alt Hacker NewsSo you're not allowed to own a company whose share is worth more than $1b? So everyone would cease productivity after that point because you'd essentially be working for free. Even worse, you have downside.
Suppose you own 10% of a company worth $10b and you love grinding so you keep working, grow it to $20b and your net worth is now $2b on paper so you have to give up 5% to the government, leaving you with 5%, bringing you down to $1b cap. Now the company drops back down to $10b and you now have $500m.
Bezos would have retired when Amazon was worth ~4-5b. But according to the kind of people that want this kind of cap, Amazon would just continue to grow to 50x over the next 25 years just through inertia. Because it's totally normal for a book retailer to 50x over 25 years.
Makes no sense.
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Most uberwealthy aren't doing it for the extra money. And if they are, I think it's fine if they call it quits early. There are plenty more people who could be rich if Bezos/AMZN didn't suck all the air out of the room.
I honestly haven't done enough thinking on it, but it doesn't strike me a priori as ridiculous to limit people's ownership of these nation-sized companies, and to possibly limit the size of the company as well
Once someone has a billion dollars do we really want them to continue accruing more wealth (power)? Isn't billion dollar people and companies unduly influencing our government the source of many of our problems?
> Makes no sense.
It makes no sense if you reason backward from "I should be allowed to have infinite dollars" as a premise. You simply can't do enough work to create a billion dollars[1]. It is just not physically possible to create that much value through sheer effort, nor is it even possible to keep that much value stored anywhere you can physically defend yourself. We're not talking about some chest of gold you keep in a bedroom closet in your very big house. It's so much more than that. Every billionaire is a beneficiary of a large organization of hundreds, usually thousands of people, that they've managed to put themselves at the top of or make a direct beneficiary of, or owns a special kind of currency that the markets have inflated to a valuation. Similarly, defending the integrity of a sprawling set of assets like that takes a virtual army of security, even if it's just the stock certificates you supposedly have in your name.
And I reject the premise that there isn't a limit on ownership. Ownership is a social construct. Ownership requires a functioning justice system and police force to maintain. Both of said things are collectively agreed upon social contracts that absolutely are negotiated. If you disagree, then by all means, build a moat around your island with a trillion gold bars and man it with automated sentry guns. No one does that because we've negotiated a system that actively helps wealthy people maintain their wealth and defends them against pitchforks, which have a nasty habit of turning up when said justice and organization breaks down and leads to anarchy.
Don't want anarchy where rich people a lynched by mobs? Well, yeah, that's why we negotiate limits. I'm saying the social contract just doesn't let you have more than a billion dollars.
[1] And incidentally, one cannot even enjoy that much wealth, even if they dedicated themselves to it! The kind of enjoyments that us regular people enjoy, like hockey games and surf trips, wouldn't even put a dent in a billion dollars, even if done for a lifetime. It's absurd that we think hundred million dollar yachts and private jets for the lucky ones are a birthright of our system or something. Because that's what we're really talking about--obscene wealth, not just living comfortably.
> So you're not allowed to own a company whose share is worth more than $1b? So everyone would cease productivity after that point because you'd essentially be working for free.
Or, you know, pay your employees better¹. You want more money? Help other people earn more, get your rich friends on it, raise the median. Then you can earn more. And on a multiplier! The more you give everyone else, the more you can raise your cap.
¹ Seeing as we’re talking Bezos, not exploiting people to the point they have to pee in bottles and work next to dead collapsed coworkers would already but an improvement.
> So you're not allowed to own a company whose share is worth more than $1b?
I don't find it unreasonable either to limit this. A 1B company should probably not be in the hands of a single person.