[WalterBright]

> The point is that you can’t catch up

That's not the point at all. You cannot catch up with anyone who is ahead of you and you follow the same investment protocol.

> What did Jeff Bezos’ children do that would warrant their wealth?

Allow me to reframe. Why should anyone else get it? It's Bezos' money and he can distribute it as he sees fit.

[lurk2]

> You cannot catch up with anyone who is ahead of you and you follow the same investment protocol.

This is true and a major critique of capitalist growth economics; it privileges those who were born into wealth and those who were simply born earlier than others. To an extent, this is natural. An elder in a tribe of hunter gatherers will necessarily possess more knowledge than an infant, but no one would seriously suggest that this kind of inequality could be done away with. The issue is when that advantage compounds exponentially year over year. If it just stopped there we could all get rich and live with robot butlers, but the general tendency in these kinds of scenarios is for the new money to take control of the political process via media influence, bribery, or force, and to use political power to acquire further wealth, not via competition and creative destruction, but by monopoly (I would argue a lot of the tech giants are technically already here).

As a long-time and well-regarded member of this forum, I assume you are familiar with Peter Thiel. Thiel and a number of his affiliates have been funding political influencers for the last ten or so years. JD Vance and Blake Masters both came out of Thiel’s camp. The goal here is ultimately not to remain agents of competitive market capitalism, but to seize control of the political process. There’s an argument to be made that the world would be better off with the political process being under the control of technologists than the various democratic mafias that comprise post-national states, but I don’t think it’s a very compelling one. First, it undermines the entire premise that capitalism as a social arrangement enfranchises everyone via the market (if this were true, political power would be superfluous). Second, we are talking about the people who gave us Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit (2005) and then gave us Facebook, YouTube, and Reddit (2025); they have a proven track record of making things drastically worse than when they started.

The whole critique of capitalism (which is not necessarily a critique of markets in and of themselves) is that exponential growth will lead to economic inequalities that will inevitably be exploited by unscrupulous actors who then undermine the entire system to benefit themselves.

> Allow me to reframe. Why should anyone else get it? It's Bezos' money and he can distribute it as he sees fit.

Bezos will be dead by then. The question then follows: Why should we respect the wishes of dead men, when there is no obvious social benefit to respecting these wishes? There is a feasible (if contentious) argument that Bezos “created” and thus “deserves” his wealth, but it seems undeniable that his children did not earn it, so the only justification we have left is a dead man’s wishes. It may be that the social benefits of inheritance are greater than the potential benefits of confiscation (dividing Bezos’ wealth would only yield about $31 per person). I have reservations about both theories; I’m just presenting them as well as I understand them.

[WalterBright]

It's a man providing for his family. It's a basic drive for men. I don't see a compelling reason why other men should decide it for him.

BTW, the federal estate tax is 40% and the Washington estate tax is 37%. That's 77%. How much more do you want?

[lurk2]

> It's a man providing for his family.

Provision is not a problem in and of itself; it’s the scale at which it is occurring. I know from your posts that capital accumulation is an issue you’ve thought a lot about, and I’m sure you’re smarter than I’ll ever be, but I feel strongly that you’d change your mind on this if you spent some time reading about late Roman, medieval, and early modern economies. I was a libertarian for many years prior to looking at the dynamics of wealth accumulation that occurred during these periods and how societies came up with new ways to navigate them. I will admit I never came up with a cohesive moral theory to justify it, which is why I stop short of endorsing any alternatives; I’m just saying that the idea that it is a moral and practical necessity for these fortunes to accumulate is a relatively new one.

> BTW, the federal estate tax is 40% and the Washington estate tax is 37%. That's 77%. How much more do you want?

That is higher than I would have expected. It is notable that the federal rate has an exemption that as of 2025 is just under 14 million dollars.

[WalterBright]

The WA exemption is $3m. (I also misremembered - the tax rate is 35% not 37%.) The rapacious greed of the state is astounding. I expect high net worth elderly will simply leave the state.

What fortunes enable people to do are great things. Like found rocket companies.

Keep in mind that the wealthy people under free markets created that wealth. It wasn't confiscated from others.

[nickpp]

> exponential growth will lead to economic inequalities that will inevitably be exploited by unscrupulous actors

This is a completely unproven theory. I haven't seen any society where unscrupulous actors wouldn't exploit various exploitable aspects for their own advantage.

The so-called "equalitarian" communist society I previously lived under (pre-1990 Eastern Europe) was basically raped though and through by unscrupulous players using political power (in lieu of straight financial power) to their own advantage.