[tw04]

There’s a very large chasm between being successful, and having $10s of billions of dollars in net worth.

Do you really think someone worth $100m can’t live a life of absolute luxury and choose how and if they want to ever work a day in their life?

[SoftTalker]

Their $10s of billions is not a vault full of gold coins in their basement, like Scrooge McDuck has. It represents companies and investments that are creating jobs and wealth for lots of people, probably many of the people who post here owe their job to a billionaire. Those things would not exist if "net worth" were somehow capped at $100m.

[tw04]

> Those things would not exist if "net worth" were somehow capped at $100m.

Of course they would, and the world would likely be a much better place for it. Those companies you speak of are mega-corporations that tend to operate outside the laws we all get to follow, and typically result in monopolies or oligopolies.

There are VERY few industries that NEED a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars to operate. In almost all cases you’d be better off with hundreds of companies worth hundreds of millions competing for your business.

[pilom]

Sure they would. The companies would just have to have different ownership models that incentivized more distributed ownership between more people. If we somehow said that no one could own more than $100 million of a company, then for every person who has $1 billion of a company now, there would be 10 people with $100 million instead. This would be a net benefit to society.

[friend_and_foe]

They would be the same 10 people all owning shares of each other's companies if you said one person couldn't own more than x of a company.

Where do all these other people who have the money to own all these shares come from? If they existed they'd be buying the shares right now, and probably own them. You hand wave that this would be a net benefit to society but don't say how, or even demonstrate an understanding of how any of this works.

This is all a misunderstanding of power, where it lies, how it works. We imagine the government has power and we can democratically change the fabric of reality, will our desire into existence with no blowback or fallout. The people that own these companies, they cannot be stopped. They exist because they have to exist, they emerge naturally. Someone always holds all the cards. If you try to pass laws to stop it they'll just hide it from you and do it anyway.

[eestrada]

> There’s a very large chasm between being successful, and having $10s of billions of dollars in net worth.

Because of marginal utility, there really isn't such a large chasm. Every additional dollar has less utility than the dollar that preceded it. Capping what producers can earn or use their means/money on is a good way to stifle innovation and productivity. Also, what indication is there that the government won't squander taxes from this in the same way they have squandered taxes from so many other things?

[tw04]

>Also, what indication is there that the government won't squander taxes from this in the same way they have squandered taxes from so many other things?

Everybody in the US likes to talk about the golden age of the 50s. The top marginal tax rate was pushing 90%.

Empirical data answers your question. Trickle down economics has been a provable disaster with the VAST majority of wealth accumulating in the hands of a few.

[eestrada]

> Everybody in the US likes to talk about the golden age of the 50s. The top marginal tax rate was pushing 90%.

The effective tax rate was never actually that high. There are always carve outs to lower the rate.

https://www.aei.org/economics/public-economics/were-taxes-re...

https://checkyourfact.com/2019/01/09/fact-check-90-percent-t...

> Empirical data answers your question. Trickle down economics has been a provable disaster with the VAST majority of wealth accumulating in the hands of a few.

At no point did I mention "trickle down economics". I mentioned innovation and productivity, things that are easily measured. The gap between productivity and wages in the US only widely diverged once going off of hard money. This is because the upper class own assets (largely unaffected by monetary inflation) and the lower/middle class own currency (heavily affected by monetary inflation). If the empirical data you speak of is so evident, please provide some references for it. I don't subscribe to "trickle down economics" so I don't know anything about it.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/