[insickness]

> As a society, we should prevent "escape capital" to be a thing.

Why, though? You always hear people say that one person having too much wealth is a problem but rarely hear a good reason. Just because one person is richer, does not mean another is poorer. Wealth is not a limited pie where everyone only gets one piece of it. Wealth is created. If one person's ideas and actions brings up the standard of living for everyone else, I'm fine with that person having more wealth.

[lapcat]

> Wealth is not a limited pie where everyone only gets one piece of it.

This is where you're mistaken, because wealth is not simply a collection of material goods. Wealth is power, and power is a zero sum game. You don't have power over someone else unless they have less power than you.

The ultra-wealthy already have all of their material needs and desires met. They run out of things to buy with their money. You don't actually need a billion to buy all of the houses, cars, boats, and other stuff that you want. Beyond a certain point, the only thing left to buy is people. And that's what the ultra-wealthy do. They exercise power over other people. That's precisely why they're never satisfied with their level of wealth, and continue to accumulate it despite not needing to buy any more material things. The more wealth you have, and the less other people have, the more power you have over others.

Wealth buys politicians. It buys laws. It can buy entire countries.

[insickness]

Of course wealth is power. If you have 10 million dollars and I don't, you have more power than me. You can do many things I can't. But perhaps you did cancer research for 20 years and found a cure for cancer while I spent my money on vacations and partying. This incentive acted as it should. The world now has a cure for cancer. We can't now say that you should have the same wealth/power as me because power/wealth is bad.

[lapcat]

> But perhaps you did cancer research for 20 years and found a cure for cancer while I spent my money on vacations and partying.

LOL nice straw man.

> The world now has a cure for cancer.

Except it doesn't.

> We can't now say that you should have the same wealth/power as me because power/wealth is bad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk Salk was immediately hailed as a "miracle worker" when the vaccine's success was first made public in April 1955, and chose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution.

[giantg2]

It seems corporations are the ones influencing laws with spending. Even then, it's the constituents that are the problem. Are they really so gullible that a new attack ad funded by donations to the politician will sway them? Are they even paying attention? It's the attention and strength of the constituency that will make a democratic society better.

If you really want to fix the voting in a somewhat realistic way, you will completely do away with campaign spending, allocate a government website with a page for each candidate to display their positions, have the site searchable by your address, and have an alternative that you can request by mail if you don't have access to a computer. You also need to ban the news from reporting on the campaign to get around this, including the observation biases that come from all those early polls. Suddendly campaign funding becomes a non-issue, and we're likely to see less manipulation.

Even if you eliminated the wealthy altogether, you could still have outsized impacts by many groups due to the most extreme people being willing to donate more. This is essentially what we see primary elections due to the low voter turnout - the most motivated/extreme people have a larger say.

[stana]

"Poor man wanna be rich. Rich man wanna be king." Bruce Springsteen

[makomk]

Wealth is indeed power rather than simply a collection of material goods, and most of all the wealth this article talks about is the power to run specific large businesses in the way those specific wealthy people want. That is, the way capitalism works in this case is that control over businesses and the ability to dictate how they allocate resources is given to individuals who are in some sense "successful" at running those businesses in that they manage to make lots of revenue and convince investors they'll do a good job of continuing to do so going forward.

The reasons why this system might be attractive may become more obvious if we consider some alternatives. For example, in Russia currently the power to control big businesses is given to politically well connected "oligarchs", and anyone whose business success exceeds their political influence tends to find that business is taken off them and given to someone much less capable but better connected. This does not lead to a functining economy. (There's a popular idea on the left that capitalism has oligarchs too which we just don't call that, which misses this important difference.) We could also imagine a system where this power is distributed democratically, and everyone in the country gets a say in how all the businesses are run. The problem with this is that in order to make decisions that are as well informed as even just some dude who happened to be in the right place at the right time, every member of the public would have to dedicate as much time to informing themselves as all of those random dudes collectively do already. That is, it's structurally impossible to just distribute this power out to everyone.

Also, most of the things that populist campaigners claim that wealth redistribution will achieve are about more material goods for everyone which relies on those material goods or at least the capacity to produce them being there already and just horded by the super-rich - just handing out power will not satisfy people's expectations for wealth redistribution and wealth taxes.

[lapcat]

You seem to be presenting some false dichotomies here. I'm not calling for the abolition of privately owned businesses. I'm an entrepreneur myself.

