Americans have allowed the rich to become too wealthy. The kind of power that comes with billions of dollars just doesnt work with justice or democracy.
jmward01 · 1h ago
I have nothing against rich. I have everything against a single person having a megaphone for themselves and a gag for everyone else and still calling it a democracy. We need strong laws that reduce the voice of money and increase the voice of individuals. Having said that, the practical implication is that money needs to loose power and there are very few ways to truly do that other than just take it away. So, I agree that our only known practical path to a healthier democracy is to make it harder to be pathologically rich.
idle_zealot · 59m ago
I'm not sure I understand what distinction you're drawing between ideological opposition to rich people existing and opposition to disproportionately powerful people existing.
In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing? Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it, and is just another way of saying "power over others". A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
pdonis · 7m ago
> Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action
Not in a free market. In a free market, people have the option to refuse to accept your money if they don't want to give you what you want to buy from them with it.
teachrdan · 1m ago
> people have the option to refuse to accept your money...
This is the contradiction, isn't it? A free market that you or I might define requires safeguards like a social welfare net to make sure individuals are truly free to decline an offer that is harmful to them. Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your dignity and all of your belongings, or worse.
But then the owning class has every incentive to reduce or remove the safety net. Not least because they will be paying a lot for it! But even more so because that safety net is what gives people some small amount of power to say no to them.
zdragnar · 23m ago
Being rich is a measure of wealth. In a world in which there is no resource scarcity and everyone has access to lots of resources, everyone is rich but not necessarily more rich or powerful than anyone else.
The average person today is much wealthier than many rich people from generations ago, even if they have less social power.
Being disproportionately powerful is tautologically a direct measure of disproportionate influence.
Tin pot dictators of resource-poor nations may not be especially wealthy compared to the very wealthy in the US, but typically have more disproportionate power (within their own country at least).
saulpw · 59m ago
There's rich, and then there's 10x rich, and 100x rich, and 1000x rich, and 10000x rich, and now even 100000x rich. Millionaires are fine, billionaires are bad, and hectobillionaires are supremely terrible.
I think once someone gets to a billion dollars net worth, they should get an AmEx black card, and 99% of their assets moved into a sovereign public wealth fund. They can have anything they want, they lose the power of extreme asset allocation, and if they just like competing, they can start over and try to ring the bell again (and can give the second AmEx black card to a person of their choosing).
lotsofpulp · 5m ago
So if your business is extremely successful, your reward is losing control if it?
To who, politicians?
Leaving the large business intact and just changing the leader doesn’t seem like it changes anything.
orwin · 1h ago
Yes, ideologically, i had no issue with people being rich, it's people having undue power over other people that i found morally wrong. I was a libertatian almost in the american meaning of the word, a liberal libertarian. Then, i tried to put my ideas real conditions, and came to the realisation that as long as money could buy you power, you can never be free. I don't realistically see how we can limit money influence on power, when you can offshore your company in two days, so in a practical manner, the only way to limit how rich one can get, until we figure out the rest.
tart-lemonade · 1h ago
It also doesn't work when the media is either striving to uphold the status quo that got us here or actively going out of its way to try and make things worse.
cut3 · 1h ago
you mean the megaphones owned by the rich?
AnthonyMouse · 58m ago
> Americans have allowed the rich to become too wealthy.
This consistently happens in a very specific way. A corporation that dominates a concentrated market becomes excessively large, which makes its early shareholders billionaires.
In other words, if you want to change this, you need to enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations.
No comments yet
thegreatpeter · 1h ago
Plenty of billionaires all over Europe. Relative to salaries the spread is quite worse. Democracy there is perfect
bbreier · 1h ago
As far as I am aware, wealth inequality is significantly better in Europe than it is in the United States (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/wealth-in... as an example) and I still wouldn't characterize democracy in Europe as "perfect" even if we narrowly define the rubrick to be only concerned with money tipping the scales of power
aetherson · 9m ago
That site is weird. As far as I can tell, it's measuring income inequality, not wealth inequality, and it doesn't... appear to know the difference? Quoting it:
> The Gini index, or Gini coefficient, is a statistical measure of wealth distribution developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini. The Gini index is used to gauge economic inequality by measuring income distribution, also called wealth distribution.
It's a kinda big red flag if they say that income and wealth are the same thing!
There are a few notable cases of European countries having very high wealth inequality despite lower income inequality (my take which may not be shared by many: having low income inequality makes it hard for people who aren't generationally wealthy to overcome old money). Notably, Sweden has a higher wealth inequality than the United States.
