[jmward01]

I have nothing against rich. I have everything against a single person having a megaphone for themselves and a gag for everyone else and still calling it a democracy. We need strong laws that reduce the voice of money and increase the voice of individuals. Having said that, the practical implication is that money needs to loose power and there are very few ways to truly do that other than just take it away. So, I agree that our only known practical path to a healthier democracy is to make it harder to be pathologically rich.

[idle_zealot]

I'm not sure I understand what distinction you're drawing between ideological opposition to rich people existing and opposition to disproportionately powerful people existing.

In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing? Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it, and is just another way of saying "power over others". A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.

[tripletpeaks]

If I read their post correctly, they’re saying they wouldn’t mind rich people if money didn’t… do the stuff that money does. But it does, so they do.

Like yes I think if money didn’t confer incredible power over others and distortionary effects over the shared environment, and allow crazy-wide reach for one’s possibly-nutty beliefs, lots of people wouldn’t have so big a problem with the ultra-rich. Like if the money were just a score on a pinball machine high score table. Cool, you hit a billion, good for you, glad you’re so good at the game, that’s nice. Not a lot of people would mind that so much. But that’s not how money works.

[zdragnar]

Being rich is a measure of wealth. In a world in which there is no resource scarcity and everyone has access to lots of resources, everyone is rich but not necessarily more rich or powerful than anyone else.

The average person today is much wealthier than many rich people from generations ago, even if they have less social power.

Being disproportionately powerful is tautologically a direct measure of disproportionate influence.

Tin pot dictators of resource-poor nations may not be especially wealthy compared to the very wealthy in the US, but typically have more disproportionate power (within their own country at least).

[bigbadfeline]

> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.

First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money. That leaves only one logically possible version of your statement and the correction looks like this: "A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where big money isn't big money"

In that form, your statement is perfectly logical, if somewhat tautological, but there is another problem with it and it's a real huge one: No textbook has anything like that and no school teaches it either, even the media is vary shy of talking about it.

At a first glance, that's not your problem but it definitely has to be, meaning, you and the people who gold similar views, should become loud public proponents of Speaking Truth to the Powerless (tm).

We can no longer have this cognitive dissonance economics that teaches that money is means of exchange, unit of account, etc, but skips the most important truth: that big money is, first and foremost, a tool of power over small money.

Only after this educational task is complete, your explanation will have the right to exist and be heard.

[nielsbot]

> First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money

That's not true. Depends on your wealth bracket of course, but money certainly is the power to compel.

Let's say you have a neighbor whose dog is a nuisance barker. With money you can hire an attorney to go after them. If you don't have money, you have to suffer. There are millions of examples... this is just one not-particularly-good one.

[idopmstuff]

I don't think you even have to go to the extreme of compelling someone to do something through the legal system. I can use money to get someone to clean my house or walk my dog - they don't have to do it, but the fact that I have money does give me the power to get them to do what I want.

[bpt3]

Can you compel someone to walk your dog because you have enough money to pay someone to do it, or are they choosing to do it to earn some money?

[lucyjojo]

i mean... if people don't get money they die so....

[nielsbot]

Absolutely--This was just an example that came to mind in the moment.

[thrance]

> First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money.

Of course it does. Call the cleaning service, see if your money can't compel someone to come clean your house while you sit on your ass. Or more indirectly, try to picture the chinese kid making your shoes for a meager wage, and try to explain what, if not your money, is compelling them to do so this menial, repetitive and unfulfilling task for you.

[palata]

What the hell are you talking about?

> First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money.

Sure, but it doesn't invalidate the sentence you quoted. At all. You can't "educate" people if you don't understand basic sentences. Let me quote it again, so that maybe you can try to understand it properly:

> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.

[bigbadfeline]

> What the hell are you talking about?

I wasn't talking about hell but about logic, apparently our areas of expertise aren't the same.

> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.

