zlacker

>>southe+(OP)
I wonder if this is coming up just before the election because of the Harris campaign’s suggested policy of capital gains tax on unrealised gains for people who have over $100m in assets? I think this is a great idea personally given what these people are doing to avoid paying tax including taking out loans against their own share portfolios. Worth thinking about what people are willing to do to not pay billions of dollars worth of taxes.

>>andy_p+ex
Unrealized gains taxes is an extractive and totalitarian tax. Someone is always risking 100% loss until they realize those gains. It's an affront to entrepreneurial risk-taking and it's capricious. It would be just as ridiculous to allow someone to write-off unrealized losses.

>>chrisc+fX
Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive.

>>kjkjad+5Y
> Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive.

This is emotional pleading, not a serious argument of any sort, based on the core premise of "this person has more money than me, and I don't like that, therefore I should get some".

>>throw1+Vv2
It's a very serious argument, and it's somewhat insulting that you consider it to be emotional and meritless.

Wealth and income inequality has well-studied negative effects on society.

The ability for a single person to own over $100m in assets is not a human right. It's not a protected class or status. It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake.

And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth. This completely insane $100 million figure is so small to those men that you would have to earn $100 million every single year for over 30 lifetimes to get to their level of wealth.

It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy. That's a shallow way to think about it. It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this.

Think for a second what would happen to you if Jeff Bezos banned you from using all Amazon products. Would the Internet even work anymore for you? You know, every company has the right to refuse service to anyone. This one man can basically cut you off from television, e-commerce, Internet, employment (if you do engineering work on AWS), even Thursday Night Football.

>>dangus+qA2
> It's a very serious argument, and it's somewhat insulting that you consider it to be emotional and meritless.

Because, factually, the statement "Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive." is emotional and meritless. There's literally zero value here. It's an opinion. In fact, you doubled down on this throughout your response.

> It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake.

This is also factless, meritless, emotional pleading.

> And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth...

As is all of this.

> It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy.

That's literally what you're doing.

> It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this.

It's clearly not about the power imbalance and exploitation, because someone genuinely interested in curbing those effects would address them directly. The fact that everyone who claims to care about the destabilizing effects of concentrated wealth immediately goes to "we should take the wealth away" instead of "we should try to figure out why concentrated wealth is destabilizing and address that" is extremely strong evidence that the goal is, actually, to take money from the wealthy.

If you consider pointing out that you're not making logical arguments, and instead engaging in emotional pleading, to be insulting (especially when, upon that being pointed out, you can't make a rational argument and instead continue pleading), then you should take a step back, because there's a good chance you're engaging in advocacy and emotional manipulation as opposed to genuine, rational arguments in good faith.

>>throw1+XB2
You have what I refer to as “root cause syndrome”. It happens a lot to engineers and tech adjacent people.

You see a problem and you refuse to fix it, and instead look for a root cause that should be addressed instead, that will then fix the problem itself.

The problem with that kind of thinking is that that’s not how the real world works. The problem of homelessness is that people don’t have homes. It’s not something else. Give people homes and you solve it. But people with RCS try to solve it through jobs, training, education, etc. All those things are nice but they won’t fix the problem, which is that people are homeless.

Likewise, the problem of wealth inequality can only be solved by reducing wealth inequality. There is no other solution. Just tax rich people until they’re not rich anymore.

>>amroch+zN2
> You have what I refer to as “root cause syndrome”.

This is an ad hominem fallacy/attack. Instead of discussing the actual argument, you instead attack the person making it.

> Likewise, the problem of wealth inequality can only be solved by reducing wealth inequality.

This is an opinion, completely non-factual and unjustified by any reasoning. And, the only possible underlying belief from this paragraph is "some people having more wealth is intrinsically bad" - completely separate from the negative societal effects of that wealth, and from any moral framework that even allows you to describe "bad". You just believe that it's bad.