[somenameforme]

But this divide is farcical. People like Musk/Bezos/etc don't make their money from literal profits, but from the stock price going up, which is driven by speculation. In particular the total valuation of the stock market is worth more than literally all money in existence. And neither Amazon nor Tesla pay dividends, so you can't even go that route. And the owners rarely just sit around letting the money come in, but quite often are obsessive work-a-holics.

I'm very antagonistic towards people like the Waltons who, themselves, have mostly contributed absolutely nothing whatsoever to society and are just coasting off daddy's success - being born to tens of billions of dollars and then dying with your biggest accomplishment being born to tens of billions of dollars is just so many degrees of pathetic. They fit quite closely to what you're describing (and WalMart does pay dividends), but they're a vanishingly small percent of the ultra-wealthy.

[_DeadFred_]

Musk had a video game system installed in his DOGE office. I've had that kind of 'workaholic' boss. It's that they have no life, so make work their life, not that they are so good at 'working'.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

Here's a steelman for some brand of leftism (I don't ascribe to any label, though I'm an alleged market socialist)

You can buy votes, even if it's banned, by buying up and controlling the media.

Therefore money and political power can be exchanged.

The existence of billionaires - People who have as much money (and therefore, as much political power) as ten hundred millionaires - Therefore represents a dangerous accumulation of power.

When we look at the market and capitalism, we aren't seeing a fun little game where some speedrunner gets a high score and there are no consequences. We are seeing an incentive landscape trying to reform the aristocracy. We are seeing kings arise from first principles.

This should be stopped.

One nonviolent way to stop this is to fund just massive welfare programs, close all tax loopholes, all offshore tax havens, and give poor people money, which is the most American franchisement you can have.

Implementation is left as a simple exercise for the reader

[somenameforme]

This is true is all systems. People will never be equal in society, because the things that need to be done vary radically in difficulty and the number of people realistically capable of doing them - and those close to the top will always be 'more equal' than those who are doing basic labor. I'm also sidestepping the issue that's probably inescapable in practice - hierarchy. And historically social economic systems have created systems where it's even more difficult to transition between top and bottom, than it is in capitalist systems.

I do not think your solutions are viable. Giving people money is going to simply drive mass inflation, because you end up massively increasing the amount of money in circulation, but keep the same amount of products. Okay, so then the typical response is well then we just add price controls. And now you end up in a scenario where you have empty shelves because supply no longer meets demand, but also you likely have declining production because the things producers are producing become worth less in real terms, often to the point of them being unable to continue profitably producing them.

I offered some solutions that I think are more viable here. [1]

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45059980

[hnbad]

> This is true is all systems. People will never be equal in society, because the things that need to be done vary radically in difficulty and the number of people realistically capable of doing them - and those close to the top will always be 'more equal' than those who are doing basic labor. I'm also sidestepping the issue that's probably inescapable in practice - hierarchy. And historically social economic systems have created systems where it's even more difficult to transition between top and bottom, than it is in capitalist systems.

This is called "capitalist realism".

The problem of capitalism isn't that "some people are better at doing things". The problem of capitalism is that anything that exists or can be imagined can be designated as private property and any claim to this property is enforced with the full monopoly of violence of the state.

The problem of modern capitalism is that we've expanded the concept of private property to the point where the vast majority of profits generated are not tied to actual sales of products any more but come from the finance industry - essentially a system of speculative gambling multiple layers of abstraction removed from even the notion of actually "running a business".

And it's not just the "evil bankers" or investors. Even retirement is nowadays based on the finance market. We gradually replaced relying on the community to take care of its elders with relying on your own family to take care of you as an elder to having the government set some of your wages aside to pay for taking care of you as elder to having your company set some of your wages aside to having you invest money in the finance market.

And with everyone having to participate in the finance market despite only receiving a minute fraction of its profits, the interests of the finance industry also shape the nature of the real industry of service and production, driving up deregulation, encouraging short-term growth over long-term sustainability, pump and dump schemes, lobbying against labor protections, etc.

And as any of the Georgists here on HN will tell you: of course this also means that sales (i.e. transfer of property) have been displaced by rent-seeking because rent-seeking is more scalable.

None of this had to necessarily follow from "some people are better at doing some things than others". Of course a lot of this logically follows from the existence of a class of people who hold power over others continuously wanting to maintain and extend that power out of a persistent fear of losing it and ending up on the other side of the equation. But in order for this to work we had to have a culture that would enable this. And the myth of those at the top having gotten there (implying they all started wherever you did as a recipient of this myth) simply by being better at doing something rather than by having literally an entire society provide them a stepladder and handing them the reins, this myth has been reinforcing this culture of enablement for tens of centuries.

[somenameforme]

I mostly agree, but I'd argue that this is largely because of funny money. Check out this great site. [1] The event it's alluding to is the end of Bretton Woods, which is the point that the government completely unrestricted in their ability to 'print money'. In an economy it may or may not be true that money trickles down, but it's indisputable that it gushes upward. And so each time the government dumps trillions of dollars into the economy, that money makes its way straight to the top in very rapid fashion.

Next thing you know you have people and companies that literally have more money than they know what to do with. And then government and industry become increasingly incestuous as politicians filter money to various companies while in office, and then those companies not only stuff their election coffers full of money, but then have cushy 7+ figure 'advisory' roles for these politicians, or their inner circle, once they leave office - sometimes not even waiting for that. And then the government ends up printing endless amounts of money to keep this businesses afloat after they come crashing down to their own incompetence, completely wrecking the natural process of progression over time. All the while the stock market continues to reach record highs even in the midst of an economy destroying epidemic simply because it's all fake and driven on endless speculation, backed by endless injections of funny money.

And then on top of all of this you have various meta-effects. For instance when you live in an economy without much inflation or deflation, it's practically impossible to lower wages simply because people won't accept that. But in an inflationary economy? Somebody might even be happy about earning 25% more than they were in 2020, when in reality that means they've actually taken a pay cut thanks to inflation. And inflation is driven by the excesses of funny money.

And an inflationary society also strongly incentivizes the hoarding of things which, in turn, drives rent seeking behavior. Your things become worth more over time, but money becomes worth less over time. So you want to accumulate as many things as you can and rent access to them. Whereas in a stable or deflationary economy, things remain a comparable cost or even become worth less over time - so there's less motivation to hoard things and more motivation to hoard money.

[1] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

[queenkjuul]

Musk is a Walton in every way that matters

[somenameforme]

He started from relatively little in spite of claims from his estranged and strange father, and has built up literally species-changing industries in both rocketry and electrical vehicles. The world is a million times different, and better, because of him. And he will certainly go down in history as the Thomas Edison of this era.