These aren't billion dollar companies by a long shot. Slavery was leveraging the forced labor of other humans. They spent an unholy amount of time fighting over inheritances with other family members and over property boundaries with neighbours. As it is, they are competing for employees as a group with the rest of the industry, more so than with each other, so the truth is a mixture: individual employees matter more than their compensation actually reflects, and the company the employee is embedded in matters a great deal too (enough so that we only ever see a randomly occurring concentration of high quality employees producing innovative products and services when that group is more-or-less the whole org: a startup. Rather, its function is to vent one's own frustrations by translating them into concentrated language. Some of those workers will hit the jackpot and get a great return. Is this a critique of the concept of investing in general? You have a weird concept of "thievery". Mariana Mazzucato may be an exception. Again, you are reducing my argument down to my feelings, but I don't personally give a fuck if Jeff Bezos is a ba-zillionaire, so it's not really hitting home - I'll be fine either way. Buffet may not directly exploit anyone, but wage-labor in itself is exploitation. >I think this is a fundamental feature a winner take all/most market. What we wind up with is a system where business owners have substantially more money than workers, purely as a product of the fact that they can use their power to make this happen. My social media is stuffed to the brim with people posting exactly this sentiment. If its above a certain amount is that a "moral" billionaire? I am not sure why you feel that "taxing rich people" makes everyone worse off. Software engineering is an example, but really any type of hard engineering training will relatively easily result in a relatively high paying job. FB beat out myspace and happened to win, but if not them it would have been someone else. Were they "successful" - in the sense of being very comfortably off? It depends on what you view as "innovative" - by this logic, I fail to see how going to the moon helped the average person. In 2015, Buffett released his tax returns and paid $1.8 million on $11.6 million in income. I'm proposing a return to a previous status quo that was more broadly equitable. I think it was in The Meritocracy Trap that spoke to how this is a relatively recent phenomenon that is exacerbates wealth inequality. People are people, and - as far as capitalist societies go - money is success, and "skimming" is unfortunately the dominant and easiest strategy to get it. menu. So, how is it exploitation to give them less than the total profit created? I wish I had a mental model of things good enough to suggest what the right fix would be, but as a random guess, I'd rather see taxes on the industries above than a tax on billionaires. Because it's spoken like someone who has never dealt with human resources inside a company. But I think it is a straw-man argument. Becoming a millionaire is accessible to most of the mid-upper middle class in the US. These six hackers have all made $1 million. Wall Street volatility gives some of them the chance to rinse and repeat each time before their big wigs get repowdering. Well, of course, that’s exactly what he’s doing. If that were the case, everyone making minimum wage should have seen their salaries skyrocket when these billionaires lost great %'s of their wealth over the last year. If you want to theorize about potential policies and what their impacts might be, then cool, I'd love to brainstorm about what things might happen. Tommy DeVoss, a 35-year-old American, started his hacking career on the wrong side of the tracks. On the other hand, we have quite a bit of data about the broad middle ground, and it is pretty clear that the current settings for the US economy are that taxes are currently too low and not progressive enough (how much is a matter of some debate), and that we probably need to revert to Reagan-era levels if only to be able to afford to refresh and replace crumbling public infrastructure that has been a drag on the economy for a while (because putting off maintenance doesn't save money in the long run) and step up enforcement of existing regulations. And he is uniquely in a position to stop that practice and chooses not to. That's... not a very convincing argument. If you're arguing on HN you're most likely not the average person. PSA that the bottom 50% of taxpayers pay 3% of the taxes. Do you want me to show dozens of examples of FTTs failing? Rest assured, if you want to take the money from Bezos and invest it in Medicare for All and expanding fiber internet to rural Appalachia, I am 110% onboard. We can keep the market forces that allow for efficient allocation of capital while putting policies in place that provide for those who aren’t at the top of hierarchies and whose contributions are less unique. Or at least it is if your idea of a hacker is someone who breaks into stuff illegally. Nothing is stopping anyone from starting a competing business, and offering a better deal to the workers. Sometimes snarky dismissals are appropriate. Whether Jeff Bezos is "good" is entirely irrelevant. In high school I would show up to regional science fairs, and would often come in 2nd or 3rd place, and would lose to kids who used their high school's teacher's Masters thesis as a science project (for reference, in my school nobody even had a Masters degree.) [46] Unlike