[simonh]

Most of the wealth of billionaires is not cash, it’s locked up in their ownership of the companies they control. Elon Musk for example has 99% of his wealth in shares in Tesla, SpaceX etc. The only way to take that off him is to take those companies away and give control of them to someone else. It’s the same for Warren Buffett, the vast majority of his wealth is in ownership and control via BH. He sells some of that to fund his lifestyle and philanthropic efforts, but taking away his control basically means breaking up BH and selling off all it’s assets and management structures to fund the tax/confiscation bill. It's the same for almost all the wealthy.

Even for the conventionally wealthy, much of their wealth is in investments, so all those bonds and shares get taken and go where? Who manages them? Who makes investment decisions down the line? The current entire investment community can't, they've just had most of their assets taken away. So what you're talking about is the dismantlement of the ownership and management structures of huge swathes of the economy and what? Handing it over to who, civil servants?

It would of course also make it impossible for anyone to start a company and grow it to becoming large and successful, because as soon as it became significant, the founders would have ownership and therefore control taken away from them.

[valenterry]

It would be possible to have people keep control but still have everyone benefit - not all shares have to be the same, as we can see with Facebook.

[verisimi]

> Most of the wealth of billionaires is not cash, it’s locked up in their ownership of the companies they control. Elon Musk for example has 99% of his wealth in shares in Tesla, SpaceX etc.

Yes. But its possible to allocate a value to these assets.

The point I'm making is that it if we are trying to find a solution to these problems, the easiest one would be to take the billions in wealth - more wealth that can be spent in hundreds of lifetimes - away from the people who hold it and redistribute it to those who don't. This doesn't seem to be under consideration, but this is because it doesn't suit those that run corporations and governments - the elite aren't planning to shoot themselves in the foot.

As I said elsewhere, I don't think this is actually a valid solution. I only mention this as an equally invalid solution - putting the cost onto the population in general, ie the comparatively poor - is actively being implemented. Despite the obvious unfairness and greater complexity - the implementation of a technocratic system that allocates energy and resources.

So the new system is also insane and will be harder 99.9999% of the world's population, but does allow the billionaires to keep their comfort.

Which of these 2 insane options is better in your opinion?

[helloworld11]

Aside from other complexities and negative consequences of your hypothetically proposed wealth cap, you forget that the world isn't a pie from which wealth is taken by some at the expense of others, at least not in many of the ways that create wealth on the market.

These billioniares and many more millioniares worth more than 10 million dollars by and large create their fortunes through certain lucky or careful investments and in the case of many of them, their wealth is locked up directly in stock that the public values highly enough for them to be worth that much. As many here have pointed out better than I will now, creating confiscatory policies on this would lead to the wealth itself mostly evaporating as if it never were. What you propose is in this sense a tired, economically irrational and self-defeating idea that tries to be the real world equivalent of the proverbial farmer and his golden goose.

Also worth mentioning that the total wealth of all the world's billioniares today amounts to 13.1 trillion dollars, give or take. The U.S. government alone spend 8 trillion just on its wars in the middle east and Asia between 2001 and and now.

This is only one example out of many of government funds being spent rampantly, in amounts that dwarf the wealth or annual income of the world's billionaires but with little or sometimes even negative productive results. And you'd like to confiscate these very often useful private sources of productive wealth to government bureaucrats that already receive trillions in tax revenues annually but somehow can't seem to make them definitively improve the world?

[anamax]

> The point I'm making is that it if we are trying to find a solution to these problems, the easiest one would be to take the billions in wealth - more wealth that can be spent in hundreds of lifetimes - away from the people who hold it and redistribute it to those who don't.

After you take that stock, who do you sell it to? (Simply confiscating it doesn't move resources around.) What are they not buying so they can buy this stock? More to the point, why are they going to buy that stock if they're not buying it today.

I could buy Amazon, SpaceX, Facebook, Google, stock but don't. Under this system, AWS will be less expensive but what are the odds that it will appreciate significantly? I ask because I buy stock to make money.

Who is better off if I buy SpaceX instead of living on that money while I work on my startup? (If I buy said stock, I'll need to get a job to cover living expenses. Maybe that stock will go up in value so I can live off it later, but I'm eating this week.)

[simonh]

>Yes. But its possible to allocate a value to these assets.

And do what with it? A value is just a number. What would you do with the assets and the value?

I'm not being facetious, I'm really curious how you imagine this working and right now I honestly don't have any idea. Who would control these companies now that they're not owned by their founders and current owners? How would ownership and control work? Who would run the economy and how? I'm imagining millions (a $10m company isn't actually all that big) of founders, investors and CEOs retiring to the country with $10m retirement funds. Viva la Revolution! Who takes over?

What are the world's poor going to do with a handful of shares in e.g. Microsoft, Tesla and Berkshire Hathaway each? probably you don't imagine it working that way, but you won't say how you do imagine it working.

You say 2 options, but I'm not clear what you think the other one is. We have many possible options.

[verisimi]

I'm trying to formulate the problem in broad strokes. I say we have on the one hand huge amounts of wealth in the hands of very few individuals on the one hand, and lots of people that do not have enough on the other. There is a competition for resources and something needs to be changed.

I hope you accept that is a fair if broad formulation of the problem.

If you are neutral in approaching this, and trying to find an answer, which of the following would be easier: a/ to find a way to take wealth from the rich (still leaving more than they can spend in a lifetime) or b/ to micro manage everyone, decreasing population and options for 99.999% of the population?

