[socialismisok]

Maybe it's time to consider whether we're better off not having such concentrations of wealth...

Let Musk keep $5B, he'll be able to live luxuriously forever on that. But he won't be able to ruin thousands of lives so easily.

[krapp]

The maximum value any human being should be able to control as wealth in any form - property, stock, rights, cash, what have you, is $1 million dollars. Anything more gets appropriated and redistributed by the state.

More than rich enough to live on, but nowhere near rich enough to buy governments and corporations on a whim.

[decafninja]

1 million is both a lot, but also not a lot, in 2022. Especially depending on where you live.

There are so many nuances in play that you can’t really put a hard number to this.

[kibwen]

Make it a billion and it would still be strictly better for society. Hell, burn the money in a pile if you object to it being given to the state and it would still suffice. You don't need to completely remove inequality, or even get anywhere close, you just need to prevent the unilateral exercise of such tremendous power. Power must be decentralized.

The irony is that if you want to believe in the power of a market economy (which I do, or at least did before the modern era), you must oppose the massive concentration of wealth because it distorts our markets to the point of irrational uselessness.

[ryandrake]

There has to be some kind of limit. Take an extreme example. Would it be OK to have a single individual (or company) worth $1e24? A septillionaire could give $1 trillion to every person on the planet every year for 100 years and still have 99.99% of his money left. How much power and influence over the world would someone like that have, while the rest have comparatively close to zero? I think we all agree that wouldn't work for a functioning society. We probably also agree that $1million is probably too low a limit. So it's not a question of whether there should be a limit but where that threshold is.

[SuoDuanDao]

I don't disagree that there has to be a limit. If the house of Windsor could own most of the world in the twentieth century and lose it, there's clearly a limit.

What I disagree with is the benefit of an explicit limit that's formally set once and can't be updated. And if it could be updated the limit would be constantly ahead of where the richest person is now and meaningless. Markets are an ecosystem, ecosystems are self-correcting. In large part, markets are the self-correcting behavior of humans valuing tangible things writ large. The market sets the limit, the idea of an autocratic limit set from outside such a system because we don't like the signal it's sending just strikes me as hubristic.

[ryandrake]

The minimum wage is a limit "set from outside" and most people (besides very strict idealist Libertarians) agree that it's a generally good idea. We might disagree on minor implementation nit-picks.

I think it's a mistake to single out one single economic system: specifically unlimited, unrestrained free-market capitalism, and frame that system as the universe's base, "natural" system. Doing so conveniently lets you frame deviations from that system as "unnatural" or "autocratic". Unlimited free-market capitalism is not some natural, universal frame of reference--it is a deliberate choice made and enforced by governments/people, and that choice can be un-made by people.

We mostly agree that a minimum wage that can change with political pressure is a good economic policy. Nothing but reasoning and political will prevents us from agreeing that a maximum wage, or maximum net worth, could be good economic policy.

[Ekaros]

Million is not much, at very reasonable 2% or 3% it would be 30000 a year. Or just burning it straight up 50000 in 20 years. That is actually not that much money these days.

5 or 10 million starts to look lot more reasonable limit.

[concordDance]

So you think hedge fund account managers should only ever manage up to $1M in assets? Seems very inefficient...

(Snark aside, this idea is completely unfeasible for a number of reasons you can probably think of given a couple of minutes)

[SuoDuanDao]

I think GP's point was that 1 billion is also completely unfeasible.

'there should be no billionaires' is just a dumb idea put out for impact more than any hope of achieving it. When I try to steelman the idea I come up with the fact that smaller amounts of capital can be allocated more efficiently, and that society should therefore try to ensure capital naturally flows to individuals with less rather than more assets. Not a bad point, Warren Buffet definitely made higher returns early in his career and he credits that in large part to being able to pick targets better when investing millions than when investing billions.

But going from 'billionaires are a sign of capital inefficiency' to 'lets ban billionaires' rhetoric posits using violence to seize or suppress billionaires capital, which requires a larger concentration of capital than the billionaires have now. It's a statement at war with its own ideals, I shouldn't even be giving it the oxygen necessary to refute it.

[socialismisok]

10% annual tax on wealth above $1 billion would get us pretty close.

[concordDance]

Try and introduce that and you'll run right into the impossibility of measuring wealth. E.g. what if Bill Gates just gives all his many over 1 billion to a charity or trust? Say, the Gates foundation (see wikipedia for the good work that charity has done)? Is the wealth "his" given he still has a great deal of control over how it gets spent?

Try a wealth tax like that and the Musk charitable foundation is founded with the goals of fighting climate change via electric cars and making a Mars colony.

[SuoDuanDao]

once again, assuming someone can impose that tax already implies a greater concentration of power than the billionaire himself. It's a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease.

[socialismisok]

That's probably a bit extreme for me (and I'm a self described communist). A million dollars of property is a fraction of a house in major urban areas who have seen big upswings in home values.

That said, if we can decommidify housing, I'd be much more willing to discuss wealth caps in the millions of dollars.