thus wants warfare. Trump is just, in addition to being corrupt, really really not that clever. And now he is old and has dementia - amazing how the USA can so easily become subverted by Russia here. The KGB won.
  - cindyllm 5mo ago
    [dead]
- slashdev 5mo ago
  Suppose you add a very high tax (it would have to be a wealth tax, not income, because they don’t have much income.) Zuckerberg just moved to Florida for a tiny wealth tax in California. These people would just leave the state or leave the country. It’s been happening in Norway with just a small wealth tax. It’s not impossible, but it’s also not that simple to do. These kind of policies are risky, because you may drive away the next generation of entrepreneurs and the jobs they create. The rich should pay more taxes, but not to the point that it would chase them away or disincentive them from building companies. That being said, taxes are incredibly destructive. Every dollar you tax someone is much more than a dollar you take from that person and the economy. Government is too big, it’s out of control. They can’t balance a budget either, so we pay an additional destructive tax called inflation. I would personally like to see government go on a diet to half or a quarter of the size it is and reduce taxes at the low end instead.
Havoc 5mo ago
Capping it makes sense but should also be quite high. 1B actually seems good...congrats you've won capitalism but that's enough for one person
- quirkot 5mo ago
  Made $1 billion? Throw 'em a parade, put their name on a plaque on Wall Street, and never let them touch a new penny from here on out.
ainspotting 5mo ago
[flagged]
voidUpdate 5mo ago
I heard a while back that the average person will see about a million of their currency over their lifetime. So we can take a million dollars to be about 1 lifetime's worth of money. Elon is currently sitting on 817,000 lifetimes worth of money. I feel like we could have like a >95% income tax when you are worth more than like $20 million and it wouldnt actually matter too much to the people who would cap it out? Of course, its a 4000x decrease in wealth for some people, but at that level, when you're getting over 10 million, its basically infinite money anyway. There is no real gain from having 800 billion over having 20 million. What are you going to do with 800 billion dollars? Buy a thousand mega-mansions?
- ido 5mo ago
  Power and influence.
- keiferski 5mo ago
  To me it all comes down to time. If you have money to cover your needs, you functionally have control over your time. And your time is more or less the closest analogue to your actual life. The tragedy of course is that the vast majority of people have no real control over their time, and the free time they do have is aggressively fought over by media corporations and advertisers convincing them they need to work more to buy more.
  - 9999px 5mo ago
    This is the same conclusion Karl Marx came to. “The entire development of wealth rests upon the creation of disposable time.” —Karl Marx, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), 1857 “…real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.” “The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power.” —The Grundrisse, 1857 “Labour-time, even if exchange-value is eliminated, always remains the creative substance of wealth and the measure of the cost of its production. But free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the product, 3 partly for free activity which—unlike ‘ labour—is not dominated by the pressure of an extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled, and the fulfillment of which is regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty, according to one’s inclination. Karl Marx Theories of Surplus Value” “Just as plants live from the earth, and animals live from the plants or | plant-eating animals, so does the part of society which possesses free time (disposable time not absorbed in the direct production of subsistence) live from the surplus labour of the workers. Wealth is therefore disposable time.” —Economic Manuscripts, 1861-1863
shevy-java 5mo ago
I don't necessarily intrinsically have a dislike against billionaires per se. However had, if you look at the USA, where basically billionaires are dictating policies (Elon mass-firing people at DOGE, showing a chainsaw and right-arm gesture antics) - this simply undermines and cripples democracy. This, in addition to it being unfair that they aren't really contributing their due share to society usually; and no, creating a legal foundation to avoid paying taxes, including "Bill Gates Foundation" (see the benefits it has) when you avoided paying taxes before, does not fix anything at all. The model that is currently used, is broken by default. The ancient greek did not have this problem. Modern democracy does. And let's not even get into the issue of Putin-Trump being suspiciously a corrupt tandem team, just as Yuri predicted in the 1980s (!!!!!) already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9apDnRRSOCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9apDnRRSOCk (Flood the zone with shit is based on an older KGB strategy, and the chinese had this under an even older stratagem name, though not necessarily based on information-overload; I'd call the KGB strategy primarily information-overload. The chinese stratagems are named a bit differently, e. g. holding the dagger under the cloak, or attack west while convincing the enemy you would attack east; sun tsu also built on the older chinese stratagems.)
- ipaddr 5mo ago
  Billionaire's always influenced policy. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford and Morgan were much more powerful than Egon, Bezos or Gates. In Ancient Greece you had a larger gap between rich and power. Landowners vs farmer. In the early 6th century BC, inequality was so extreme that poor farmers regularly sold themselves or their families into slavery just to pay off debts and survive. If we only learned more about history we might be more thankful for where we really are.
trolleski 5mo ago
The issue is not the money, the issue is massive wealth imbalance which is best reflected in the $ class owning the current political players. In other words, oligarchy must be stopped, and democracy defended.
Rebuff5007 5mo ago
Every conversation about the existence of billionaires misses the point: Its not about whether or not billionaires should exist. Its about whether they should exist at the same moment in time when there are people cannot get healthcare or have a decent roof over their head, or a number of other basic things.
