[QuixoticQuibit]

The recently proposed wealth taxes (e.g., Elizabeth Warren’s proposal) that work the way you’ve described would only start on wealth above $50 million.

So your framing of such a tax as a way to steal from your working-class retirement funds is incredibly disingenuous. Unless, of course, you have 8+ figures of wealth. In which case I hope one day you’re made to pay your fair share to society.

[nickpp]

Once a new tax is imposed, its limits and brackets are probably the easiest things to change about it. Moreover, if they aren’t inflation-adjusted, the Fed will make sure we’ll all get there pretty soon, just by printing money like they are doing these days.

Anybody who has any legally earned wealth has already paid his fair share to the society by simply creating the corresponding value. Usually value creators get a few percent of the created value, the rest being enjoyed by the society, by the rest us.

[imtringued]

>Once a new tax is imposed, its limits and brackets are probably the easiest things to change about it.

Just introduce a tax on money held in bank accounts. Doesn't matter if its above $100k or $1 million.

>Moreover, if they aren’t inflation-adjusted, the Fed will make sure we’ll all get there pretty soon, just by printing money like they are doing these days.

When people are stupid enough to "invest" into money you run into an obvious problem. The supply of money is limited. Every dollar that is being saved makes it harder to save the next. So you have to create new money as people save money. The conventional way is to run a government deficit. The better way is to stop regressive saving in money by introducing a negative interest rate for big accounts.

Investments don't matter. Even if the rich HODL all existing stocks someone can start a new company that you can invest into. Old businesses can also issue new shares without people being angry. None of this is zero sum. But saving money? Oh boy, that is the most zero sum way to "invest". The only reason the system hasn't collapsed is that the Fed is making sure that every time a dollar is being hoarded there is a new one to replace it.

[QuixoticQuibit]

So Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk (and other stupidly rich executives) created hundreds of billions of dollars of value themselves?

Of course not. They got their through exploitation. Any profit that a business has is value not being paid back to the actual workers who created the value of the company through their labor.

Nobody has ever worked for $100 billion. Or $1 billion. Or $100 million.

[jurassic]

If your skill is moving boxes onto a delivery truck your work is not more useful/valuable as part of Amazon than at a small traditional company with no scalable internet components. The excess value in these companies should flow to those who took risks to set them in motion and continue leading them. Asserting this ownership premium is theft is pretty ridiculous on the face of it.

Also, imagine if the guy loading trucks for Amazon did make 100x more money just because he’s connected to a high-growth internet company. The economy would be thrown into chaos because no logistics workers would be willing to do less remunerative but essential work like unloading food at the grocery store without substantial wage increases that get passed to the consumer as higher food/gas/delivery prices. Many sectors without productivity growth would get annihilated by Baumol’s cost disease, and consumers would have to spend a much larger share of their income on anything that is trucked around (which is basically everything we buy).

[nickpp]

> Nobody has ever worked for $100 billion. Or $1 billion. Or $100 million.

Of course. However, some of us had had a positive impact on the society measurable in Trillions, usually through ideas and entrepreneurship. It is preferably for us a society to encourage such endeavors.

Neither Bezos nor Musk have created that value by themselves. They did it together with investors, partners, employees and clients, all of whom were rightly and fairly compensated and became better because of it.

The only unhappy are those who did not participate to any of it, but they have no right to complain, just envy.

[maverick-iceman]

> The only unhappy are those who did not participate to any of it, but they have no right to complain, just envy.

What is right or wrong is just semantics, in reality a mob with pitchforks doesn't care about semantics.

Humans have forced the redistribution of resources concentrated in few hands since the beginning of time

As an entrepreneur the quality of life you provide to people has a really short shelf life, as soon as the hedonistic treadmill adjusts , people start looking at the monetary reward that the entrepreneur got for providing such quality of life...and all of a sudden they think it's not fair because hedonistic treadmill made that monetary reward becomes excessive in retrospect.

Bezos critics have been using Amazon in the current form ever since the early 2010s now, and Amazon rate of innovation has dropped, so hedonistic treadmill did catch up and now they want Bezos head.

Same thing happened with Microsoft. The transition from 3.1 to Win95 was something which shocked the whole world, people were talking about honorary President Bill Gates.

Rate of innovation slowed down from Win95 to Win98 and all of a sudden people began looking at Bill Gates 150B wealth back in 1999 and pressure mounted to break up Microsoft and arrest Bill Gates and expropriate his wealth

[iso1631]

Make the limit linked to income levels. Say 100 times the median income.