Yes. And the second question is, should only a handful of people be deciding that. They amass great fortunes on the backs of the labor force then tell them what's good for them is to ... go to mars[1]. The fuck!?
No. Hell no. People shouldn't be allowed to be THAT wealthy. I don't know how that looks but just no.
[1] Knowing full well that same labor force won't be invited.
> And the second question is, should only a handful of people be deciding that.
Yes. Large groups can't formulate answers to complex questions. The way hive minds make great decisions is by using algorithms to select the handful quickly and effectively.
Consider an online forum with comments and voting. The top few comments are usually much more insightful than the average comment - the forum can be very intelligent. But only a handful of comments actually express that. The same basic forces hold in politics. For any decision there are only a handful of people needed to get a good result and the major complication is finding them, appointing them, resourcing them and determining if the people are corrupt.
> go to mars[1]. The fuck!?
After a century, technological processes trumps most other concerns for bettering the lot of humanity. Without ill-will, if you're feeling an emotion it is more than likely pulling you away from long term gain and towards short term certainty. The reason people like Musk get to make the decisions is because they are a lot better than average at doing the rational thing rather than falling into the emotional trap of burning the seed corn.
If watching governments attempt to budget teaches us anything it is that collective groups completely suck at managing resources long term. They are appallingly bad. It is hard to overemphasise just how bad mass voting is at managing a budget. The US is doing comparatively well as far as governments go - and it is the largest debtor in history. It is just a big whirlpool sucking effort in and putting it all towards unproductive projects. You can argue for better or worse, but it is a lesson in why billionaires are allowed to be that wealthy. Someone has to generate the wealth and the government isn't up to the challenge.
> The reason people like Musk get to make the decisions is because they are a lot better than average at doing the rational thing rather than falling into the emotional trap of burning the seed corn.
I believe that there are genuine skills separating billionaires from normal people, but I'm not sure that the primary one is reliably "[being] better than average at doing the rational thing". Being OK at logic, starting with some money, and having an enormous tolerance for risk seems to be a common formula for becoming billion-scale rich (and also, in most cases, much poorer than that). I'd argue that this kind of appetite for risk, and volatility in general, makes such people questionable managers of society's resources, though I guess there are more "steward-style" billionaires like Buffett that might be more palatable.
> The reason people like Musk get to make the decisions is because they are a lot better than average at doing the rational thing rather than falling into the emotional trap of burning the seed corn.
I call BS.
First, Musk is all about the irrational.
Second, being a billionaire doesn't mean you have some super power. It's luck and rich parents (usually). Is it rational for Bezos to build a huge fucking yacht to pull behind his enormous fucking yacht instead of making sure Amazon warehouse workers have the absolute first class working environment? Hint: NO!
> Is it rational for Bezos to build a huge fucking yacht to pull behind his enormous fucking yacht instead of making sure Amazon warehouse workers have the absolute first class working environment? Hint: NO!
Amazon has ~1.5 million workers. If Jeff Bezos donated his entire fortune to them, that would be a one-off payment of $11,000 each. That is quite substantial, but it isn't enough to be a political issue - for example the US wasted an order of magnitude more money on the Afghanistan war (completely pointless) and about order of magnitude people were displaced. We should be more worried about allowing people like Bush having influence.
Do you expect to be typing my comments for me? Of course it isn't what you said! It is what I said.
You're focusing on the rounding error. Focus on the big issues. Bezos is making great use of those resources compared to the next-best non-billionaire institution, which is the US government.
Relative to to you or I the richest are of course effectively kings, but relative to what governments already spend, their entire wealth - even collectively, amounts to quite little. For instance, the Iraq War cost around $2 trillion. [1] Take the complete wealth of the richest 25 Americans [2] and you still couldn't even come close to funding that one conflict. And it's not like Iraq was an outlier. This happens repeatedly, and endlessly.
The idea that one man might even possibly be able to make humans a multiplanetary species by expending a lifetime earning that amounts to less than 3% of the US government spends per year, or less than 1/5th of what we spend on 'defense' per year, is, to me, one of the strongest arguments I've ever heard in favor of private capital. If we were able to take that sort of efficiency as a given, we might now be living in the world that people in the 60s and 70s thought we'd be living in today.
I think you'll find that even if you cap lifetime earnings and max inheritance at one billion dollars (and were able to rigorously enforce that), you'd still have a healthy population willing to start large enterprises.
If someone needs more motivation than earning billion dollars to start large industrial enterprises, I guarantee there's someone who'd be willing to try it for a billion or less.
pg has an interesting essay exploring this question called Billionaires Build[0], the TLDR is that he finds that these people are intrinsically motivated to keep going for reasons other than monetary gain. Otherwise they would’ve quit long before a billion dollars anyway.
"One thing few people realize about billionaires is that all of them could have stopped sooner. They could have gotten acquired, or found someone else to run the company. Many founders do. The ones who become really rich are the ones who keep working. And what makes them keep working is not just money. What keeps them working is the same thing that keeps anyone else working when they could stop if they wanted to: that there's nothing else they'd rather do."
That there's nothing you'd rather do in the present context, doesn't mean that'd also be true if you make it literally financially pointless.
In any case, I think this is all a non-starter. If loop-holes were not readily available, people would simply move to different countries. The exact thing is happening in Norway to a somewhat comical degree. They recently chose to increase their wealth tax on billionaires. Dozens of billionaires thus chose to leave the country directly because of this, resulting an overall decline in tax revenue than if the country had retained the previous tax levels. [1]
I wonder how much that motivation is about 'well, if I sold out- these other people are purely about the monetary gain from it and me cashing out' vs the original mission. Or in other words, the altruism of the motivation.
This requires a person to believe that money which wends its way through a political system, with its attendant cronyism and moral hazard, is better spent than money with a shorter path between its donors and recipients. The caveat is that the overall level of outflows from rich to poor might be (would probably be?) lower without taxation, but it is possible for individuals to be telling the truth when they say they believe that money does more good as charity than as tax revenue.
Yes. And the second question is, should only a handful of people be deciding that. They amass great fortunes on the backs of the labor force then tell them what's good for them is to ... go to mars[1]. The fuck!?
No. Hell no. People shouldn't be allowed to be THAT wealthy. I don't know how that looks but just no.
[1] Knowing full well that same labor force won't be invited.