- paulcole 5mo ago
  I think this misses the point as well. If we eliminated billionaires would everyone have healthcare, a decent roof over their head, and other basic things? I generally believe that to not be the case. The government misspends (to an extent) the money it has now. So the solution is to give them more money to misspend?
  - harimau777 5mo ago
    The billionaires themselves cause massive harm on society due to the extreme power that wealth inequality gives them. So getting rid of billionaires, even if their money wasn't actually used for anything useful, would still be a win for society.
    - paulcole 5mo ago
      So if Jeff Bezos (and every other billionaire) was worth $999,999,999, then the world is much better off? You’re going to have to explain the logic of that to me. Do you disagree that (many, perhaps not all) billionaires also create a massive amount of value for society? Would Jeff Bezos be a billionaire if Amazon was a net drain on society? Jeff Bezos being incredibly rich doesn’t make my life worse. In fact, Amazon makes my life better. I’ve had jobs that existed because Amazon existed. I’ve had things I wanted to buy delivered very quickly. I read my Kindle for hundreds of hours a year.
olalonde 5mo ago
Sure. Having billionaires allocate their own capital driven by profit motive and market feedback results in more efficient allocation than having some random bureaucrats do it. That's what it's really about. For example, Elon Musk probably doesn't personally consume much more than the average American. He perhaps consumes 10x or 100x more, whereas his net worth is actually 5,000,000x. There are likely millionaires who live more lavish lives than him. The bulk of his fortune is actually just resources allocated in the economy.
erelong 5mo ago
"The problem isn't that we have billionaires but that the system doesn't make more millionaires and billionaires" Discuss?
- emsign 5mo ago
  lmao, that's a good one
cindyllm 5mo ago
[dead]
iloveoof 5mo ago
> Surely there has to be some number that pushes individual wealth from a net benefit for the country to a net detriment? Surely we are seeing lots of data and examples right now where we can start to come up with that line as a society? Surely it’s very reasonable that we might want to develop policy to make it hard for an individual to end up with more than, say, ten billion dollars1. That doesn’t seem very controversial to me. This seems very controversial to me. Why does increasing wealth eventually cause negative outcomes? What do you mean by “make it hard”? This article skips over justifying its argument. I don’t think, for example, that someone should have come along to Warren Buffett in the late 80s and said: “Your company is too successful, you can’t be the full owner of it anymore” Individual, founder-led companies are a good thing, especially if the companies are very successful. You’re more likely to force these companies into being led by investors and private equity if you don’t let the founders lead them.
inglor_cz 5mo ago
It seems to me that even here on HN, way too many people think in the binary "rich-poor" schemes. Ironically, what produces billionaires quite reliably, is precisely the growing global middle class, which is now estimated to number around four billion. If 4 billion people can spend, say, 200 USD a month on various non-necessities, much of that enormous stream of cash will naturally flow to some big corporations producing universally demanded services and will make their main shareholders billionaires. If Africa ever gets to the living standards of Asia, expect even more billionaires. Etc.
d3ckard 5mo ago
Controversially, yes. The right frame of comparison is not towards average Joe, but towards governments. Billionaires, for better or worse, are independent power sources, which IMO in grand scheme of things are useful. I think the problem with modern world is not that some people have lots of money, but that we allowed money to buy pretty much everything else.
- Brendinooo 5mo ago
  Yeah I was gonna offer a similar hot take: in a world where government can have trillions, it's probably good on some level that some people have billions. Checks and balances.
  - quirkot 5mo ago
    If you want good checks against a government, one dude rich enough to field an army has historically been a bad way to keep the government in existence
  - thrance 5mo ago
    Except billionaires are never on the side of the people. They functionally already own the US government, which is how they've been able to amass so much wealth while the rest of the world gets poorer and hotter. They buy media to push their propaganda, buy politicians... They are not acting as "checks and balances" to power. They are power.
casey2 5mo ago
It's not so much risktaking that's the problem with Reaganomics. It's the risktaking+socalizing costs. If we let billionaires fail there wouldn't be as many of them. Joel Schreiber, Adam Neumann, Miguel McKelvey all billionaires yet nil contribution to society, arguably slight contribution to a small group of insiders. Clearly that's not a a stable situation in regards to resource allocation, the terrifying thing is that the gamblers and scamees of the world know this, they just want to lose all their money as a group and obtain a collective casus belli to fuck shit up.
madmaniak 5mo ago
Billionaires are infinitely smaller than money printers (and they are created by them). Did you got the scale?
cyberjerkXX 5mo ago
Yes, because we need to respect private property rights. All criticisms of people using money to corrupt government is actually a criticism of government power. You need to limit government's coercive power.
- emsign 5mo ago
  Naaaah. Property entails obligations.
  - cyberjerkXX 5mo ago
    ok lets do tyranny of the majority then - fuck it. Maoism for everyone.
emsign 5mo ago
No. Because no single man should have so much power: a person as a single point of failure, no-one is smart enough to think of everything and everyone has blindspots in their reasoning, awareness and wisdom. Billionaires especially because people around them become sycophants. Billionaires don't talk to regular people anymore, they are in an elitist bubble out of touch with other people's reality.
mplanchard 5mo ago