It's crucial to note a couple of things:

(1) The world's wealthiest people accumulated their wealth from publicly owned corporations, not from privately owned businesses. In fact, there are famous cases where a publicly owned corporation ousted its own founder, e.g., Apple and Uber.

(2) The world's wealthiest people get even wealthier after they stop running businesses. Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, et al., are wealthier now when "retired" than when they were CEOs! Gates even claimed he's giving most of his money away, but somehow that's having the opposite effect. Gates can't give money away faster than he makes it, despite "retirement".

The point is not necessarily to "socialize" businesses. The point is to limit the size of businesses and of individual accumulations of wealth, for the good of society as a whole, to prevent them from accumulating too much power over society. One of the ways to do that is via progressive taxation that heavily taxes higher amounts of income and wealth. It's not confiscating the business or individual wealth as a whole; it's just trimming off the edges, so to speak.

I personally feel that publicly owned corporations are a problem and should be discouraged. They're effectively the tragedy of the commons. I prefer privately owned businesses. And it's more difficult for privately owned businesses to become huge, because there's never an influx of public capital.

> control over businesses and the ability to dictate how they allocate resources is given to individuals who are in some sense "successful" at running those businesses

You've got cause and effect reversed. The control comes first, the success comes later.

> Also, most of the things that populist campaigners claim that wealth redistribution will achieve are about more material goods for everyone which relies on those material goods or at least the capacity to produce them being there already and just horded by the super-rich - just handing out power will not satisfy people's expectations for wealth redistribution and wealth taxes.

My point was that the ultra-wealthy are motivated by power rather than material goods, because all of their material desires are already satisfied.

Of course non-wealthy people are motivated by material needs, because theirs haven't been satisfied. Indeed, wealth inequality results in hunger, homelessless, lack of health care, situations that we would not tolerate if everyone were equal and in the same boat.

[CapricornNoble]

>> And that's what the ultra-wealthy do. They exercise power over other people.

Arguably, there is always SOMEONE doing this, even without ultra-wealth. Perhaps the argument could be made that the ultra-wealthy are the least malign manifestation of power-hungry sociopathic megalomania?

It's not like Stalin in the 30s or Mao in the 50s were using wealth to buy people, for example. But they sure as Hell led to really negative outcomes for the people they influenced. Far more negative than any damage that Musk/Bezos/Buffet/et al are doing now, IMO.

[lapcat]

Of course there are always some people striving for power over others. And of course the current billionaires are not as bad as Stalin or Mao. That's not really the question. The question is whether society should strive to prevent individuals from acquiring great power over the masses, and my answer is yes. In other words, even though billionaires are not as bad as dictators, billionaires should still be discouraged rather than encouraged.

What I was arguing against was this: "If one person's ideas and actions brings up the standard of living for everyone else, I'm fine with that person having more wealth." It's not clear that they do bring up the standard of living for everyone else. For example, poor people can't afford to buy a Tesla, so what has Musk done to raise the standard of living for the poor? Let's be honest: Tesla caters to the wealthy. Moreover, as I argued, it's not just about material goods. It's about power. It's also about personal freedom for the masses; how much personal freedom would you trade just to have more material goods?

[CapricornNoble]

>the question is whether society should strive to prevent individuals from acquiring great power over the masses

Whatever people or person has the authority to prevent individuals from acquiring great power over the masses.....has great power over the masses.

The power-hungry don't like being told they can't do something. Another possible outcome is the uber-rich start converting their wealth into men-at-arms to secure their power. Every time my wealth ticks over from $998M to $999M I burn $1M secretly acquiring the loyalty of violent men. Eventually my wealth goes from $999M to $1B and the Equality Enforcers pay me a visit....only to find out the hard way that they didn't bring enough bannermen. I don't think its particularly far-fetched to conclude that eventually men with near-limitless resources and near-limitless egos will resort to armed conflict before they allow some paper-pushing bureaucrats to put them back in a box. Maybe that's not the character of Buffet or even Musk, but on a long enough timeline I consider it a certainty. It's better for everyone that they collect yachts and "atmosphere models"( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSvvvrKhx0w ) instead.

> For example, poor people can't afford to buy a Tesla, so what has Musk done to raise the standard of living for the poor?

