> I realize startups are not the main target of those who want to eliminate economic inequality. What they really dislike is the sort of wealth that becomes self-perpetuating through an alliance with power. ... But if you try to attack this type of wealth through economic policy, it's hard to hit without destroying startups as collateral damage.

> The problem here is not wealth, but corruption. So why not go after corruption?

[1] https://paulgraham.com/inequality.html

The reality is our system is not compatible with the internet. Our system is made for a network with much lower density and clustering coefficient. When you crank these up with the internet, it creates power law distributions everywhere.

Complaining a few people have all the wealth when we have created a society with this massive power law distribution of wealth is just pointlessly stupid. Of course they do.

There is nothing really to figure out. The system isn't going to work long term. I think most people are just in denial of this because they think there is a solution. No, what we are doing right now, communicating like this, is the problem itself.

Of course, if we stopped using the internet society would collapse too.

There is no solution.

You (and I) have no idea whether there is a solution. We've only explored the tiniest fraction of the societal solution space. The idea that we've exhaustively searched it by trying both "communism" AND "capitalism" is idiocy.

Choose to believe that we can build a better world. It might not be true, but it's certainly false if none of us believe it.

Is that your actual objection? It sounds more like a smear by association.

Famously, the USA under Eisenhower had a top marginal tax rate of 90% on income over $200K - "merely" a few million dollars in modern-day money.

Was the Eisenhower administration Communist? If it wasn't, would it have become Communist if they had gone a bit further and added a marginal rate of 99% for income over oh, let's say $20M (a few hundred million dollars nowadays)?

I think if you traveled back in time and proposed such a bill, the reaction from folks like Senator McCarthy would not have been "that's Communism" but more likely "that's a ridiculous and useless bill, how could anyone ever accumulate that much personal wealth? It would be absurd".

On that note, trust-busting is also worth discussing as a counter to the modern concentration of wealth.

In communism, an individual can not own any means of production - effectively 0% of the society's total capital. I don't think it follows that any non-communist system must permit any single individual to gain up to 100% of the society's wealth.

I don't know what the limit could look like or how to make it work, but societies commonly called capitalist already implement various brakes on free trade, from regulation to capital and immigration controls, subsidies, tariffs...

Concentrated power is corrupt, there's no power without the will to wield it. If you have more power than 99 percent of humans, they become insects for you.

Sure, the real problem is the abuse of power. This is the nature of power, though. Give a person or an organization too much power and it will find a way to abuse it. In democratic government, the power of the government is limited by having three independent branches where, at the least, the laws are being made by representatives of the people. In democratic government there are some evil politicians but not too many. In the US the situation went completely off the rails and one of the parties completely deteriorated. I cannot help thinking that statements like 'politicians, who are genuinely more evil' are part of the problem. I.e., this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The party where people tend to believe this turns out the consist of crooks, is maybe not that surprising.

'What we should do is focus of punishing people who abuse their power.'. Well, this presumes that there are institutions capable of doing this. For instance, a democratic government.

I'll have "Everything I don't like is communism" for 500, Alex.

Ever heard of this little-known thing called taxes?

Particularly, progressive taxation and wealth taxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_tax

>What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.

Wealth isn't power.

Obscene accumulation of wealth is abuse of power in and of itself.

Capital attracting capital is as natural as power corrupting people. Instead of hoping people play nice and punishing the few who get caught and hoping against nature, the better alternative is to set up systems that encourage healthy, competitive markets through sensible rules, regulations, and redistribution.

Edit: re the socialism/communism scarecrow, back when woman started wearing pants in the US, they called it socialist. That same logic is oft applied today.

Of course you can. Those billionaires don't pay much taxes, but normal people do. And we don't call that communism.

> It will either end up in the hand of politicians (who are genuinely more evil than tech bros)

This is a very weird take. In a functioning democracy (which the US are not at the moment), politicians are elected to represent the people. If they are evil, we change them. Tech bros are not elected, period.

> What we should do is focus of punishingpeople who abuse thier power.

That's where you completely miss the problem: the problem is that when people get too powerful, we cannot punish them anymore.

Similar with companies: you have to prevent companies to become as big as the FAANGs before they do. Otherwise they become too powerful and do whatever they want.