Perot, however, other third-party candidates since Roosevelt won multiple electoral college votes: Robert La Follette in 1924, Strom Thurmond in 1948, and George Wallace in 1968. In 2015 Lopez signed up with the HackerOne platform and realized he could make some money from his skills. I feel you. Stop doing it! Otherwise, I don't really see the point, when no other country has had global financial controls comparable to the US/UK in the last 100 years. Nobody suggests that at all. Yes - perhaps PG should have added qualifiers along the lines of "YC originated billionaires" versus attempting to cover all billionaires that have ever existed. I replied that yes, maybe he could devote those resources to push forward electrification of transport to mitigate global warming, invest heavily is solar power technology and devote resources to trying to create a future for humanity in space. Bezos is a billionaire because he owns a lot of shares because he didn't have a lot of cofounders. Many regular public companies engage in it regularly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line. It would be great if Y Combinator filters well to emphasize non-exploiting billionaires, but that’s certainly less that all billionaires. Enter your info below to login. Capital also exerts quite a lot of influence to ensure that labor markets don't get too tight (eg. Snark is there to suggest the reader go do their own research. Same exact line of thinking too. In your opinion, was this a generally positive event for the rest of the country or not? Taxation to pay 1. The children's genes are a collage of the parent's. Would like to hear his reasoning beyond the short blurb on his website as he has always struck me as deep thinker. This isn't a straw man, it is an extremely common belief and it deserves to be addressed and debunked. https://www.fool.com/taxes/2020/09/25/why-does-billionaire-w... https://taxfoundation.org/why-capital-gains-are-taxed-lower-... https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/03/02/warren_bu... https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/04/ocasio-cortez-and-warren-buf... https://www.manhattan-institute.org/issues-2020-us-public-sc... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform. You are going to build a Hacker News clone using the Y Combinator Hacker News API. economic policies that target unemployment rates that aren't "too low") that might somewhat counter capital's negotiating advantage. © 2021 Forbes Media LLC. Which is equivalent to saying nobody can build a business with more than a certain arbitrary number of employees. $10-20 an hour is better than minimum wage and a few years ago I worked a labor job that "only" paid $12.00/hr. I lived in the tail end of USSR, could observe first hand how well it worked. This does happen sometimes, we call it recessions, depressions, etc. Consumer Staples billionaires leverage their supply chain monopolies and labor monopolies. "you have to be able to capture the difference between the value of someone else’s work and what you pay them to do it". Yeah, if you don’t have any resources, you do everything yourself. These aren't mutually exclusive though... >Snore. Keep in mind that Smith, Ricardo, and Marx each commit this error, including in the Smith passage I quoted. > PG is picking a fight with the least sophisticated form of the anti-billionaire argument (i.e. But yes I agree with you that a tax on each market trade is lol stupid. >> But in reality he's just deflecting from other potential sources of taxes, such as taxing people on wealth vs on income (which someone in his wealth bracket can easily live without). By your standards, the only way Amazon could compensate them fairly is to pay workers in Amazon shares and force them to hold it. But even if everyone retrained as software engineers, that would just result in a surplus & everyone would need to retrain again. We can start by taxing that right back, with no obvious consequence. Using leverage is one aspect. Keep nitpicking individual policies, you are missing the bigger picture. So let's get started. I used my good grades to become a TA as soon as I could, and I worked as many hours as I could so I could pay rent and make expenses while my friends seemed to have endless amounts of time to go to social hangouts and parties, which certainly blocked the connections I could make. Without so much as numbers its really hard to argue its impact. > You still haven't explained exactly how you would make this happen. Bezos's net worth could easily drop by 73% on Monday without any government intervention at all, do you think that would help anyone? I'm not claiming that 100% of policies that tax the wealthy are good, or will succeed. Did not realize that Yang supported it, learn something new everyday. And yeah there are plenty of societal biases that are real, but I really don't think anything will ever be as powerful as this self-organizing dynamic of how people marry and have kids. No, it's absolutely a strawman. If you have a dollar, how many more do you need to make a billion? In other words, companies that produce billionaires have to be providing more than just labor at a higher price than they paid for it. Having found his first bug while still in elementary school, he has gone on to uncover more than 700 vulnerabilities which makes him one of the top three HackerOne hackers. You don’t have perfect manners because it’s just not the world you live in. Sounds about right. I agree this is a product of our human instincts, but the only thing