You cannot claim money in general not to be money if the money for the not-rich still function as money without the rich, in other words, you falsely claim that in order for money to work as a means of exchange, it has to grant the rich power over the not-rich.

Your claim is obviously false, plus there have been closed and open societies, since antiquity to this day, which used money giving no additional powers to the rich - the simplest case - when all the power was concentrated elsewhere.

I didn't invalidate your claim, I demonstrated that it's invalid on its own.

[palata]

> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.

What this means is that they can't imagine a world where having an extreme amount of money does not grant you power over others. As in, if you build a world that has something called "money", but where having more money than a whole country does not give you power over others, then that thing you call "money" is so different from the one we have in our world that it would not count as money in our world at all.

> You cannot claim money in general not to be money if the money for the not-rich still function as money

That is not what they claim, you misunderstand the sentence. It's like if someone said "A implies B" and you answered with "no, because B does not imply A". You would be lacking basic logic skills there.

> you claim that in order for money to work as a means of exchange, it has to grant the rich power over the not-rich.

Nope, not at all. You misunderstand the sentence.

> I didn't invalidate your claim, I demonstrated that it's invalid on its own.

You did nothing of the sort: you just seem to genuinely not understand the sentence you quoted.

And don't get me wrong: it's fine to misunderstand a sentence. What I reacted about was your tone. If you want to talk like this and "educate" people, you better be goddamn right.

[bigbadfeline]

> You did nothing of the sort: you just seem to genuinely not understand the sentence you quoted.

That might be the case, there's no point in arguing about details which depend on definitions that aren't necessarily shared. Besides, we're using money in a very vague sense that includes wealth - not a good foundation for detailed analysis.

As I originally wrote, can money-in-general exist without power is a minor nitpick, I can readily accept both answers, more so given that money as it exists today can definitely grant power under certain conditions.

The real problem here is the lack of awareness about it, the lack of anything approaching a clear formulation of it and the absence of that topic from education and public discourse in general.

I would love to see the proponents of "more power to money" approach go public and explain their ideas while emphasizing that foundation.

[like_any_other]

> In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing?

A world with laws against monopolies, anti-competitive practices, and media ownership concentration. Not all uses of power are equivalent.

Standard Oil wasn't tamed by taking money from its owner. In fact, even if ownership over the company was dispersed among 10x as many shareholders as before, so long as the company can continue to act as a single entity, the abuse of its monopoly would continue.

[fsflover]

Enforcing such laws becomes practically impossible when the monopoly becomes wealthier than many countries. Case in point: this court decision. Why do you think it happened? Probably because Google is too wealthy.

[pdonis]

> Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action

Not in a free market. In a free market, people have the option to refuse to accept your money if they don't want to give you what you want to buy from them with it.

[Yizahi]

It is theoretically and practically impossible that free market could exist. Every unregulated market will be quickly monopolized by a biggest player and it will stop being free by definition.

It's like saying that humans can fly unassisted. Sure, we can jump in the air and for a few milliseconds remain completely in the air. But we can hardly call that process a flight, if it can last for extremely short period of time. Same with free market.

[pdonis]

> unregulated market

A free market is not unregulated. It's regulated by the voluntary choices of all market participants.

The alternative is to have the market regulated by those who aren't participants--i.e., who have no skin in the game and who suffer no consequences if the regulations are bad. That's basically the situation we have now. Anyone who thinks that's a good thing isn't living on the same planet as I am.

> will be quickly monopolized by a biggest player

The claim that this is a problem of free markets, as opposed to non-free ones, is historically false. Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players. THe original meaning of the word "monopoly" was permission from the king to be the sole seller of a particular product or service.

[Yizahi]

> It's regulated by the voluntary choices of all market participants.

So, what do you think would happen when the biggest market participant makes a choice incompatible with choices of the smaller participants? I can tell you - the biggest player would win. Or it would slowly destroy competitors (slowly mean just a few years), and then start imposing it's rules. Basically any free market would turn to feudalism, which would then turn into a bloody and crude proto-government. Basically the same we have today minus any pro-human and pro-free market policies we have managed to carve for ourselves over centuries. It is impossible that free market would be anything different.

