[andsoitis]

> You don't make 2 billion dollars just by doing honest work for 94 years.

It is absolutely possible to make that (and more) by doing honest work.

> If the average man's labor is worth $15/hr, and he never spent (nor was taxed) a dime of that, Al-Fayed was either more than 700 times smarter, faster, stronger, and harder-working than the average man... or he acquired that wealth by doing something other than hard work.

Other reasons someone can vastly outperform others:

- more leverage from one's work (e.g. plumbing vs. software engineering, or starting a business that employs 100 people rather than sole proprietorship)

- higher demand for one's skills

- capitalize on luck (e.g. he had very influential connections early on that he leveraged)

- ambition

- risk taking

- etc.

[runnerup]

> It is absolutely possible to make that (and more) by doing honest work.

I’d agree with you under our current ethical system.

Under my personal moral system, I think anyone “capturing” $1 billion as a “portion of the value they created” most likely involves greatly undervaluing the contributions of the system they built upon/in (which should have been captured by taxes and reinvested into that system), as well as much of the labor they employed (other key employees were probably given too little equity, and much of the bottom rings are likely underpaid on an hourly basis for the value they provide).

Personally I’d like to see significantly higher taxes on top-end earners to help allow the “system” which provided the infrastructure, skilled and educated labor, and favorable market environment, to capture a little bit more of the value it provided to billionaires and reinvest that in K-12 education to create a strong workforce for the next generation of business owners to rely on.

I personally think even with say, an absurdly high tax rate of 90% on earnings over a billion dollars, folks like Elon Musk and Sam Walton and Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos would still have nearly as much personal incentive to earn money past their first $1 Billion.

I personally feel that Jeff Bezos would absolutely still fight for growing his net worth from $1B to $13B at 90% tax rate, instead of $1B to $130B at his current tax rate.

[IG_Semmelweiss]

IF Sam Walton etc. contribution is overvalued.

Hundreds of thousands of customers that willingly gave them money, would seem to disagree.

[runnerup]

That is an incredibly shallow and fairly snarky response. I can do a lot of legwork to fill out a more robust position based on assumptions about people’s beliefs who make quips like this.

—————

I think the most important thing this misses are that there are more parties to an economic enterprise than just a single seller and their buyers. At one extreme, let’s envision a fictional world:

Walmart builds a small empire on the back of public highways. They pay fair taxes which allows the highways to capture and reinvest the value they created for Walmart.

Walmart then lobbies government leaders to eliminate their taxes. Walmart now pays no taxes.

Walmart continues to extract value from the public highways but no longer shares that value with the government which created the value.

I’m not saying this is literally what’s happening - I’m just using it as an example to show how a company can provide great prices to customers, while inappropriately capturing value created by others. This is just to show that your model posited above fails to take into account some pretty large effects in the real world.

[snapplebobapple]

Plus the system lets you do highly risky things and be paid handsomely if you are right, so by definition you will get these guys and this is wonderful because we keep a lot of the benefit they create. This is the main end feature that makes it work in my opinion. There is a smart and large part of the population motivated to take huge risks on their ideas by guys winning like this and when they win we usually benefit because they cant capture 100% of the value they create and if they lose they absorb the cost. As more of the downside is socialized (i.e. crony capitalism and marxism) the system breaks down.