9 ms·

> In a more fair world a person should probably not be able to amass more than USD 1B by making the right bet on the stock market. That wealth is build in this

by 4wsn 3y ago

> In a more fair world a person should probably not be able to amass more than USD 1B by making the right bet on the stock market. That wealth is build in this way is anti-meritocratic. It's anti-meritocratic for someone to invest their money intelligently in the stock market? How do you determine the threshold where on one side they're entitled to the wealth they earned, and on the other side their wealth is unfairly earned?

fennecbutt 3y ago
Algorithmic trading produces nothing of value and yet we allow it for some reason. It actually detracts from the entire purpose of a stock market. It has also created our poisonous modern environment where companies chase record profits every year, endless unsustainable growth with the added side effect of ass-covering for all their bad investments. A lucky investment like this guy is probably fine but the truth is that the system is set up so that wealth begets more wealth; the wealthiest people have so much money that they don't have to be careful with it, look at how much Musk spent on Twitter as a toy for him to destroy, it doesn't matter because record profits and valuations ensure that dumbfuck CEOs and investors are bailed out of their dumb decisions. Meanwhile we live in a biological society where our evolutionary path has made it exceedingly easy to manipulate people to hate based on sexuality, gender, race, etc ignoring the class war going on. We're too apathetic and ignorant to vote together, we could all share in our species' accomplishments but no, the suit and tie ruling class can have all the Bentleys they like so long as I get to vote for the guy that'll let me hate the people I want to hate.
mateo1 3y ago
>How do you determine the threshold I think most people will agree the threshold to be in the few millions. Some will argue for 5 and few for 50, but nobody can produce $1B of value. Take control of it, sure, but produce, no.
- 6510 3y ago
  Apparently they can by giving it to the right entity at the right time. What we could do (besides taxing it away) is configure a limit to what they are allowed to do with it. I also see room for special titles with cosmetic privileges if someone accomplishes to pay the enormous tax. It will be hard to find the right privileges. Something like a medal or an outfit is obviously doable. An annual fancy dinner for the group doesn't seem over the top. A daily 30 min slot on the TV for them to bid on exclusively, or each their own slot annually. Can grant 3 lectures in any university. It gets slightly dubious if we add special construction permits for locations no one else may build in. The funniest I could think of, at 10 bl+ we seize all of your money and assets, you are forbidden to participate in the financial system. You get a robe and a cloak and a card with which you can eat any place, stay at any hotel, buy cloths, do shopping, take a taxi and take any flight with a maximum of 3 guests + partner and kids.
  - vineyardmike 3y ago
    This reminds me of ancient Athens. The rich would all compete to pay taxes, because your social status was based on your taxes, and you had special perks if you paid enough. It became a bragging opportunity to showcase your wealthy. If you funded something with your taxes, you could hire the artist that made the sculptures. Say you build a new civic center with a theater. You have an incentive to hire a good artist to make the place in your preference, with your image, which means the city has more art. If it was an ugly building, it’d be an ugly building with your name on it. The rich during times of war would be separated into those that could fund a whole battleship and those that didn’t. If you shirked your responsibilities during war, you were viewed as a traitor who was so greedy they’d let the city fall. Maybe we need to stop chastising the rich for building things in their names, but instead give them more opportunities to do so. Additionally maybe we should make all tax payments public, so you can see if your friends and family avoid taxes. Maybe people would become embarrassed to pay less taxes than their employees if everyone could look it up.
    - rblatz 3y ago
      ”... he didn't pay any federal income tax.” “That makes me smart.” - Donald Trump
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    > Apparently they can by giving it to the right entity at the right time. I want to understand this. If I buy a Novo Nordisk share on the market I never gave novo nordisk a single krone. My counter part is the seller (who rarely would be the company itself). Generally I would say that investors provide liquidity to the market. Ie. the action of buying and selling are the ones that provide the value. Not holding. You can conclude that a person holding onto a share for 30 years did not provide any value. That person was merely a rent seeker based on other people providing value by doing the asset allocation – In Denmark these people would be punished by the progressive capital gains tax, while the people trading ones in a while would benefit from a lower tax bill. Or am I wrong?
    - sokoloff 3y ago
- edanm 3y ago
  > I think most people will agree the threshold to be in the few millions. Some will argue for 5 and few for 50, but nobody can produce $1B of value. Take control of it, sure, but produce, no. That is just, on the face of it, false. Did Stephen King not produce millions and almost a billion in value? Despite writing books that have been read by millions of people, have turned into super successful movies, including some movies considered some of our best art?
  - lobocinza 3y ago
    Yes, people can produce value at scale.
  - fennecbutt 3y ago
