a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by veen
veen  ·  867 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The billionaires are angry

You really don’t think there is exploitation at play after amassing a certain amount of wealth? Or an immoral shirking of responsibility?

What I’d do is to tax the ever loving shit out of anyone holding onto more than 10 million, and make it incredibly easy to avoid those taxes by investing it into strictly regulated funds aimed at innovation/science/the arts/nature.





b_b  ·  867 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I don't know where you draw the line. I have no problem raising taxes on rich people, even aggressively so. But I also have no problem with being rich, per se. The company I work for is funded by a billionaire, and I see very little other way that my type of business could operate in its early phase, since there's no way to make money making medicine for at least 10 years from founding, and that's with sunk costs that range into the hundreds of millions. No government grants are going to solve that problem. Some investment funds may be able to, but really what's the difference between owning a piece of an investment fund and having any other type of asset. You're still equally as rich.

Obviously big companies could be a lot more aggressive in their pursuit of R&D. I mean, how many Nobel prizes did Bell Labs win back in the day? But that was before we let the shareholder revolution destroy any public company's ability to think further than 2 quarters into the future.

I think what we need is a rolling back of the shareholder revolution, to create space for companies to plan and to disincentivize gigantic pay packages that are so often stock- or options-based. I'm not educated enough to know how to do that.