[danielheath]

The thing that makes any given arrangement of society work (or not work) is how quickly/cheaply it removes decision-making power from people who demonstrate poor judgement.

This is a difficult task, because people with decision-making power tend use that power to alter the system to solidify their position.

Capitalism, at its finest, does this by letting people make bad decisions with their money until they haven't got any. This was an improvement on, say, holding wars until enough people decision-makers get killed off. However, a variety of long-term policy shifts have meant this no longer appears to happen - merely possessing capital is so profitable that even astonishingly poor decisions cannot reduce your wealth enough to matter.

IMO, through this statement Larry Ellison has demonstrated the kind of poor judgement which a functional society cannot tolerate in a decision-maker, and lacking an effective way to remove this from the decision-maker pool is the primary cause of societal trouble today.

[pinkmuffinere]

Are you saying that we/some govt org should seize his assets because he had a bad opinion?

Fwiw I agree with you in disliking the “eternal power“ dynamic that seems to come with being rich. I’d prefer to solve this by requiring more disclosure in lobbying efforts, restricting the kinds of donations you can make, etc. Money shouldn’t lead to political power IMO.

[danielheath]

> Are you saying that we/some govt org should seize his assets because he had a bad opinion?

I'm saying that a system in which someone with poor judgement manages to accrue his level of assets is broken somewhere.

Policy settings under which "having capital" allows you to grow your wealth while making terrible decisions are bad policy settings.

Various alternative policies exist, the most obvious of which is adjusting taxation settings such that growing your wealth requires consistently making good judgement calls.

[pinkmuffinere]

I’m not trying to be obtuse, my best guess is that I’m in favor of what you’re proposing. Can you add more details though? I’m certainly in favor of progressive taxation, which kindof matches the spirit of what you’re saying by reducing the profit margin for those who have massive amounts to “play with”. Maybe there’s a more direct method though? Maybe a wealth tax? Something else?

[danielheath]

I'm explicitly not claiming any particular proposal is right; my background is not in public policy.

I'm pointing out that across a great many economic nations, times, and economic systems, the core problem of every social system is not the obvious stuff like "how do we allocate resources" - it's "how do we remove bad decision-makers" - because those people are implementing "how we allocate resources".

There's a great many ways to solve this problem, but there's little evidence that _anything_ is currently being tried. I'd support any policy that seemed reasonably likely to improve this situation.