> It's a kinda big red flag if they say that income and wealth are the same thing!
Wealthy and old people love when income is used as a stand in for wealth. It deflects political action onto the young and hard/smart working, and helps keep their dynasties and rent seeking assets intact.
NoMoreNicksLeft · 1h ago
> The kind of power that comes with billions of dollars just doesnt work with justice or democracy.
The government has billions of dollars. Thankfully government officials are immune to the corrupting influence of billions of dollars.
johannes1234321 · 1h ago
Budget (in theory) is controlled by Congress, this is a bunch of people with their agendas who aim for being reelected.
The true billionaire doesn't have anybody else to ask and can finance the campaign to get somebody (not) elected.
drivebyhooting · 1h ago
Can I opt out from having my data shared with other companies? Or will some kind of privacy framework like ATT be applied to it?
inetknght · 1h ago
Would you be shocked to learn that neither will happen?
wmf · 1h ago
I think it's aggregate data so it's not really yours.
vkou · 18m ago
> Can I opt out from having my data shared with other companies?
Sure, the easiest way you can do that is to move to Europe and petition its regulators to further tighten the screws. They might actually listen.
davmre · 1h ago
> The government doesn't have to win an antitrust trial in order to create competition. As the saying goes, "the process is the punishment."
This is an argument for authoritarianism, that the government should be able to "punish" any company at will based only on them falling into political disfavor.
> ... the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google.
Yes, this is called the rule of law. Punishment comes through the courts, after a guilty verdict. The government has to actually win the argument as to what remedies would be proportionate under the law. In this case the judge didn't buy it. It's fine to disagree with his reasoning (or with the law), but the fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment here is frankly un-American.
msarrel · 1h ago
Who knew that the two O's in Google were the author's testicles?
In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing? Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it, and is just another way of saying "power over others". A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
Not in a free market. In a free market, people have the option to refuse to accept your money if they don't want to give you what you want to buy from them with it.
This is the contradiction, isn't it? A free market that you or I might define requires safeguards like a social welfare net to make sure individuals are truly free to decline an offer that is harmful to them. Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your dignity and all of your belongings, or worse.
But then the owning class has every incentive to reduce or remove the safety net. Not least because they will be paying a lot for it! But even more so because that safety net is what gives people some small amount of power to say no to them.
The average person today is much wealthier than many rich people from generations ago, even if they have less social power.
Being disproportionately powerful is tautologically a direct measure of disproportionate influence.
Tin pot dictators of resource-poor nations may not be especially wealthy compared to the very wealthy in the US, but typically have more disproportionate power (within their own country at least).
I think once someone gets to a billion dollars net worth, they should get an AmEx black card, and 99% of their assets moved into a sovereign public wealth fund. They can have anything they want, they lose the power of extreme asset allocation, and if they just like competing, they can start over and try to ring the bell again (and can give the second AmEx black card to a person of their choosing).
To who, politicians?
Leaving the large business intact and just changing the leader doesn’t seem like it changes anything.
This consistently happens in a very specific way. A corporation that dominates a concentrated market becomes excessively large, which makes its early shareholders billionaires.
In other words, if you want to change this, you need to enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations.
No comments yet
> The Gini index, or Gini coefficient, is a statistical measure of wealth distribution developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini. The Gini index is used to gauge economic inequality by measuring income distribution, also called wealth distribution.
It's a kinda big red flag if they say that income and wealth are the same thing!
There are a few notable cases of European countries having very high wealth inequality despite lower income inequality (my take which may not be shared by many: having low income inequality makes it hard for people who aren't generationally wealthy to overcome old money). Notably, Sweden has a higher wealth inequality than the United States.
However, I don't think it's true that Europe in general has higher wealth inequality than the United States. Here's the wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
Wealthy and old people love when income is used as a stand in for wealth. It deflects political action onto the young and hard/smart working, and helps keep their dynasties and rent seeking assets intact.
The government has billions of dollars. Thankfully government officials are immune to the corrupting influence of billions of dollars.
The true billionaire doesn't have anybody else to ask and can finance the campaign to get somebody (not) elected.
Sure, the easiest way you can do that is to move to Europe and petition its regulators to further tighten the screws. They might actually listen.
This is an argument for authoritarianism, that the government should be able to "punish" any company at will based only on them falling into political disfavor.
> ... the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google.
Yes, this is called the rule of law. Punishment comes through the courts, after a guilty verdict. The government has to actually win the argument as to what remedies would be proportionate under the law. In this case the judge didn't buy it. It's fine to disagree with his reasoning (or with the law), but the fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment here is frankly un-American.