Can anyone recommend a convincing argument one what benefit there is to society of letting anyone accumulate/control a billion dollars? Is it kind of like the lottery where we need a few outrages winners to convince all the rubes to play?
The value that gets created might not have been created otherwise. The key is taxation, which is where the US and other countries have failed since the Reagan years.
A billion isn't really that much. Most billionaires are billionaires because they own a company that is with that much. Is the solution to take the company away from them? If so people will not try to grow billion dollar companies, and that isn't a good thing either.
> If so people will not try to grow billion dollar companies, and that isn't a good thing either.
I'm not sure of that. What some mega-corps like Google have been able to create is amazing for sure, but who's to say that a thousand smaller companies wouldn't be better. Or maybe being a billionaire should have a term limit? Make all the money you want, but it is socialized at death.
But is it really amazing or is it just a natural outcome of countless hours of intelligent humans working together motivated by high pay to further enrich the oligarchs? Would society be worse off without these technically impressive giants? Maybe more competition of lesser products would be better overall.
> My argument for pro billionaire is “Who gets to set the amount that is too much?
That's not an actual argument though.
It's your gut justification that no one should be able to set the amount posed as a question. You are presuming that just because there's no perfect agreement on an arbitrary number, then the problem somehow becomes not worth solving.
> If the global GDP per person is less than $14k, why set at a billion, why not much less? How about $100k?
Good questions. We can have a discussion about it, but that doesn't mean there's never going to be a number that we can agree upon.
If you can’t answer it you can’t move forward with the plan. It might be an interesting intellectual discussion, but it’s pointless beyond the cerebral exercise because it’s impossible to implement. “It’s impossible to implement” simply trumps all other arguments.
> but that doesn't mean there's never going to be a number that we can agree upon
There is no way to get to an agreement on a specific amount because you theoretically apply the same “pro” arguments to wealth limitation to a billion dollars to $100k or even to $14,001. The alternative is a prohibition against any individual wealth accumulation. I’m absolutely not for that, so you and I will never agree on a number, because there isn’t a number where I would say “that is too much”. I am dead set against any wealth limitation.
W: "for $1M dollars? Yeah, I guess I could be convinced for $1M."
M: "What about for $10"
W: "No, what do you take me for!"
M: "We've already established that, now we're just haggling over price."
I don't think this is that funny of a joke, but the point I'm making is that picking a number is a detail that comes after we decide that there needs to be a number. And I think if you agree that there needs to be a number, the gov't is the one that could set it (or the voting public).
The most likely answer is you pick some multiple of minimum wage, and then some number of years at that number. 1000x minimum wage, 10 years of earnings at that value. That's the maximum you can have. You want more? You gotta raise minimum wage.
Is this a real question? You can't imagine any population that can make this determination for itself?
If only there were organizations responsible for populations that could determine this locally for places in the world. Guess we just got to take a "world vote".
It’s a real question. If it’s not worldwide you haven’t eliminated the ultra-wealthy, you have just relocated them. Their wealth is still tied up and unavailable for the redistribution the original premise hopes to achieve.
In those local places where you have made the ultra wealthy illegal, you have also discouraged them to invest in your locality. In other words, you shot yourself in the foot.
I am glad we got to your real answer. Which appears to be "we can't do that, we need the ultra-wealthy to spend money on us." One of the lessons of the pandemic is your economy is actually better serviced by many people spending money than by 1 person hoarding it.
You can make the cost of doing business in your country that they have to be worth less than your cap.
But the effect of this is actually that we would realize we don't need the ultra-wealthy. We would likely do better because it would be a significant downward pressure on inequality in the countries that enforced it, and more people would have opportunities to make it big.
That's kind of a lazy argument and it falls apart when you go the other way. Do you ever feel like we should intervene? What about if we have a trillionaire? A 10 trillionaire? A 100?
Is there no conceivable amount of wealth hoarding that you would find excessive?
It's a baseline which, given the current value of money in mind, in most people's heads defines someone as obscenely/aspirationally wealthy (or even having a multi-generation wealth), yet not someone who could just be endlessly spending this wealth on stupid stuff (having several megayachts, for example) without eventually running out.
Hypothetically, if some government some day sets this amount, then it will pave the way for further adjustments.
the only reason we have entrepreneurs is that there are people who do not like the idea of working for someone else :) becoming a billionaire is like maybe 8765896th on entreprenuer’s mind
Everyone who visits this forum would do well to remember the narrative of tech being “the last meritocracy” is at the very least completely dead now, if it was ever true to begin with.
Founders have been so thoroughly mythologized that everyone is becoming blind to the reality of the industry as a whole, and that is a few large corporations are increasingly holding all the keys.
Yet you have the people most affected by this decrying others who push against this in society, the workplace or in politics as if it’s an affront to do so.
We are losing our innovation spirit as we allow such rot to set in. We should have known better, we did nothing to prove we did
>Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead…
It is just the oligarchy as the above mentions. The take over startedwith Reagan, then Citizens United ruling locked in their power.
"It is considered democratic, for example, that state offices are filled by lot, and oligarchic that they are filled by election"
— Aristotle, Politics
Either this thread is full of "temporarily embarrassed billionaires", or there's a lot of arguing in bad faith going on.
One human having a billion is like somebody weighing 1000 pounds. It's hella unhealthy for them (does anyone here imagine that Elon Musk is happy?) and it's catastrophically bad for the rest of society to have to deal with these people throwing their weight around.
Where do we "draw the line"? I dunno, could we consider something like 200 million? Judging by some of the responses here, probably not.
