US billionaires:
“Wait, you mean to say that we can keep our current quality of life, dabble in our little space projects, and that those we employ won’t suffer???”
“Lol naw fuck that.”
Exactly. The cruelty is the point. They enjoy making people suffer.
I feel like it’s a means of creating a further distance between the rich and poor when conventional means have reached their limit, though i imagine there is likely at least some sadistic pleasure they derive from it (and there are very likely some that get a lot)
Here’s a comparison that came to mind for me: when i make dinner, i like to make my wife and i a salad but I’ll go out of my way to make a very nice presentation of the various ingredients on my wife’s salad. I will have the exact same ingredients for mine, but intentionally slop them onto the plate with hasty abandon and even take measures to try to make it look even worse. I like to argue that my wife’s salad is the better of the 2, that there is a hierarchy that’s immediately distinguishable–even though it’s the exact same stuff. That her salad is actually even better than if they both had been presented the same way–that i can make that basic salad even better than previously thought possible by creating a severe inequality in its presentation to the other one. Of course, that’s a very harmless comparison but i think there’s something in it.
I mean, it’s like the rich can only be so pleased with their riches and the luxuries it affords them. Not to mention a lot of that stuff probably becomes trite/commonplace even if it’s a giant yacht or fancy food or living space or whatever. They can only be so happy, and sustaining that happiness is probably not easy when you’ve burned through the conventional happiness-granting activities. It would seem that they find more nuanced, and perhaps even perverted means of pressing the happiness button. I suppose Epstein’s Island really kinda drives home that whole disgusting “someone has to suffer in order for me to be happy” kinda dynamic.
It’s disgusting to think people derive pleasure from making others suffer like this, but it’s not the least surprising to discover. 🫠
I notice a lot of wealthy people spiral out with drugs or plastic surgery, they’re just desperately grasping to get the magic back.
Yeah… It’s like the mobile f2p games. The paying players need the f2p players so they can stomp on them.
Unfathomable wealth isnt enough, they also need to rule.
You mean, instead of having $ 99.9, I would only get 99? Over my cold, dead body!
Eh, no reason to discard the idea of putting a ceiling on the rich. Even if you took away all of the money people had that was over 1 billion dollars, that wouldn’t cause any of those people to suffer.
1000x the median household income. That should be the cap. It’s a nice round number; people can understand it. And it indexes automatically with inflation.
Moreover, this is about the maximum lifetime fortune achievable by someone who actually works for a living. In a US context, 1000x median household income is about $80 million USD. That’s still an incredible amount of money, though just barely achievable by actually working for wages. It’s the kind of fortune two neurosurgeons could amass if they both worked long careers, lived extremely frugally, and invested everything they made. 1000x median household income is what I consider the largest possible ‘honest’ fortune. In order to earn beyond that level, you have to earn your money not through your labor, but the labor of others. You have to start a business and start sponging off the surplus of your employees. 1000x median income is about as large a pile as you can get without relying on exploiting someone else’s labor. And that seems like a reasonable place to set a cap. Still high enough to provide people plenty of incentive to work hard, get an education, better themselves, etc. But no so high that people amass fortunes that are threats to national security.
Indeed, whilst it’s more difficult to raise a floor, it’s certainly a good idea to have a roof close enough to it to keep the heat where the people exist
What if we just burn the rich as firewood instead?
It would probably be environmentally friendly even
The issue is a bit more… circular than that.
Certain things, certain ventures, need more money than that. And in a free, capitalist society you want people to be able to achieve such goals and ventures.
Problem is, once you pool that wealth into a company (the very meaning of the word, like companion, meaning “together”, or more literally “with others, in a multitude”), imbalances will occur. What if you start it out as a group of 5, each putting in a billion, then the company, without employees, becomes successful, but due to how it worked out, one person was the main brain behind the success so they get a bigger share? Suddenly the company is worth 25 billion, 15bn belonging to the genius, and the rest having 2.5bn stake. How do you regulate that?
Also what if that money is truly for operating costs, because this company is setting up a brand new town, so they’re literally paying dozens of construction crews, establishing shops and whatnot for people to use once they move in, and so on? Do you just take any excess wealth away?
Or do you let them continue operating knowing full well that someone in the company will try to use the operational funds as their personal bank account?
