I don’t think that looking at the accumulation of wealth from a moral perspective is worthwhile. It would be difficult to determine which billionaires did something worthwhile as inventors and entrepreneurs and artists, versus and those who are just leeching off the system as CEOs. But in practice, you will still get the same level of innovation and art unless you set the tax rates so high that a lot of time and resources will be spent on tax avoidance which could have been spent on innovation and social programs, say, somewhere in the 90% region. So progressivize the heck out of the tax code.
“Everyone else” isn’t suffering.
Again, Bezos only has as much wealth as he does because other people decided his company was worth a lot. That wealth didn’t start elsewhere and move to him. Your wealth cap means that as soon as other people decide your property is worth more, you will be required to sell it. Maybe even lose control of your own company because your success resulted in too much (some arbitrary amount) value.
I agree it’s not zero-sum, but it’s not infinitely expandable either. There are real limits to growth, even for consensus fictions like “wealth”.
…and the money they put into the shares just comes from the ether?
Your question suggests a fundamental lack of understanding of how the stock market works.
If I own 10% of a $10B company and the share price doubles tomorrow, my net worth increases by $1B. That can be based on the trading of just a handful or shares. Nobody “put in” that billion.
If Amazon paid a living wage I might cut him some slack but in many cases it does not. And while the economy is not zero sum, it’s pretty misleading to imagine all those 600,000 jobs appearing out of nowhere; bricks-and-mortar jobs have been displaced.
But let’s just get to specifics. Apparently Amazon made $5.6 billion in profits last year, while paying zero dollars in federal taxes. Soo…you think that’s the right balance?
Discrete packets of phlogiston. We persist in analyzing the consumer economy as though it were a rational thing, but its made up mostly of us monkeys. Some people like to compare our brains with computers, but its more like pinball machines. Slow pinball machines. On the one hand, we have the rising interest in renewable energy, on the other, hula hoops, Enron, and five dollar cups of coffee.
There’s not such thing as capitalism, or socialism, for that matter. There’s just us. No liberal, no conservative, just people eager for change, and those afraid of it. Just because two stances can be viewed as opposites doesn’t make a “center”. His “centrism” is snake oil lite.
Re: their federal taxes:
Last I checked, Amazon’s SEC filings for 2017 showed an expected $137M rebate. So call it less than zero dollars, just in case your outrage-o-meter wasn’t already pegged.
Re: wages and displacement:
Amazon pays minimum $15/hour. Per BLS, retail sales paid $11.24/hour in 2017. Retail trade employed more people last month than ever, and that’s expected to keep growing. That’s not to say there hasn’t been decreases in subsectors or geographical changes to where the jobs are.
Theres an excellent SMBC Theater skit on exactly this premise, interestingly enough!
I’m aware - that’s the “consensus fiction” part I already mentioned. But I’m talking about the initial purchase of those shares, in relation to the idea that, say, Bezos didn’t get anything from anyone else. Ultimately, the base starting capital for the shares is grounded in some real-world activity by someone in relation to real property. That’s what has finite limits, like I said. Everything else on top - smoke and mirrors.
Agree completely. Every libertarian totally ignores the society that enables them to espouse such silly ideas as they have. They take advantage of everything a society has to offer, then bitch because they are tasked with not being able to take everything for themselves. The ultimate 3-year-olds. Personally, I’d lower the threshold for a 90% tax bracket to $5 million or so. AND institute a wealth tax on fortunes over $10 million. Plus a 110% tax on anything they attempt to take out of the country. Probably reinstate estate taxes, too. 50% sounds about right.
And I’m a moderate.
They created all their wealth on the margin. Billionaires share the same government provided public goods as everyone else. Bezos had access to the same streets, airports, schools, police protection, and other government services as you and I. Yet he used those resources to create a company worth 800 billion dollars and you and I have not(yet).
An old farmer was showing a preacher his manicured fields of ripening crops and the preacher says “The Lord has really blessed you with a prosperous farm.”
The farmer says “You should have seen it when the Lord was doing it by himself”
Well said. Not sure why more people don’t understand this.
Presumably you think that if MS Windows cost only $50 instead of $119 then you’d be $69 less productive; so let’s talk about the wealth of, for example, Jim Simons. (Know that I have nothing whatsoever against Mr. Simons; he’s just a convenient example to make my point.)
No, Jim Simons did not take his entire $20 billion from you personally, but where do you think he got it? He didn’t market software. He didn’t find gold on his property. He developed an edge in the constant-sum stock market. Depending on the details of your savings and trading history, you’d have several $1000’s more in your retirement account if it weren’t for the activities of stock market profiteers. Not only would you be better off if Simons had retired 30 years earlier, you’d be even better off than that if our society’s incentives had persuaded Simons — a very smart man — to turn his talents to, e.g. pharmaceutical engineering.
If you think Bill Gates’ mastery of the PC improved the value of American infrastructure by $70 billion, or that Warren Buffet’s support of Coca Cola and Wells Fargo added billions of value, that would be a different [del]hijack[/del] thread. But it’s just silly to think every billionaire contributed a billion dollars of worth to society. Or to think wealth appears out of nowhere.
