Do we need billionaires?

dm_

The book "Limitarianism" seems relevant: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/21/limitarianism-...

joncrane

We need intensely ambitious and competitive people. We shouldn't use money to keep score.

shrubby

I was just gathering a list of global top hundred with their influence relevant spending and boy that was not a pretty sight. At least in terms of normal people.

lucamark

> risk-takers who are badly needed But at what point does marginal private incentive stop helping innovation and start damaging democracy? For sure risk-taking deserves reward but the size of the reward matters

ggm

It's very unlikely any mainstream political class is going to take serious action anywhere to forbid them, but a few take action to limit them. Too few I think. The (mis-attributed to Lenin and Stalin) quote "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." is quite big in this. A little humility and a lot more tax-paying could save the trillionaire classes from the tumbrils but they lack the emotional intelligence to see it and as long as they make a few thousand millionaires below them they have useful idiots to decry any changes. On the plus side, workers are in short supply. The future needs more people who can do things other than thinkers, and robots (bless their hearts) don't spend money as consumers so the other side of the billionaire equation demands new people to come into spending class: this means Africa, Asia and South America levelling up.

qaq

We need competent people to remain in control of companies they have created.

shrubby

Human being, with very few exceptions, is corrupted by power. And a billion dollars is immense amount power. You can make your opponent's life a living hell with a hundred thousand and buy or figure out a way to frame extortion material from almost any decision maker with a million. See how wars are being started tweeting from the toilet seat by a man who has never known anything but power to harm others. See the many "formerly normal" people ending on a private island, doing horrendous things to children. We tried to figure out examples of people with power who weren't corrupted by it, at least to some extent, and came up with very few. It's a human trait we know very well, but do very little about.

Havoc

Capping it makes sense but should also be quite high. 1B actually seems good...congrats you've won capitalism but that's enough for one person

shevy-java

I don't necessarily intrinsically have a dislike against billionaires per se. However had, if you look at the USA, where basically billionaires are dictating policies (Elon mass-firing people at DOGE, showing a chainsaw and right-arm gesture antics) - this simply undermines and cripples democracy. This, in addition to it being unfair that they aren't really contributing their due share to society usually; and no, creating a legal foundation to avoid paying taxes, including "Bill Gates Foundation" (see the benefits it has) when you avoided paying taxes before, does not fix anything at all. The model that is currently used, is broken by default. The ancient greek did not have this problem. Modern democracy does. And let's not even get into the issue of Putin-Trump being suspiciously a corrupt tandem team, just as Yuri predicted in the 1980s (!!!!!) already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9apDnRRSOCk (Flood the zone with shit is based on an older KGB strategy, and the chinese had this under an even older stratagem name, though not necessarily based on information-overload; I'd call the KGB strategy primarily information-overload. The chinese stratagems are named a bit differently, e. g. holding the dagger under the cloak, or attack west while convincing the enemy you would attack east; sun tsu also built on the older chinese stratagems.)

trolleski

The issue is not the money, the issue is massive wealth imbalance which is best reflected in the $ class owning the current political players. In other words, oligarchy must be stopped, and democracy defended.

Rebuff5007

Every conversation about the existence of billionaires misses the point: Its not about whether or not billionaires should exist. Its about whether they should exist at the same moment in time when there are people cannot get healthcare or have a decent roof over their head, or a number of other basic things.

voidUpdate

I heard a while back that the average person will see about a million of their currency over their lifetime. So we can take a million dollars to be about 1 lifetime's worth of money. Elon is currently sitting on 817,000 lifetimes worth of money. I feel like we could have like a >95% income tax when you are worth more than like $20 million and it wouldnt actually matter too much to the people who would cap it out? Of course, its a 4000x decrease in wealth for some people, but at that level, when you're getting over 10 million, its basically infinite money anyway. There is no real gain from having 800 billion over having 20 million. What are you going to do with 800 billion dollars? Buy a thousand mega-mansions?

olalonde

Sure. Having billionaires allocate their own capital driven by profit motive and market feedback results in more efficient allocation than having some random bureaucrats do it. That's what it's really about. For example, Elon Musk probably doesn't personally consume much more than the average American. He perhaps consumes 10x or 100x more, whereas his net worth is actually 5,000,000x. There are likely millionaires who live more lavish lives than him. The bulk of his fortune is actually just resources allocated in the economy.

erelong

"The problem isn't that we have billionaires but that the system doesn't make more millionaires and billionaires" Discuss?

iloveoof

> Surely there has to be some number that pushes individual wealth from a net benefit for the country to a net detriment? Surely we are seeing lots of data and examples right now where we can start to come up with that line as a society? Surely it’s very reasonable that we might want to develop policy to make it hard for an individual to end up with more than, say, ten billion dollars1. That doesn’t seem very controversial to me. This seems very controversial to me. Why does increasing wealth eventually cause negative outcomes? What do you mean by “make it hard”? This article skips over justifying its argument. I don’t think, for example, that someone should have come along to Warren Buffett in the late 80s and said: “Your company is too successful, you can’t be the full owner of it anymore” Individual, founder-led companies are a good thing, especially if the companies are very successful. You’re more likely to force these companies into being led by investors and private equity if you don’t let the founders lead them.

inglor_cz

It seems to me that even here on HN, way too many people think in the binary "rich-poor" schemes. Ironically, what produces billionaires quite reliably, is precisely the growing global middle class , which is now estimated to number around four billion. If 4 billion people can spend, say, 200 USD a month on various non-necessities, much of that enormous stream of cash will naturally flow to some big corporations producing universally demanded services and will make their main shareholders billionaires. If Africa ever gets to the living standards of Asia, expect even more billionaires. Etc.

d3ckard

Controversially, yes. The right frame of comparison is not towards average Joe, but towards governments. Billionaires, for better or worse, are independent power sources, which IMO in grand scheme of things are useful. I think the problem with modern world is not that some people have lots of money, but that we allowed money to buy pretty much everything else.

casey2

It's not so much risktaking that's the problem with Reaganomics. It's the risktaking+socalizing costs. If we let billionaires fail there wouldn't be as many of them. Joel Schreiber, Adam Neumann, Miguel McKelvey all billionaires yet nil contribution to society, arguably slight contribution to a small group of insiders. Clearly that's not a a stable situation in regards to resource allocation, the terrifying thing is that the gamblers and scamees of the world know this, they just want to lose all their money as a group and obtain a collective casus belli to fuck shit up.

madmaniak

Billionaires are infinitely smaller than money printers (and they are created by them). Did you got the scale?