My favorite way of conceptualizing the difference between being a millionaire and a billionaire is relative purchasing power. If I have $100k in the bank, so not even a millionaire, a billionaire has 10k times more than me. If Let’s say I imagine making a normal purchase for someone with six figures in assets, like a car, and let’s say the car costs $20k. Imagine what that feels like. It’s a big purchase, right? Probably will use a loan for it, pay it off for a while. For someone with $1 billion (10k difference), the car is the equivalent of something that costs me $2. They don’t even have to think about it, it affects their total monetary position not at all. If on the other hand I’m a millionaire, and I’m imagining buying the same car, it’s a bit easier: equivalent to me with $100k buying something that costs $2000. Still though, a $20k purchase for a millionaire is just a $20 purchase for a billionaire. I know net worth != purchasing power, but they are likely correlated enough for the examples to be broadly accurate. The quote defending the billionaires also reminds me of this piece from a recent Harper’s about the march in support of the ultra-rich: https://harpers.org/archive/2026/05/billionaire-blues-thomas-frank/ https://harpers.org/archive/2026/05/billionaire-blues-thomas...
rsynnott 5mo ago
They seem, fairly clearly, like, at the very least, a market inefficiency. In a perfect spherical-cow market they would not exist.
hollerith 5mo ago
We need a system that allows people to keep most of what they lawfully earned.
burnt-resistor 5mo ago
The wrong question to ask. We need much higher taxes on the high end, at all levels, especially on loans on expensive assets, estates, and carried interest. And make stock buybacks illegal. Higher high-end only taxes realign interests promoting a middle class rather than a serfdom, unequal world of neoliberal utopian fantasies. Furthermore, we need much less corruption and influence purchasing by separation between wealth and social/mass media and journalism and state.
mistic92 5mo ago
We don't. Tax the rich, globally
WhereIsTheTruth 5mo ago
The money experiment is a failure, there is nothing else to add, you just have to look outside of your rotten mind to notice how mankind has collapsed, there no longer is a society
NoGravitas 5mo ago
It seems like China has about the right approach to billionaires: allow them to come to exist, to drive up economic growth, but when they start trying to influence the political system, just execute them, so that the others know their place.
the_solenoid 5mo ago
It would be fine if: Labor was better protected Elections were funded by the gov and any money spent outside of that sent you to jail and confiscated everything from you and your company and your family They were taxed at the top marginal back at 90% They could not buy or own anything in media My problem with capitalism is the rules were made at a certain time and place. Then the industrial revolution happened which bricked the old rules, and let wealth concentrate, which started eroding rules to favor those with the accumulated wealth. Then the sale of single input products and services (first software, then the web - or make one sell infinite) bricked what was left of capitalism and let wealth accrue at 99% of light speed. And the laws/regulations never got changed to put a clamp on that, the tax rules and everything else went to favor those with more than they could spend, then the self-interested actors spent a pittance to do what the framers were trying to avoid: buying up all the government reps. And here we are - all the monied people who mostly dont seem to grasp that they are just hastening their own implosion doing their 60 year old plan of robbing the bank, as it were.
Gud 5mo ago
Literally no single person has produced "a billion dollars value". 99.999% of the times, the people who reach billions come from a privileged position in society and are using their position to gain wealth for themselves. We live in a society built for the powerful. It is paramount that we decentralize and democratize the power. Look at Switzerlands system of governance. Tear down the giant empires(USA, EU, China, Russia, etc). Build small to medium sized nation states, subdivided into commune with self governance(cantons in Switzerland as an example). My country Sweden is having an election this September. I am voting for direktdemokraterna(https://direktdemokraterna.se/ https://direktdemokraterna.se/). https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/political-system https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/political-syste...
- klatchex_too 5mo ago
  >> Literally no single person has produced "a billion dollars value". How has someone like Taylor Swift not produced a billion dollars value? Some of her tours have brought in more than 2 billion in revenue, she makes many millions a year in merchandise sales, millions selling streaming rights to her music, she has re-recorded the albums she didn't own the rights to and bought back the rights to others. She has a net worth of over 2 billion, how has she not produced "a billion dollars value"? What does she do that you think you should be able to tell her that she can't do? And where do you think you get the right to tell her she can't do that? If she wants to do concerts and concert goers want to go to them, who should stop her? If people want to stream her music and she gets a cut, you're going to tell her she can't do that? If she wants to sell vinyl records and I want to pay for one of them, you should be the boss that says no? Is that what you're saying? I don't think so. A single person, Taylor Swift, has produced multiple billions of dollars of value. This is not a problem to be solved. This is America. This is no country for everybody. It's a country for me. For people like me. This ain't Switzerland. I'm not saying Taylor Swift never did anything wrong. But mostly, she earned that. You're still allowed to do stuff like that in America. Sorry, not sorry.
Lockranor 5mo ago
Let's say no. Now what?
- readthenotes1 5mo ago
  Let's say yes. Now what?
readthenotes1 5mo ago
Of course, the author should have been asking imwhat people were worth over $350M in 1988. There's been a bit of inflation since then
tsoukase 5mo ago
Forget about reasonable arguments about wealth distribution. Human greed is infinite and the belly is insatiable, so they will stop at no amount of money. The ultimate goal of a totally capitalist society, like the US, is to create a single mutli-trillionaire, while all others starve.
ruicraveiro 5mo ago
No. Billionaires ultimately go hand in hand with fascists (Ford, Musk, ...) and the only threat to democracy and freedom that competes with those is communism.