    If I charge $1000 with a 90% profit and sell 10m units, can I claim all of that as having "produced value"? If my movie budget is 300m but 200m of that went to high priced actors (think JD, RDJ getting paid 50m~) did that movie produce that amount of value? Corporations have perfected consumer value extraction, allowing them to pay themselves more and bid higher against the competition, further increasing prices to consumers in an endless loop. It produces nothing of value for us, but we're too dumb to boycott this behaviour.
    - edanm 3y ago
      > Corporations have perfected consumer value extraction, allowing them to pay themselves more and bid higher against the competition, further increasing prices to consumers in an endless loop. This flies in the face of most economic theory, and also flies in the face of reality. How many corporations are out there with 90% profit margins? Very few, if any. > If my movie budget is 300m but 200m of that went to high priced actors (think JD, RDJ getting paid 50m~) did that movie produce that amount of value? I'm not sure what the high-priced actors have to do with it, but the amount of value produced has nothing to do with the budget - it has to do with the tickets you sell. If your $300m movie tanks and no one ever goes to see it, you've in some sense created 0 value. If everyone in the world goes to see it and you make billions of dollars, you've created billions in value, as decided by actual people choosing to vote with their wallets to giving you money for your art. The budget only figures into it in the sense that you need to subtract it from the revenue to decide on the actual profit.
- RestlessMind 3y ago
  JK Rowling surely produced $1B of value. Much more in fact.
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    I would love to see the itemisation and deduction for this. In particular, how did you decide how much value was due to the publisher, movie studios, etc. vs. her? We can safely assume that she would have produced absolutely no value, had there been no publisher. Maybe the publisher produced $1B of value and JK Rowling produced none? They did after all select her over other authors.
    - RestlessMind 3y ago
      > Maybe the publisher produced $1B of value and JK Rowling produced none? You are actually right that publisher produced most of the value... though only in the beginning when she was a nobody. I am sure publishing industry knows that too and read somewhere that their deals with new authors reflect that reality. After the first 3 books when the series started gaining traction and people talked about lining up for the 4th one? It was absolutely the author who was producing the value. Publishing house couldn't have conjured up the remaining 4 books at the same quality - they are good at publishing, not good at creating. (Just ask HBO / Game of Thrones showrunners how it went after GRRM didn't write the last 2 books).
      - chuckinthegump 3y ago
        Nah. You were right the first time. Own it.
JohnKemeny 3y ago
It's about putting an upper limit to the amount of resources a single person is allowed to amass and thus control. We agree that we don't want a dictator. A single person with too much wealth can be almost as powerful, hence there are good arguments in favor of setting such limits.
- edanm 3y ago
  And yet many people have far more actual power over people's lives, for example many elected and/or appointed officials. If a cop in my city wants to ruin your life, there's a chance it'll be easier for them to do so than it is for a rich individual, not to mention the mayor of the city. And unlike a billionaire, who'd have to spend money to actually "control people's lives" and is therefore limited by some constraint , an elected official gets to control people's lives with no constraint at all.
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    This is a straw man: A police man can only ruin so many lives. He would have to be Santa Claus in order to harres the entire population of the US. A policeman does not have the same impact over peoples lives as, eg., Jeff Bezos.
    - edanm 3y ago
      A policeman in my city could arguably have more impact on my life than Jeff Bezos does. What kind of impact do you think Jeff Bezos has exactly? And obviously, a policeman is the lowest-power individual in this scenario - my city councilman probably has more impact than that.
      - madsbuch 3y ago
        It is because this debate is not about your life, but the life of the masses.
  - tijtij 3y ago
    What if the cop wants to ruin the lives of a large group of people? How about if it's a group people living in the next town over, can he get away with it? If he does manage to ruin the lives of people, will he get voted out or dismissed? Bill Gates improved the lives of countless people around the world. He could as easily made the lives of countless worse if he wanted to or as an unintended consequence of his projects.
madsbuch 3y ago
> It's anti-meritocratic for someone to invest their money intelligently in the stock market? I like how you threw in the word "intelligently" like this investments was planned and thought out from the beginning ;) Thresholds are are not that hard to decide: It is about taxation that takes macro-economic behaviour and targets into account. We have a political party that wants to reduce capital gains tax in Denmark (currently 27%/42%). However, analysis shows that this would benefit only the wealthiest 2% so the consensus is that this is a bad idea from a macro economic perspective. The value of money is relative. Your 1 million dollars are worthless if everyone else has 10 million dollars. The second people act upon and realise that, we can start to build good economic systems.
- zaptheimpaler 3y ago
  If you really don’t believe that it’s possible to invest intelligently, better than others that’s just wrong. There are many people who have done that. Like there are 10000s of investments and over any long period of time, some will so far far better than others. Some of those will be public companies or otherwise be investments that are open to all people.
