There's some truth to it ... but why is that a bad thing exactly?
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How important are Bezos, Musk, Page, Brin and Zuckerberg to society?
It’s hard to fathom FB, Amazon, Tesla and SpaceX becoming the behemoths they are without a dictatorish stock holder with absolute control. Amongst those, certainly Musks’ contribution from an electric car and space exploration standpoint are societally argueably positive. Tesla and SpaceX simply would not have happened without him.
You say they wouldn’t be behemoths like that’s a bad thing. There’s weekly threads on HN about Amazon, Google and FB abusing their position on the market.
The specific people mentioned are certainly nowhere near as important to society as their wealth makes it appear.
Can you honestly point to Bezos and say he is "worth" 196,100,000 times more to society than the Amazon warehouse worker who has $1000 in the bank?
Did he put in 190 million man hours more than the Warehouse worker?
Did he have ideas that were 190 million times better? What kind of IQ would you need to pull that off?
It a matter of good ideas, some long hours no doubt, right time, right place and leverage the work of many thousands of others.
Smart work, but not worth 190 million times his lowest paid.
This level of wealth inequality is indicative of a broken system.
> The specific people mentioned are certainly nowhere near as important to society as their wealth makes it appear
No one knows how much someone is "worth to society". Not me, and not you. Not even Bezos. This is not even a well-defined question.
But what we do know is that this is not what money measures, and attempts to politicize that -- to create some algorithm that decides what someone is worth to society, and then pay them according to that algorithm, always lead to terrible outcomes.
In the same way, we don't know how good or evil Bezos is, and neither is money a measure of good points net evil points.
The sooner we abandon these weird discourses around money, trying to endow it as some kind of metaphysical tally, or make it conform to some metaphysical tally, the better.
I like your comment. Discrete "worth to society" is indeed a vague and nebulous idea.
And money doesn't measure that, nor serve as a cosmic measure of morality.
If you remove wealth as being an indicator of worth to society, then Bezos has one less reason for such wealth.
The only reason he has the money is that he played the game well. But society makes the rules of the game and I think they should change.
if you start a company you should be able to continue to own that company until you decide you're ready to sell it
Then the company can pay out salary for him to pay those taxes. Then he can continue to be owner without selling shares.
Changes in law often result in changes to how companies operate, they're not forced to stick with status quo.
Most of these billionaires are founders of companies that were worth many billions of dollars before they ever turned a profit. There is no option just to pay out the cash to cover the gains tax.
I don't really see a problem. There would just be a new equilibrium. Pay salary->increased burn->lower valuation. The valuations are mostly detached from reality currently, it would bring it more in line.
There are no mom and pop store billionaires.
And the Income Tax originally was only 3% and only applied to less than 1% of the population.
The idea that it would apply to everyone, and be 20% was literally laughed out of the debate on implementing a national income tax as a "crazy conspiracy", it took less than 50 years before that crazy conspiracy was reality.
There is little reason to believe history will not play out the same, and it will not be long before this expands beyond the evil billionaires you despise soo much to those mom and pop stores you seem to claim love for...
But don't forget: the slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy!!!11!
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but Walmart started as a mom and pop store, and the Walton family maintains majority ownership to this day.
Walmart didn't go from mom and pop store to national corporation without an IPO.
I'm going by wiki data here, which says they had 18 stores and annual revenue of 9 million in 1968. If they had stayed private they were probably clearing a million dollars a year, give or take. To get from there to billions they had to raise outside money, specifically by selling stock and debt to someone else. That is by definition "not owning it anymore" because they're selling (some of) it to raise funding.
Like I said, there are no mom and pop billionaires. To get from millionaire to billionaire requires outside money. And yes, that includes tech companies. I know tech founders like to write false hagiographies for themselves after the fact about starting XYZ in a garage, but dig far enough and you usually find it was more like "garage + 25 million from Sequoia Capital," like Google.
Koch industries does over $100B in revenue and has never gone public.
Bloomberg is another example.
Yes, but Walmart is no longer a mom and pop shop.
It's a principle that we should apply evenly. I also find it hard to believe that this won't grow in scope once implemented.
Sam Walton says, "Huh?"
because taxes should be paid on money that exist and can spent.
you wanna take a loan against your stock? you pay taxes on that loan.
you wanna sell your stock? you pay taxes on the stock you sell.
you just get your salary from the company and never sell stock? you pay taxes on your salary, and not on stock that are doing nothing.
you wanna take a loan against your stock? you pay taxes on that loan.
That’s exactly the problem —- loans aren’t income, they’re debt, and debt isn’t taxed. Worse yet, the ultra-elite can carry out “buy (or ‘found’), borrow, die” strategies that let them pass the debt onto their kids, who can sell the securities at a tax advantage due to the stepped-up basis loophole.
but this is the kind of loophole that should be closed.
but they aren't.
and now we wonder why some "loopholes" are closed and some are not.