71 points by speckx 5mo ago

dm_ 5mo ago

The book "Limitarianism" seems relevant: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/21/limitarianism-the-case-against-extreme-wealth-ingrid-robeyns-extract https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/21/limitarianism-...

throwaway742 5mo ago

No.

0123456789ABCDE 5mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- shrubby 5mo ago
  Correct once again it seems.

joncrane 5mo ago

We need intensely ambitious and competitive people. We shouldn't use money to keep score.

shrubby 5mo ago
In the times of metacrisis and power concentrated in the hands of few who actively try to fry the world I think what we need is the exact opposite of that. That is what we've had mostly for the last fifty years and look where it has gotten us? And US. I'm not from US
folkrav 5mo ago
Money pays the bills, not ambition and competition. Every freaking thing out there uses money to keep score. There's no reason we should not use money to keep score of the people hoarding more and more of the money bags, and actively using their money towards leaving the rest fighting over am ever shrinking pot.
weeznerps 5mo ago
What do you propose as the alternative? Whuffie?
dqv 5mo ago
"Competition" is too ambiguous a term to be something to strive for. It needs to be qualified further to remove the domination mindset that many competitors have. I just don't get the mindset of living in a society where you know you have to cooperate with others because they have skills you do not have, but also of the mindset that, if push comes to shove, they must be homeless so that you don't have to be. "Why aren't there any clothesmakers?" the person who made the clothesmakers homeless asks. I wish billionaires were competing on how many people they've lifted out of homelessness or how many people they've fed without making a profit (with the additional caveat that it is a carbon negative, sustainable production). And not in the fake way where they use creative language to obfuscate the harms they've done, but in an actual tangible way where when you look at it, it actually shows a genuine desire to be participant in society, not a dominator of it. All the "good" that billionaires do these days comes with caveats or over representation. Of course, this stuff all gets rationalized away by people. They will ask stupid questions like "why don't you open your home up to homeless people then" or the classic "do you know what capitalism has done for you you ungrateful little shit? you better do 5 hail Bezos prayers right now before I report this to Palantir", because why would you try to understand a metaphor? Things have to be this way! There are no other options. We have to fuck people over to survive.

shrubby 5mo ago

I was just gathering a list of global top hundred with their influence relevant spending and boy that was not a pretty sight. At least in terms of normal people.

lucamark 5mo ago

> risk-takers who are badly needed But at what point does marginal private incentive stop helping innovation and start damaging democracy? For sure risk-taking deserves reward but the size of the reward matters

alpinisme 5mo ago
Totally. Those conversations often also overlook the fact that some people are just driven and curious and risk taking by personality (especially after they’ve made it to adulthood and have entrenched work habits that may have been partly the result of economic incentives along the way). Even if you start having diminishing (personal financial) returns on added effort at some point, or even hit a ceiling, there are plenty of people who will keep pushing just because it’s all they know how to/want to do. Or because they get a thrill out of knowing that they’re on top of a still growing product (how much bigger can I make this?). Or because they are vying for non-financial social status.
- lucamark 5mo ago
  Exactly. Many people - e.g., founders, scientists and artists - keep pushing because of curiosity and mission. Money matters, especially early, but after some extreme level it is hard to believe that the next $50B - just to say a number - is what causes the useful work to happen.
sschueller 5mo ago
But when they fail, they fail upwards. These risks are always on the backs of everyone else. For example, they take risks by using chemicals (that they know) can kill people, by the time people get cancer they are retired, there are no claw-backs. More recently you commit actual fraud, get convicted but then get a pardon and somehow end up with money again running the next "scam". These people never take real risks. DOGE resulted in the death of over 100k people [1] and will result in many people dying of Ebola. It was a huge failure yet the "risk" Elon took is not his. [1] https://healthpolicy-watch.news/the-human-cost-one-year-after-the-us-took-a-chainsaw-to-global-health/ https://healthpolicy-watch.news/the-human-cost-one-year-afte...

mccoyb 5mo ago

[flagged]

ggm 5mo ago

It's very unlikely any mainstream political class is going to take serious action anywhere to forbid them, but a few take action to limit them. Too few I think. The (mis-attributed to Lenin and Stalin) quote "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." is quite big in this. A little humility and a lot more tax-paying could save the trillionaire classes from the tumbrils but they lack the emotional intelligence to see it and as long as they make a few thousand millionaires below them they have useful idiots to decry any changes. On the plus side, workers are in short supply. The future needs more people who can do things other than thinkers, and robots (bless their hearts) don't spend money as consumers so the other side of the billionaire equation demands new people to come into spending class: this means Africa, Asia and South America levelling up.