I think in a system as complex as the world economy it's difficult to pinpoint this with any certainty. MAYBE one could argue that Tesla forced a paradigm shift onto other automakers and that the entire industry dragging its feet to produce EVs is a net quality of life improvement for the civilization in the aggregate due to reduced emissions?

Why are we judging the wealthy by their utility to the poor anyway? Belle Delphine isn't a billionaire, but at one point she was making >$1 million per month shaking her butt on a webcam and selling used bathwater to lonely males. Are we going to judge EVERYONE by how they've raised the standard of living for the poor? Where is the cutoff point? $1B net worth? $1M annual income? The market principles which have elevated Elon Musk to the top of his industry have similarly elevated Belle Delphine to the top of hers, with massively disproportionate earnings compared to the bottom-tier OnlyFans content creators. Do we have enough moral outrage for them both? Why or why not? Who has the authority to judge?

> how much personal freedom would you trade just to have more material goods?

I'm a military reservist who is considering returning to full Active Duty for several years so trading away my personal freedom is.....quite normal to me. That said....I have pretty modest material desires, and am mostly trading my personal freedom for.....wealth accumulation! If you're going to own something, own something that other people need, and that generates revenue.

[lapcat]

> Whatever people or person has the authority to prevent individuals from acquiring great power over the masses.....has great power over the masses.

I'm talking about the masses. The masses of people should prevent individuals from acquiring great power over them.

> Why are we judging the wealthy by their utility to the poor anyway?

That didn't come from me but from the person I was originally replying to: "If one person's ideas and actions brings up the standard of living for everyone else, I'm fine with that person having more wealth."

I guess it was supposed to be some kind of justification for massive inequality. That's not my criterion though.

[BiteCode_dev]

Stalin and Mao were wealthy. That's why many people argue we never implemented communism, since our attempts ended up as oligarchies.

Just because you don't have a paper stating you own something doesn't mean you don't control it.

[mihaic]

> Why, though? You always hear people say that one person having too much wealth is a problem but rarely hear a good reason.

Historically, most societies where this happened ended up with large violent episodes as a response, so we should want to prevent that.

While it's possible to enlarge the pie for everyone, to anyone that wants to buy a house it's obviously not the case in today's economy. In some cases the economy is zero-sum, especially with things that are inherently limited such as good real-estate.

[giantg2]

" to anyone that wants to buy a house it's obviously not the case in today's economy."

Land is very much a limited resource. But most of the problems today are due to the distribution and consumer wants. In much of the US, you could easily buy some land and put a trailer or small manufactured house on it (or buy forclosed, vacant, etc). The problem is the jobs, especially the good ones, are concentrated in a dozen or so major metro areas with higher population density. The. You have the preference of most people who want good public schools, yards, big fancy single family houses, etc. Most people don't want a small house, and due to the job distribution can't live in the less populated areas.

[bryanrasmussen]

>If one person's ideas and actions brings up the standard of living for everyone else, I'm fine with that person having more wealth.

how would that be proved - that is to say there is probably a reasonably causal line to say that their ideas and actions brought up the standard of living for themselves, but the causal line to determine ideas and actions bringing up standard of living for other people would probably be difficult to calculate.

[soco]

I guess they meant that elusive "trickle down economics" concept which always looks like Bigfoot - everybody talks about it but nobody has actually seen it.

[dgb23]

"Wealth is not a zero sum game" has some truth in it but is ultimately false.

There's only so much inhabitable space, only so many resources and only so many people on earth. You only have so much time to live and even thinking over generational legacy, we're fundamentally limited by time. Infinite growth doesn't exist in any meaningful and practical sense of the word.

And if we're coming back to the original argument: You can't be ultra wealthy without exploitation. Someone, somewhere has to generate all the value you feel entitled to have, because you inherited a bunch of wealth. And "someone" is a vast understatement.

There is some line where power and wealth not only become completely unwieldy, because the disconnect between responsibility and power is too great, but also parasitical.

I have no idea where that line is and how to solve this problem. But it _is_ a problem and I'm tired of hearing ideological platitudes that try to naturalize and defend it.

I say this all with a caveat: I have nothing personal against people who are wealthy or even ultra wealthy. Ultimately they are just part of a larger, hard to solve issue like everyone else.

[BiteCode_dev]

It does, because power is bought with money and if you buy a vote, the richest win.

Also, resources are not infinite. Eg: There is a limit to the number of the best doctors and their time. Fresh air is locally finite, and jets do pollute more per person.

