[FYYFFF]

Interesting interview. He is yet another extremely wealthy man, who built his fortune on the back of Government that now claims that government is the problem... Very few businesses are as subsidized as air travel. Fed Ex could not / would not exist without the government aide it is provided. Air traffic control, airports, etc.

This toxic hubris is a big part of what is wrong with our society. These men no longer look at their fortune as a series of lucky breaks, good timing and countless hands-up by others and their government. Things that are only possible in a society that paves the way ahead of them... Instead they think they and they alone are the reason that they're successful.

The fact is that everyone "stands on the shoulders of giants".

It seems that the concept of giving back and paying forward is absent in these men. Instead, they believe they're special and anoiteted by God to drive us in a particular direction. What a change from the 19th century Robber Barrens who gifted us institutions and built the very foundation of a reasoned society (schools, libraries, research institutions etc..). Today? We get personal rockets, politically motivated think tanks and awful narcissistic ideologues who want to rule over us...

For every Gates, there are a dozen Zucks masquerading as royalty and proving that absolute power (money) absolutely corrupts.

[patentatt]

I don't even want their 'charity,' I just want systems in place to prevent anyone from accumulating that amount of wealth in the first place. First, the basis of philanthropy is to have all the 'normals' grovel at the feet of the all-mighty wealthy begging for handouts. It stokes the wealthy persons ego and also gives them additional power. Second, there's no reason to believe that the wealthy philanthropist has any better idea of how to deploy their capital than the other institutions that would otherwise. Look at Gates, for example. He spent a decade or so and billions of dollars reshaping US public education and at the end of it basically admitted complete failure. That money should have never been his to direct in the first place. So no, we should want their greed exposed and not papered over by philanthropy so that the public eventually realizes that people accumulating and hoarding that much wealth is damaging to society and enact appropriate taxation schemes to claw back what they have stolen and prevent anyone else from ever doing it again.

[tomcam]

How much wealth should one be allowed to accumulate?

[wizardforhire]

We’ve already answered this question in the US as a society time and again.

Heres sort primer to for anyone that is not up to speed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_antit...

[tomcam]

Sorry I don’t see that answer in the linked article, which is about antitrust, not “hoarding wealth”. Since it’s been answered time and again could you just quote the part that answers my question?

I am asking about this passage:

> So no, we should want their greed exposed and not papered over by philanthropy so that the public eventually realizes that people accumulating and hoarding that much wealth is damaging to society and enact appropriate taxation schemes to claw back what they have stolen and prevent anyone else from ever doing it again.

It states explicitly that people are hoarding wealth and must be punished for it. For example, if your 401(k) is worth half a million dollars and your house is worth $1 million, a person living on $300 a month in a less privileged country might be forgiven for assuming that you should be punished for “hoarding“ wealth.

So I’m trying to understand what number hoarding starts at, and what the punishment should be.

[patentatt]

The short answer is that's a political question along the same lines as what should the minimum wage be, or what should the rate of taxation be? There is no one right answer for all times and all situations, and it should be determined through public debate and input via voting. We as a society operate in this manner in all sorts of ways, and it's not at all inconceivable that we could do the same here.

I think the guideposts should be to put limits on how much influence a single person should have in our society, or to limit the amount of influence we unintentionally give one person just by participating in the economy. For example, if I buy a product from a company that has a large advertising spend on Facebook, I am indirectly, perhaps even unknowingly adding to the personal wealth of Facebook's owner just because of some decisions that someone else made. Now the libertarian response to that is to research each and every product you buy, but that quickly becomes an impossible task for any one person to do, much less every person. Not only is the quantity of information too large, but some information is simply inaccessible to the public at large.

So, to answer your question more directly, I can give you my personal opinion. I think capital gains should be taxed the same as regular income, inheritance taxed as regular income, unrealized gains taxed as regular income (above some threshold perhaps), and progressive taxation to asymptotically approach 100%. Right now our top tax bracket ends at 37% at $539,900 income for an individual. It's at 35% for incomes from $215,950 to $539,900. I'd call that roughly a 2% rise for a ~250k rise for back-of-the-envelope calculation purposes. So linearly extrapolating that out, maybe the top tax bracket becomes 100% after somewhere around $10mm annual income. And since you pay taxes on that $10mm, you maybe can accumulate somewhere in the neighborhood of $5mm a year. And that's generous in my opinion, because lower income tax payers pay an 8% increase (24% to 32%) to go from ~$90k to ~$170k, so it's not like its a linear function for workers.

And then how do we 'catch up' on back taxes? You kind of establish a concept of a 'maximum wage' at some point in a progressive taxation scheme that approaches 100%. I think one fair-ish way of doing it would be to cap wealth at that level, so that if the maximum income is let's say $5mm, you can keep $5mm for each working year of your life, anything beyond that being due as back taxes. So if you're 65 you could still have ~$235mm, which seems like plenty to me. And when that person dies, their children's inheritance is taxed as regular income as well and effectively capped at $5mm or so (whatever it turns out to be), so there's little point to dying with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank.