The idea of a wealth limit in an optimal society is good, but in our current imperfect crap, it’s never going to work, because it will put limits to what we can achieve in general.
Mind you I do agree that billionaires shouldn’t exist and should be taxed out of existence but that’s not done with a wealth ceiling.
Companies shouldn’t be creating towns, period. If we need new cities, their locations and forms should be chosen by the people. By elections. Not by some lone asshole whose only urban planning qualification is that he happens to have a large pile of money.
Towns were just an example of scale - a more realistic example would be, albeit futuristic, is whatever space-faring vessels we’ll build, and I don’t mean Musk and his rocket toys he keeps blowing up, I mean actual interplanetary and deep space ships, which will cost about the same to build as a small town.
Do you want the right to building those to be retained by the government only? Or would you prefer if the right people with the appropriate resources could do it too?
The billionaires ARE the right… they’re the ones with all the money to be pushing those right-wing narratives and the ones that profit most from the success of those narratives. Mussolini himself admitted that Corporatism was a more fitting name for his ideology than Fascism, because it is a merging of the state and corporate power. If the corporations and billionaires didn’t privately capture all those billions of dollars, what, do you think that wealth would just evaporate? No! It’s us doing all the work and making all the sacrifices, we should have control over the profit we generate and a say in what we are willing to sacrifice for it!!
Whatever spacefaring vessels are going to be built should be built at the behest of the people, for the interests of the people. Not by and for whatever person is able to lie, cheat, and steal the most wealth out of our hands. What is the point of building a rocket if all it’s going to do for us is generate another few billion dollars for one guy, who already has more money than god, at everyone else’s expense?? It’s our cake, we are the ones who spilled our blood sweat and tears over it, and we’re gonna just give it away to a guy that’s pinky-promising to drop some crumbs behind him? Fuck that!
Repeat after me: THE INTERESTS OF BILLIONAIRES ARE INCOMPATIBLE WITH THOSE OF THE PEOPLE.
Man, so interesting. Why do we have to pay those workers to build something that society needs? Is it because the workers need to eat? Why are the workers starving? Is it because the food they need is locked away in a hoard of wealth that only gets distributed by people who own the hoard? Why won’t they just feed people? Oh they only feed people if it means they’ll make a profit?
Hmm. How does a system this cruel stick around? What’s that? 90% of the wealth of the world is owned by a vanishingly small number of people who will only deign to feed people if it makes them a profit?
Man. Real “imperfection” you got there. I’m sure we can fix it with some reforms though once we learn more about economics…
15bn belonging to the genius
Oof.
Anyway…
The regulation part is absurdly easy: they get a tax bill, they sell their shares, they pay the tax bill.
Operating costs don’t have anything to do with personal wealth. The company pays the operating costs. If the company’s revenue is greater than its costs, it pays dividends or reinvests and in theory, the stock prices goes up. See above.
The problem isn’t the logistics: point gun, take money. That’s pretty straightforward. The problem is ramifications. If billionaires can no longer grow their wealth, what would happen? Well, for one their control over these companies would wane. If Musk can’t own more than a billion, then he’d have to sell a bunch of stock, which means he would have less control over the board, and thus less control over decision-making. But is that such a bad thing? Are the skills and personality that cause a company to go from zero -> public the same ones you want once the company has grown to a large size? Idk, maybe ask Zuckerberg about Oculus Rift and the Metaverse.
I don’t think anyone actually knows what would happen. But we do have a lot of data on what happens if you significantly increase the marginal tax rates for upper income brackets, and it sure seems to benefit society as a whole, but depends on what outcomes you’re targeting. And that doesn’t actually target the ~900 billionaires in the United States because most of them earn money through capital gains rather than regular income.
It is kinda done with a wealth ceiling if you tax the higher wealth more, but yeah let them make infinite money somehow if they are at the top end paying 99% of it back into society.
If a company gets so big that it “needs” billions of dollars to build its own town then that company’s profits and decisions should be split among its stakeholders (i.e. all of its employees).
If someone starts a company then they should be rewarded with profits if it succeeds. Contrary to capitalist arguments. The big brains behind companies don’t do it to make 15 billion dollars. They do it instead to get obscenely rich, and despite our completely warped views with companies like Tesla and Amazon, “obscenely rich” starts in the hundreds of millions of dollars maybe a billion dollars if someone was an idiot.
