[Kon5ole]

In the western democratic world billionaires are an inevitable side-effect of having a high standard of living for the general population. If you create a company that employs a million people and manages to remain profitable you'll be a billionaire even if you don't want to. The only way for you to not be a billionaire is to give up control of your company to someone else who will then be the billionaire.

We have yet to discover a system of government that both allows for a generally high standard of living yet at the same time prevents billionaires. Every variant that has been tried so far has inevitably led to total misery for the entire population.

I think the solution is not to prevent billionaires, but to prevent their ability to affect politicians, being very strict about anti-trust and so on.

By no means easy but I think preventing billionaires from even existing is a dystopian nightmare in any scenario.

[M95D]

No. Billionaires are a result of avoidable taxation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_avoidance

Have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality . There are lots of countries there with a very high standard of living AND a low economic inequality, mostly in Europe.

[Kon5ole]

That makes no sense to me - you don't become a billionaire just by avoiding taxes, you have to actually create at least a billion dollars worth of surplus value first. And the only way to create a billion dollars worth of surplus value is to create many more billions of total value.

If you want Jeff Bezos to pay taxes on the value of Amazon (which is the measure by which he is a billionaire) you basically force him to sell Amazon. How else can he pay the taxes?

In such a system, where you will be forced to sell your success, Bezos (or anyone else) would never have created Amazon.

It's worth keeping in mind that Amazon generates several billions of dollars in taxes every year. Every one of the million plus employees of Amazon pays taxes, every transaction is taxed, every service Amazon buys from other companies is taxed and so on. If you kill Amazon by going after Bezos, you have caused society a net loss, even if you get all his money.

Economic equality is a different topic IMO. If a teacher makes 10% the money of a doctor you get problems in society since teachers can't buy houses priced for doctors and so on, but the difference in wages between workers has nothing to do with billionaires. Nobody became a billionaire from earning wages.

This has to be solved from the bottom up, not from the top down. Increase minimum wages, dictate working conditions and so on. You don't have to target billionaires to do that. Most countries in Europe has at least one billionaire, in fact lately the wealthiest person in the world is French.

[M95D]

You concentrated on Jeff Bezos' taxes. I should have been more specific.

What each individual billionaire pays (or not) in taxes, depends on his nationality, current residence and the specifics of his income. But avoinding taxes happens at every level: avoid company profit taxes, avoid company VAT (or even do VAT returns fraud), avoid import taxes, avoid individual income taxes, avoid VAT on goods that the billionaire buys, avoid property taxes (both individual and company property), avoid luxury taxes, get income from non-taxed sources, etc. There are probably hundreds more ways to avoid taxes than an ordinary person like me can imagine.

> If you want Jeff Bezos to pay taxes on the value of Amazon (which is the measure by which he is a billionaire) you basically force him to sell Amazon. How else can he pay the taxes?

So? Don't we all sell our work to pay taxes? I live in east-Eurpean country. Currently, aprox. half of my work value (as eval'd by my employer) goes to taxes and mandatory services provided by the state (health, pension fund, etc.). How much did he pay?

Taxes vs declared income don't make much sense for a billionaire. I wish we could know the value of the goods and services he got (paid or free, as in "this is the company's car, not mine") in a year, vs. his taxes.

> pay taxes on the value of Amazon

AFAIK, there are no taxes on the value of a company, except maybe property taxes in some places.

> This has to be solved from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Mostly true, but not enough. Creating extremely wealthy individuals should be avoided, because money brings power and power influences politics/policy, including (or especially) bottom-up reforms. To take Amazon as an example: I suspect the management would do anything to avoid a minimum wage increase or improving working conditions.

[adamhp]

Amazon's "value" comes from the insane profits they generate each year. Profits they earn by taking advantage of labor (not paying them enough, not giving them breaks, not hiring enough people to staff warehouses), and by taking advantage of not paying taxes on those profits with creative schemes. It's not about making Jeff Bezos pay individual taxes, it's about making corporations incentivized to not suck the soul out of every human being in their supply chain in order to maximize profits to result in some higher valuation. People that hold your view tend to look at Amazon's value in a vacuum and say "Wow! Amazon produces so much value, they deserve it!", but you ignore that they do it off the backs of labor and off public infrastructure (roads, etc.) and have been for years.

> In such a system, where you will be forced to sell your success, Bezos (or anyone else) would never have created Amazon.

This is simply conjecture and is not provable in any way. In fact, there are plenty of centi-millionaires and billionaires outside of America (in countries that require them to pay their fair share of taxes) that are doing just fine.

[Kon5ole]

>It's not about making Jeff Bezos pay individual taxes,

You are commenting in a thread that started with a statement that the very existence of billionaires is a problem, and a followup claimed that billionaires exist because they don't pay taxes.

My point is that the mechanism that creates billionaires in western societies is beneficial since the same mechanism generates a higher standard of living for everyone, not just the billionaires. It also generates way more taxes than the billionaires can pay even if you forced them.

I don't see how you can remove the billionaires without killing the mechanism. It has been tried, and has never worked out.

To be clear, Im not talking about people becoming billionaires in dictatorships or by owning the natural resources of entire nations. That's a different matter entirely.

I completely agree that one of the actual problems is that corporations are incentivized to treat workers as poorly as possible btw, and that is a problem that is actually fixable.

Whether billionaires pay a "fair share" or not depends on what you consider fair. I don't think basing tax on a market valuation of something you own is fair and I am not aware of it being done in any western nation. You get taxed when you sell shares, not by simply owning them.

The only example I can think of where it kind of happened is Jack Ma in China.

[cxr]

> I don't see how you can remove the billionaires without killing the mechanism. It has been tried, and has never worked out.

You are implicitly claiming that if you write the tax laws in such a way that every dollar of income past $999,999,999 will be taxed 100%, then that kills the mechanism. And you say it as if it's self-evident that it's true. From here, it seems to be self-evidently untrue. So what gives—why do we disagree on this? Why am I wrong?

[carlosjobim]

> There are lots of countries there with a very high standard of living AND a low economic inequality, mostly in Europe.

A low amount of economic inequality among the lower class, absolutely. European rich are absolutely as extravagantly wealthy as any American or Asian moguls. Their assets are nowhere close to where Wikipedia can account for them.

At least in America there is an impression that an industrialist or tech genius can become a billionaire. In Europe you need to belong to banking families or have deep tentacles into government.

[watoc]

Rather than focusing on billionaires I think the overarching issue is the widening wealth gap. this is not sustainable in the long run and will lead to catastrophes for our society.