I don't think it's unreasonable to limit a person's total wealth to, say, 100x the median person's lifetime earnings. In America, the median income is about $50k/yr. So 40 years as a wage earner means $2 million. With compounded interest, inflation, and wage growth, it's still under $10 million. So if we capped individual net worth at 100x that, it'd be $1 billion.
The fact that we live in a society where people don't bat an eyelash at people who have literally 100,000x the median lifetime earnings of a person (literally, 1000x what I personally consider reasonable) and yet want more says that our society has passed one of these absurdity tests and just suck down whatever stupid propaganda they promulgate.
So you're not allowed to own a company whose share is worth more than $1b? So everyone would cease productivity after that point because you'd essentially be working for free. Even worse, you have downside.
Suppose you own 10% of a company worth $10b and you love grinding so you keep working, grow it to $20b and your net worth is now $2b on paper so you have to give up 5% to the government, leaving you with 5%, bringing you down to $1b cap. Now the company drops back down to $10b and you now have $500m.
Bezos would have retired when Amazon was worth ~4-5b. But according to the kind of people that want this kind of cap, Amazon would just continue to grow to 50x over the next 25 years just through inertia. Because it's totally normal for a book retailer to 50x over 25 years.
It makes no sense if you reason backward from "I should be allowed to have infinite dollars" as a premise. You simply can't do enough work to create a billion dollars[1]. It is just not physically possible to create that much value through sheer effort, nor is it even possible to keep that much value stored anywhere you can physically defend yourself. We're not talking about some chest of gold you keep in a bedroom closet in your very big house. It's so much more than that. Every billionaire is a beneficiary of a large organization of hundreds, usually thousands of people, that they've managed to put themselves at the top of or make a direct beneficiary of, or owns a special kind of currency that the markets have inflated to a valuation. Similarly, defending the integrity of a sprawling set of assets like that takes a virtual army of security, even if it's just the stock certificates you supposedly have in your name.
And I reject the premise that there isn't a limit on ownership. Ownership is a social construct. Ownership requires a functioning justice system and police force to maintain. Both of said things are collectively agreed upon social contracts that absolutely are negotiated. If you disagree, then by all means, build a moat around your island with a trillion gold bars and man it with automated sentry guns. No one does that because we've negotiated a system that actively helps wealthy people maintain their wealth and defends them against pitchforks, which have a nasty habit of turning up when said justice and organization breaks down and leads to anarchy.
Don't want anarchy where rich people a lynched by mobs? Well, yeah, that's why we negotiate limits. I'm saying the social contract just doesn't let you have more than a billion dollars.
[1] And incidentally, one cannot even enjoy that much wealth, even if they dedicated themselves to it! The kind of enjoyments that us regular people enjoy, like hockey games and surf trips, wouldn't even put a dent in a billion dollars, even if done for a lifetime. It's absurd that we think hundred million dollar yachts and private jets for the lucky ones are a birthright of our system or something. Because that's what we're really talking about--obscene wealth, not just living comfortably.
You can't individually do enough work to do much of anything we take for granted in our modern era but you can design and build systems, mechanical and social, to do that work. A corporation is such a system often put in motion and helmed by a single person for a significant portion of its existence. It accumulates many people and a lot of capital along the way by means of exchange, cash for goods and services rendered, physical capital in exchange for cash or debt and people's work in exchange for wages. Those people don't own the corporation unless they are given or purchase stock in it. They have already been paid for their input. Expecting otherwise is like expecting to use my lawn for your picnic or vegetable garden if I pay you to mow it twice a week.
These people get wealthy by making a pyramid-shaped apparatus that funnels the actual productive output of their employees up to them.
> like expecting to use my lawn for your picnic or vegetable garden if I pay you to mow it twice a week.
The analogy is flawed. It'd be more apt if you were selling grass clippings and they were paid to run the business of growing and cutting the grass. If you just own the land and call the shots, then sure, you're doing work too, but ultimately the resource that is of value to other people is primarily produced by the work of others. You've created an apparatus and put in work, and have earned (in some sense) compensation for enabling that. That's what most people would agree is equitable. But now we have corporations and stock; that adds a whole other dimension to this where you have a side hustle of selling future revenues in the form of stock on the open market, but retain privileged stock for yourself. The price of that stock goes up, you get disproportionately rewarded for that price increase. But even worse, when the market has a lot of money available for speculation, it can inflate the price of the stock far beyond what your employees can supply in terms of grass clippings (inflated price/earnings ratio). Your employees get zero of that inflated speculation bubble, but are absolutely the underlying value. In today's hyper growth world, the disconnection between revenue, growth, and valuations is worse than ever. Billionaires exist in this super-inflated valuation bubble that is completely disconnected from the grass clippings business.