Surely you’ll agree that Pablo Escobar didn’t provide the world with $30 billion of useful value. 
How about Martin Shkreli? Jamie Dimon? If someone has never gone to prison does that mean their net worth is magically identical to their contribution to the world?
No, the idea that earning $X always means you’ve contributed $X of value is just a silly meme. The falsity becomes obvious when you consider how many hundreds of billions are siphoned off by useless “rent seekers.”
The IPO raised $54 million. Which was not transferred to Bezos.
I used to have a boss that would give homeless people gift cards to local fast food places during the Christmas season. I took her aside and told her that a couple of meals at a fast food place was not nearly enough. These people needed to be fed everyday, they needed better clothes, a place to stay, and probably some sort of mental health treatment. I explained it was immoral for her to just give them the gift cards when they needed more. She then tried to change the subject by saying that I had never given the homeless people anything and that she was not the immoral one.
You are correct that there are no hard and fast distinctions to be drawn, but isn’t funny how most people draw the distinction right around “more money than I have or have a realistic shot at getting”.
I see no valid reason that Bezos not giving money to a warehouse worker making $31 grand a year is more immoral than that warehouse worker not giving money to a poor african making $400 a year.
It’s not clear what your point is or how it contradicts anything I wrote.
If Bezos’ fortune were 100% tied up in Amazon stock (it’s not) and people started trading it at 2x its value tomorrow, I am not harmed by Bezos suddenly becoming twice as wealthy. His piece of the pie got bigger by $138B. Mine did not shrink. It probably got bigger just because I get paid tomorrow. But his piece growing has next to no effect on my well being or yours. The wealth in and of itself does not harm me or you or an Amazon warehouse worker.
So there are two things that always come to mind when we treat people like Bezos like impossible revolutionaries and visionaries.
The first is Sony’s entrance into the video game market. The PS1 and PS2 were fine machines… But they also joined the party at a time where the only competitors were kind of jokes - for the PS1, everyone was eager to get away from Nintendo and Sega was dying. For the PS2, the only real competition was Nintendo, which was really struggling, and the Xbox, which was virtually nonexistent in Japan. Sony made a good business decision, but it also got phenomenally lucky, and its attempts to get into mobile gaming (where there was strong competition) failed. Indeed, as soon as their competition got stronger in the next console generation, they kinda screwed the pooch there as well. Was it genius business acumen from Sony that led to Sega dying and Nintendo sucking for two console generations? Or did they just get lucky?
The second is, if Bill Gates had been randomly hit by a bus before founding microsoft and suffered brain damage, would he still be a multibillionaire?
Amazon wasn’t the only company to get on the online shopping boom. It was, however, the most successful. Why is that? Does it come down to Bezos’s shrewd decision-making? Or did they just get lucky? Obviously, it’s some combination of both. But when you say things like this:
Really? I kinda doubt that. Remove Jeff Bezos from the universe, and we may not have Amazon, but do you really think we wouldn’t have something that looks and acts a whole lot like Amazon?
I’ll be honest, I do not have a good intuitive understanding of what a CEO actually does. But I do know that CEO compensation and company performance do not correlate well, and I know that CEO performance in one branch may not correlate well with the same CEO’s performance in another branch. The idea that these CEOs are somehow special, unique superbrains that create all this value just seems borderline untenable for me. Sure, what they do is probably a fair bit more involved and difficult than the actions of any given day laborer. But this deification is utterly unwarranted.
I’m sorry my point was unclear. If you can point to specific sentences that were confusing, I’ll try to help.
You focus now specifically on “paper wealth” which can balloon quite out of proportion. It could be part of a general asset bubble, or the rise of AMZN stock could be coupled with a decline in other paper values. But this is all tangential. (Anyway, I think economists who want to increase taxes want to tax consumption, transactions, or perhaps real property, NOT paper assets.)
More relevant would be to focus on the goods and services purchased when dividends or high salaries are paid. In a full-employment economy $X spent on yachts is $X not spent on cars for the middle class or public transport for the lower class.
The entire post is utterly unrelated to any point I have made in this thread. You started it by presuming what I think about software prices and productivity when I have written nothing at all about productivity. Maybe you’re confusing me with another poster.
The OP rather incoherently attempts to make to case that the existence of wealthy individuals is harmful. I disagree. I’m not focusing on any type of wealth. My point is that someone having more does not require me to have less. People can certainly get more by harming others. But getting more or simply having more does not require others to be harmed.
This is a relatively simple point and does not appear to me to be in any way controversial (although the author of the OP seems to disagree), and I’m struggling to see what the price of Windows has to do with it.
You pay $X for Windows and the money flows to people like Bill Gates. If the price of Windows were less, you would have more money and Bill Gates would have less money. Is that simple enough for you?
Now, if you think Windows is worth $119 or more, then Mr. Gates has done you a service just like the butcher that sold you your T-bone this morning. Fine.
But to state as a general rule
“Someone else having more than me doesn’t make me worse off. The pie isn’t fixed; it’s not like they took all that wealth from me…”
implies that you think every rent-collector has provided $X of “value” for the $X you’ve paid him. I hold that to be counterfactual.