As a problem, any neutral solution would say it is far more equitable and simpler to tackle the smaller billionaire group. Even though the billionaire class could lose lots of their wealth, they would have plenty to live. Trying to micromanage the world's population is much harder. Do you agree?

Apparently though, taking the wealth from billionaires cannot a conceivable answer. Yes their corporations have ravaged the natural world, yes they are geared to manipulate us via psychology, indoctrination, PR, etc to separate us from our monetary tokens, but somehow it is right that the population as a whole should foot the bill. Why?

But, even the question of what would be the best (fairest, equitable) allocation of resources is moot. The answer is b/ and the planned, controlled implementation has been underway for decades, and is finally materialising. Banking, the governance structure, education, technology, media, corporations, NGOs, etc are already managed by billionaires, and they do not want to give up their wealth or power. The institutions they manage have been bent in order to help them achieve their goals, in the name of serving us and the planet. What we are presently experiencing is a long planned move to greater power - it is not history unfolding naturally.

We are implementing technocracy, and we will be micro-managed. We will come to see it as neo-feudalism. To the 99.999% it will feel like hard slavery. But even this has been negative outlook had been planned and managed - they want us to choose the micromanagement. If the turkeys vote for Christmas, they want to be eaten, right? We are voting to get rid of cars, constrain our use of energy, move to UBI, etc - our lack of understanding and imagination means we vote for slavery.

[mercutio2]

How much wealth do you think would be redistributed if governments confiscated all the assets you think are held be billionaires?

There just isn’t that much wealth to be expropriated. It wouldn’t go very far.

So no, I don’t think you’ll get broad agreement that confiscating wealth from the very rich is even numerically a viable strategy.

Not to mention the fact that historically expropriation isn’t exactly associated with the generation of social welfare.

Now, as it happens, I’m in favor of higher progressive taxes!

But we can’t pretend we can create a social welfare state just by picking on billionaires. The middle class would need to be taxed generously for that to pencil out.

[teknopaul]

In theory you dont have to confiscate wealth or assets for this idea, you could just prevent share owners from taking out and spending more than X per year. And/or have high income tax at the top end of the scale without expropriation of assets. There is a precedent for the viability of this, most billionaire company owners don't take out all their stock and attempt to spend it in their lifetime. People who build up huge enterprises seem happy that others and future generations benefit. Some try to spend it on good causes before they die. An unspendably large pay check or comparatively small pay check compared to company growth does not seem to stop people from trying to build up the business to the day they die. It seems it's power/success rather than cash that is the driver. Many people are happy to have the company own the yacht they are swanning around on.

[verisimi]

Its an impossible answer. I don't think it is a viable strategy either.

I don't think you are right about how much wealth the rich hold. The middle class would not need to be taxed. The illegitimate ruling class should just have the bulk of their wealth confiscated (at least according to the proposal I am trying to air here). The billionaires would still live well, but the rest of would have a chance to utilise all the assets that are currently being sequestrated away from us.

We see articles such as, 'World's 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50%, says Oxfam':

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/21/world-26-ri...

I think this is a joke - we don't even know who holds what as it is all in off-shore, tax free funds and trusts, shares, etc. So the true amounts of wealth are bound to be far higher. Also, if it were possible to resolve the ownership structure, you would see that everything is owned by individuals - only living people own things. People direct the trusts, own the funds, corporations etc.

What I'm trying to get across is the fact that if we were genuinely seeking solutions, releasing this stockpiled wealth would be the simplest. It would be at least deserving of some consideration. And I'm not talking about releasing it into an NGO that directs how culture is to be created.

But we have the opposite - we are moving into a complex, AI managed world, where the poor are going to be paying carbon taxes, water taxes, have more expensive electricity and be unable to ever consider owning anything for themselves. This won't mean that ownership as a concept will have gone - it will mean the billionaire class will own everything, and the rest of us will be demoted to serfs, aka overt slavery.

But as I said I don't think this is viable answer either.

And I'm not sure what the right answer could be. For a start governments are a problem - they do not act for people, they are beholden to corporate interests. The legal system is also a problem - it only works for the rich - how can it be ok for the richest to pay no tax? Let's all not pay tax! Let's pay for the services we want. But, government has become a comfort blanket for most - most people are happy to pay 40% of their income to have their bins collected.

[scatters]

What assets are actually being sequestered? Isn't billionaires' wealth in paper?

If that paper wealth was confiscated and spent, it would lead to a significant increase in demand, so central banks would have to implement sharply contractionary policy, or see all that newly distributed wealth inflated away. How would that leave anyone better off?

[simonh]

You refuse to say what you mean by 'confiscated' or how that might work. Until you do so, it's meaningless and impossible to evaluate as an option. Frankly, you don't seem to have the slightest conception what 'wealth' actually is.

Wealth is control of economic assets - companies, resources and property. Transferring wealth means transferring that control. For example it means taking Tesla away from Elon Musk and giving it to someone else. So what I'm asking is, who would that control go to and how would it be exercised to better serve the average person? If you can't answer that question, you're not making a proposal it's possible to evaluate. I may disagree with Marxists, but at least they have an answer to this question.

[valenterry]

You are making a mistake here though. Avoid thinking about the wealth to distribute! Because that doesn't work. As was already said, you can't take all stocks and sell them, because no one can then buy them.

Rather think about money flows. How much money does e.g. Musk consume? Probably much more than the everage person. But will it be a significant boost to everyone's quality of life if Musk out only consumes as much as the average and donates the rest? Probably not.

There more interesting part is his power and what he does with his money. But that's a totally different point.