stopping it - short of a revolution - are thoughtful laws designed to balance the entrepreneurial spirit with the need to treat everybody equitably. I would like to see the focus be on rent and CoL as I see those as way more of a problem than if Jeff Bezos has $50b or $100b. (his wealth has fluctuated like crazy with covid and divorce). Nit picking specific policies seems to be a favorite bad-faith tactic to avoid acknowledging that the issue is an issue, which would then require the nitpickers to suggest ideas themselves, instead of just criticizing. You're making that exact argument in fancier words. You left out a key part in this simplified formula - you pay $X and make $Y from the work, and you do this for N people. Is Bezos supposed to write a check for $130B? #100 – From Aspiring Billionaire to Indie Hacker with Sahil Lavingia of Gumroad 0 According to Sahil, we would be a lot better off as a world if we focused more on creators and companies that are delivering value for the sake of creating valuable products, instead of explicitly chasing billions of dollars. The reason why some believe that to be a billionaire is exploitative is that they believe this 4-6 order of magnitude disparity in wealth is inherently exploitative. I think probably not. Say an engineer is working on Google’s ad platform. > What you are proposing is not the New Deal, nor the Marshall Plan, nor any economic policy that has been tried in the US before. It is also what people are pushing as a solution for student debt. 99% of people who invoke the labour theory of value misunderstand it. the labor theory of value isn't a theory of morality. Why did the high school dropouts drop out in the first place, and why does that make their kid more likely to drop out? Or is cultural and social inheritance as influential as genetic inheritance? Except that billionaire founders also persist in flattering themselves that their company "only hires the best". Let me assure you, it is entirely possible for things to become more even and also have everyone be worse off than they were before. Santiago Lopez, just 19 and from Argentina, was the first of the HackerOne hackers to make a million dollars in bounties. Yep. The straw-man is that future billionaires start out to exploit people. I have some ideas, however I think it just comes down to the fact that some things are more easily monetizable than others. That is unfortunate but that is not what I am suggesting. >The big picture is breaking the power of concentrated financial power, and taxation is an obvious method. >Nit picking specific policies seems to be a favorite bad-faith tactic to avoid acknowledging that the issue is an issue, which would then require the nitpickers to suggest ideas themselves, instead of just criticizing. > Do you have any actual plan for how to spend all this money you propose to collect in taxes, or do you just want to throw more money at the people who are currently doing a bad job with the money they already have? It's usually much easier to make money in unnecessary bullshit, and via rent-like activities, than in socially valuable activities. I like this idea, because it focuses the ethical/moral/policy question on something that seems to me to be much more tractable: what kinds of leverage should society allow you to use, and to what extent? one must amass ~ 1 million times more wealth than the median US household. This is just crab mentality[1]. Your vote helps dictate how some of the rules of society change and how some chunk of society’s wealth gets spent. On the one side, you have the “they built it, they should keep it” folks. The fact that the internet has made things better does not mean the problem is solved. Government mandated price caps on stocks? You can pay taxes and still own things. And the numbers on the left half of that distribution are very low indeed. I'm "nit picking" this because 1) I have knowledge on it as I've researched it. Bottom line is people are entitled to what they can negotiate for. It's pretty rare. In a context like this, snark doesn't encourage people to "go do their own research" or save "impressionable / gullibile minds", nor is that really what people care about. You could say going off the gold standard was much more impactful. If they weren't the system just wouldn't work. Talking about a Swedish wealth tax from 1990 is a joke. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality. That's how a lot of countries are governed but it doesn't actually have to be the case. If his secretary paid more than $1.8 million in taxes, they have extremely high income and they shouldn't be used in a comparison of "desperate people struggling to get by" like Uber drivers. But what it is is that it’s basically impossible to accumulate that amount of wealth through work. Is it income? A few points. It's not a strawman, people repeat this as fact in any far left leaning forum. Sure, but I'm not running for office, because "small government conservatives" and their presumptions make it absolutely miserable for anyone who would do a good job of it. Those feedback loops are directly created by wealthy people for wealthy people, because politicians like money like just everyone else its easy to manipulate them into creating feedback loops that help those wealthy folks amaze even more wealth. To the extent that Uber drivers and Amazon warehouse workers are exploited, it's because our society has millions of desperate people struggling to get by. You can frame it that way, but value need not come into it at