So despite the fact that in theory we are not playing a zero sum game, practically at the scale of one life, many things can be approximated as such.

[wildrhythms]

'Wealth' is too nebulous a term to discuss anything socioeconomic related. When 'wealth' is measured in material- land, housing, money... these are all finite. You seem to be creatively measuring 'wealth' as immaterial things like ideas and actions. Be precise.

[jampekka]

Money isn't finite or material and it's worthless in itself unlike e.g. land and housing.

[DFHippie]

In addition to the reasons others have cited, I think the corrosive effect of wealth inequality on social cohesion is under-appreciated. The wealthy fear their wealth being taken, so they live in gated communities and hire guards. The society they have walled out and the society they have walled in see their interests as diverging. Neither wants to invest in the other, protect the other. The less wealthy see that wealth buys power, which buys "voice." The government responds to voice, so however democratic their nation is on paper, they don't perceive the government as responsive to their desires -- and in fact it is less measurably less responsive to their desires -- so they have less stake in preserving its legitimacy and stability. Why preserve the tool someone else uses to cheat you? And so on.

Unequal societies are low-trust societies. Low-trust societies are less capable of providing public services efficiently. They are less capable of making and achieving long-term goals. They are more prone to corruption and criminality. If you don't trust the agents of the state to keep you safe, you are more prone to taking matters into your own hands, less prone to cooperating with the agents of the state to address crime. And so on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_socie...

[bitcharmer]

This comment reads as either trolling or a very naive take but I'll bite.

Why obscene wealth is a problem? Even my 10yo knows that. Extreme asymmetry and inequality. From different treatment by the government, to the justice system, to access to health care, education to getting in a position where being rich means you can exploit poor people to get richer with zero consequences.

How this has to be explained to someone on this forum is beyond me, but here we are.

[Kon5ole]

>From different treatment by the government, to the justice system, to access to health care, education to getting in a position where being rich means you can exploit poor people to get richer with zero consequences

All the things you mention are problems that need solving, but they are wrong in themselves separated from the wealth. A wealthy person might not be doing any of those things.

Wealth in a free capitalist society is generally the result of increased economic activity which often benefits many more than the billionaires that appear as side effects. This is a good thing which should be kept, but we need to ensure that society isn't corrupted in the process.

We used to have much more extreme divisions of wealth than we do now, kings and nobility a few hundred years ago, and we made laws to limit their influence. So it can be done.

[bitcharmer]

> We used to have much more extreme divisions of wealth than we do now, kings and nobility a few hundred years ago, and we made laws to limit their influence. So it can be done.

I think your comment is optimistic to the point of being naive. Wealth disparity has been increasing in the last 200 years.

https://ourworldindata.org/the-history-of-global-economic-in...

[Kon5ole]

>I think your comment is optimistic to the point of being naive. Wealth disparity has been increasing in the last 200 years.

You mention disparity as if it is a problem but ignore that most of the population is much better off. Your source clearly shows that in 1800 the world population was mostly poor, while in 2015 it was mostly _not_ poor. This despite the population being 7x larger.

Which is exactly my point - the system that generates billionaires has done so as a side effect of generating enough wealth to lift a several times larger world population above the poverty line.

Is disparity itself so offensive that we should let everyone be poor just to avoid billionaires? I can't get behind that, but I do want better laws to prevent corruption.

[bitcharmer]

It's a bit like saying: oh look, everything's going better now because fewer people die from pneumonia now than a hundred years ago. You're missing the bigger picture. An average young person is now much less likely to afford housing than the generation before them and even less likely then their grandparents.

What does that mean to you?

[Kon5ole]

>everything's going better now because fewer people die from pneumonia now than a hundred years ago. You're missing the bigger picture.

I'm not talking about pneumonia though, and surely the bigger picture is that the average person in the world is better off today than they were before?

I think the mechanism that caused that has billionaires as a side effect, which is hard to eliminate without also eliminating the thing that makes everyone better off.

>An average young person is now much less likely to afford housing than the generation before them and even less likely then their grandparents. What does that mean to you?

To me it means that the housing markets in many countries are poorly regulated and speculation fueled by low interest rates have inflated prices.

[soco]

If we actually read the maths presented by the article, it looks like many people did get poorer. You could argue there's no causation between them, but if correlation gives us civil unrest, we go fixing correlation (unless we prefer street wars).