[arjie]

People are billionaires because they “share with society”. They take a small fraction of the wealth and surplus they create. If you create $6 of value for every American and capture half of it you are a billionaire.

“Public investments” besides are heavily spent on. The majority of the US federal budget goes to welfare. If you want new infrastructure and so on, the primary blockers are the universal veto powers we hand normal people.

[js8]

If they want to "share with society", it's nice, but they can do it after taxes, just like everyone else.

Even if a rich person reinvests everything, the control over large amount of money is what makes it problematic.

Also the idea that welfare doesn't go to investments is wrong. When you buy groceries (or anything really), there is a decision made by the management of the company you buy these things from to reinvest part of it to maintain or build productive capacity.

There is no need for a "capitalist" (owner of the enterprise) to insert themself into the process, they are useless middlemen who get a cut, essentially. (They are not so useless when they do actual managerial work, but then they can be just an employee like everyone else.)

[landl0rd]

You could always replace him with a "banker" who instead loans you the means of production on credit, but nobody is going to make you a lathe for free out of the goodness of his heart, nor buggies for your grocery, nor the produce for your shelves and meat for your coolers. The banker makes you take the risk because, if it fails, he probably takes your house.

Believe it or not co-ops exist just fine and some do very well. It sounds like what you would like is a co-op and I will be quite happy for you if you start one.

[js8]

Bankers are even worse than shared ownership due to moral hazard (that's where muslim and christian view of money lending comes from), but yes, as a socialist I am in favor of coops.

[zozbot234]

> Even if a rich person reinvests everything, the control over large amount of money is what makes it problematic.

What about the control that out-of-touch politicians and bureaucrats have over large amounts of taxpayers' money? Shouldn't we find that far more problematic overall?

> There is no need for a "capitalist" (owner of the enterprise) to insert themself into the process, they are useless middlemen who get a cut, essentially.

Then why do newly created enterprises almost universally seek outside capital investment? Sounds like there is a need after all, otherwise you could just have a partnership structure and take no outside money whatsoever.

[js8]

> Shouldn't we find that far more problematic overall?

These things are connected and both are problematic. See e.g. Citizens United vs FEC.

> Then why do newly created enterprises almost universally seek outside capital investment?

I agree there is a need to raise capital, because any large scale economic activity is a collective enterprise. Whether this collective enterprise should be owned by a single person, or small subgroup, or by all participants, is an orthogonal question.

[energy123]

What's your solution to the local knowledge problem? Capital markets are like other markets. Capital gets allocated to where it's needed, holding aside market failure (which is what regulations are supposed to fix). Capital owners seek out the best return/risk, and because they are on the ground and diverse in views and skills, that solves for the local knowledge problem.

This is where startup seed funding comes from, capitalists like YC who are good at it rather than some incompetent. It's why bad companies eventually lose the ability to raise, freeing up societal resources.

What appears to be implicit in your comment ("There is no need for a capitalist") is an advocacy for central planning for capital. Although you also say "they can pay taxes" so maybe that's not what you're advocating for.

If you want to know what I think is best, it's possibly a wealth tax applied on global wealth, along with stronger regulations around media concentration, political spending, and a few other things. But to eliminate capital markets and push it all into a central planner is bad.

[js8]

> an advocacy for central planning for capital

No, it isn't. You can have democratic control over capital, respecting subsidiarity principle. It's no more centralized or decentralized than under capitalism.

> But to eliminate capital markets and push it all into a central planner is bad.

If you have a high concentration of wealth you have the same centralized control, regardless whether the mechanism is capital markets or gosplan.

[saghm]

> People are billionaires because they “share with society”. They take a small fraction of the wealth and surplus they create.

That's certainly an opinion that some people have, but as the parent comment stated, companies don't run without employees, so the idea that the value created is solely attributed to the founders or other executives is not an empircal fact like you're claiming it is. There's no scientific formula for "how much of this result of a bunch of actions that multiple people took over the course of a few years is attributed to each of the people"; the only way to have any sort of objective delineation of that like you're describing is if you already bake in assumptions of how valuable each piece is before you've started, which just moves the opinions one later deeper.

I can't prove you wrong any more than you can prove the parent commenter wrong, because what you've said is based on so many premises that I fundamentally agree with that seem like universal laws to you.