On top of that there are thousands of examples throughout history that show that people don’t invent things solely to make money and the original big brains behind company innovations were not necessarily profit motivated.
Suddenly the company is worth 25 billion, 15bn belonging to the genius, and the rest having 2.5bn stake.
This doesn’t just happen. How did the value go up so much? Are their sales not taxed? Will the liquidation of this value not be taxed?
The core of literally any anti-billionaire economic policy needs to be the taxing of loans made on potential valuations. With that, the numbers you gave are effectively irrelevant because there’s no more infinite money glitch. They have to liquidate assets to spend money, and must pay taxes on that.
no reason to discard the idea of putting a ceiling on the rich.
There is a very good reason to discard the idea of assigning an arbitrary ‘maximum wealth’, two actually:
- it’s effectively impossible to actually enforce
- it will cost us more to try to enforce it, than we will gain in revenue
It would be tremendously expensive resource-wise, logistically, to even reliably determine if one has reached that ceiling (net worth figures for individuals that you see in the media are guesses, not the result of actual auditing), much less calculate with any degree of certainty how far over the ceiling someone is, and that ‘research/enforcement cost’ is practically certain to completely cancel out (and then some) any potential added revenue, especially because it’s also trivially easy to circumvent by creating debt, etc.
- it will cost us more to try to enforce it, than we will gain in revenue
That sounds to me like an assertion that has no basis in reality.
That would most likely be because you are ignorant of when it has already literally happened in the past, in other nations.
On multiple occasions in multiple countries, wealth taxes primarily aimed at the wealthiest demographic have been tried, and then repealed because overall tax revenue literally decreased as a result. There is a reason the vast majority of countries that have implemented such taxes have either since repealed them, or ‘loosened’ them such that they’re no longer primarily aimed at said demographic, and have become a much more ‘typical’ tax that the middle class pays.
This is why the Zucmann taxation model is so hyped tbh. I doubt you haven’t heard of it?
I honestly don’t think the problem is that Capitalist’s don’t understand that concept; they very much do.
They also understand that the money for raising that floor would likely come from taxes on them; and so keeping the floor low means that they can keep even more profit.
It’s not a lack of understanding. It’s pure unadulterated evil.
There are definitely bad actors out there trying to convince people of misconceptions, and I’m sure they have a non-zero amount of success. I recall being told some overly simplifying misconceptions of socialism when I was young.
this is the reason social democracy rarely works in practice.
The reason social democracy doesn’t work is because it doesn’t change the power structure. It’s treating a symptom and not the root cause. By leaving the root cause untouched, the symptoms will always come back.
that’s pretty much what happens in my country. without other countries our rich can extract value from, it’s still business as usual and purchased/pressured politicians because money is still power.
I think its more than that, they already have all the money, but wealth is relative so if they can make everyone else twice as poor then their wealth relative to everyone else just doubled.
Depends. I actually fully support putting a ceiling on wealth.
The analogy I always come back to is nuclear weapons. We don’t let private individuals own them. We don’t make you get an atomic bomb license. We don’t tax nukes heavily. We don’t make sure that only the kindest and most ethical people are allowed to own nukes. We simply say, this is too much power to be trusted to one individual. No one should have that level of power.
And yet, would anyone doubt that someone like Bezos, all on his own, can cause an amount of damage comparable to a nuclear bomb? If Bezos had it in for an entire city, could he not destroy it? Could he not buy up the major employers and shut them down? Could he not buy up all the housing and force the citizens into penury? Could he not buy up and shut down the hospitals? I have no doubt that, if he wanted to, Bezos could single handedly destroy a city. And how many lives would that take? How many would drink themselves to death or die by their own hand after Bezos came in and destroyed their entire lives? How many would die from lack of resources and medical care, etc?
Bezos could absolutely, if he wanted to, single-handedly cause a level of destruction and human misery comparable to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
And that is a power no one should have. The only way anyone should have that level of power is through democratic elections.
This is why I support wealth caps. I would personally set the maximum allowable wealth at 1000x the median household income. In the US, this would be about $80 million USD. That’s about the maximum fortune a person that actually works for wages can amass in a lifetime, if they’re a very high earner, live very frugally, and marry someone of similar status. 1000x median household income is the limit of what I consider to be an honest fortune - one made primarily through your own work, rather than sponging off the labor of others.
