So when you create $10,000,000 of economic value you should be forced at gunpoint to stop contributing to society and creating jobs.
Jeff Bezos has created many, many millions of jobs while selling essential goods at margins sometimes below 1%. If his reward was stolen after $10m, why would he have bothered slaving away?
Aside the blatant jealousy factor, it's economic suicide and contains shadows of economic systems which have led to the deaths of tens of millions of people.
It’s so disappointing to constantly see this type of evil envy driven nonsense posted on HN. Capitalism has delivered humanity unbelievable prosperity and improvements in living conditions.
Anyone finding themselves agreeing with ideas like 100% marginal taxes needs to look deep into their own soul and understand where it originates from and then go back and learn history and read authors like Hayek, Mises, and Sowell.
Sowell - “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”
And the worst part is that they don’t perceive the massive irony of posting these comments on this particular medium, the Internet, which was initially the product of a military-funded project of the most capitalistic country in history. A project which aimed to deliver a resilient communication network in case of all-out nuclear war!
Most of the people who comment like this most likely have lived since birth in a stable, western democracy with social and economic security and they don’t know anything else. They don’t know what living in a dictatorship is like, or under a fully corrupt government bureaucracy where only nepotism or favoritism gets you ahead. All they’ve known is their little, stable corner of the world, protected by the largest military and economic powerhouse in history, and they don’t appreciate it.
Hypocritically it is often extremely money focused people who put out opinions about taxing the greedy wealthy. Dressed up as caring for others but the underlying drive is selfish.
There’s not enough rich people with enough money/assets/wealth to actually make a difference and even worse nobody will be rich once you try take from them. That experiment has literally been tried dozens and dozens of times with 100% failure rate. Economies are organic organisms and your type of ideas as cyanide.
Please educate yourself and stop believing in fairy tales. Socialism is also extremely unethical and even evil from religious perspectives.
I’d be curious what educational system you went through that failed to teach the dark evil and catastrophic consequences of your 100% marginal tax rate type ideas.
> There’s not enough rich people with enough money/assets/wealth to actually make a difference
They could make a difference to some. Also consider the harm they do to the system through their politics. It's not just the wealth hoarding, it's the attacks on education and social safety nets.
I think in practice you want to take steps towards structural wealth equality. It's a problem when someone has their big ideas and step-functions a society into them. I have enough intellectual humility to admit that my conception of what policies and systems we need would most likely not work in practice. But changing a few things to be more socialist, measuring, then course correcting would be nice for once. Instead we get Capital and their purchased representation telling us what works and stepping towards what's good for them.
Also apologies but I won't read a 400 page book on your recommendation. But looking over the topics covered it seems to be about states that tried a command economy. To me a command economy is obviously foolish. How is a government, notorious a slow moving decision maker, going to replace the free market? As you said it's an organism. It's complicated with millions of actions happening in parallel. I want incentives to be changed - ideally with as few changes as possible.
> But changing a few things to be more socialist, measuring, then course correcting would be nice for once.
This is constantly happening actually and constantly failing.
> To me a command economy is obviously foolish.
And who exactly distributes or allocated your confiscated money from your 100% marginal tax rate?
> I want incentives to be changed - ideally with as few changes as possible.
Ask yourself why? is it because something is broken and you think this will fix it? that’s the classic empathy narrative which I guarantee is actually nothing but envy masquerading as empathy.
