Didn’t that tax get repealed? It’s not like it was just Amazon that opposed it. It was pretty much universally opposed by the entire business community.
And it’s kind of a dumb tax. It is effectively punishing companies for operating in the city. But it’s beneficial for the city to have those companies operate there, because all of those employees pay taxes and spend money in the city.
This is the problem with a bunch of these proposals. Punishing the very companies which drive your economy… isn’t beneficial to you. You’re punishing behavior you want to encourage.
Which is good, but we aren’t always so lucky as to have ‘nice billionaires’ (Gates being another one). The Kochs have been actually helping to kill the planet*, for example.
*OK, not literally, Earth will keep on revolving around the sun whether or not there are any mammals left on it
Man, that would be delicious. But Murdoch will never sell. He specifically kept Fox News when he sold Fox to Disney for a reason. He’s a propagandist and it’s a powerful asset for him.
This is not hero worship. The only way to view it as such is to take the most disingenuous interpretation of everything that anyone has said about the flaws with this approach and the general idea that dismissing the founders of these companies as not important and their efforts not worthwhile all while throwing disdain in their direction because other people voluntarily purchased their goods and/services.
This paragraph has a kind of awesome beauty, as if it might not be disingenuous to characterize what people are saying as dismissing the founders of these companies as not important and their efforts not worthwhile.
This is actually what people were saying Scott, that if Bezos and Amazon didn’t exist it was inevitable that someone else would do the exact same thing, course is set, people are not important. And this is despite the graveyard of dot.com companies that emerged around them trying similar efforts.
I don’t think saying someone else would have done something similar with similar success is the same thing as saying he is not important. A lot of people tried to develop powered flight. Someone finally did, and they were important, but if they had never existed then someone else would have done it instead, and they would be the ones we remember.
As with almost anything in life, both extremes are nonsensical. Of course the leadership of successful business ventures matters, and of course the leadership isn’t the overwhelming reason that the business became successful. There are a ton of factors that all have to come together to create a Google or Amazon or Microsoft, from people to circumstances to economic environment. The “billionaire” question come from the fact that we allow one factor - the founder and other top executives - to reap a much larger share of the benefits than those other factors.
So it’s not okay to say that taxing the rich will cause them to leave the country…but it’s okay to basically say, “If we don’t tax the rich, then common people are going to break into their houses and kill them”? And it’s not like Bezos has $11 billion in a shoebox under his bed.
The situation is the U.S. today is nothing like what happened during the French or Russian Revolutions. And by the way, the French Revolution isn’t some lofty ideal; it didn’t really work out too well for the people who started it.
And part of the reason we do that, is they are the ones taking the risk. They’re taking the loans. They’re doing the pitches, not the employees. Now it’s nice if early employees get early shots at the stocks too, and sometimes they absolutely do. In addition to actual paychecks, which the founders may not actually take, for years, they do get access to those stocks when they are cheap. Other times, the employees get their paychecks, they get the stocks, but the company goes under and it’s worthless.
The risks are high for those who are all in. Very high. They can lose everything. Many have.
That’s a fair point, and I have no problem with compensation for the leaders within reason. Let them amass enough to live comfortably the rest of their lives, if that’s what they want to do. At that point, their risk has paid off. Then you tax additional wealth heavily. That does two things: provides society the resources needed to keep providing for social needs, and prevents a small group from amassing so much wealth that they distort justice, politics, regulation, etc.
Here’s what I posted elsewhere on this “live comfortably” idea:
But that’s not how risk works. If someone invests in a high-risk, high-reward venture and it pays off, you don’t get to decide “Oh that’s too much of a reward, we’re going to take everything that you made that’s not within reason.” All you’re doing is discouraging people from taking similar risks in the future. And since these “risks” involve building companies and paying employees a lot of money to work there, that’s going to have negative effects on the job market as a whole.
