[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.