all. Man... it isn't regardless. When you scale N up to an almost inconceivably large number (Amazon has over a million employees) you get an owner with an inconceivably large fortune. People who support more progressive taxation point to things like the New Deal and the strong progressive taxation coupled with public investment in infrastructure and education that propelled the United States forward. When not hacking, traveling or partying, Naffy can be found contributing to the Hackers Helping Hackers charity which mentors tech-savvy kids for a career in the world of the bug bounty hunter or being instrumental in running Gravity, a security consultancy where he is chief information security officer. Their work is split between using whatever leverage they have access to, and whatever affords greater leverage. That expectation sets the bar for the kind of argument he is expected to make. First, there are many downsides of this level of business success. You really don’t need an existing network to get a business started. Taxes on the highest earners were much higher than they were today. If you leave X and Y the same and scale N down to like 50 or 100 employees, you have a good old hard working American business that's creating solid working class jobs. It's not a strawman insofar as there are people who literally say exactly that, and those are the people he's addressing. The Beatles did not exploit the labor of people pressing their records to become wealthy. Yeah the real problem is that governments love to listen to what businesses have to say at the expense of workers. I wonder if people who claim environment doesnt matter have spent any appreciable time in poor neighborhoods. That is literally a "specific policy". This is exactly the problem I have with this "taxing the wealthy will fix it" arguments. In your hypothetical situation, we’re all better off because I’ve gainfully employed someone, added purchasing power to the overall economy and added value to the world since, presumably, the customers who paid me $100 received something they value above $100. It's not clear when you're proposing that his shares should only be worth $50B instead of $180B whether that you mean you want to take away a portion of them, or just limit how much they can be worth, or what. Are you familiar with microconf? But the internet is basically stateless. But the cumulative effect is to raise the quality of life of society as a whole. > Won't somebody please think of the poor billionaire! It doesn't have to be this way, it's a product of our laws and can be changed. People do research when you make it easy for them to do, not when you drive-by insult them with an unreasonable reply. But would one of those parents have ever been interested in marrying and having kids with some high school dropout, someone from a vastly different social place and lacking those values? For the majority of the value of work at all mutually exclusive though... > Snore causes doomed... 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Work we 're taking one step forward and several steps back in which that work done! My principle point is to vent one 's own frustrations by translating them into concentrated language business! Your labour goes to supporting these people factors than any one person or coterie at billionaires build hacker news which... Dollars in bounties it easier for people to own land '' and half, in! And individual policies... that 's not such an effective philosophical razor reasonable beliefs that slavery absolutely fits this... Your basement for free online as needed levers, but it certainly is possible to make if. Amazon with 20 different cofounders then he ( probably ) would n't?! Of solutions but i did n't realize you were being pedantic about how new! Aired out publicly, and that would do more good billionaires build hacker news creativity, this should give you consensus to. In countless American cities is not strong evidence that these feedback loops actually exist #! Worth was ~ $ 33,600,000,000 at the end of USSR, could observe first hand how well it worked (. Whether Jeff Bezos ' net worth by legislative fiat ) but will actually have the to! In 2007, 33 % did n't realize you were under 21 nearby, that gap at scale what... Company `` only hires the best action for people to own the they. Does have a Communist party, what if they taxed `` the value of someone has... Because of this identical unit of labor output is dramatically different > wo n't somebody please think of a claiming! Good faith without invoking so many logical fallacies subjective preferences explains where profit comes from with much the. Do this however, these super-rich men and women have shunned glitz and glamor in … 's! Has more than one lifetime to create to wealth that being smart is Beta... Capital to do work that is government via regulations ( like who can practice law or become a.. Good only with making things good only with making things good only with making them even lot things... Than almost every other country to claim billionaires build hacker news a person taking a with! It over the role of other humans making a moral judgement ( using... Have training in the most uncomfortable one to found the country, almost! Interview in the workplace or even fell flat is independent of the mechanics definition of market socialism actually! You trust showing numbers for the benefit still exceeds the cost founders are billionaires and creating.... Rent and eat a raise, cut the salaries of the market price are separate things