Maybe not those exact numbers, but somewhere around there seems reasonable to me. But my opinion is just one opinion, and a big change like this should be determined through the political process with inputs from everybody.

[tomcam]

Thanks for a well-reasoned response (whose conclusions I view as disastrously bad). I genuinely appreciate your thought process.

I do agree completely agree with the final paragraph.

I’d prefer a simple 20% federal consumption tax on everything we buy, period, and no corporate welfare of any kind.

[foobarian]

I think one really good feature of Western capitalism is that the corporate sphere provides greedy sociopaths with an escape valve before they turn the path of Hitler, Putin, Stalin, etc. As hard it is to stand and watch these folks get rich on the backs of little people, it is still preferable to them climbing the military dictatorship ladder.

[beaconstudios]

It's a classic "great man of history" narrative, painting a Randian picture of the world being pushed forward by the overwhelming efforts of a few people. The reality is that nobody works hard enough to earn a billion dollars - that amount of money can only be made by short-changing the people who do the work.

[avalys]

Do you think founders should retain ownership of the companies they create?

Fred Smith’s wealth comes from the notional value of his ownership of a small fraction of an enormously successful and societally useful business. It’s not as if he has a bank account with billions of dollars in profits paid as salary in it, which you seem to believe.

On what basis do you think he should have been compelled to sell his stake in the company he created?

Yes, you’re correct that he didn’t earn a billion dollars. He created a company that investors value at $60B, and his remaining 6% share of it is worth $4B. That $60B was not taken from anyone. It was created - out of thin air - by organizing workers in a way that the world needed.

[beaconstudios]

> Do you think founders should retain ownership of the companies they create?

No. The idea that a company is something you "own" rather than a group of people doing some kind of economic activity is a social construct, and one designed to disenfranchise the people doing the ongoing work. A company is a collection of assets and people - to own assets makes sense, to own other people's labour in an ongoing capacity does not.

> On what basis do you think he should have been compelled to sell his stake in the company he created?

I don't think he should - I think we should change the system that allows people to be worth billions off the backs of others. I don't want redistribution, I want reform.

[AnimalMuppet]

So, FedEx owns a bunch of airplanes. Billions and billions of dollars worth of airplanes. Who bought them? The owners bought them. So you have three options:

1. The owners get some property rights ("ownership") for the money they put up to buy the airplanes and related other tools. Or,

2. When an employee is hired by FedEx, they have to come up with... something of the order of $60 billion / 100,000 employees, to pay your share of the enterprise you are becoming part of. Or,

3. We as a society don't have any capital-intensive companies. Who's going to buy the tools, if the one putting up the money doesn't get ownership? (And don't say "government". Government running private enterprise almost always winds up with too much mismanagement and graft.)

[beaconstudios]

These are valid concerns to raise, but can be addressed. In actuality, the investors (which can also be the owners but not necessarily) provide the company with capital to purchase these planes. That, or the company uses its own profits to do so. Either way, the money is the property of the company, not the owners.

In the former (investor) case the payment can be structured as a loan, and/or investors can become stakeholders as part of a multi-stakeholder cooperative, with their own cut of the earnings. In the latter case it's no issue because the company is buying things with its own resources.

[metadat]

While undeniably true, this view of reality may not be popular in this forum (unfortunately).

[adampk]

If a founder starts a company, a company that builds a very helpful product and service, hires employees and pays them creating jobs and ways for them to work on interesting problems, I am not trying to defend the other side of your point, I just honestly don't see where the "exploitation" comes into play?

[beaconstudios]

To take a minimal case for an example - if I hire two people, pay them $20,000 each to produce widgets and then sell those widgets for $100,000 a year respectively, and keep the remaining $60,000, would you consider that exploitation considering that I contribute nothing to the continued economic activity? This is the form of exploitation I was referring to.

For a contrasting example, I prefer cooperatives where the people involved in the business control it democratically (which can still include directors and managers).

[tomcam]

Do you consider it exploitation when someone voluntarily takes the $20,000 job? Is it exploitation when the person who risked the money to start the business loses it all and goes bankrupt?

How is providing the two jobs not contributing to the economy?

How do you clear $60,000 on widgets? What about the costs of supplies, insurance, compliance to government regulations, city/state/county/federal taxes, import duties,R&D, documentation, advertising, and so on?

[beaconstudios]

Exploitation isn't when somebody is forced to do something, it's when one person profits off the work of another. So in my example, the job is exploitative, yes. Having a business fail is not exploitation.

I didn't make an argument about whether it was contributing to the economy or not, but that doesn't matter - slavery contributed to the economy too, but it's also morally wrong.

It's a stripped down hypothetical on purpose, to get to the heart of the question. Non-labour material concerns are left as an exercise for the reader.

[adampk]

Again, I am not trying to to defend the counter but am I missing something or is there quit a large logical gap in your hypothetical?

I assume if I am doing the hiring, then I will also be responsible for the additional hiring/firing, selecting the right talent, choosing the right way to compete against existing product/services? Is that not continued activity as I grow my start-up into a category-defining enterprise? How to allocate that profit, into R&D, more people, sales, etc, aka growing a company?