[vintermann]

> There's no scientific formula for "how much of this result of a bunch of actions that multiple people took over the course of a few years is attributed to each of the people"

I can think of a few. You've got things like Shapley values. But it's not a "neutral" way to attribute outcomes to actors.

It's funny actually, I read about Shapley scores ages ago, and then the go-to example was basically political corruption: assume a bunch of political parties with varying vote weight but no principles whatsoever, aiming to secure a majority to split a "prize" among themselves. But looking at Wikipedia now, it's practically presented as a method to guarantee fairness.

Either way, there's no neutral measure of value (or for that matter, effort) either. What a dollar gets you depends 100% on who else has dollars and how much, so productivity or efficiency can never be separated from distributional concerns.

[saghm]

Fair enough, I wasn't precise. There isn't one single objective way to do this math because, as you point out, different assumptions will lead to different results, and it makes it impossible to do neutrally. My reaction to the parent comment was mostly due to the rigid view that the way things work now is inherently right and proper rather than there being any number of plausibly defensible allocations of credit (and therefore the value generated), and I think many of them are probably a lot more defensible than what we have now.

[tjwebbnorfolk]

> companies don't run without employees, the idea that the value created is solely attributed to the founders

That's why the owners get to keep what is left AFTER paying employees. It's called profit.

One way to become a billionaire is when you offer that stream of future profits securitized as "stock" to other people who buy those future profits from you and collectively value those securitizations at over a billion dollars.

The owner takes the risk that there is no (or negative) money left over after paying employees and all other costs. As a result, if there is money left over, they get to keep it. I suppose I should remind you that the vast majority of businesses fail. The entire dataset visible to you is imbued with survivorship bias.

Welcome to money 101. This is how all business works everywhere. Nobody thinks that value is created "solely" by the owners. That's a fake strawman.

[js8]

> The owner takes the risk that there is no (or negative) money left over after paying employees and all other costs.

This is not true, and somewhat confusing, because "takes the risk" means two distinct things - making decisions and living with the consequences of them. Economic production is a collective effort. The management of the company is who usually makes the decisions; these might coincide with owner (especially in small business) but often they're just another employee.

On the other hand, bad decisions made by management affect everyone in the company, not just the owner. The rich enough owner rarely lose their livelihood (we have limited liabilities btw), but the employees might lose the only source of income.

And the system where you have only one person (owner as main manager) making decisions ("take risks") that can negatively impact many people (his employees, customers and what not) is structurally risky, it actually increases the risk of something going wrong (aside from it being a moral hazard). (POTUS is an extreme example of this.) The risk is shared (collectively owned, if you will) and so should be the decision-making.

[kannanvijayan]

What if over time, the system degrades in such a way that there's a group of people that extract more and more value from the system while adding less and less value themselves?

Is this a possible failure mode of the system?

What sort of symptoms might one look for in a society if we believed this might be happening?

Or do we simply dismiss that this has been proven impossible (as per the theory of Money 101) and move on?

[saghm]

> The owner takes the risk that there is no (or negative) money left over after paying employees and all other costs. As a result, if there is money left over, they get to keep it. I suppose I should remind you that the vast majority of businesses fail. The entire dataset visible to you is imbued with survivorship bias.

Right, and CEOs famously are the first ones laid off when the company is flailing and losing money, because after all, they're the ones at the helm of the ship! And of course when a CEO does leave, they never get a golden parachute.

> Welcome to money 101. This is how all business works everywhere. Nobody thinks that value is created "solely" by the owners. That's a fake strawman.

Sure, but plenty of people think that the way value is distributed today is completely out of proportion to their contributions, and you're presenting it like the current way is the only possible rational way rather than an emergent property of the entirety of human history being an uneven playing field.

[throwaway894345]

Billionaires extract a vast amount from the economy and pay a tiny fraction of that back in. It’s not “creating value” to replace millions of middle class retail jobs across the country with tens or hundreds of thousands of largely poverty line jobs and parking the delta in shareholder investment accounts.

Without billionaires, money stays in the community where it circulates (workers and small business owners make money and they spend it). With billionaires it is extracted from the communities and hoarded in investment accounts a thousand miles away.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Almost all billionaires are parasites who don't really "create" anything except figure out ways to either game the money markets or underpay employees.

There's also all the various shenanigans they employ to avoid paying a fair share of tax, so they're mainly "stealing from society".

