I'm not sure how he proposes to limit people to less than a billion dollars (or $100m as he also suggests) without completely overhauling the financial system. Seems like the harms of that are greater than the harms of having some extremely wealthy people (most of whose wealth is tied up in their businesses).
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> how he proposes to limit people to less than a billion dollars (or $100m as he also suggests) without completely overhauling the financial system.
I mean, "there is a wealth tax that kicks in at $1,000,000,000 at 100%" is a one-line change. I don't see much issue. I mean, Bezos and Musk would have to sell some stock. And? That certainly is a possibility.
Sure that's one line. What about all the other changes you have to make as a consequence?
- You've now changed corporate governance, since companies can only grow to $2bn before a majority shareholder can no longer exist.
- You've created an opportunity for market manipulation since speculators can drive the price up to force a large shareholder to have to liquidate part of their position.
- What do you do in the event of a takeover? The acquirer buys the company for stock, the previous owner now has to liquidate some of that stock to pay for his increase in net worth. Situations like these are going to create problems for the legal and regulatory system.
Maybe some of those are unimportant or even desirable, my point is that it's not a simple change. It has large, far-reaching effects.
> You've now changed corporate governance, since companies can only grow to $2bn before a majority shareholder can no longer exist.
The vast majority of companies worth over $2bn don't have a majority shareholder. Do you think if Elon Musk didn't have a majority share of Tesla they would boot him. (BTW, he doesn't). I actually don't see any examples where that couldn't happen nor do I see any negative consequences.
> You've created an opportunity for market manipulation since speculators can drive the price up to force a large shareholder to have to liquidate part of their position.
To what end? But sure, market fluctuations happen, and we would need to prevent that.
> What do you do in the event of a takeover? The acquirer buys the company for stock, the previous owner now has to liquidate some of that stock to pay for his increase in net worth. Situations like these are going to create problems for the legal and regulatory system.
I don't understand how that's different from "what happens when stocks go up".
Obviously, the effects are far reaching, I'm pretty sure that's the goal. And I think a naive wealth cutoff isn't a good idea. But the idea that we couldn't deal with the fallout seems a bit crazy to me.
Please expound on what you think the problem is with overhauling the financial system?
"Doing Y without X is harmful" doesn't mean "X is harmful"