[Aarostotle]

We live in the most equal time in human history. The actual standard of living of the average person in most developed countries rivals that of royal families from just a couple of centuries ago.

Don't confuse monetary inequality with wealth inequality. Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units.

What are the actual differences between the life of the average American worker and Jeff Bezos? It's not that big. Jeff Bezos has the ability to buy luxuries most of us could never dream of, sure, but what about the essentials?

Nearly everyone can get fresh, nutritious meat, as well as fruits and vegetables. High quality milk and dairy products. Frozen goods. Bacterial epidemics are unheard of. Our recent viral pandemic increased annual deaths by about 10-15% over baseline — compare this to epidemics which used to wipe out entire populations. Life expectancy for all people, regardless of class, ranges between 2-3x human life expectancy in a state of nature (roughly 30 years). You can travel hundreds of miles in a day for only a few hours of labor worth of money. You can cross continents or oceans with a few day's of labor worth of money.

Sure, Bezos can have a fancier car with someone driving or his own jet with a pilot flying, but at the end of the day, you can both take off from LAX and land at JFK 6 hours later. You're both going to eat 2,000 calories of nutritious food. You both have running water. And, you're sitting here, both able to communicate with everyone in the world instantly.

Let's not buy into the political propaganda about inequality, the reality of the situation is right in front of our eyes.

[ryandrake]

> What are the actual differences between the life of the average American worker and Jeff Bezos?

Here are just a few massive differences between the life of the average American worker and Jeff Bezos that have nothing to do with buying luxury goods:

1. Jeff Bezos can get an audience with any Congressperson, any State governor, most countries's heads of state and probably the President of the US, with a telephone call and likely with less than 24 hours notice. That person will listen to and likely be influenced by what he says.

2. Jeff Bezos's public statements can move global financial markets.

3. Jeff Bezos can (and does) own and control mass media companies which can amplify and downplay political issues and shape the outcomes of elections.

4. Through philanthropy, Jeff Bezos can, if he wants, simply decide what counts as a "public good" to be funded and supported, as opposed to the public deciding through the democratic process. Bezos is capable of offering an amount of support for his causes that dwarfs government-funding. We are merely lucky that billionaire philanthropists have so far focused on good things like curing malaria and not on evil.

[its_ethan]

None of what you've said about Bezos is dependent on him having wealth though. If you could somehow construct a functioning society without money, there would still be someone who has the exact same power/influence that you've described here.

Basically, when you remove money, something else becomes the currency you're describing. Taking away billionaires wealth might actually make it harder to identify the people who have this influence. Rather than news outlets writing articles every other day about Jeff, you'd have some shady person high up in some unelected bureaucracy getting to wield this power. How is that better?

[chrisseaton]

> Jeff Bezos can get an audience with any Congressperson, any State governor, most countries's heads of state and probably the President of the US, with a telephone call

Can he?

[LunaSea]

Didn't you see how US state politicians danced to get the new Amazon offices located in their state?

[chrisseaton]

So some politicians took calls when it was directly relevant to their area of concern?

[SketchySeaBeast]

Lots of America struggles under the weight of trying to pay for basic health care and dental (50% of Americans have medical debt[1]) and for many education is utterly out of reach. 11.4% of America lives in poverty (poverty being defined as "a lack of those goods and services which are commonly taken for granted by members of mainstream society"). It's disingenuous to look at the state of things and say that because we have cellphones and cavemen didn't we're all doing fine.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/debgordon/2021/10/13/50-of-amer...

[memish]

They struggle more with being overweight. Most humans in most of human history struggled with having enough food and water to survive. They would trade their struggle for ours in a heartbeat.

Americans are the people who complain when the wifi goes down or someone says the wrong word.

[SketchySeaBeast]

And cavemen would have thought the Roman's life pretty good too, but I don't know how that relates to the average American and billionaires unless it's an attempt to silence people and tell them to know their place. Societal inequality can still be a very real issue even if we're collectively on average doing better than a 19th century chimney sweep.

[FabHK]

> We live in the most equal time in human history. [...] Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units.

Well, then, surely it doesn't matter if we tax away 90% of Bezo's wealth, right? His living standard will be same.

[Aarostotle]

It's not ours to take. Where did it come from? Bezos produced it at Amazon. He has a moral right to keep it.

Beyond that, though, you can only tax away 90% of billionaires' wealth once. That whole game depends on them continuing to produce the same amount of wealth, even though they won't receive any of the returns. (Remember also that most of these people reinvest the majority of this money into their ventures, meaning that taking these dollars will have a compounding negative effect on future productivity.) Look at history. Your superficially benevolent idea has been tried, it always results in mass hunger and death.

Why would they keep taking on so much responsibility? To raise your standard of living? Why should they care about you?

Any of those guys are capable of becoming a surf bum, living on $30k a year, but instead, they build massive companies that deliver incredible value to the rest of us — they get their money because we pay them for that value. Would you rather incentivize Elon Musk to keep working on Tesla or would you prefer him to retire?

[FabHK]

> It's not ours to take. Where did it come from? Bezos produced it at Amazon. He has a moral right to keep it.

So you are advocating 0% taxes?

That argument (of type Econ 101/Ayn Rand) is misguided, because the world is not as envisaged by Econ 101 (or Ayn Rand, who famously enjoyed Social Security and Medicare).

Counter arguments:

1. Society has made available the gift of the limited liability company, to encourage risk taking and entrepreneurship.

2. Society has made available streets, canalisation, schools, defence, police, fire fighters, certain forms of insurance, etc., for a simple reason: market failures. Those goods would be provided in insufficient (suboptimal) number by the free market due to: strong positive externalities, non-excludability, adverse selection, and many other reasons.

For those (and many other reasons) government does have the right to taxation. The question then is the optimal level.

> Your superficially benevolent idea has been tried, it always results in mass hunger and death.

Yeah, the poor Northern Europeans, starving to death... Somewhat higher income, capital gains, estate, and maybe even wealth taxes won't result in mass starvation.

> they get their money because we pay them for that value.

Again, a neat Econ 101 idea that fails to take into account reality. "salary = marginal product" is only true under entirely idealised assumptions of perfect competition [1], in particular no economies of scale and no network effects. That is most definitely not the case for today's tech companies, which quite obviously have monopolistic tendencies, thus extraction of monopoly profit (rent) which accrues, guess to whom, the boss.

And, for what it's worth, if Elon becomes a surf bum, or twitters full time, we'll still get great electric vehicles, maybe a tad later.

[1] Here's a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing...

[Grustaf]

The problem with rich people is not that they live too comfortably, but that a person like Bezos can buy an important media property and control the political narrative that millions of people are exposed to.

[FabHK]

While I don't agree with your conclusions, part of your arguments are correct:

> Measure by the standard of living, not monetary units.

From the paper below:

"This reflects considerably stronger global convergence in quality of life than in income"

https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/technology-and-dev...