Your employees are not barred from and often do get a piece of that speculation if they receive shares or choose to buy them. If they aren't willing to buy stock in the company they work for then how does that square with the idea that they should in some other way own more of the profit the company produces? i.e. if they choose to only put in the required labour in exchange for pay what claim do they have on that secondary market when they haven't participated in it?
A business selling grass clippings is a tortured metaphor, just use something sensible like farming. Say I buy land, pay for it to be cleared or clear it myself, buy farm machinery to work it, seed to plant it, arrange to sell it and deal with all of the business overhead of taxes, surveying, planning permissions, records, fees, etc. and maybe I even do some labour at the start to get it running before hiring others. Once I've hired other people and I'm paying them for the work they're doing, which they agreed to as a fair exchange, then what additional claim do they have on the profit I'm making from selling turnips or whatever? Why do you think they should be able to claim more if turnip prices skyrocket? Worse, what claim do they have if turnip futures go through the roof (if I had also speculated on them)?
You're talking millionaire problems and I'm talking billionaire problems. You're not getting to the billionaire class through any self-started farming business.
Billionaires are sitting in board rooms paying millionaires to deal with all that bullshit why they are just trading stocks left and right and play shell games with businesses. They're at a completely different level of capital class and wouldn't touch a blade of grass.
It doesn't really matter what the business is, farming was an example but if you need a concrete example of a billionaire that started as a farmer and built his fortune in agriculture and ag related business then look to Harry Stine[0]
There are plenty of other billionaires that started as small business owners putting in their own work. They became billionaires by successfully managing their business and scaling, expanding and pivoting it. There are also ones who derive their wealth strictly from investing or purchasing other businesses, maybe that doesn't seem like work or seems unfair for some reason but you can't just take a random person and hand them millions of dollars and expect them to turn that into a billion dollars. Most would go bankrupt if they tried, smarter ones would just be low risk millionaires living off interest or broadly diversified investment returns. To me, those ones would be the only people I'd say aren't really earning their money but if it's their money then it's their choice what they do with it.
Design is work, and designing any of the technologies that underpin industrialized societies is also the shared work of many many people. There are specifications like 5G or BLE or browser compatibility that no single person understands, let alone could've written.
The average working software engineer contributes far more knowledge to society than their billionaire boss who is worth 1000x more with the principal contribution of "being the specialest boy".
titzer · · focus · HN ↗
The fact that we live in a society where people don't bat an eyelash at people who have literally 100,000x the median lifetime earnings of a person (literally, 1000x what I personally consider reasonable) and yet want more says that our society has passed one of these absurdity tests and just suck down whatever stupid propaganda they promulgate.
bko · · focus · HN ↗
Suppose you own 10% of a company worth $10b and you love grinding so you keep working, grow it to $20b and your net worth is now $2b on paper so you have to give up 5% to the government, leaving you with 5%, bringing you down to $1b cap. Now the company drops back down to $10b and you now have $500m.
Bezos would have retired when Amazon was worth ~4-5b. But according to the kind of people that want this kind of cap, Amazon would just continue to grow to 50x over the next 25 years just through inertia. Because it's totally normal for a book retailer to 50x over 25 years.
Makes no sense.
titzer · · focus · HN ↗
It makes no sense if you reason backward from "I should be allowed to have infinite dollars" as a premise. You simply can't do enough work to create a billion dollars[1]. It is just not physically possible to create that much value through sheer effort, nor is it even possible to keep that much value stored anywhere you can physically defend yourself. We're not talking about some chest of gold you keep in a bedroom closet in your very big house. It's so much more than that. Every billionaire is a beneficiary of a large organization of hundreds, usually thousands of people, that they've managed to put themselves at the top of or make a direct beneficiary of, or owns a special kind of currency that the markets have inflated to a valuation. Similarly, defending the integrity of a sprawling set of assets like that takes a virtual army of security, even if it's just the stock certificates you supposedly have in your name.