js8 5mo ago
> A little humility and a lot more tax-paying could save the trillionaire classes from the tumbrils but they lack the emotional intelligence to see it I think there is some research which shows that as you get rich, you lose emotional intelligence (empathy towards others). So maybe we should consider being rich a health hazard.
prawn 5mo ago
Many people would've seen the tweet: "Ok how about this: No more billionaires. None. After you reach $999 million, every red cent goes to schools and health care. You get a trophy that says, “I won capitalism” and we name a dog park after you." If there isn't the political will to ramp up taxes on extreme wealth, I'd be interested to know how much effort there is in pitching legacy projects (more exciting than dog parks) to those with the means to execute them. Like crowd-funding, but for major developments and with further tax incentives if necessary. It wasn't pitched to him, but in Australia, a wealthy individual put Hobart (more) on the map with a now famous contemporary art gallery complex which is an excellent drawcard for the state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Old_and_New_Art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_of_Old_and_New_Art That is an extraordinary development for sub-$100m. Supposedly Australia has 150+ billionaires. Build us some crazy things.
- 5mo ago

qaq 5mo ago

We need competent people to remain in control of companies they have created.

dm_ 5mo ago
What's ironic about your statement is that it's this exact belief--that founders should remain in control--that has led to the widespread adoption of dual class shares, in which founders maintain control while ceding a majority of equity. And the irony here is, by that same token, founders could maintain in control while not having such large equity stakes, and not becoming so rich. So I do not think this is an argument for billionaires.
- qaq 5mo ago
  if you look at actual proposals like in CA they focus on taxing based on control %
  - dm_ 5mo ago
    I don't think this is true of "proposals" in the plural. This is arguably true of the California ballot measure due, allegedly, to sloppy drafting. But this isn't a fundamental aspect of wealth taxes; it's a choice. So I don't think it's a meaningful argument against wealth taxes in general. (As an unrelated point, I think dual class shares are sort of bad and it makes sense to me to discourage them as a matter of public policy, but this doesn't seem like necessarily the best way to do it.)
    - qaq 5mo ago
      I don't think it sloppy drafting. They are trying to close "loopholes".
      - dm_ 5mo ago
        I'm not a tax lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt, but yes, I think they were trying to close loopholes, but did so sloppily. Read the text (https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/initiatives/pdfs/25-0024A1%20%28Billionaire%20Tax%20%29.pdf https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/initiatives/pdfs/25-0024A1%2...), specifically 50303 section c. It seems to me that the authors were, as you say, trying to close a loophole, namely that where I set up a Nevada LLC to which I hold 99% of voting shares but 1% of outstanding equity, put my assets in it, and just direct the LLC to spend on things I want it to--but in the process, they failed to realize that non-public super-voting shares (like Google class B shares) seem to fall into category (3) of section (c) (i.e. neither sole proprietorships nor publicly traded assets). I don't think that's a great design, though it's still worth noting that it doesn't rule out privileged shares in general--GOOGL, to give an example, are privileged voting shares that trade publicly, and thus are obviously under category (1), and assessed per their FMV. But in any case, I stand by my broader point: this is a specific detail of how the California proposal has been written; it's not a fundamental aspect of wealth taxes. Switzerland has a wealth tax that does not have this aspect, for example.

shrubby 5mo ago

Human being, with very few exceptions, is corrupted by power. And a billion dollars is immense amount power. You can make your opponent's life a living hell with a hundred thousand and buy or figure out a way to frame extortion material from almost any decision maker with a million. See how wars are being started tweeting from the toilet seat by a man who has never known anything but power to harm others. See the many "formerly normal" people ending on a private island, doing horrendous things to children. We tried to figure out examples of people with power who weren't corrupted by it, at least to some extent, and came up with very few. It's a human trait we know very well, but do very little about.

shevy-java 5mo ago
> See how wars are being started tweeting from the toilet seat by a man who has never known anything but power to harm others. To be fair: it is not Trump only who is addicted to warfare. You have a whole industry that benefits from war and thus wants warfare. Trump is just, in addition to being corrupt, really really not that clever. And now he is old and has dementia - amazing how the USA can so easily become subverted by Russia here. The KGB won.
- cindyllm 5mo ago
  [dead]
slashdev 5mo ago
Suppose you add a very high tax (it would have to be a wealth tax, not income, because they don’t have much income.) Zuckerberg just moved to Florida for a tiny wealth tax in California. These people would just leave the state or leave the country. It’s been happening in Norway with just a small wealth tax. It’s not impossible, but it’s also not that simple to do. These kind of policies are risky, because you may drive away the next generation of entrepreneurs and the jobs they create. The rich should pay more taxes, but not to the point that it would chase them away or disincentive them from building companies. That being said, taxes are incredibly destructive. Every dollar you tax someone is much more than a dollar you take from that person and the economy. Government is too big, it’s out of control. They can’t balance a budget either, so we pay an additional destructive tax called inflation. I would personally like to see government go on a diet to half or a quarter of the size it is and reduce taxes at the low end instead.