So yeah, because humans are shit at governing, the only viable way (until someone invents something new) is external control.

> Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players.

Correct. And do you know why that happened? Because there was no control and biggest market players could simply buy the poor politician they wish. And in the free market you describe these two step would be simply combined into one - the biggest market player would also perform as a pseudo politician, ultra monopoly with zero oversight.

[pdonis]

> because humans are shit at governing, the only viable way (until someone invents something new) is external control.

No, that's even worse, because, as you admit, humans are shit at governing--and the "external control" is just more humans being shit at governing, but with a much bigger negative impact because the scope of their shitty governing covers many more people.

Advocates of free markets, like me, don't advocate them because we think they solve all problems. We advocate them because, given the fact that humans are shit at governing, free markets are the least worst of the alternatives open to us. Big market players who still have to make money through voluntary transactions do less damage than governments run by humans who are shit at governing. That's the lesson of human history. Unfortunately most of us still haven't learned it, and continue to cling to the foolish belief that somehow calling a bunch of humans a "government" magically makes them no longer shit at governing. It doesn't.

[pdonis]

> And do you know why that happened? Because there was no control

Nonsense. It was because the government had control, and could force people to accept that it was giving special privileges to certain players. For example, the railroad barons in the late 19th century US who got the government to give them exclusive access to key routes. The people had no choice about accepting that. In a free market, there would have been competition, and that would have ended up resulting in better service. How do we know that? Because that's what happened until the government stepped in and gave special privileges to certain players.

In other words, your view is exactly backwards to what has actually happened.

[worik]

> Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players

Really?

* Search: What special privilege for Google?

* Desktop OS: Microsoft?

* On line retail: Amazon

What am I missing? These firms got no "special privilege " from government, did they?

[b_e_n_t_o_n]

> These firms got no "special privilege " from government, did they?

They did and still do. They spend millions lobbying the government to make it harder for outsiders to break into their industries.

[TFYS]

There are probably very few things people wouldn't do if the price is high enough. How many people would refuse to lick a boot for ten million dollars? The bigger the wealth differences become, the harder it is to resist the people with wealth. Wealth is the same thing as power, denying that is silly.

[account42]

Plus even if you resits the cash incentive yourself, with enough money other people can be bought to impose other kinds of pressures on you.

[teachrdan]

> people have the option to refuse to accept your money...

This is the contradiction, isn't it? A free market that you or I might define requires safeguards like a social welfare net to make sure individuals are truly free to decline an offer that is harmful to them. Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your dignity and all of your belongings, or worse.

But then the owning class has every incentive to reduce or remove the safety net. Not least because they will be paying a lot for it! But even more so because that safety net is what gives people some small amount of power to say no to them.

[pdonis]

> A free market that you or I might define requires safeguards like a social welfare net to make sure individuals are truly free to decline an offer that is harmful to them.

That depends on how the safeguards are implemented. If they are implemented through coercive taxation, you don't have a free market, because people don't have the right to refuse to pay taxes, even if they disagree with how the money will be used.

> Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your dignity and all of your belongings, or worse.

Can you give an example?

> the owning class

What you're saying here is something different from what you said above. The problem you're now pointing to is not that rich people have power because they're rich, but that they have power because own too much other than just money. For example, they might own all the housing in the area you want to live in, so you either have to look elsewhere or accept renting on whatever terms they offer.

The solution for that isn't a "social welfare net". It's to restrict how much non-monetary property a rich person can own. And also to make it easier for people who aren't rich to own more things--for example, to own homes.