And I reject the premise that there isn't a limit on ownership. Ownership is a social construct. Ownership requires a functioning justice system and police force to maintain. Both of said things are collectively agreed upon social contracts that absolutely are negotiated. If you disagree, then by all means, build a moat around your island with a trillion gold bars and man it with automated sentry guns. No one does that because we've negotiated a system that actively helps wealthy people maintain their wealth and defends them against pitchforks, which have a nasty habit of turning up when said justice and organization breaks down and leads to anarchy.
Don't want anarchy where rich people a lynched by mobs? Well, yeah, that's why we negotiate limits. I'm saying the social contract just doesn't let you have more than a billion dollars.
[1] And incidentally, one cannot even enjoy that much wealth, even if they dedicated themselves to it! The kind of enjoyments that us regular people enjoy, like hockey games and surf trips, wouldn't even put a dent in a billion dollars, even if done for a lifetime. It's absurd that we think hundred million dollar yachts and private jets for the lucky ones are a birthright of our system or something. Because that's what we're really talking about--obscene wealth, not just living comfortably.
pigpop · · focus · HN ↗
titzer · · focus · HN ↗
> like expecting to use my lawn for your picnic or vegetable garden if I pay you to mow it twice a week.
The analogy is flawed. It'd be more apt if you were selling grass clippings and they were paid to run the business of growing and cutting the grass. If you just own the land and call the shots, then sure, you're doing work too, but ultimately the resource that is of value to other people is primarily produced by the work of others. You've created an apparatus and put in work, and have earned (in some sense) compensation for enabling that. That's what most people would agree is equitable. But now we have corporations and stock; that adds a whole other dimension to this where you have a side hustle of selling future revenues in the form of stock on the open market, but retain privileged stock for yourself. The price of that stock goes up, you get disproportionately rewarded for that price increase. But even worse, when the market has a lot of money available for speculation, it can inflate the price of the stock far beyond what your employees can supply in terms of grass clippings (inflated price/earnings ratio). Your employees get zero of that inflated speculation bubble, but are absolutely the underlying value. In today's hyper growth world, the disconnection between revenue, growth, and valuations is worse than ever. Billionaires exist in this super-inflated valuation bubble that is completely disconnected from the grass clippings business.
pigpop · · focus · HN ↗
A business selling grass clippings is a tortured metaphor, just use something sensible like farming. Say I buy land, pay for it to be cleared or clear it myself, buy farm machinery to work it, seed to plant it, arrange to sell it and deal with all of the business overhead of taxes, surveying, planning permissions, records, fees, etc. and maybe I even do some labour at the start to get it running before hiring others. Once I've hired other people and I'm paying them for the work they're doing, which they agreed to as a fair exchange, then what additional claim do they have on the profit I'm making from selling turnips or whatever? Why do you think they should be able to claim more if turnip prices skyrocket? Worse, what claim do they have if turnip futures go through the roof (if I had also speculated on them)?
titzer · · focus · HN ↗
Billionaires are sitting in board rooms paying millionaires to deal with all that bullshit why they are just trading stocks left and right and play shell games with businesses. They're at a completely different level of capital class and wouldn't touch a blade of grass.
pigpop · · focus · HN ↗
There are plenty of other billionaires that started as small business owners putting in their own work. They became billionaires by successfully managing their business and scaling, expanding and pivoting it. There are also ones who derive their wealth strictly from investing or purchasing other businesses, maybe that doesn't seem like work or seems unfair for some reason but you can't just take a random person and hand them millions of dollars and expect them to turn that into a billion dollars. Most would go bankrupt if they tried, smarter ones would just be low risk millionaires living off interest or broadly diversified investment returns. To me, those ones would be the only people I'd say aren't really earning their money but if it's their money then it's their choice what they do with it.
[0]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Stine_(businessman)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Stine_(businessman)
jackb4040 · · focus · HN ↗
Design is work, and designing any of the technologies that underpin industrialized societies is also the shared work of many many people. There are specifications like 5G or BLE or browser compatibility that no single person understands, let alone could've written.
The average working software engineer contributes far more knowledge to society than their billionaire boss who is worth 1000x more with the principal contribution of "being the specialest boy".