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
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.
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.
It would cause them to move to a country without such regulation. Maybe somewhere in Africa or Southeast Asia, or South America. Though maybe there they lose a bunch of their money to corruption so overall it’s a win.
If billionaires decide to leave the country then the factories and businesses run by workers producing the billions they made will remain. You can’t pick up a building and take it with you.
It’s exceedingly rare that they actually do this because they don’t want to live in a third-world country. The irony, ofc, is that their actions are turning the U.S. into one.
If that were true, they would have already done it.
They scream about taxes and such, but they know that they are in the very best country in the world to get super wealthy. It’s relatively easy to get access to money, systemic corruption is relatively low, and legal bribery is build into the system. The government is literally based on Capitalism.
Sure, they threaten to leave if their billion dollars is threatened with a 1% increase in taxes, but they won’t, because they know that the American economic system is what gave them the billion dollars in the first place. They’re just being whiney little bitches.
These people will lie to you to make you help them get what they want, at YOUR expense. You aren’t obligated to believe them, or help them.
This what they so to literally every positive economic policy ever discussed and yet every one of those places still has rich people and overinflated companies. Maybe we should stop believing their lies?
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…
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.
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.
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
You’re thinking of wealth of a person. There’s not even a tax on capital yet.
There is a very good reason to discard the idea of assigning an arbitrary ‘maximum wealth’, two actually:
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.
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.
It would cause them to move to a country without such regulation. Maybe somewhere in Africa or Southeast Asia, or South America. Though maybe there they lose a bunch of their money to corruption so overall it’s a win.
If billionaires decide to leave the country then the factories and businesses run by workers producing the billions they made will remain. You can’t pick up a building and take it with you.
It’s exceedingly rare that they actually do this because they don’t want to live in a third-world country. The irony, ofc, is that their actions are turning the U.S. into one.
If that were true, they would have already done it.
They scream about taxes and such, but they know that they are in the very best country in the world to get super wealthy. It’s relatively easy to get access to money, systemic corruption is relatively low, and legal bribery is build into the system. The government is literally based on Capitalism.
Sure, they threaten to leave if their billion dollars is threatened with a 1% increase in taxes, but they won’t, because they know that the American economic system is what gave them the billion dollars in the first place. They’re just being whiney little bitches.
These people will lie to you to make you help them get what they want, at YOUR expense. You aren’t obligated to believe them, or help them.
This what they so to literally every positive economic policy ever discussed and yet every one of those places still has rich people and overinflated companies. Maybe we should stop believing their lies?
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…
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.
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.