How exactly do you propose keeping a founder from becoming wealthier once their company scales past the point where they are worth a hundred million?
How exactly do you propose keeping a founder from becoming wealthier once their company scales past the point where they are worth a hundred million?
The market is supposed to do that. Once an opportunity is identified there is a rush to compete and margin disappears, so the people still get the new, better thing, but for much cheaper.
What can happen though is that companies figure out how to prevent meaningful competition to preserve high margins. They're worth millions for the innovation but they get to billions through anti-competitive and extractive practices.
Most things don't behave like pure commodities regardless of anything that can be considered monopolistic.
I agree with you on it being hard.
But we can start by not forgiving CG on death. That seems like a no brainer with no downsides.
No downsides I respect, at least. "We want to keep the business in the family" should be ignored.
100%. I don't understand how anyone defends the "death loophole" for capital gains. If you get rid of it you could actually get rid of estate taxes, which are a kludge to capture some of the capital gains that are given away by resetting the basis at death. It's a nutty system we have right now.
This one does seem to be a no brainer
Are you expecting someone to drag your contribution to the discourse out of you?
My question was how do you prevent anyone from having over 100M? No motte and baileys please.
Reverse lottery.
Like I said...
It's hard. But if we make CG inescapable it should as a second order effect close the Buy Borrow Die loophole, and the super rich must fund their life some other way. Probably by selling assets to consume.
And putting a tamper on inheritance (which could be progressively taxed or capped) it has a second order effect of discouraging hoarding while alive.
So increasing inheritance tax (effectively) would mean a change of incentives for hoarding money. Which is the only thing that actually works.
Obviously, being a hard problem, there's no quick fix. But in the choice between slowing down the problem and not, we should do the former.
How do we "prevent" it? Well, we can throw the baby out with the bathwater. Is that your proposal?
As for your question: no intransigence please.
By taking the excess yearly, and that's very doable.
When Bezos divorced, Mackenzie Bezos was awarded 25% of their Amazon shares valued at over 38 billion dollars.
Just by the above being possible, that means there's no reason why such a "divorce" couldn't happen once per year, and there's also no reason why it has to be 25% rather than "everything above 100M". It means that the tools for this exist. The government takes the place of Mackenzie Bezos. During the divorce, not a single mention of "oh it's just _impossible_ to take 25% of Jeff Bezos' Amazon shares, it will cause collapse". Just all of a sudden if you replace MacKenzie Bezos with "the government" or "the pension fund", suddenly there's all kinds of supposed reasons why it can't happen - even though there's zero reason why it couldn't.
No "but technically they will temporarily have over 100M in the intermediary period" please.
The amazon shares weren't liquidated in the divorce. Are you saying the government will receive shares instead of cash?
Yes.
So then the government becomes a stakeholder with vested interest in certain companies and not others?
You can simply mandate by law that these sells must be sold to the market at, say, 2% per month, and that the government will not make use of voting rights during that period.
There's so many possible options.
I’msure they will just ensure they will never reach 100m and stash their cash somewhere hidden. So won’t work that well. But might work for a one off cut. Which is good.
Why didn't Bezos just stash his assets somewhere hidden so that he wouldn't have to give $38 billion of it to his ex?
Because it doesn't work that way at that level of wealth, especially for tech CEOs. You can't just hide billions worth of shares in a company.
Guillotines are the classic method, and they are likely coming if we don't change course.
Revolutionaries often overestimate the appetite in the general populace for revolution. Also I'm not sure guillotines will be able to do much against the killer drones that palmer luckey is making
It's mind boggling that you view the solution to this as so counter to the interests of the capital class that you can't even speak it aloud
You tax them. Wealth inequality of this magnitude is toxic to democracy. It's simply too much power. These men aren't gods, they are just flesh and blood and usually really terrible people. We are not staff at their resort. Let them live in luxury for the rest of their life, great. But they don't get to have more political power than half a million people put together.
So you're saying the obvious solution is to force founders to liquidate all shares necessary every year to keep their wealth under 100M? How to keep short sellers from feasting on this? Who will the buyers be if everyone is selling around tax season? If the stock crashes because there is government-mandated short interest and no long interest are they off the hook?
On the point of democracy, none of the candidates who spend the most on major elections seem to be winning much lately, Bloomberg, Harris, Cuomo, Steyer, etc.
> On the point of democracy, none of the candidates who spend the most on major elections seem to be winning much lately,
Thomas Massie was just ousted in the most expensive house primary in US history.