The level of wealth hoarding by certain people would be classed as a serious mental illness if they were hoarding something else, but it's actually far more damaging to the rest of the world that they hoard wealth.

[vasco]

Pro-tip: more often than not people are billionaires because their parent was a billionaire or multi millionaire

[arjie]

That’s actually a pretty good thing. Becoming a multi-millionaire is quite achievable in this country and if that means I provide a compounding ability to my kids to provide a large amount of value to a large amount of people and capture some amount of that, that’s a good thing.

Since 2/3rds of American billionaires are from industry, if it is true that their parents were multi-millionaires, that is wonderful. The fact that children here can take the platforms their parents build them and turn that into great value for the American people is a good thing and one of the reasons I am drawn to this country.

[Rapzid]

You are drawn to the multi generational accumulation of wealth and power? The societal ill our founders were concerned about that's currently giving us a high grade fever?

Brings to mind a certain creature that thrives in festering wounds.. It's in the tip of my...

[zozbot234]

Yes, I'd rather people bequeath their wealth and power over the generations than they waste it in purely self-serving ways, such as by buying yet another luxury yacht. Of course many billionaires choose to donate much of their wealth to charitable pursuits as well.

[Detrytus]

Yes, and the contributions from those parents were so valuable that the society still owes them, even long after their death. That's why we pay our dues to their children and grandchildren.

[saghm]

> Yes, and the contributions from those parents were so valuable that the society still owes them, even long after their death. That's why we pay our dues to their children and grandchildren.

You're ascribing a level of agreement with your opinions about who deserves what level of credit people deserve for results that are far beyond the scope of a single person to vast swaths of people who have no power to contest the system that has existed for so long that no one alive created. The reason I "pay my dues" to the grandchildren of random rich people from 100 years ago is not because I owe them but because there's literally nothing I can do to avoid it regardless of how plausible I find the extreme opinion you're confidently asserting is some sort of self-evident fact.

[mcv]

Sorry, why would society owe their children? Where does this obligation come from? You're making a leap here that doesn't make sense.

Also, it's not sharing with society that makes people billionaires, it's taking from society. Had all that profit gone to society, they wouldn't be billionaires. Now often (not always) they provide some value to society but that generates that profit, but quite often even that was based on taking from society. They take natural resources to exploit, monopolise a market, exploit workers, etc.

[vasco]

You might be living inside a philosophy book about capitalism. Do you know about the existence of Russian oligarchs and their offspring? Or Texan billionaires that one day woke up and found out they were living on top of oil? What contribution did they give to society?

[Detrytus]

Well, I can give you Russian oligarchs - they came to their wealth during time of chaos, and mostly through stealing. But Texan oil billionaires? They won their wealth fair and square, if not for anything else then for just recognizing an opportunity and acting on it. Believe me, there are many people in this world who would blew it in stupid ways.

[vasco]

I won't even argue about Texans even though you're wrong there, but since you accepted Russian oligarchs as a problem with this world view that having money = having contributed to society then I'm not sure what else to say. You already admit this model doesn't work as a proxy to merit in the case of using force and connections.

Take another example, someone who won a lottery vs someone who hasn't, but otherwise lived the same life, in your world view one deserves it and the other doesn't. And their their offspring forever on as well? If you accept this now your list of exceptions is using force, connections and also luck. But we can keep adding examples and exceptions to the rule until at some point you need to admit that way of looking at the world is too flawed, no? BTW this luck aspect is the same as the "Texan got a knock on the door offering them millions forever because they have oil under their house" so I guess I did end up re-arguing that.

[gloxkiqcza]

In an ideal capitalistic world billionaires are people that provide most value to society, yes. In the real world it’s questionable to say the least because they usually do not do fair win-win business, they do cutthroat “I’m gonna abuse my position to the absolute limit, what are you gonna do about it, you have no other choice” business. People that don’t do that don’t end up billionaires because they can’t compete with those that do.

[adrianN]

The definition of „value“ in capitalism is already contentious, so even in idealized capitalism billionaires can provide „value“ that does not align with the „value“ of most of the people.

[onion2k]

People are billionaires because they “share with society”.

I appreciate that this is a flippant remark, but there are crypto billionaires proving that there are exceptions to this assertion.