Havoc 5mo ago

Capping it makes sense but should also be quite high. 1B actually seems good...congrats you've won capitalism but that's enough for one person

quirkot 5mo ago
Made $1 billion? Throw 'em a parade, put their name on a plaque on Wall Street, and never let them touch a new penny from here on out.

ainspotting 5mo ago

[flagged]

voidUpdate 5mo ago

I heard a while back that the average person will see about a million of their currency over their lifetime. So we can take a million dollars to be about 1 lifetime's worth of money. Elon is currently sitting on 817,000 lifetimes worth of money. I feel like we could have like a >95% income tax when you are worth more than like $20 million and it wouldnt actually matter too much to the people who would cap it out? Of course, its a 4000x decrease in wealth for some people, but at that level, when you're getting over 10 million, its basically infinite money anyway. There is no real gain from having 800 billion over having 20 million. What are you going to do with 800 billion dollars? Buy a thousand mega-mansions?

ido 5mo ago
Power and influence.
keiferski 5mo ago
To me it all comes down to time. If you have money to cover your needs, you functionally have control over your time. And your time is more or less the closest analogue to your actual life. The tragedy of course is that the vast majority of people have no real control over their time, and the free time they do have is aggressively fought over by media corporations and advertisers convincing them they need to work more to buy more.
- 9999px 5mo ago
  This is the same conclusion Karl Marx came to. “The entire development of wealth rests upon the creation of disposable time.” —Karl Marx, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), 1857 “…real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time.” “The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power.” —The Grundrisse, 1857 “Labour-time, even if exchange-value is eliminated, always remains the creative substance of wealth and the measure of the cost of its production. But free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the product, 3 partly for free activity which—unlike ‘ labour—is not dominated by the pressure of an extraneous purpose which must be fulfilled, and the fulfillment of which is regarded as a natural necessity or a social duty, according to one’s inclination. Karl Marx Theories of Surplus Value” “Just as plants live from the earth, and animals live from the plants or | plant-eating animals, so does the part of society which possesses free time (disposable time not absorbed in the direct production of subsistence) live from the surplus labour of the workers. Wealth is therefore disposable time.” —Economic Manuscripts, 1861-1863

shevy-java 5mo ago

I don't necessarily intrinsically have a dislike against billionaires per se. However had, if you look at the USA, where basically billionaires are dictating policies (Elon mass-firing people at DOGE, showing a chainsaw and right-arm gesture antics) - this simply undermines and cripples democracy. This, in addition to it being unfair that they aren't really contributing their due share to society usually; and no, creating a legal foundation to avoid paying taxes, including "Bill Gates Foundation" (see the benefits it has) when you avoided paying taxes before, does not fix anything at all. The model that is currently used, is broken by default. The ancient greek did not have this problem. Modern democracy does. And let's not even get into the issue of Putin-Trump being suspiciously a corrupt tandem team, just as Yuri predicted in the 1980s (!!!!!) already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9apDnRRSOCk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9apDnRRSOCk (Flood the zone with shit is based on an older KGB strategy, and the chinese had this under an even older stratagem name, though not necessarily based on information-overload; I'd call the KGB strategy primarily information-overload. The chinese stratagems are named a bit differently, e. g. holding the dagger under the cloak, or attack west while convincing the enemy you would attack east; sun tsu also built on the older chinese stratagems.)

ipaddr 5mo ago
Billionaire's always influenced policy. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford and Morgan were much more powerful than Egon, Bezos or Gates. In Ancient Greece you had a larger gap between rich and power. Landowners vs farmer. In the early 6th century BC, inequality was so extreme that poor farmers regularly sold themselves or their families into slavery just to pay off debts and survive. If we only learned more about history we might be more thankful for where we really are.

trolleski 5mo ago

The issue is not the money, the issue is massive wealth imbalance which is best reflected in the $ class owning the current political players. In other words, oligarchy must be stopped, and democracy defended.

Rebuff5007 5mo ago

Every conversation about the existence of billionaires misses the point: Its not about whether or not billionaires should exist. Its about whether they should exist at the same moment in time when there are people cannot get healthcare or have a decent roof over their head, or a number of other basic things.

paulcole 5mo ago
I think this misses the point as well. If we eliminated billionaires would everyone have healthcare, a decent roof over their head, and other basic things? I generally believe that to not be the case. The government misspends (to an extent) the money it has now. So the solution is to give them more money to misspend?
- harimau777 5mo ago
  The billionaires themselves cause massive harm on society due to the extreme power that wealth inequality gives them. So getting rid of billionaires, even if their money wasn't actually used for anything useful, would still be a win for society.
  - paulcole 5mo ago
    So if Jeff Bezos (and every other billionaire) was worth $999,999,999, then the world is much better off? You’re going to have to explain the logic of that to me. Do you disagree that (many, perhaps not all) billionaires also create a massive amount of value for society? Would Jeff Bezos be a billionaire if Amazon was a net drain on society? Jeff Bezos being incredibly rich doesn’t make my life worse. In fact, Amazon makes my life better. I’ve had jobs that existed because Amazon existed. I’ve had things I wanted to buy delivered very quickly. I read my Kindle for hundreds of hours a year.