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    I do believe that. But your choices has diminishing effects over long term. And also, in a meritocracy the "profit" needs to be congruent to the merits. I think there is a broad consensus that talent won't make you a billionarie in the stock market, otherwise we had seen many more people become billionaires in the stock market. If you really believe that that the person in question got billionaire on the stock market by their merits that’s just wrong.
- lobocinza 3y ago
  Macro-economy shows that EU is doing wrong as US companies outperform EU companies. Wealth/power concentration isn't due to capitalism but due to human nature and society scale. Even if success greatest factor is luck it still requires merit. By punishing success you're punishing people that put money into savings, that attempt to innovate and improve human society, that invest in promising areas. In the long term society will be stagnant. And I doubt that in the short term society will be more equal because forced distribution of wealth historically increases inequality.
scotty79 3y ago
> It's anti-meritocratic for someone to invest their money intelligently in the stock market? Absolutely. To achieve such results you need so much luck and such a headstart that any merits you might additionally have are drowned in everything else that contributes to "your" "success". > How do you determine the threshold where on one side they're entitled to the wealth they earned, and on the other side their wealth is unfairly earned? Rule of thumb. About $10 million. But it's not about who deserves what. It's about how much influence can society safely let a single random primate have. The actual number will be determined by the political process. It's a number that seems sufficiently unachievable for 51% of people so that they feel safe to vote to heavily tax those who hace that much. Current barriers to that is that the very wealthy own the culture and they are selling poor people the illusion that everybody can be the rich and what they are doing is actually building value not extracting it despite the fact that trillions of dollars have been extracted from the control of democracy and market and placed exclusively in their hands.
- lobocinza 3y ago
  > Rule of thumb. About $10 million. It's difficult to quantify but many government bureaucrats hold much more power than that. Your "solution" replaces one problem with a worse problem while punishing sucess.
  - scotty79 3y ago
    What worse problem? And why success should not be punished? Do you think people will voluntarily stay poor just because they might be taxed more if they reach 10 million? And even if that would be the case. It's still good because inequality harms vast majority in the short term and everybody in the medium to long term so any disincentive to people getting rich at the expense of poor consumers is a win.
    - lobocinza 3y ago
      > What worse problem? How would you solve the problem of wealth concentration in free-markets without incurring in greater wealth concentration under a closed-market? > And why success should not be punished? Because generally we want to reward and incentive the betterment of society. > Do you think people will voluntarily stay poor just because they might be taxed more if they reach 10 million? Maybe. It must be depressing to live in such a place. If you punish success, you reward mediocrity. But the thing is that those that reach 10 million or plus will always have the option to move their fortunes abroad, so it's the middle class that ends up paying the heavier burden in countries ruled by this mindset.
Brian_K_White 3y ago
"It's anti-meritocratic?" Yes. "How do you determine the threshold?" Somehow. It doesn't matter how you determine it or what you end up determing nearly as much as doing it at all by any means, and working out good procedures and results over time. Currently, we have nothing at all. A sub-optimal limit, a downright wrong limit, derived from sub-optimal, downright wrong methods is better than none at all. The Bezoss and the Musks of the world are not doing anything we need done badly enough to be worth what we give them. Those people who like to run big projects will still be full of themselves and still seek to be in charge of everyone else and will still command the same resources even in a world where that isn't expressed as personal private ownership of the resources. If the change in incentives changes anything, if there are people who currently became billionairs and produced Amazon and Facebook, who would not have bothered if they couldn't own it all, I am prepared to call that only a win. We'd still get anything that was actually valuable to us rather than just valuable to the owner. The only problem is needing to incorporate enough ownership and capitalism so that there is any motivation for excellence. If everything is purely communist and no one owns anything, then all products and services suck. There does need to be some sort of reward for making the electric car and the charging network actually good, and some anti-reward for not making it available to everyone. Patents and copyright need to be somehow quite different. Maybe they still exist and confer some sort of benefit, but nothing like now. Rewarding people for inventing or improving things only to let them keep it for themselves, and even retain ownership control through drm and software over products that were sold more than nullifies the value of getting them to invent the thing in the first place. More than merely negates. Their existence suppresses everyone else who might have done it differently. Where is the line and how do you determine it is no conundrum at all. It's nothing but some boring policy grunt work to hash that out.