To be more succinct, the way I always describe it is wealth is not just money, money is too abstract. Wealth is power and that degree of power should not be so concentrated in so few private individuals.
Bezos could single handedly destroy a city And Musk actually did this with Boca Chica.
Also the power to launch a nuclear strike is shockingly consolidated. The president can if they decide to, and they’d likely get positive support from military command.
Anyways, I’m in full agreement even if I’m poking at your examples and metaphors.
Norwegian here: the floor is getting more and faulty and it is dependent on the imperial mode of living generally and oil and arms exports specifically
Didint you guys just find one of the biggest rare earth minerals deposit in the world?
Yes, we did. But with the current political climate I’m less and less sure that we’ll be able to handle it as well as we did with the oil.
If you want an example of an industry where we didn’t do a great job of spreading the wealth, you can look at our other major export: Salmon.
Salmon seems like a very different resource than oil or rare earth metals. My understanding is that with the oil, it was a resource that largely came out of nowhere. One day Norway had little oil. Suddenly you find this vast field of immense unclaimed resources. It’s a huge resource that no one has a claim to. Thus, it’s reasonably easy to divide it in an equitable way. But salmon? People have been harvesting that resource since the dawn of time. There must be centuries of various rules, laws, ancient royal decrees, relating to who can harvest how much salmon. And there’s going to be people that if you tell them how much salmon they can catch, they’ll point out that their family has been harvesting salmon for generations, and it’s not fair to…And on an on.
Oil seems like a much easier resource to divide equitably, simply because there’s not such a cultural and legal history behind the management of the resource.
The issue with this is that there’s plenty of rare earth minerals (they’re not rare) all around the world, it’s the refining process that is expensive and extremely polluting.
Doesn’t matter if Norway found decades worth of supply, when nobody but China is willing to build the processing plants. And China has more than enough rare earth mineral supplies themselves.
Hard to say. Current political view seem to be that EU wants to get rid of dependancy on china and great way to get free is to start mining our own.
There is pretty large deposits in Sweden, Finland and Norway so one effiecient, central refining plant could be churning virtually limitless amounts of materials, if only there would be enough funding to get the ball rolling. (Before anybody says i know Norway is not part of european union, but it is part of european economic area and part of EFTA) France already has a refining plant so the tech knowledge is already found inside the EU.
The issue is that nobody has found a way to refine it in a way that isn’t extremely polluting without the cost being extremely excessive and making it entirely pointless.
We could mine as much as we want, but the only country OK with refining this stuff is China. Unless we solve the issue of refining this in a relatively clean way at a somewhat competitive price, no refining will ever be set up in Europe.
Only sith deal in absolutes.
Caremag/Caresters plant in France is scheduled to open in 2026 and Solvay that is already running in France is trying to hit 30% of EU’s demand by 2030.
If we would start building the mines right now it would take close to 10 years to have the mines running. By that time the refining process in France should be pretty well tested and if there would be more minerals produced than they can process, building new facility with the know how they have accumulated and any progress in tech, is not that big of an leap anymore.
By the way this would be pretty close how Norway originally got their economy running with hydropower and later with oil. They waited until there was enough know how to make effective plants. Then they made deals with outside companies where the state would own part of the facilities, but the companies would make enough money to make a profit. After the deals would expire the state would get the now profitable facilities for them self, but the original companies had made enough money for the deal to be good for them.
I’m of the opinion that that doesn’t go far enough
We need to put hard limits on personal wealth (and the wealth of companies too). After 10 million networth in wealth, all your income should go to taxes 100% until you’re below that limit… something similar should exist for companies
Same goes for power and fame. I don’t want or need a president, or a CEO that directs billions of dollars
Keep everything small, keep everyone small. Mega projects can still be done by multiple companies together, for example
End the rich!
After 10 million networth in wealth, all your income should go to taxes 100% until you’re below that limit…
This would be trivially easy to circumvent if it was put into place, just so you know.
You can’t just tax wealth, you need to tax net controllable assets and cap that.
“doesn’t put a ceiling on wealth”
eeeeehh. maybe we fucking should?
increased privatisation is happening all over the Nordics. I don’t know how much in Norway compared to here in Finland, but being in my fourth decade I can definitely see it happening and intensely. I can’t get a fucking public dentist anymore. Hell, children aren’t given free dental care anymore.
