[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?