by 4wsn 3y ago

fennecbutt 3y ago

Algorithmic trading produces nothing of value and yet we allow it for some reason. It actually detracts from the entire purpose of a stock market. It has also created our poisonous modern environment where companies chase record profits every year, endless unsustainable growth with the added side effect of ass-covering for all their bad investments. A lucky investment like this guy is probably fine but the truth is that the system is set up so that wealth begets more wealth; the wealthiest people have so much money that they don't have to be careful with it, look at how much Musk spent on Twitter as a toy for him to destroy, it doesn't matter because record profits and valuations ensure that dumbfuck CEOs and investors are bailed out of their dumb decisions. Meanwhile we live in a biological society where our evolutionary path has made it exceedingly easy to manipulate people to hate based on sexuality, gender, race, etc ignoring the class war going on. We're too apathetic and ignorant to vote together, we could all share in our species' accomplishments but no, the suit and tie ruling class can have all the Bentleys they like so long as I get to vote for the guy that'll let me hate the people I want to hate.

mateo1 3y ago

>How do you determine the threshold I think most people will agree the threshold to be in the few millions. Some will argue for 5 and few for 50, but nobody can produce $1B of value. Take control of it, sure, but produce, no.

6510 3y ago
Apparently they can by giving it to the right entity at the right time. What we could do (besides taxing it away) is configure a limit to what they are allowed to do with it. I also see room for special titles with cosmetic privileges if someone accomplishes to pay the enormous tax. It will be hard to find the right privileges. Something like a medal or an outfit is obviously doable. An annual fancy dinner for the group doesn't seem over the top. A daily 30 min slot on the TV for them to bid on exclusively, or each their own slot annually. Can grant 3 lectures in any university. It gets slightly dubious if we add special construction permits for locations no one else may build in. The funniest I could think of, at 10 bl+ we seize all of your money and assets, you are forbidden to participate in the financial system. You get a robe and a cloak and a card with which you can eat any place, stay at any hotel, buy cloths, do shopping, take a taxi and take any flight with a maximum of 3 guests + partner and kids.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  This reminds me of ancient Athens. The rich would all compete to pay taxes, because your social status was based on your taxes, and you had special perks if you paid enough. It became a bragging opportunity to showcase your wealthy. If you funded something with your taxes, you could hire the artist that made the sculptures. Say you build a new civic center with a theater. You have an incentive to hire a good artist to make the place in your preference, with your image, which means the city has more art. If it was an ugly building, it’d be an ugly building with your name on it. The rich during times of war would be separated into those that could fund a whole battleship and those that didn’t. If you shirked your responsibilities during war, you were viewed as a traitor who was so greedy they’d let the city fall. Maybe we need to stop chastising the rich for building things in their names, but instead give them more opportunities to do so. Additionally maybe we should make all tax payments public, so you can see if your friends and family avoid taxes. Maybe people would become embarrassed to pay less taxes than their employees if everyone could look it up.
  - rblatz 3y ago
    ”... he didn't pay any federal income tax.” “That makes me smart.” - Donald Trump
- madsbuch 3y ago
  > Apparently they can by giving it to the right entity at the right time. I want to understand this. If I buy a Novo Nordisk share on the market I never gave novo nordisk a single krone. My counter part is the seller (who rarely would be the company itself). Generally I would say that investors provide liquidity to the market. Ie. the action of buying and selling are the ones that provide the value. Not holding. You can conclude that a person holding onto a share for 30 years did not provide any value. That person was merely a rent seeker based on other people providing value by doing the asset allocation – In Denmark these people would be punished by the progressive capital gains tax, while the people trading ones in a while would benefit from a lower tax bill. Or am I wrong?
  - sokoloff 3y ago
edanm 3y ago
> I think most people will agree the threshold to be in the few millions. Some will argue for 5 and few for 50, but nobody can produce $1B of value. Take control of it, sure, but produce, no. That is just, on the face of it, false. Did Stephen King not produce millions and almost a billion in value? Despite writing books that have been read by millions of people, have turned into super successful movies, including some movies considered some of our best art?
- lobocinza 3y ago
  Yes, people can produce value at scale.
- fennecbutt 3y ago
  If I charge $1000 with a 90% profit and sell 10m units, can I claim all of that as having "produced value"? If my movie budget is 300m but 200m of that went to high priced actors (think JD, RDJ getting paid 50m~) did that movie produce that amount of value? Corporations have perfected consumer value extraction, allowing them to pay themselves more and bid higher against the competition, further increasing prices to consumers in an endless loop. It produces nothing of value for us, but we're too dumb to boycott this behaviour.
  - edanm 3y ago
    > Corporations have perfected consumer value extraction, allowing them to pay themselves more and bid higher against the competition, further increasing prices to consumers in an endless loop. This flies in the face of most economic theory, and also flies in the face of reality. How many corporations are out there with 90% profit margins? Very few, if any. > If my movie budget is 300m but 200m of that went to high priced actors (think JD, RDJ getting paid 50m~) did that movie produce that amount of value? I'm not sure what the high-priced actors have to do with it, but the amount of value produced has nothing to do with the budget - it has to do with the tickets you sell. If your $300m movie tanks and no one ever goes to see it, you've in some sense created 0 value. If everyone in the world goes to see it and you make billions of dollars, you've created billions in value, as decided by actual people choosing to vote with their wallets to giving you money for your art. The budget only figures into it in the sense that you need to subtract it from the revenue to decide on the actual profit.
RestlessMind 3y ago
JK Rowling surely produced $1B of value. Much more in fact.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  I would love to see the itemisation and deduction for this. In particular, how did you decide how much value was due to the publisher, movie studios, etc. vs. her? We can safely assume that she would have produced absolutely no value, had there been no publisher. Maybe the publisher produced $1B of value and JK Rowling produced none? They did after all select her over other authors.
  - RestlessMind 3y ago
    > Maybe the publisher produced $1B of value and JK Rowling produced none? You are actually right that publisher produced most of the value... though only in the beginning when she was a nobody. I am sure publishing industry knows that too and read somewhere that their deals with new authors reflect that reality. After the first 3 books when the series started gaining traction and people talked about lining up for the 4th one? It was absolutely the author who was producing the value. Publishing house couldn't have conjured up the remaining 4 books at the same quality - they are good at publishing, not good at creating. (Just ask HBO / Game of Thrones showrunners how it went after GRRM didn't write the last 2 books).
    - chuckinthegump 3y ago
      Nah. You were right the first time. Own it.