olalonde 5mo ago

Sure. Having billionaires allocate their own capital driven by profit motive and market feedback results in more efficient allocation than having some random bureaucrats do it. That's what it's really about. For example, Elon Musk probably doesn't personally consume much more than the average American. He perhaps consumes 10x or 100x more, whereas his net worth is actually 5,000,000x. There are likely millionaires who live more lavish lives than him. The bulk of his fortune is actually just resources allocated in the economy.

erelong 5mo ago

"The problem isn't that we have billionaires but that the system doesn't make more millionaires and billionaires" Discuss?

emsign 5mo ago
lmao, that's a good one

cindyllm 5mo ago

[dead]

iloveoof 5mo ago

> Surely there has to be some number that pushes individual wealth from a net benefit for the country to a net detriment? Surely we are seeing lots of data and examples right now where we can start to come up with that line as a society? Surely it’s very reasonable that we might want to develop policy to make it hard for an individual to end up with more than, say, ten billion dollars1. That doesn’t seem very controversial to me. This seems very controversial to me. Why does increasing wealth eventually cause negative outcomes? What do you mean by “make it hard”? This article skips over justifying its argument. I don’t think, for example, that someone should have come along to Warren Buffett in the late 80s and said: “Your company is too successful, you can’t be the full owner of it anymore” Individual, founder-led companies are a good thing, especially if the companies are very successful. You’re more likely to force these companies into being led by investors and private equity if you don’t let the founders lead them.

inglor_cz 5mo ago

It seems to me that even here on HN, way too many people think in the binary "rich-poor" schemes. Ironically, what produces billionaires quite reliably, is precisely the growing global middle class, which is now estimated to number around four billion. If 4 billion people can spend, say, 200 USD a month on various non-necessities, much of that enormous stream of cash will naturally flow to some big corporations producing universally demanded services and will make their main shareholders billionaires. If Africa ever gets to the living standards of Asia, expect even more billionaires. Etc.

d3ckard 5mo ago

Controversially, yes. The right frame of comparison is not towards average Joe, but towards governments. Billionaires, for better or worse, are independent power sources, which IMO in grand scheme of things are useful. I think the problem with modern world is not that some people have lots of money, but that we allowed money to buy pretty much everything else.

Brendinooo 5mo ago
Yeah I was gonna offer a similar hot take: in a world where government can have trillions, it's probably good on some level that some people have billions. Checks and balances.
- quirkot 5mo ago
  If you want good checks against a government, one dude rich enough to field an army has historically been a bad way to keep the government in existence
- thrance 5mo ago
  Except billionaires are never on the side of the people. They functionally already own the US government, which is how they've been able to amass so much wealth while the rest of the world gets poorer and hotter. They buy media to push their propaganda, buy politicians... They are not acting as "checks and balances" to power. They are power.

casey2 5mo ago

It's not so much risktaking that's the problem with Reaganomics. It's the risktaking+socalizing costs. If we let billionaires fail there wouldn't be as many of them. Joel Schreiber, Adam Neumann, Miguel McKelvey all billionaires yet nil contribution to society, arguably slight contribution to a small group of insiders. Clearly that's not a a stable situation in regards to resource allocation, the terrifying thing is that the gamblers and scamees of the world know this, they just want to lose all their money as a group and obtain a collective casus belli to fuck shit up.

madmaniak 5mo ago

Billionaires are infinitely smaller than money printers (and they are created by them). Did you got the scale?

cyberjerkXX 5mo ago

Yes, because we need to respect private property rights. All criticisms of people using money to corrupt government is actually a criticism of government power. You need to limit government's coercive power.

emsign 5mo ago
Naaaah. Property entails obligations.
- cyberjerkXX 5mo ago
  ok lets do tyranny of the majority then - fuck it. Maoism for everyone.

emsign 5mo ago

No. Because no single man should have so much power: a person as a single point of failure, no-one is smart enough to think of everything and everyone has blindspots in their reasoning, awareness and wisdom. Billionaires especially because people around them become sycophants. Billionaires don't talk to regular people anymore, they are in an elitist bubble out of touch with other people's reality.