By the way, your use of the term "owning class" implies that ownership is somehow a bad thing, or that it's naturally restricted to a certain class of people. But that's not how things should be. Ownership gives you control. For example, if you own the home you live in, you're much better protected from various possible bad things forcing you to move, than if you rent. But that also means people need to be willing to accept the responsibilities that come with ownership. It appears that many people in our current society aren't--but they also don't want to accept the tradeoffs of giving up ownership. That's not a stable situation. You can't get something for nothing. And the best "safety net" a person can have is to own as many of the things they depend on as possible.

[nielsbot]

People like to talk about politically tyranny, but forgot about the tyranny of capitalism.

We've financialized servitude is all.

[Supermancho]

Many people decry the tyranny of capitalism, but this site tends to lean into it and defend it at every turn because capitalism is painted as the tide that lifts all boats, despite the bodies on the ocean floor. Some believe, wholeheartedly that a few regulations is all that is needed to establish a fair free market, despite evidence to the contrary. ANY niche market where a world-spanning monopoly can be established, makes a mockery of regulation time and time again.

[bpt3]

What is the alternative to capitalism you propose? Every alternative has resulted in many more "bodies on the ocean floor".

[pdonis]

Capitalism is not the same thing as a free market. A free market means all transactions are voluntary. That's how wealth gets built--by voluntary cooperation among productive people through specialization and trade.

Capitalism is just the view that one should try to accumulate more capital, by hook or by crook. And there are lots of ways to do that that don't involve any kind of productive work, much less building wealth through cooperation, specialization, and trade. Buying government favors, for example, which is how most big-time "capitalists" in US history did it (for example, the railroad barons who got the government to give them exclusive access to key routes). Today they do it by buying regulations that favor them.

[gspencley]

> Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it

Citation required.

Money is an intermediary form of exchange. It arises organically because if, for example, you are a dairy farmer, there is no practical way for you to a) save enough milk to barter for a house (not only is it perishable but where do you store it all? Especially before refrigeration) and b) find someone with a house they want to trade for that much milk.

Money is just a commodity and in the absence of fiat currency it arises organically. People tend to seek intermediary forms of exchange that are non-perishable, easily divisible, transportable and difficult to forge/counterfeit because it is a necessity of life.

You simply cannot practically barter everything you'd ever want to trade. So instead we humans trade what we produce for something we can stash away and trade later more easily.

Money is not an invention to compel action. It is a natural product of trade that arises because most people, when they're not too busy spouting ideological drivel on Internet forums, have common sense.

[NoGravitas]

The barter myth is just that, a myth. Barter has never been observed in any society that had not previously been using money. Money, in fact, appears to arise not organically, but from the need early states to maintain standing armies. Creating markets denominated in currency allows you to simply pay your troops rather than maintaining their entire supply chain even when not on the march. And then requiring that taxes be paid in currency gives everyone a reason to accept currency for payment. It transforms your entire economy into a machine for feeding soldiers. This is not a thought experiment like the barter myth; it is documented in ancient sources from India, Mesopotamia, and China.

An article treatment: https://archive.is/20250725000932/https://www.theatlantic.co...

A book treatment (that of course covers many other things): https://archive.org/details/DebtTheFirst5000Years

[TheCoelacanth]

That's not how barter really worked in practice.

Pre-modern societies generally had very little currency and only used it for large transactions. Smaller transactions happened through debt and transfers of debt.

The transaction wouldn't be "I give you a bunch of milk and you give me a house" it would be "You give me the house and I'll give you milk every day for the next 5 years" or something like that.

Or it might be "Bob owes me a calf the next time his cow gives birth. I'll transfer that debt to you and give you eggs for a year and you give me the house."

Vendors who have debt relationships with a very large number of people would often get together with other vendors and swap debts to consolidate them into a more manageable number of debts.

Even if the debt was denominated in units of currency, it was typically settled in goods rather than currency because typical people just didn't have access to much currency.

[branko_d]

Can Elon Musk confiscate your property, limit your freedom of movement, or outright kill you?

There were times in history where having a lot of money was correlated to having all those powers. There are places in this world where that’s still the case.