JohnKemeny 3y ago

It's about putting an upper limit to the amount of resources a single person is allowed to amass and thus control. We agree that we don't want a dictator. A single person with too much wealth can be almost as powerful, hence there are good arguments in favor of setting such limits.

edanm 3y ago
And yet many people have far more actual power over people's lives, for example many elected and/or appointed officials. If a cop in my city wants to ruin your life, there's a chance it'll be easier for them to do so than it is for a rich individual, not to mention the mayor of the city. And unlike a billionaire, who'd have to spend money to actually "control people's lives" and is therefore limited by some constraint , an elected official gets to control people's lives with no constraint at all.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  This is a straw man: A police man can only ruin so many lives. He would have to be Santa Claus in order to harres the entire population of the US. A policeman does not have the same impact over peoples lives as, eg., Jeff Bezos.
  - edanm 3y ago
    A policeman in my city could arguably have more impact on my life than Jeff Bezos does. What kind of impact do you think Jeff Bezos has exactly? And obviously, a policeman is the lowest-power individual in this scenario - my city councilman probably has more impact than that.
    - madsbuch 3y ago
      It is because this debate is not about your life, but the life of the masses.
- tijtij 3y ago
  What if the cop wants to ruin the lives of a large group of people? How about if it's a group people living in the next town over, can he get away with it? If he does manage to ruin the lives of people, will he get voted out or dismissed? Bill Gates improved the lives of countless people around the world. He could as easily made the lives of countless worse if he wanted to or as an unintended consequence of his projects.

madsbuch 3y ago

> It's anti-meritocratic for someone to invest their money intelligently in the stock market? I like how you threw in the word "intelligently" like this investments was planned and thought out from the beginning ;) Thresholds are are not that hard to decide: It is about taxation that takes macro-economic behaviour and targets into account. We have a political party that wants to reduce capital gains tax in Denmark (currently 27%/42%). However, analysis shows that this would benefit only the wealthiest 2% so the consensus is that this is a bad idea from a macro economic perspective. The value of money is relative. Your 1 million dollars are worthless if everyone else has 10 million dollars. The second people act upon and realise that, we can start to build good economic systems.

