Bezos does not get to define his own wealth. The stock market does that.
If the workers at Amazon have better job offers they would take them. That they have not indicates that Amazon is paying the market rate for their job. Paying them more out of his own pocket would be charitable and charity is to be much admired. However, why are warehouse workers in America the best recipients of the charity. Wouldn’t poor Africans or Venezuelans be better recipients of charity. Than Americans whose income puts them in the top 25% of incomes worldwide?
What it tells us is that wealth is not primarily the natural resources but the way people and technology are organized. Thus the way to make the pie bigger is to find more efficient ways to use the resources we have. Thus Bezos has made the pie bigger by finding more efficient ways for people to shop. If we then take away all the wealth from people who are trying to grow the pie, the pie will eventually stop growing and everyone will be worse off.
We certainly should not take all the wealth from those who grow the pie.
However there is such a thing as marginal utility, meaning that we can slice 0.1% off of Bezos’s wealth and decrease his happiness by 0.00001%, and give that wealth to certain other people for, shall we say, a greater than 0.00001% increase in their happiness. And thus progressive taxes make societal sense.
The tricky part, of course, is deterring tax dodging (including fleeing the country that’s doing the taxing). Persons who have the skills to amass ridiculous wealth also have the skills to keep it - by hook or by crook.
Of course I do - do you think I just made up marginal utility? It’s a known factor and a real thing, and pretending otherwise is just laughable.
Violent expropriation, eh? Why that’s not hyperbolic at all! Now I’m picturing a world where billionaires guard their wealth in armed fortresses and shoot approaching tax collectors. What a cinematic world!
That’s not what “question begging” means, you know.
And actually it’s pretty easy to cover the costs of hiring a bureaucracy when we’re talking about taxing billionaires. A billion is actually a pretty large number, in fact. Though to be entirely fair to you you appear to be picturing a wildly different sort of bureaucracy than I am, who has to collect taxes “violently”.
You seem to think marginal utility can be used to compare interpersonal subjective values. It can’t, but that is a common pop-Econ mistake.
You can say Bezos’ 1 billionth dollar is worth more to him than his next, but there is no framework to compare the value of his next dollar to Joe Schmo’s next dollar.
You would have to overturn subjective value and you have not as far as I know.
Threatening prison isn’t violent?
That was a separate comment.
You missed the point. Your $1 from Bezos is not $1 to Joe Schmo. The government skims off the top for its share.
Best compromise might just be to allow people to be billionaires but put a marginal tax rate of 90% on all income past that $1 billion mark. At that point, you’re not in need of money. If someone truly wants to persist in making movies or manufacturing some product to keep going, then at that point they’re doing it for love of the job or whatever passion drives them, not money.
Obviously it depends on the law. If you are threatened with prison for voluntary exchange, that is an initiation of violence. If you are threatened with prison for murder, no.
If I acknowledge that you wrote this I will have no choice but to conclude that you have no goddamn clue what you’re talking about - as in, you don’t even understand what topic is under discussion. Drawing that conclusion would be uncharitable though, so I will ignore the fact that you wrote it.
This is veering wildly off-topic, but I will reiterate that no, instituting laws for things - even minor things, like traffic violations - is not a violent act. Arguing otherwise isn’t going to convince me of your correctness, either.
I think the question is nonsensical. People with that sort of money may have that much “wealth”, but they do not have that much “cash”. There is a difference. It’s not like your local billionaire can just go to the ATM and withdraw a few million from his account and then hand it to the homeless person around the corner. That said, they still do have access to amounts of liquid assets that most of us do not.
Clearly, there are people who have more than they and their family can spend in one lifetime. But the money keeps coming-in, without them having to do anything. Is it possible for someone like Bezos or Gates to just call someone and tell them “Whelp, I have enough now, go ahead and turn-off the spigot!” Can Larry Ellison just write a check for one of his billions to the homeless shelter?
I guess that is how investment works - you put in your time, your money, your assets, and expect to be rewarded financially for putting-up these things and taking the risk. Sometimes you lose, and sometimes you win. Some people were lucky, and continue to be lucky, with their investments. But there seems to be a point where your risk was rewarded enough.
I agree that $1B is difficult to get our head around. Even $1M is hard to imagine. It seems like taxing people a tiny portion of their wealth, say 0.001% (or even less) for anything over $1B would net enough funds to provide a roof, 2 meals a day, and basic medical care for everyone in our country who is lacking those things. The billionaires would hardly miss it, and can continue purchasing luxury dog houses and islands all they want. The amount is a pittance to them.
But whoa! Now we are talking about wealth distribution! And taking dollars from the wealthy will suppress the economy, and slow hiring! :rolleyes:
Well, let’s run the math. There are 624 billionaires in the USA. From what I can find, the top 400 of them hold $2.48T. Assuming the other 224 have a billion apiece, that would be a total of $2.72T. 0.001% of that is $2.72B. How much housing, food, and medical care can we deliver for that?