[NumberWangMan]

This is the best argument I've heard against billionaires--one I had never heard before: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/billionaires-surplus-and-re....

I think most arguments for/against the existence of people with such wealth are basically capitalists saying they deserve it for creating value or that we need to incentivize wealth creation, and socialists arguing past them saying that it's just wrong for anyone to have so much more than anyone else.

This is the first time I've heard anyone making a good argument that actually, even IF you are a staunch capitalist, and you only consider people who made their money without leaning on government to bend the rules in their favor, maybe billionaires don't deserve all their wealth.

[sojournerc]

Thanks for sharing that. Great way to think about _where_ the billionaires' wealth comes from and where it could've been instead.

[kortilla]

It’s not very good because it somehow thinks billionaires just have that money that can be easily taken. Most billionaires don’t have anywhere near a billion in cash and huge chunks are just ownership stakes in a company.

It’s not just cash that accumulated and could be better used somewhere else. It’s a FMV applied to a much larger portion of what the liquid market can support. Nobody gave Bezos $200 billion instead of giving it to charity. He just has ownership of multiple companies with share prices that when multiplied times his stake land at that value.

So it’s not surplus at all and it’s just instead, “here appears to be a valuable company, let’s seize and liquidate 10% to fund some socialist endeavors”. It makes no difference if it’s one owner or 10 at that point. It’s illogical because it’s not about wealth at all.

The author of that article based the entire premise on Jeff taking in $200 billion in profit himself, which is so uninformed the whole thing can be more or less dismissed outright.

[a_bonobo]

Yet when billionaires make huge donations, it's usually in stock:

>Warren Buffett has donated another $4.64 billion of Berkshire Hathaway stock to five charities, boosting his total giving since 2006 to more than $51 billion.

https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/warren-buffett-donat...

So which one is it? They can't have cash because it's all in stock, so they shouldn't be able to donate. But they can donate stock, because then it suddenly behaves like cash.

[dbmikus]

Not the parent poster, but the point is that if the government taxes equity instead of capital gains, it turns every large company into a de facto socialized company. Some would consider that bad, including myself.