If no one were living in poverty I would be more accepting of the ultra-rich’s existence.
Except that that’s hard to happen.
The very existence of an ultra-rich means that there was someone who managed to get extraordinarily high amounts of extra value from someone as compared to what they paid that ‘one’ for it and then did it over and over again, essentially leeching value out of the system, making it a -ive sum game for anyone inside it.
So when you take more than you give, you end up breaking the original meaning of money (that was “proof of work/goodwill”) and when you do that enough, the worth of work gets warped and those who do similar work, end up indirectly losing more than what they give.
3 people in America each have several times as much wealth as the entire bottom half of America. It’s ok to have a ceiling nobody contributes 400B to society. For reference that is more than every teach and every doctor make in America. Does anyone believe that Elon is individually more valuable than the either profession?
Norway has a very high gini coefficient, i.e. high inequality. It’s just that the people at the bottom still get a decent standard of living.
You know, I don’t think most people care about the inequality so much as the abject misery of being at the bottom of that equation. I kinda wouldn’t care how many yachts a rich buffoon has if there weren’t so many starving desperate people, it’s just the optics are wholly awful for these ghouls in the world where cruelty and greed are so rampant that it’s inevitable even the crumbs are sucked from those who need them the most.
I would kind of care that there is blatant division between people’s worth as human beings depending on how much money they possess.
There is a deep equitable drive between human beings, we want fairness and equality as a matter of who we are as a species. Moderate differences in standard of living are tolerable, but social discrepancies over a certain limit unravels the fabric of our human connection.
In a way, capitalism turns us into monsters, predating on one another. There is no lowest common level of comfort that could ever undo that type of break with who we are, because we are more than the arbitrary division the system creates. We are creatures with dignity and a sense of justice.
If I make one dollar for every million you make, we haven’t “both gotten richer”.
Certainly, my evaluation lacks the depth of considering the system as a whole. Just saying that individually if we could make it so the bottom of the equation wasn’t so desperate relatively it would be okay for wealthy people to own ostentatious things, but you’re right, capitalism run rampant makes the situation inevitable
I agree. I’d much rather be poor in Norway than in the US.
That last line nails it: it doesn’t cap success, it just makes sure failure isn’t catastrophic.
But that’s one of the primary tenants of conservatism! What will conservatives do if people are allowed to continue living after they fail?
It does cap the wildest, antisocial forms of success that are insane excess.
Progressive taxation should mean you can never gain enough power, which capital is, to warp your society with power beyond your single vote, whether that power is expressed through direct bribery, lobbying, or mass media propaganda to try to trick your fellow citizens into voting and advocating against their own interests with your booming, capital powered voice that drowns out those you disagree with merely because you’ve exploited more capital into your private account than others.
I don’t see any shame, horror, or problem with putting a hard cap on how much an individual can accumulate, as other people live here too.
Despite what Elon Musk believes, this whole planet shouldn’t be his personal playground, but that’s what it means to become a trillionaire, entire governments will bow at your feet. That’s perverse. No unelected, unaccountable individual should hold so much power, unless humanity wants to live in a hell of its own making.
lobbying is direct bribery, isn’t it?
Shhh, that’s a secret, those are “campaign contributions” and nothing is expected in return! Mercy me, I have the vapors…
I think a ceiling would actually be healthy. I don’t love that we’re still pandering to the rich even with this summary. Still, it’s good to push any healthy message. I’m just saying it could be better. No one in the entire world needs more than 20 million dollars. No one. That should be the highest we allow, and even lower would be better.
To be fair, it helps that Norway suddenly got rich by selling ecologically disasterous products to the rest of the world while avoiding them itself.
are you serious?
A rising tide lifting all boats??? Nah Elon needs to tie three gold cybertrucks together to drive around or his pp cant be the big pp
Great. Now do both.
The only thing that I think really needs to change is that it should be harder to get more wealthy past the point where the average person would say that you’re wealthy.
That difficulty spike should be caused by an increase in taxes that you have to pay in order to accrue more wealth so that those taxes can be redirected to the less wealthy.
You can sail as high as you want to go, but you have to raise the tide along with you.
Then your wealthiness would match my ideal of what it means to be wealthy.
