[WalterBright]

> as they will be little affected by it

Everything you tax away from wealthy people is removed from their investments.

For example, if all of Musk's income above $1m were taxed away, the following companies would never have existed:

1. Tesla

2. SpaceX

3. Starlink

4. Neuralink

[sumeno]

You didn't have to sweeten the pot, I was already on board

[shakna]

Its still less than the fines most of those companies have incurred in the space of a year.

[saagarjha]

Do you think they were arguing for taxing away all wealth over $1 million?

[WalterBright]

If they were taxed $1, that's $1 taken away from investments.

[saagarjha]

Ok, but how does that prevent the existence of what you mentioned?

[roenxi]

Do you think they weren't? What about that logic doesn't apply to millionaires?

Or to put it another way, if I make the same claim about millionaires; how do you expect to argue that they will be greatly affected by being taxed more? A 1% tax increase on someone's gross income is never going to "greatly" affect them unless, but if it happens 100 times they will be pennyless.

If you take money away from someone, they will have less money and do less because they have less resources.

[saagarjha]

I'm not sure what the disagreement is? None of the stuff you said is wrong, but I don't see how it is a response to my comment. Nor do I see how it is particularly relevant in a conversation where I assume the idea is a different progressive taxation rate.

[roenxi]

There isn't a disagreement, it is a question (technically, several questions). The hint is in the "?". Your 1 sentence comment isn't long enough to respond to directly without more information, even if I wanted to.

[sgc]

I am going to abstract from the hard 1 million number which is obviously low in 2025, and just base my arguments on maybe a few million as a reasonable limit. Make it ten or twenty if that fits your mental model better. You have no way of knowing that those companies would never have existed. They could very well have existed, just no billionaire would have been the majority owner. The money is not removed from their investments, but they are required to divest them to other owners. Funding mechanisms for the companies now self-funded by billionaires would be quite different if the ultra-wealthy were never allowed to exist. It would require more cooperation, but it would not therefore be impossible.

If somebody cares about progress and is highly motivated, they should remain highly motivated to create incredible products and services, whether that buys them unchecked power or not. If some people would be less motivated and do less than they do now, it would be a lesser evil that creating oligarchs thirsty to dominate whenever they get the chance. As long as people can live a good and comfortable life, they do not have rights to more than that.

People who argue against progressive taxes tend to ignore the fact that modern capitalism is basically a game, one where the rules greatly favor the richest, who have virtually unlimited leverage compared to the average person. They make money exponentially more easily than others. It is absolutely right to correct this game through appropriate progressive taxes. Every once in a while an adult needs to step in to keep the game fun for everybody, and not just let the best player dominate others and make everybody else miserable. Maybe if we did this, the price gouging and constant turning of the screws would give way to a society where fair trade was the default cultural and economic norm.

Certainly hoarding more wealth than Smaug is a crime of grave injustice against humanity. For the mind completely sold to capitalism, this is impossible to understand. But people come before wealth and power.

[WalterBright]

> If somebody cares about progress and is highly motivated, they should remain highly motivated to create incredible products and services, whether that buys them unchecked power or not

If you tax their money away, they have that much less capital to invest.

> It is absolutely right to correct this game through appropriate progressive taxes.

Only if you don't like electric cars, cheap space rockets, cheap global communications, and enabling people with spinal injuries to need a lot less help.

> Certainly hoarding more wealth than Smaug is a crime of grave injustice against humanity. For the mind completely sold to capitalism, this is impossible to understand. But people come before wealth and power.

Nobody hoards wealth. They invest it. Nobody has a Smaug hoard. There are no Scrooge McDuck cash vaults.

I suggest you check out what happened under communism in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, etc., under communism where people came before wealth and power. Your ideas sound good in a textbook and in the classroom, but they just don't work in the real world.

[Teever]

How come the system rewards someone like Musk with so much but doesn't do the same for people like Norman Borlaug (green revolution), Frederick Banting (insulin), Karl Landsteiner (ABO blood groups) or Katalin Karikó (mRNA vaccines)?

What sort of things can our society do to ensure that the people who dedicate their lives to eliminating the suffering of so many are compensated for what I'm sure we can agree are absolutely amazing accomplishments?

[shakna]

> Nobody hoards wealth. They invest it. Nobody has a Smaug hoard. There are no Scrooge McDuck cash vaults.

There are, unfortunately. [0] Though Putin's gold palace did have to be stripped for fungal problems, later.

Musk does go around with a large amount of debt, such as the 13bil he currently owes. So he's less likely to have a prepper vault. That does not mean that human greed doesn't turn to cartoons for inspiration, at times.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=ipAnwilMncI

[thelastgallon]

Musk's companies are hype stocks. Today's many successful tech companies run because of the commodification of x86 hardware, allowing them to build massive data centers, run cheap ad platforms, provide things like YouTube, etc, for free. All of this was because of Linux, which Linus Torvalds created. Before Linux and commodity x86 made it reliable and useful, every company had to pay Sun/IBM exorbitant amounts. In no conceivable universe has Musk created more value than Linus. Yet, Linus is not a billionaire.

Most businesses are funded by taxpayers, either directly or indirectly. Elon Musk is a billionaire because of DOE funding, or there would have been no Tesla today.

By January 2009, Tesla had raised $187 million and delivered 147 cars. Musk had contributed $70 million of his money to the company.

In June 2009, Tesla was approved to receive $465 million in interest-bearing loans from the United States Department of Energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla,_Inc.