>About a billion people are living on a dollar a day or less. The number of people living at this level is going down. That’s good... Bill Gates has an estimated worth over one hundred billion dollars. He could eliminate a category of poverty without changing the number of digits in any box on his tax forms.

I don't think giving 1 day's wages to the world can be construed as "eliminating a category of poverty".

Nitpick: It depends on what "over one hundred billions" means. You could only give $1 to 1 billion people of you have $101 billion, but if you have $999 billion then you could give $998 to 1 billion people without violating the digit constraint.

My guess is that it's closer to your estimate, about 1 day of wages, but it could be 2.7 years of wages at most.

I really like Peter's stuff and would recommend him any day, but I really can't think of a worse target/focus for what he's going for here; Gates is as close to an exception to the rule as I can imagine.

Yeah well, this was super pro-communist.

But I agree with those ideas and I like the post.

"There cannot be both billionaires and the means of billionaires fixing the world out of the goodness of their hearts, because the only way to maintain billionaires is to maintain a system of dragging money toward billionaires."

This

Not really that, no.

Say Microsoft didn't do the shady, anticompetitive stuff stuff it did. Would they be as big? No, but they'd still be huge. Bill Gates wouldn't be as rich, but he'd still be a multi-billionaire.

And how would he have gotten there? By enabling hundreds of millions of people to be able to use computers better. That is, he would have become a multi-billionaire by making his customers lives better.

There wasn't a system of "dragging money toward billionaires" (well, all right, there is, but he wasn't using it). He was using the system of "making things that have low manufacturing cost that have really high value to the customer". That system of creating billionaires has to remain operational, or we all suffer.

Bill Gates did not, personally, earn a hundred billion dollars, by any meaningful definition of the word "earn". That is what is meant by "system of dragging money toward billionaires", not any reference to anti-competitive practices. If you want to argue that all that money represents value contributed to the world, well then fine, but it's not value that Bill Gates himself created; it's at the very least value created by the employees of Microsoft that he skimmed off like a feudal lord.

Nobody needs a 12-figure bank account. We certainly don't need to allow private individuals to have that much power in order to incentivize creation.

> it's not value that Bill Gates himself created; it's at the very least value created by the employees of Microsoft that he skimmed off like a feudal lord.

That is true. And yet, Microsoft also made many of those employees into millionaires. Is your objection that they should have become multi-millionaires instead? (Yes, I know, not all became millionaires either.)

And what is your proposed solution? That business owners not be allowed to keep the profits of their business? That owners of large businesses not be allowed to keep the profits? Or... what?

Be careful what you wish for. In particular, be careful that you not destroy the engines of progress just because you don't like the unevenness of the distribution of their fruits.

> That is true. And yet, Microsoft also made many of those employees into millionaires. Is your objection that they should have become multi-millionaires instead? (Yes, I know, not all became millionaires either.)

Microsoft is not a single entity, it is the combined efforts of thousands of talented and not-so talented devs. The success of the company should yield financial reward for all employees at a uniform rate.

> And what is your proposed solution? That business owners not be allowed to keep the profits of their business? That owners of large businesses not be allowed to keep the profits? Or... what?

That they pay their taxes, and that the pay ratios between highest and lowest paid employees in the company are capped to something that is less than 500:1.

That doesn't solve dTal's complaint. Bill Gates got rich as an owner, not primarily as an employee.

That last sentence reminds me of the saying "if you chase away my demons, some of my angels might follow them."

>is it really that controversial to think that hoarding all that wealth

This premise is false, American billionaires do not hoard wealth, rather they invest it in companies.

Bill Gates sells Microsoft shares every year to fund his charitable foundation. He is effectively allocating capital away from Microsoft and towards world health. It is a misconception that these billionaires are like scrooge mcduck hoarding money in their vaults.

Ah yes, that's why his net worth goes down every year.

It’s immoral to think they owe you or anyone else any of the fruits of their labors. The average person in this world has never been this wealthy, when will it be enough?