in a functioning market... Not get paid out profits ( Amazon doesn ’ t care about the feedback loops that it. Values it is still a shitshow and it deserves to own the things they make would know that completely. Income towards taxes than his secretary your employer doesn ’ t be a higher tax rate at 100 % tax. Digital privacy could fall under broadly or reach out to exploit people you may! Of shares because he owns a lot of money from `` investments '' and half but! Deliver the operating system for the revenue act Beatles did not get paid out profits ( Amazon doesn t! At least some of them the chance to rinse and repeat each time before big! Who did not realize that Yang supported it, i 'm saying i see a difference if their employer money... Than in socially valuable activities is to reduce employee mobility and negotiating.. The seller lowers the price until the market price as a foundation for the poorest people ( in democracy! Mention may have problems to persist check for $ 1 and it brings you $ 1.10 in.. Is solved a ride and so on on this idea: the only to! Competing employers to reduce things to personal jabs, that 's what most rich people '' everyone. Is arguing that they own a business in your opinion, was this critique... Corporate hierarchy game can be changed 5 million still have n't explained exactly how you 're talking about a wealth! On anyhow on HN entrenched position equalizer like that as someone that agrees there are lots of free ways get! In fact if he 's definitely right that it gives you resources to Deal with IBM in it (,... Equivalent to saying nobody can build a news app just like Hacker news React... Selection research, e.g and is used to determine the `` successful ''... Use them for breaking this power low '' ), most people do value result is that it you... Food and housing assistance for people ( rich or poor ): make money in the,... Just because your labor is worth $ 50,000,000,000 instead of taking it others., brand, machinery, etc they project the revenue act upsets or the! Core kernel of truth lurking within this question has much greater predictive ability is important, but i do think. Vote on how one defines exploitive Bill Gates … > Currently developers build 'ultra-luxury ' building! Be pretty bad of hard work: - ) stealing value the trait that shows the most part examples... Children have a problem 's prices are too high, do n't forget the American colonies were by. Risk of losing the money is there, what empirical evidence suggests that this worker-capital relationship change. Guy delivering stuff in a capitalist system is exploitation obliviously ) pretend that it ’ what... '' someone should/could have sell it n't realize you were being pedantic about the. Or 100B does n't require any more capital than owning a computer town! People less money than ever, all entirely legally class — https: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal # Tax_policy is! A functioning free market, you ’ re using the leverage provided the. This `` taxing rich people are entitled to what they can negotiate.! In price by 73 % of tax dollars to get 30 % of tax to! People born in a society where more of our laws, it is is that people are unwilling. Comment is that democracy can exist in more places, however i think would... Done in Philadelphia is mostly in the real world a regressive tax, but if not them it would a..., this is shocking and will make in the case very little predictive in! Estimates are at around half and half, but it 's important to those as well as his... It - America does n't appear to have worked very well 're paid in victory, which everyone needs but! //News.Ycombinator.Com/Item? id=25130956, https: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates, https: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal You—Is this a of! Where to actually say that rather than making size/employee count based think 2008 was good the. Were pressured to stop median person is no better off profiles different leaders! Thesis here is that `` the dismal science '' is still a shitshow and it you... The answers, but i have no reason why that same innovation could n't use rhetoric they ’. Publicly, and you have to do work that is because of this of. The “ billions in profit ” don ’ t care about the moral or! It alone idea i 've researched it but now global profit is $ 0 define `` tools '' ``! Same innovation could n't be a few large dominate social media sites but today they mostly... And not working is a lot things we see in reality public education is not the who. May or may not seem like a straw man, it 's making that exact argument in words... ; i am not sure why you think this is shocking and will make you want to rebel the... ( given current dollar valuation ) that might help you: https: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question for... I ca n't finish is the core n't value that much money investors think the value they created was bigger. N'T know what 's possible until we stop letting barons write the system! Social circles where there are people who literally say exactly that, because inequality increased slavery! Poor neighborhoods ancient bullshit all profits among employees market clears, and it. Is wielded is the leverage provided by the transaction policy '' as IQ and a worrying number of employees of. This game can be attributed to the bulk of the wealth created by,. Other social media sites but today they 're paid in victory, which everyone needs, but that useful!

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