[autoexec]

Contributing nothing isn't even the worst case. There are also people who make their fortunes costing society. The Sackler family made insane amounts of wealth as literal serial killers. The CEO of Nestlé make a ton of money killing babies. The folks at DuPont made huge profits knowingly poisoning people (and ultimately the entire planet). Some of the wealthiest individuals are also the most sick and dangerous people who have ever existed and are responsible for incalculable damages to society. The worst part is that they usually bribe their way out of any actual accountability for what they do.

[antirealist]

I think this is essentially correct. I'm sorry you're getting downvoted. I think there seems to be a prevailing attitude here (and in the world in general) that making money is 0 sum and you get it by taking taking it from others, rather than the reality (in free-ish, market-ish economies) that most people make money by adding value to other people's lives and being voluntarily paid for that value. Similarly there's a sentiment that policies are bad because billionaires lobby politicians, as opposed to that most people want terrible policies (though the lobbying can definitely be bad).

I guess one important nuace is that it's not all billionaires for whom this is the case. You have lots of Carlos Slim style 'get a government monopoly and collect the rents'. So it's a bit messy.

[Carrok]

> People are billionaires because they “share with society”. They take a small fraction of the wealth and surplus they create.

I truly cannot believe that anyone with an ounce of empathy or integrity could possibly believe a statement as absurd as this.

[autoexec]

One day it's all going to trickle down, just like they promised us, keep waiting! All that wealth is going to leak through and soak our empty pockets until they are heavy with gold! The Holy Gipper wouldn't lie to us.

[robocat]

My sister in New Zealand uses StarLink because ADSL stopped working in the rural wops.

She gets more utility than she pays for (that's the one trick of capitalism).

Is that trickle down?

[autoexec]

I feel bad for your sister. Only one reasonable option for an essential utility and all it costs your sister is hundreds a month plus sending all of her private data to a Nazi billionaire who is using it to train his AI while externalizing the costs of light pollution and space congestion/garbage onto the entire rest of the planet? It's looking like there's more than one trick to capitalism.

[robocat]

Why blame capitalism?

Maybe look for a better word that encompasses other political systems too - power?

There are many examples of surveillance states (and the best known examples were not labeled capitalist).

The surveillance you blame on Musk is the same from other ISPs - therefore your analysis is simply incorrect. She needs a VPN to avoid ISP snooping on the metadata (IP addresses used, DNS, etc).

And the US is a bigger snoop (Echelon, 5 eyes, Room 641A).

Our individual choices are limited in New Zealand (written on an iPhone - far more snoopy than my ISP).

[zozbot234]

You do realize that any broad-based improvement in overall living standards is a result of exactly that kind of process?

[arjie]

Disbelief rarely alters reality. Eppur si muove.

[throwaway894345]

Stating something as fact doesn’t make it so. :shrug:

[ai_slop_hater]

Why is this absurd?

[onion2k]

Two sorts of people become billionaires from share price increases. The founders and the early investors. Neither are thousands of times more impactful than the other early hires, but they get to keep billions of dollars while the early hires only get a handful of millions. And the slightly-less-early-hires who were too late to get equity usually get nothing more than their salary, regardless of their impact.

I don't have any problem with people getting insanely rich from stock price increases, but the argument that it's society sharing the value they created ignores the fact that they were only responsible for the initial foundations of that value, and not all the work that continues later.

[antirealist]

Society shares in the value because - insofar as the company is now worth say $X - that's because they have some way to create value that justifies a price of $Y per year for N people. And for those N people to be willing to pay $Y, they presumably have to be getting more than Y value (otherwise they wouldn't bother). So the real consumer value minus $Y is the 'value' created - the consumer surplus. Obviously there are exceptions but I think this is true in general.

And re the impact of the founders/early investors, I agree that they didn't contribute 1000s of times more. But like, if I bet a million dollars on a sports games and I get bet right and make 5 million would you say I ought to pay the players who really did the work? It's not about "adding value" its about property rights. The the second tier of engineers isn't happy they can (and sometimes do) found a competitor.

[zozbot234]

> Neither are thousands of times more impactful than the other early hires, but they get to keep billions of dollars while the early hires only get a handful of millions.

That's a meaningful tradeoff of risk vs. return. If you choose to be an early hire rather than founding your own risky venture, that ultimately means you value the security of "only" getting millions over a lottery ticket that might or might not be worth billions.