this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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No one should be allowed to accumulate more than $100 million, period. And we should have a maximum income of $10 million per year, with no borrowing to get over that amount. Max inheritance of $10 million per beneficiary.
It should be progressively more expensive to remain rich.
Figure out a baseline of what’s required to provide comfortable subsistence.
Set a tax rate of 0.01% for income above 10x the baseline.
Set the tax brackets to:
If you want to earn more and pay less tax, you work toward raising the baseline.
An economy is a construct provided by the society to help facilitate its function. Hoarding wealth denominated in its currency is intrinsically sociopathic, and societies which tolerate it are suicidal.
I would argue a comfortable subsistence should be a right, and not require any work at all. And this taxation could provide the basics for everyone.
This is a part of a broader thesis, which also argues the ‘comfortable subsistence’ should be treated as a right.
The taxation wouldn’t be required to pay for anything, its primary purpose is to constrain inequality, and incentivise continual elevation of the social floor.
I’d like to see ‘wealth’ accumulation and persistence as a legitimate proxy of how much someone has contributed to and supported the society they participate within, as opposed to its current form of how much they’ve extracted from and damaged it.
They can build their reputation, and be happy with it. Individualism is a lie to justify unequal distribution of resources.
Show me someone born on a deserted island, who built their entire world and infrastructure from the ground up as an individual, and you’ll have a case for someone who deserves all that they’ve built. For the rest of us, we are a species that builds on the works of all others who came before, and we succeed together.
The singular genius myth is a lie built to justify a race to the patent office, and dismiss multiple discovery.
So zero critique but to me these numbers still seem insurmountably huge. I wonder what makes $10/100 million your cut off points?
I ask because it's hard for me to imagine how one individual can amass $100 million in wealth without theft from those actually producing value. But I’m also aware that somewhere along the way actual lines have to be drawn and don't necessarily have my own metric for where that should be.
Yeah, I’ll admit it’s a bit arbitrary. Personally, I think $1 million per year max income, and $10 million is enough wealth for any one person to live a comfortable life and never work again. The extra zeros are an attempt to meet in the middle.
Thanks for the reply. That makes sense to me, part of me balks at meeting in the middle with such extremes already in play especially given that even these numbers will still be seen as nigh poverty enforced by evil socialist to the ultra wealthy.
Services and intangible property.
If I write and record a song, and 100 million people like it enough to pay me a dollar for it, that's $100 million right there. If I then tour and sell out stadiums and arenas and negotiate a cut of $10 per ticket (and make sure that the staff that actually makes the event possible gets paid fairly, and incorporate that into the ticket price), and end up selling 10 million tickets, that's another $100 million to myself.
I'd argue that there's no exploitation or theft there. It's just scaling to a huge, almost unfathomable volume of sales.
The same can be true with other forms of intellectual property. A popular book may sell billions of copies. A popular piece of software might be downloaded billions of times. Even without copyright, one can imagine a patron/tip/donation model raising billions for some superstars.
Other services might not have a property model, but can still scale. There are minor celebrities making a living doing Cameos for $500 per video, who can easily do 20 a day. Nobody is getting hurt when someone does that.
So I'd argue it is possible to earn a billion without exploitation. They should still be taxed, though.
Yeah I can see that, very interesting example. I have to think about that more as I'm already thinking of loads of similar examples. I guess at the end of the day a 90-99% tax above $x would still be "fair" but it def is a different perspective on ultra wealth that might not necessarily be "stolen."