mplanchard 5mo ago

My favorite way of conceptualizing the difference between being a millionaire and a billionaire is relative purchasing power. If I have $100k in the bank, so not even a millionaire, a billionaire has 10k times more than me. If Let’s say I imagine making a normal purchase for someone with six figures in assets, like a car, and let’s say the car costs $20k. Imagine what that feels like. It’s a big purchase, right? Probably will use a loan for it, pay it off for a while. For someone with $1 billion (10k difference), the car is the equivalent of something that costs me $2. They don’t even have to think about it, it affects their total monetary position not at all. If on the other hand I’m a millionaire, and I’m imagining buying the same car, it’s a bit easier: equivalent to me with $100k buying something that costs $2000. Still though, a $20k purchase for a millionaire is just a $20 purchase for a billionaire. I know net worth != purchasing power, but they are likely correlated enough for the examples to be broadly accurate. The quote defending the billionaires also reminds me of this piece from a recent Harper’s about the march in support of the ultra-rich: https://harpers.org/archive/2026/05/billionaire-blues-thomas-frank/ https://harpers.org/archive/2026/05/billionaire-blues-thomas...

rsynnott 5mo ago

They seem, fairly clearly, like, at the very least, a market inefficiency. In a perfect spherical-cow market they would not exist.

hollerith 5mo ago

We need a system that allows people to keep most of what they lawfully earned.

burnt-resistor 5mo ago

The wrong question to ask. We need much higher taxes on the high end, at all levels, especially on loans on expensive assets, estates, and carried interest. And make stock buybacks illegal. Higher high-end only taxes realign interests promoting a middle class rather than a serfdom, unequal world of neoliberal utopian fantasies. Furthermore, we need much less corruption and influence purchasing by separation between wealth and social/mass media and journalism and state.

mistic92 5mo ago

We don't. Tax the rich, globally

WhereIsTheTruth 5mo ago

The money experiment is a failure, there is nothing else to add, you just have to look outside of your rotten mind to notice how mankind has collapsed, there no longer is a society

NoGravitas 5mo ago

It seems like China has about the right approach to billionaires: allow them to come to exist, to drive up economic growth, but when they start trying to influence the political system, just execute them, so that the others know their place.

the_solenoid 5mo ago

It would be fine if: Labor was better protected Elections were funded by the gov and any money spent outside of that sent you to jail and confiscated everything from you and your company and your family They were taxed at the top marginal back at 90% They could not buy or own anything in media My problem with capitalism is the rules were made at a certain time and place. Then the industrial revolution happened which bricked the old rules, and let wealth concentrate, which started eroding rules to favor those with the accumulated wealth. Then the sale of single input products and services (first software, then the web - or make one sell infinite) bricked what was left of capitalism and let wealth accrue at 99% of light speed. And the laws/regulations never got changed to put a clamp on that, the tax rules and everything else went to favor those with more than they could spend, then the self-interested actors spent a pittance to do what the framers were trying to avoid: buying up all the government reps. And here we are - all the monied people who mostly dont seem to grasp that they are just hastening their own implosion doing their 60 year old plan of robbing the bank, as it were.

Gud 5mo ago

Literally no single person has produced "a billion dollars value". 99.999% of the times, the people who reach billions come from a privileged position in society and are using their position to gain wealth for themselves. We live in a society built for the powerful. It is paramount that we decentralize and democratize the power. Look at Switzerlands system of governance. Tear down the giant empires(USA, EU, China, Russia, etc). Build small to medium sized nation states, subdivided into commune with self governance(cantons in Switzerland as an example). My country Sweden is having an election this September. I am voting for direktdemokraterna(https://direktdemokraterna.se/ https://direktdemokraterna.se/). https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/political-system https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/political-syste...

klatchex_too 5mo ago
>> Literally no single person has produced "a billion dollars value". How has someone like Taylor Swift not produced a billion dollars value? Some of her tours have brought in more than 2 billion in revenue, she makes many millions a year in merchandise sales, millions selling streaming rights to her music, she has re-recorded the albums she didn't own the rights to and bought back the rights to others. She has a net worth of over 2 billion, how has she not produced "a billion dollars value"? What does she do that you think you should be able to tell her that she can't do? And where do you think you get the right to tell her she can't do that? If she wants to do concerts and concert goers want to go to them, who should stop her? If people want to stream her music and she gets a cut, you're going to tell her she can't do that? If she wants to sell vinyl records and I want to pay for one of them, you should be the boss that says no? Is that what you're saying? I don't think so. A single person, Taylor Swift, has produced multiple billions of dollars of value. This is not a problem to be solved. This is America. This is no country for everybody. It's a country for me. For people like me. This ain't Switzerland. I'm not saying Taylor Swift never did anything wrong. But mostly, she earned that. You're still allowed to do stuff like that in America. Sorry, not sorry.

Lockranor 5mo ago

Let's say no. Now what?

readthenotes1 5mo ago
Let's say yes. Now what?

readthenotes1 5mo ago

Of course, the author should have been asking imwhat people were worth over $350M in 1988. There's been a bit of inflation since then

tsoukase 5mo ago

Forget about reasonable arguments about wealth distribution. Human greed is infinite and the belly is insatiable, so they will stop at no amount of money. The ultimate goal of a totally capitalist society, like the US, is to create a single mutli-trillionaire, while all others starve.

ruicraveiro 5mo ago

No. Billionaires ultimately go hand in hand with fascists (Ford, Musk, ...) and the only threat to democracy and freedom that competes with those is communism.