You Can Have Billionaires or You Can Have Democracy (2021)
25 points by wahnfrieden 16 hours ago | 16 comments
  • mouse_ 16 hours ago |
    Billionaires aren't going to do something about themselves...
  • keepamovin 15 hours ago |
    This is an overly Marxist viewpoint.
    • SllX 15 hours ago |
      It's Jacobin. You can't expect any different. I mean you can, but you'll be wrong more often than not.

      (Seriously, before anybody piles on, read their About section. They're upfront about who they are and what viewpoint they carry.)

    • TacticalCoder 15 hours ago |
      Yup it makes no sense. All the billionaires's wealth in the US, if confiscated ($6.5 trillion), wouldn't allow to pay back even 20% of the US's public debt ($36 trillion). (not taking into account that that wealth is not liquid and confiscating it would crash that very wealth to way less than $6.5 trillion).

      > The billionaire class isn’t just a group of people who happen to be superrich. It’s a dynastic oligarchy with a single overriding objective: controlling the government to protect its inherited wealth.

      It's not what happens at all. Billionaires like Jobs or Musk were made for creating Apple products or Tesla/StarLink for us. Or billionaires like Buffet: by investing in companies who created products for us.

      What's happening is the government is capturing nearly all the wealth: median household income in Washington D.C. is the highest in the world. EU bureaucrats are better paid (and pay much less taxes) than the average EU citizen. The government grows ever bigger, creating an ever bigger inefficient bureaucracy. And all the wealth is trapped there: endlessly going to state-funded agencies and organizations.

      A country like France has 60% of its GDP that's public spending. And yet what do you hear in France? That the "rich" are the problem, not the government, not the bureaucracy.

      I simply don't buy it.

      • immibis 15 hours ago |
        What does the public debt have to do with any of this? You're treating the problem like it's all about money (numbers on spreadsheets) rather than power (ability to make the world the way you want it to be)
        • TacticalCoder 14 hours ago |
          > What does the public debt have to do with any of this?

          I compared it to the wealth of billionaire. Just the cost of servicing the debt is nearing $1 trillion in 2024. It's a blackhole, created by the governement.

          I'm not making it about money: it's literally an article about "billionaires making democracy impossible". billionaires = money.

          What's making democracy impossible are bureaucrats capturing all the wealth (Washington DC: highest GDP per capita in the US) and an ever growing government, always ever extending its reach, always ever trespassing on citizen's freedom.

          I don't see billionaires as preventing me from living my life. The bureaucrats, politicians, and very left-leaning governments on the other hand...

          • didibus 14 hours ago |
            You don't see a link between billionaires and government? You must be blind.

            Edit: Though I agree with your point about wealth capture in bureaucracy, I find inherited wealth, and billionaire estate and dynasties similarly problematic, and I think those two things are highly intertwined as each one protects each other in a form of crony capitalism.

      • ttyprintk 14 hours ago |
        The article is specifically about 27 families who in 1983 had $1B. Musk and Jobs obviously performed better than 900% with their personal income, which is what those 27 families averaged. Making Mars candy.
      • didibus 14 hours ago |
        > It's not what happens at all. Billionaires like Jobs or Musk were made for creating Apple products or Tesla/StarLink for us. Or billionaires like Buffet: by investing in companies who created products for us.

        I take it you did not read the article? It is focused on inherited billionaires specifically, and explicitly excludes Jobs, Musk and so on.

        I guess it's addressing more, what will we do to avoid their children from further enriching themselves and lobbying to keep their estate for generations to come.

        I don't have a conclusion of my own yet, but give the article a chance, even though it comes from a openly biased publication.

    • dismalaf 15 hours ago |
      The source is literally a communist magazine.
    • ttyprintk 15 hours ago |
      Just like the title implies. There are a few examples which spell out a middle ground. The passing of the Corporate Transparency Act; not Marxist but attacked as technically unconstitutional if Congress doesn’t have the power.

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40431579

    • didibus 14 hours ago |
      > There’s an understandable focus on the first-generation billionaires — the Bezoses and Musks — and their surging wealth gains during the pandemic. But America also has growing and persistent “wealth dynasties”: multigenerational inherited wealth families. There are fifty dynastic families in the United States with a combined $1.2 trillion in wealth that we know of. Most likely there are trillions more hidden in trusts and offshore sites. The twenty-seven wealthiest families that were billionaires in 1983 have seen their wealth increase over 900 percent in the last thirty-seven years.

      I don't know, the article seem to make more a case of feudalism.

      • ttyprintk 14 hours ago |
        Feudalism appears 6 times.

        > Looks like feudalism, smells like feudalism.

        If legitimate grievances, like the asymmetry of offshore tax havens, must be dismissed as groundless in order to participate in politics, then extreme reactions will look like extreme reactions to feudalism.

    • quantified 12 hours ago |
      What's wrong about it, exactly?
  • alsetmusic 15 hours ago |
    When I can buy a social media platform and rejigger it’s algorithms, ban users whose views I don’t like, and insert myself into court cases on behalf of people like Alex Jones to protect their brand / social media accounts, I’ll disagree.
  • immibis 8 hours ago |
    Heh, flagged because if too many people thought along these lines, it would be damaging to Y Combinator.