zaptheimpaler 3y ago
If you really don’t believe that it’s possible to invest intelligently, better than others that’s just wrong. There are many people who have done that. Like there are 10000s of investments and over any long period of time, some will so far far better than others. Some of those will be public companies or otherwise be investments that are open to all people.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  I do believe that. But your choices has diminishing effects over long term. And also, in a meritocracy the "profit" needs to be congruent to the merits. I think there is a broad consensus that talent won't make you a billionarie in the stock market, otherwise we had seen many more people become billionaires in the stock market. If you really believe that that the person in question got billionaire on the stock market by their merits that’s just wrong.
lobocinza 3y ago
Macro-economy shows that EU is doing wrong as US companies outperform EU companies. Wealth/power concentration isn't due to capitalism but due to human nature and society scale. Even if success greatest factor is luck it still requires merit. By punishing success you're punishing people that put money into savings, that attempt to innovate and improve human society, that invest in promising areas. In the long term society will be stagnant. And I doubt that in the short term society will be more equal because forced distribution of wealth historically increases inequality.

scotty79 3y ago

> It's anti-meritocratic for someone to invest their money intelligently in the stock market? Absolutely. To achieve such results you need so much luck and such a headstart that any merits you might additionally have are drowned in everything else that contributes to "your" "success". > How do you determine the threshold where on one side they're entitled to the wealth they earned, and on the other side their wealth is unfairly earned? Rule of thumb. About $10 million. But it's not about who deserves what. It's about how much influence can society safely let a single random primate have. The actual number will be determined by the political process. It's a number that seems sufficiently unachievable for 51% of people so that they feel safe to vote to heavily tax those who hace that much. Current barriers to that is that the very wealthy own the culture and they are selling poor people the illusion that everybody can be the rich and what they are doing is actually building value not extracting it despite the fact that trillions of dollars have been extracted from the control of democracy and market and placed exclusively in their hands.

lobocinza 3y ago
> Rule of thumb. About $10 million. It's difficult to quantify but many government bureaucrats hold much more power than that. Your "solution" replaces one problem with a worse problem while punishing sucess.
- scotty79 3y ago
  What worse problem? And why success should not be punished? Do you think people will voluntarily stay poor just because they might be taxed more if they reach 10 million? And even if that would be the case. It's still good because inequality harms vast majority in the short term and everybody in the medium to long term so any disincentive to people getting rich at the expense of poor consumers is a win.
  - lobocinza 3y ago
    > What worse problem? How would you solve the problem of wealth concentration in free-markets without incurring in greater wealth concentration under a closed-market? > And why success should not be punished? Because generally we want to reward and incentive the betterment of society. > Do you think people will voluntarily stay poor just because they might be taxed more if they reach 10 million? Maybe. It must be depressing to live in such a place. If you punish success, you reward mediocrity. But the thing is that those that reach 10 million or plus will always have the option to move their fortunes abroad, so it's the middle class that ends up paying the heavier burden in countries ruled by this mindset.

Brian_K_White 3y ago

"It's anti-meritocratic?" Yes. "How do you determine the threshold?" Somehow. It doesn't matter how you determine it or what you end up determing nearly as much as doing it at all by any means, and working out good procedures and results over time. Currently, we have nothing at all. A sub-optimal limit, a downright wrong limit, derived from sub-optimal, downright wrong methods is better than none at all. The Bezoss and the Musks of the world are not doing anything we need done badly enough to be worth what we give them. Those people who like to run big projects will still be full of themselves and still seek to be in charge of everyone else and will still command the same resources even in a world where that isn't expressed as personal private ownership of the resources. If the change in incentives changes anything, if there are people who currently became billionairs and produced Amazon and Facebook, who would not have bothered if they couldn't own it all, I am prepared to call that only a win. We'd still get anything that was actually valuable to us rather than just valuable to the owner. The only problem is needing to incorporate enough ownership and capitalism so that there is any motivation for excellence. If everything is purely communist and no one owns anything, then all products and services suck. There does need to be some sort of reward for making the electric car and the charging network actually good, and some anti-reward for not making it available to everyone. Patents and copyright need to be somehow quite different. Maybe they still exist and confer some sort of benefit, but nothing like now. Rewarding people for inventing or improving things only to let them keep it for themselves, and even retain ownership control through drm and software over products that were sold more than nullifies the value of getting them to invent the thing in the first place. More than merely negates. Their existence suppresses everyone else who might have done it differently. Where is the line and how do you determine it is no conundrum at all. It's nothing but some boring policy grunt work to hash that out.