The difference between 1-2 mil that is normally spent and the $30+ million spent on that election alone.
Tom steyer spent half a billion to not even make it onto the final ca ballot
I think you'd find more examples of people spending much much less money to influence elections, or buy certain positions than you will people spending money to make the public vote for them. The money influences policies, regulations, wars, etc.
The problem isn’t necessarily that some one can buy a seat for themselves (though some people out there could spend 1000x as much as half a billion and still have 500 billion to spend), it's that for less than half a billion, someone can buy 20 house or senate seats for more conventional candidates that are willing to vote the way the financier wants.
Buying senate seats is for chumps. For $300 million, Musk got his own executive branch agency, a pseudo cabinet level position, and carte blanche to take a machete to all the programs he personally disliked including investigations into himself and his companies.
Maybe if you suck them off hard enough they will give you a few crumbs after you are done.
Beats sucking off a communist in order to not starve when there is a food shortage
Speaking of hunger, capitalist utopia is worse than a global pandemic: https://www.npr.org/2026/05/27/nx-s1-5836441/food-insecurity...
ok now compare it to food insecurity in north korea or venezuela
No one is advocating America to be more like North Korea or Venezuela. Democratic Socialism is what young people are asking for today. These cold war era dichotomies will die with the boomer generation.
How about the doesn't need to be paid in cash? The government claims a percentage of the company over time...as always only above some level of valuation
No, the shares can be directly transferred to a government-held portfolio. Come on, think for 2 seconds, my god. If you're going to rage like this at least don't come up with strawman issues that can be trivially resolved in 2 seconds of thinking.
Of course the government should own everything! How stupid of us for assuming that's a bad idea.
How stupid of you for assuming they'd have to keep it, rather than slowly selling it off, indeed exactly like Mackenzie Bezos might do. You could easily mandate this.
Not to mention that the Norwegian Pension Funds holds $2 trillion in assets. UAE and KSA have ones over $1 trillion each.
And that's ignoring that currently an even smaller group of people owns everything, who don't even represent the public on paper. Quite stupid to assume that this is a better idea.
It's so weird that taxing my property is straightforward but taxing the property of the capital class is so incredibly Byzantine and unexplainably impossible
Elon musk was unceremoniously kicked out of the white house. To say he has some great power is ridiculous. Whatever power he has aside from his companies is in his mind
Think for a second… If money doesn’t give people power… then what’s all the fuss about??
> It's mind boggling that you
Please don't do this.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
tax?
On what? You force the company to break up and liquidate so they can pay taxes?
You force the founder to give up their private property just because it is valuable?
Remember these are not dollar bills in the founders bank account. It is just the company they created is now very valuable. It does not mean it is liquid.
Owners being able to lock the value generated by workers solely within their family for generations has been tried. It ends in feudalism.
Are you proposing changing inheritance laws or are you proposing forcing companies to sell their stock in a firesale to be in accordance with the IRS? Be clear in your propositions please.
Progressive taxation, taxes on CG, inheritance taxes, and a well funded and non-partisan IRS.
None of these will prevent someone from gaining more than 100M. That is what is under discussion. I am not against more progressive taxes.
Which party is the IRS partisan towards? What do you mean by partisan?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/experts-warn-trump-imm...
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-irs-investigations...
I agree these are partisan and bad developments. It is also unrelated to the question at hand about how to prevent people from gaining over 100m which people have been able to do under the heretofore non-partisan irs
What do you mean by “is”? What do you mean by “you”? By clear.
It doesn’t end in feudalism. It ends in guillotines.
> On what?
On the business income, on the sale of shares, on their wealth, on loans, on estate and inheritance, etc.
Breaking up the company is another avenue, it could increase competitiveness and make the markets freer, open up more options for employees to shop around for employer, etc.
Raising minimum wage, stronger overtime rules, paid family leave, mandatory paid vacation and sick leave, non-compete restrictions, profit-sharing requirements, and other regulation that favors the employee is yet another avenue...
There are ways if the will is there.
> You force the founder to give up their private property just because it is valuable?
That's how taxes work.
The straightforward solution to this is to allow the tax to be paid in kind, to be paid into a sovereign wealth fund.
Owe 1M$ in taxes and have ownership stakes in a company worth 1B$? Fine, transfer a 0.1% share of ownership in the company into the SWF.
Taxes. If they want to externalize the costs then society should socialize excessive surpluses.
anti-trust