Read this today and had to do the math myself to confirm.
If you made $1.3 million every day since US confederation and paid zero taxes and hadn’t spent a cent…
You would still have less money than Jeff Bezos.
It’s hard to conceptualize how much money billionaires actually have.
This is true.
If George Washington was still alive and made $10,000 a day since July 4th, 1776 he still wouldn’t be a billionaire.
If Jesus made $50 an hour assuming he was born on December 25th in 1 AD, he still wouldn’t be a billionaire.
It is an insane number.
And yet George Washington was the richest president we’ve ever had. Likely a billionaire himself.
Billionaires come into existence through compound interest and nothing else.
If the universe made 2 cents a day since the beginning of time it wouldn’t be as rich as the Koch Brother
It would be if the universe invested a tenth of its income in an S&P 500 index fund with low fees
Too much inflation to invest in equities
https://twitter.com/wsj/status/1413313210736943105?s=21
https://twitter.com/fuentesjoseo/status/1413314889926463493?s=21
Pretty sure Ivanka did this in my building when I was in grad school. At least, that was the rumor. (She definitely lived in the building, though. And the constant construction we heard makes me think the combining apartments rumor is true.)
I’ve driven yachts for rich people. they’re not as colossal assholes as you’d might expect. i mostly got treated pretty well - although that’s probably a side effect of you driving a very expensive thing they own. it’s like the jackpot captain job getting hired to run one of these mega yachts. they don’t go out a lot, so a lot of it is just managing maintenance, and you can take down a pretty decent salary.
you’d be shocked at the operating expense of these. they can burn thousands of dollars in fuel per hour.
The problem with extreme wealth is that it’s never deserved. There is literally nothing you can do that’s worth billions or even high tens of millions of 2022 USD in VORP. What you are looking at is survivor and selection bias of thieves and lottery winners. I’d start by literally taxing all of it away over a fairly low threshold and paying reparations.
Generational wealth is the biggest issue and that is never deserved and can only really be fixed with some guillotines or at least the thread of guillotines.
Yeah. I have been trying to think of what the exact hard wealth cap should be for individuals in Utopia in 2022 USD. The problem turns out not to be that easy to solve, since you also have to make assumptions about GDP and inflation, but I think something like the purchasing power equivalent of $10-$12 million is a reasonable cap on individual wealth. Not sure about how to scale income tax rates or whether wealth tax is just more efficient than income tax, such that the latter could kind of just fall away in a socialist economic system (with redistributive cash transfers via taxing authority as the main mechanism).
I think the vast majority of great wealth made in the last 20-30 years was unexpected. It was made by people starting companies that could have been fairly small or weak that landed at the right time in the right context, and their job was no longer scraping by but managing insane growth, which takes a lot of effort but is a nice problem to have. Think Starbucks, Nvidia, Facebook, Google, post ipod/iphone apple, Tesla, PayPal, Netflix, Home Depot, etc.
These companies just hit a sweet spot and had to hold on and be basically competent while growth and demand solved all problems.
It’s both arbitrary and complicated, two things that cause Mises Bros to completely short circuit. Yet, at the same time it’s also not that complicated because smart people are likely to arrive at roughly the same answer:
“Entrepreneurs will have millions or tens of millions,” he said. “But beyond that, those who have hundreds of millions or billions will have to share with shareholders, who could be employees. So no, there won’t be billionaires anymore."
And the rest of the Piketty quote about actual VORP:
“Contrary to what is often said, their enrichment was obtained thanks to these collective goods, which are the public knowledge, the infrastructures, the laboratories of research.”
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Yeah even more reason to claw it back.
This is the important point. You can’t grow a company at an insane rate without the material and social infrastructure (law, norms, education, law enforcement, flights, mail, electricity, internet, water, sewage, roads, belief in “the system”, etc.). Otherwise, you’re just a schlub with an idea that’s impossible in, say, Russia. I’m a capitalist, but of a northern European bent (ie, Liz Warren). Nowhere above the level of tribal groups has non-capitalism worked as a solution for anything.
If you think you “built that” then you have no concept of how the system actually functions to feed, clothe, shelter, educate, and defend (most of) 350M people.
Yes. Good post. I’ve also been thinking about how extremely large stores of individual wealth, whether denominated as corporate or private wealth on balance sheets, tend to facilitate anti-competitive behavior by raising barriers to entry. Maybe something like $25 million is ultimately the most sound–at that point the marginal loss to society from effectively hoarded (non-circulating) cash starts to seem suspect to me.
Thread is locked so I can’t quote it, but I posted this in Aug 2020.
As far as taxing the rich goes, yeah, 100% wealth tax for everything over $X.
(between $5M and $20M I’d say, but then I’m a capitalist)
$10-12 million is right in there, though I’ve probably radicalized since then and would go closer to the $5m.
Well, there are co-operatively owned farms in Europe. The biggest 100 have a total turnover of E238Bn, so that’s wrong. I thought you might have been aware of that.