[rich-and-poor]

If someone figures out how to make 5M/year of income, I am absolutely certain they are better at capital allocation than the current administration. You are suggesting that they are not, and that we need to have the state decide where the money of the top earners go. I'm sorry, but we have tried that before. It does not end well.

[mindslight]

OP did not imply that someone making 5M/year was not better at capital allocation than the government, but rather just implied a different measure of "better".

For example, there is a good chance that said individual would invest the money in more regulatory-capture extraction schemes. In this case, we would be better off if those resources were just straight-up wasted by the government proper.

Of course there's also a good chance that the government would use it to fund their own citizen-hostile totalitarianism (eg the NSA). The point is that the general heuristic of government inefficiency is inapplicable.

[Harvey-Specter]

A lot of people are better at a lot of things than the current administration, that shouldn't be a benchmark.

And this argument is garbage. Individuals accumulating massive amounts of wealth doesn't do any good for society.

[rich-and-poor]

I don't think it's a garbage argument, I think that individuals with massive wealth have two useful qualities:

1) They are competent at wealth accumulation, which indicates some level of aptitude and intelligence

2) They have a large mass of capital with which to fund new businesses and ventures, and are likely to pick good candidates because of 1)

So, I don't see the problem here. It seems to me like they have an enormous good thing to offer society.

[throwawayjava]

I don't think I know anyone who thinks that funding successful businesses is the ultimate goal of a society.

Many people argue that it's the best mechanism we have for achieving whatever our actual goals should be, but few if any will claim that running businesses is itself the higher purpose of human civilization.

In order for this conversation to be productive, we'd all have to agree on some underlying moral framework prescribing what society ought to achieve. And then we'd have to evaluate whether ultra-wealth people allocate their capital in a way that achieves that outcome.

No small tasks! But I expect that in the course of such a conversation, we might discover that there are a wide variety of rich people who spend their wealth in a wide variety of ways. Some of those people will typify your caricature of the rich, and some of those people will typify Harvey-Specter's caricature.

Finally, as an aside, you put the ultra-rich on quite a pedastal. They're just people who decided they wanted to accumulate wealth and then did a good job at achieving that.

It's admirable to do so well in a competitive environment, but no more or less admirable than the top 1% in anything else (a sport, medicine, religious/military leadership, teaching, etc.). Being great in a competitive atmosphere is a good signal, but wealth accumulation is not the only place where great humans compete and wealth is not the only metric which great humans use to measure their life's work...

[amelius]

> It's admirable to do so well in a competitive environment, but no more or less admirable than the top 1% in anything else (a sport, medicine, religious/military leadership, teaching, etc.).

Yes. And the irony is that the wealth accumulators ultimately do so using achievements made by other people, who cared more about other things than accumulating wealth.

Also, I don't think that the top 1% should have all the benefits (winner takes all).

[rich-and-poor]

I actually agree that we need an underlying moral framework.

Just for fun, what is your underlying moral framework?

Mine would be population and economic growth, environmental protection, and disaster avoidance.

[rhcom2]

I think #1 is a common American thought but without any evidence. It takes no aptitude or intelligence to inherit money.

And #2 just sounds like a rephrasing of trickle down economics, which is economically questionable at best.

[rich-and-poor]

Well what other "economics" are there if not "trickle-down" economics? How else, exactly, does wealth get from the rich to the poor if not through employment?

[jtolmar]

> How else, exactly, does wealth get from the rich to the poor if not through employment?

Taxes.

> Well what other "economics" are there if not "trickle-down" economics?

If the people have money you can make money by making things they want and selling to them.

[spruciefic399]

I think the problem with that argument is that the reasons an individual might be good allocating their own capital are distinct from the reasons they have capital, or what is justified, in the sense of ethical or societally defensible.

A successful white-collar criminal can be said to be good at capital allocation, to make an extreme example.

My argument is not that wealth means someone is criminal (although I do think criminality has as a goal wealth rather than poverty, which is the inverse but relevant). However I do think there are lots of hidden costs that people advertently or inadvertently manage to get out of paying for, and taxes are meant to recognize that fact.

The bailouts of the great recession are good examples of this to me in some sense. The government saved certain businesses, or ameliorated their crash. Whether or not this was the right decision is one thing, but given that they did get bailouts (or outs), suggests that what we should expect is taxes and regulation to support these kinds of things. There are lots of other things like this that conveniently get glossed over, like hidden environmental costs, education and infrastructure, research, etc.

I find it incredibly manipulative, for example, for arguments to be made against net neutrality on the grounds that telecom companies somehow bootstrapped their way up from nothing, when the internet itself was a government invention, and much of their infrastructure is made possible by public right-of-way laws or other privileges given by municipalities.

I think the fundamental problem with US society today is an extreme form of survivorship or fundamental attribution bias, where we grossly overattribute success to individual characteristics and not other factors. Then we get locked into these strawman debates that pit extreme capitalism against communism, as if there's no moderated grey area, that our only choices are complete equality of wages etc. or winner-takes all gross inequality.

What I increasingly see in the US are the haves and the have nots, and I no longer believe that the haves, by in the large, deserve what they have in a way that the have nots do not. Income inequality, to me, is bad not just because of the disparity itself, but because it tends to exaggerate market errors in valuation.

We tend to have these conversations and HN and elsewhere where we look at these examples of downward mobility and point to everything someone did wrong, but then do not turn to management, administration, business, etc. and ask "did they really do everything right"? We also tend to act as if, if they really made an error, that is really worth the downward mobility they accrued.