Presumably this is intended to lead into an argument that because we disagree on exactly where the limit should be we shouldn’t have a limit at all. We could make the same case against drunk driving, speed limits, age of consent laws, maximum sentencing…
Yeah, I don't know why we would need a limit, I'm sure if a temper tantrum devolves into one of them building their own robo army. The others will follow suit and it will all just balance itself out.
Certainly the "maximum big level" is something that reasonable people could disagree about, but I don't think a society is healthy when people can get as big as Zuckerberg, Musk, Altman, and Bezos have gotten.
Individuals should not have that much power. It's not healthy.
But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.
I think the real problem is abuse of power, not accumulation of it.
Power cannot be eliminated. It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros) or remain in hands of wealth creators.
What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.
Somewhat similar to Paul Graham's essay _Inequality and Risk_[1]:
> I realize startups are not the main target of those who want to eliminate economic inequality. What they really dislike is the sort of wealth that becomes self-perpetuating through an alliance with power. ... But if you try to attack this type of wealth through economic policy, it's hard to hit without destroying startups as collateral damage.
> The problem here is not wealth, but corruption. So why not go after corruption?
This is a convenient cover because it allows people to convert a measurable and fairly concrete thing into a more vague and flexible thing. Suddenly, all somebody needs to do is make a claim that what they are doing isn't corruption and they are off the hook. They'll be hypothetical billionaires that are the problem, but never any actual action.
Then the people who punish those in power will gain too much power.
The reality is our system is not compatible with the internet. Our system is made for a network with much lower density and clustering coefficient. When you crank these up with the internet, it creates power law distributions everywhere.
Complaining a few people have all the wealth when we have created a society with this massive power law distribution of wealth is just pointlessly stupid. Of course they do.
There is nothing really to figure out. The system isn't going to work long term.
I think most people are just in denial of this because they think there is a solution. No, what we are doing right now, communicating like this, is the problem itself.
Of course, if we stopped using the internet society would collapse too.
While I agree that 'our system' is failing in part due to its preference for a sparser network than the one we have today, I disagree strongly on your conclusion.
You (and I) have no idea whether there is a solution. We've only explored the tiniest fraction of the societal solution space. The idea that we've exhaustively searched it by trying both "communism" AND "capitalism" is idiocy.
Choose to believe that we can build a better world.
It might not be true, but it's certainly false if none of us believe it.
> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.
Is that your actual objection? It sounds more like a smear by association.
Famously, the USA under Eisenhower had a top marginal tax rate of 90% on income over $200K - "merely" a few million dollars in modern-day money.
Was the Eisenhower administration Communist? If it wasn't, would it have become Communist if they had gone a bit further and added a marginal rate of 99% for income over oh, let's say $20M (a few hundred million dollars nowadays)?
I think if you traveled back in time and proposed such a bill, the reaction from folks like Senator McCarthy would not have been "that's Communism" but more likely "that's a ridiculous and useless bill, how could anyone ever accumulate that much personal wealth? It would be absurd".
Andrew Carnegie was worth something like 300 billion USD (today, inflation adjusted). So that level of wealth was not unknown by the time of the Eisenhower administration.
> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.
In communism, an individual can not own any means of production - effectively 0% of the society's total capital. I don't think it follows that any non-communist system must permit any single individual to gain up to 100% of the society's wealth.
I don't know what the limit could look like or how to make it work, but societies commonly called capitalist already implement various brakes on free trade, from regulation to capital and immigration controls, subsidies, tariffs...
Power can be diffused.
Wealth accumulation is power concentration. When it's legal to buy politicians then what is corruption? How can you go after corruption when those with power define what is corruption?
Concentrated power is corrupt, there's no power without the will to wield it. If you have more power than 99 percent of humans, they become insects for you.
One question is why communism is a problem. It is a problem because it is a totalitarian regime. I.e., a non-democratic government. I am not sure limiting peoples wealth is the actual problem with communism.
Sure, the real problem is the abuse of power. This is the nature of power, though. Give a person or an organization too much power and it will find a way to abuse it. In democratic government, the power of the government is limited by having three independent branches where, at the least, the laws are being made by representatives of the people. In democratic government there are some evil politicians but not too many. In the US the situation went completely off the rails and one of the parties completely deteriorated. I cannot help thinking that statements like 'politicians, who are genuinely more evil' are part of the problem. I.e., this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The party where people tend to believe this turns out the consist of crooks, is maybe not that surprising.
'What we should do is focus of punishing people who abuse their power.'. Well, this presumes that there are institutions capable of doing this. For instance, a democratic government.
You can limit people's wealth and it's not communism. If it was communism then they wouldn't have any wealth at all. A limit would just be democratic capitalism with a limit. There's no rule in capitalism that says you can't be taxed, or that the taxes couldn't be designed to approach a wealth limit. It's an economic system, not an entire governmental and social handbook.
There are several faults with this reasoning. Capital attracts capital, and with too low of marginal taxes, it pools at the top, increasing wealth inequality, hurting the non-elite's ability to compete, and squeezes the middle class. To say marginal taxes is communism is just wrong.
Capital attracting capital is as natural as power corrupting people. Instead of hoping people play nice and punishing the few who get caught and hoping against nature, the better alternative is to set up systems that encourage healthy, competitive markets through sensible rules, regulations, and redistribution.
Edit: re the socialism/communism scarecrow, back when woman started wearing pants in the US, they called it socialist. That same logic is oft applied today.
> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.
Of course you can. Those billionaires don't pay much taxes, but normal people do. And we don't call that communism.
> It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros)
This is a very weird take. In a functioning democracy (which the US are not at the moment), politicians are elected to represent the people. If they are evil, we change them. Tech bros are not elected, period.
> What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.
That's where you completely miss the problem: the problem is that when people get too powerful, we cannot punish them anymore.
Similar with companies: you have to prevent companies to become as big as the FAANGs before they do. Otherwise they become too powerful and do whatever they want.
> But I don't think you can limit people's wealth and not call it communism.
What is wrong with calling it communism? It's just a name.. You so much internalized "communism bad" that you look at a good idea and think it is bad because it reminds you something else that was implemented badly.
And by the way, you can also call it democratic socialism (democratic is really redundant).
The imperfections of 'big' people have much more ramifications than the imperfections of 'small' people. Humans work best together in much more egalitarian groups where the imperfections of individuals are compensated by the strengths of other individuals.
Ah, but this wasn't the question. You've confused formal political input with the broader idea of power.
In this hypothetical perfectly fair democracy, the ones with power would be the ones best able to sway the populace. Popularity, rhetoric, and control over media would skew the true distribution of power away from the perfectly flat one you might be hoping for.
Instead of aiming for perfection, we should oppose the systems that result in power becoming more concentrated over time. Our goal is an equilibrium where power is spread broadly and the most powerful are the most deserving (e.g, a scientist's voice has power because their expertise is respected).
One person, one vote is a good place to start. But it isn't the whole solution.
What should be the maximum of how big someone should be?
Humans are not perfect, whether "big" or "small".