[lucyjojo]

if he wanted to he very probably de-facto could.

[JKCalhoun]

> We need strong laws that reduce the voice of money and increase the voice of individuals.

Seeing the how flaccid "strong" laws have become, I prefer we go back to reducing the voice of money by taxing it away. Maybe our country could then finally have nice things.

[nielsbot]

Agreed. (I'm all in on confiscatory taxation.) No one person should be allowed to accumulate so much power and wealth.

[culopatin]

What do you do when all the money goes away to countries that don’t tax them that hard?

[alexashka]

Anyone that wants to take their money and leave and never come back ought to be encouraged to do so as soon as possible.

The never come back bit solves the imaginary problem you mention.

[spongebobstoes]

why do you think that will happen? how could that scenario be prevented, while still taxing money?

if you put more effort into making your point, I'm sure you could get better engagement

[Workaccount2]

Look at what Texas has been doing to California.

People who assign billionaires as being the living manifestation of greed are somehow quick to hand wave away "billionaires will move to protect their wealth".

[p_j_w]

> Look at what Texas has been doing to California.

What might that be? California is still at the forefront of every technological innovation this country is seeing while Texas is at the forefront of theocracy.

California may be seeing a smaller share of the world’s innovation in the past, but that hasn’t moved to Texas, it’s moved to China.

[thoroughburro]

We should be so lucky. They are leeches.

[heavyset_go]

The point of being wealthy is that you don't have to care about shit like that. You can be taxed at 90% land still have more money than you could spend in a thousand lifetimes.

Until the early 1980s, the highest tax bracket was taxed at 70%, and before that even more.

[actionfromafar]

It used to be that the US had unique ways of dealing with that, by virtue of its sheer size and dominance. But nowadays the ballon is leaking power from both ends, soft and hard.

[nielsbot]

I say "see ya!" and wave goodbye.

You think people living in NYC, for example, the financial (and one of the major cultural capitals) of the entire world (not to mention all the other benefits of US residency) are going to bother with packing up their lives and moving overseas because the taxes are too high? Not to mention these people will still have obscene wealth in all likelihood.

Some might, but I don't think we should wring our hands over it.

Rather than worrying about "capital flight" let's instead imaging all the good that could come of us having a more more equal wealth and income distribution.

[hollerith]

Maybe the reason it is the financial capital of the entire world is that historically the tax regime let people keep most of the money they earned.

[TimorousBestie]

Income tax rates and corporate tax rates were higher during the post-war era than they are now.

[bpt3]

Effective tax rates weren't much different, which is what matters.

[p_j_w]

Have you any evidence for this proposition?

[bpt3]

Yes, they've been moving to Florida in droves for the last decade plus.

Eventually you'll run out of other people's money to spend, and will be forced to face the reality of your own self-sufficiency.

[fireflash38]

Ah yes we're held hostage by the rich. Do what we say, or we take our ball and go home.

[bpt3]

If you're going to balance your budget on their backs, yes: https://taxfoundation.org/blog/one-rich-guy-moves-new-jersey...

Europe figured this out long ago and has a very broad tax base (aka higher taxes on the middle class) to fund their social welfare programs but somehow you never see that proposed as a solution by the middle class in the US...

[account42]

You tax them on the way out. Plus any transactions to/from tax havens.

[saulpw]

There's rich, and then there's 10x rich, and 100x rich, and 1000x rich, and 10000x rich, and now even 100000x rich. Millionaires are fine, billionaires are bad, and hectobillionaires are supremely terrible.

I think once someone gets to a billion dollars net worth, they should get an AmEx black card, and 99% of their assets moved into a sovereign public wealth fund. They can have anything they want, they lose the power of extreme asset allocation, and if they just like competing, they can start over and try to ring the bell again (and can give the second AmEx black card to a person of their choosing).

[lotsofpulp]

So if your business is extremely successful, your reward is losing control if it?

To who, politicians?