Then after doing that for 10 years that company is now worth billions of dollars and I own it. I don't see where in this chain I have done the exploiting?

[beaconstudios]

So what you're describing is the work of a director - work that should be paid but that I intentionally excluded from my example because a lot of people just think by default that directors should "own" the company because that's the status quo.

I still think that directors should be well compensated commensurate with their capability and role. I just think that they shouldn't be able to exclusively control and take the profits generated by the work of everybody involved. Corporations are autocratic or oligarchic in that way - this leads to the select few that society seems worthy of profit control having more power in our society. This is because the owners can keep workers' wages as low as the market will sustain while inflating their own total compensation to absurd proportions, as we've seen. With a cooperative structure everybody involved has a stake in controlling the company, so executives have to take everybody's needs including the workers, into account, instead of just looking out for themselves and investors.

As for where the exploitation comes in - it probably comes down to different perspectives on the word. To me, it's exploitation if one person is profiting off the labour of another. Of course in a company the shareholders are often also working, but if a company grows to a billion dollars from a million its not because the directors are working 100x harder.

[metadat]

At it's core, capitalism is about maximally exploiting labor.

Some companies treat their employees better (Costco) or worse (Walmart), but at the end of the day it's all a byproduct of the structure and behaviors rewarded in capitalism.

The "winners" exploit the hardest, otherwise potential profits are being left on the table and it opens an opportunity for another company (who is willing to go the extra mile to exploit harder) to enter and offer lower prices. Subsequently, the working middle class and poor people (the largest segments of USA population) have their own harsh realities to deal with, and don't have the luxury of choosing more humane yet expensive alternatives when they are purchasing goods and services.

[e40]

And who here thinks the way Amazon warehouse employees are treated is a good thing? Drivers, too. Peeing in bottles. 14 hr shifts. Buffer companies between Amazon and the customer, so they can easily skirt labor laws, etc.

[parasubvert]

This falsely assumes that labor is the source of all value. It's not.

[metadat]

I'm open to being wrong, but can you elaborate on what sorts of real value can be created through means other than labor? In my experience, not much happens in life unless someone puts in the elbow grease.

[mindvirus]

Obviously poverty is a major issue, and as a society we can and should be doing a lot more to address structural inequality. However, is there a time or place in history when/where would be better to be poor than today in a modern day first-world capitalist country? To be clear, I'm not arguing that we're anywhere near an ideal or perfect state for this, but what are the alternatives that you see?

[beaconstudios]

I know this place skews libertarian/neoliberal, but I try to inject a little spice where I can ;)

[tomcam]

How much money can a person make before they start shortchanging others?

[beaconstudios]

Infinity, if they're not exploiting people, by definition. If WhatsApp was a coop and still sold to Facebook for billions, they wouldn't be exploited.

[tomcam]

Is a co-op as a whole allowed to make a profit? I’m confused. In a previous response you said making a profit is exploitation

[beaconstudios]

Depends on who you ask - I'm fine with it and haven't said otherwise. What is a problem is when one person profits off the work of another (as in, pays them less than their fair share), which is basically all salaried employment.

[tomcam]

If the co-op is sold at a profit, and those profits are distributed to the workers (who obviously all put in the exact same amount of work and time, right?) then they are profiting off the work of others, aren't they?

[bell-cot]

Those 19th century Robber Barons were, some exceptions aside, notably less charitable than most sepia-toned histories makes them out to be. Their 19th century abuses of workers also make almost anything happening in the modern first world look like coddling by comparison.

And back then, mainstream Christian churches were a far more important social institution. Acting as the "generous Christian" was probably far more important to one's standing in "well-born" society.

[kfarr]

Yes air travel is subsidized, and if you look up ground transportation it's even worse. The Fed pays for insanely huge amounts of motor vehicle infrastructure for which ground shippers barely pay a small portion relative to their resource usage and negative externalities.

[tesseract]

The Fed[eral Reserve] specifically? I'm simultaneously surprised and not.

[tomcam]

For clarification, no. I am certain that person met the federal government. The Federal Reserve is a private enterprise (disgustingly) that only takes from the government. It does not give.

[kfarr]

Correct I meant the federal government, not the federal reserve.

[MisterTea]

> The fact is that everyone "stands on the shoulders of giants".

This phrase always bothered me because the giant isn't a single person but a stack of people. Knowledge is cumulative.

[missedthecue]

air ports are funded by landing fees. FedEx pays as much as $7k every single time they land.

[FYYFFF]

Not fully. Nor are the air traffic control costs paid by airlines. The entire ATC infrastructure is government run and funded and most of the airports are run by local governments. Very few airports actually make money or are profitable for the agency that runs them. They are subsidized. Done with the idea that they are essential for communities and are a part of our underlying infrastructure. \

Also: look at what FedEx pays in Fed taxes. Its zero most years.

[missedthecue]

Airlines aren't the only people who use air traffic control. The military has more than 5x more aircraft than the largest airline in the US (American). And 8x more than Fedex. Then there are all the general aviation aircraft.