Leaving the large business intact and just changing the leader doesn’t seem like it changes anything.

[palata]

> your reward is losing control if it?

That's not what I understand from the GP. What they say is taht if your business is extremely successful, it can keep being extremely successful and you can keep control over it.

You just cannot accumulate more money for yourself. Like if the highest amount of money in a video game was 1 billion. Once you reach it, you don't go back to 0, you just can't go higher.

Makes sense to me.

[philsnow]

I'm reminded of Nethack, which keeps track of your score as a 32-bit* signed int, and so some people have perfected making sure that they have MAX_INT when they win.. and then it becomes a game of trying to do as much as you can in the game without going over MAX_INT.

* though I guess newer builds are defaulting to 64-bit signed ints?

[BrenBarn]

>What they say is taht if your business is extremely successful, it can keep being extremely successful and you can keep control over it.

> You just cannot accumulate more money for yourself.

If that's what it means, I don't think it makes sense, because the point of taking away the money was to reduce the ability of the rich to unduly control and influence others. If they can still do that via their company that they still control, it doesn't much matter whether they have money or not.

[palata]

> If they can still do that via their company that they still control, it doesn't much matter whether they have money or not.

Of course it does. It's very different to be the head of a company and to privately have more money than an entire country.

[Workaccount2]

I face palm through the back of my skull when people think billionaires have billions of dollars. Virtually none of them do.

[palata]

I talk about the ultra-rich as "they have waaaaay too much money". I do understand that this is not exactly big purse with a lot of cash that they carry everywhere with them. Still, it's way too much.

[Workaccount2]

They have tons of assets and not much money. That's part of why the problem is so intractable.

People put limits on what they should be able to own, but if we extend that idea globally (i.e. don't discriminate based on simply where you were born), then most of us in the first world would also be liable to give up our TVs, cars, latops, houses etc. And then suddenly seizing assets is bad...

The problem is not simple or straightforward. It's mostly people who want more complaining about those who also want more.

[mxkopy]

You should be forced to invest into all aspects of the social fabric that makes your success possible. Your reward is being able to be a successful philanthropist

[Workaccount2]

Your 401k is their social fabric contribution.

[mxkopy]

You misunderstand. From a billionaire’s POV a real contribution looks like taking some responsibility for the average person’s wellbeing even if it has nothing to do with their business interests, simply because they have the power to do this. The 401k is us benefitting from their selfishness, I ask that they stop being selfish

[p_j_w]

How does a 5 year old use their 401k to increase the quality of their education?

[Workaccount2]

Probably should allow parents to open college investment accounts for kids at birth. Even $5k invested at birth would be $50k at 25, enough to mostly pay off a state school degree.

So yeah, generally I think that would be a good idea.

[nielsbot]

Taxation = losing control of your business? Sounds a little hyperbolic. But explain more what you mean?

[blargey]

They're pointing to the fact that most of a given billion+aire's net worth is ownership of a highly valued company (stock). Their billions are literally just the market-assigned value of the control itself, so it falls upon people suggesting a wealth cap to come up with an arrangement that can divest them of that value without divesting them of the ownership/control rights that said value is being derived from.

Of course, control of a very large company is itself the sort of power that wealth caps are supposed to curb, like when people buy newspapers / social media platforms / etc - so you could also just proclaim it a feature instead of a bug, but it still warrants a defense.

[account42]

Yes, if your business gets to societal scale then the rest of society gets to have a say.

[JKCalhoun]

Society?

[orwin]

Yes, ideologically, i had no issue with people being rich, it's people having undue power over other people that i found morally wrong. I was a libertatian almost in the american meaning of the word, a liberal libertarian. Then, i tried to put my ideas real conditions, and came to the realisation that as long as money could buy you power, you can never be free. I don't realistically see how we can limit money influence on power, when you can offshore your company in two days, so in a practical manner, the only way to limit how rich one can get, until we figure out the rest.