Money is power. That is the problem with extreme wealth. It provides unaccountable power outside the democratic process. It is not surprising that an already powerful man wants even more power, but I do not understand why anyone else would go along with this.
> It provides unaccountable power outside the democratic process.
Doesn't help when the government isn't maintaining or enforcing guardrails for the ultra wealthy.
This is a war on the middle class. Free and fair elections are the last hope that most have to resolve it peacefully, so of course those are under attack.
> I do not understand why anyone else would go along with this.
I've been asking myself that for 10 years. Through both traditional and social media manipulation, they found a way to get enough people to vote against their best interests, and normalize the behavior, that it doesn't matter if a large portion of the country is still paying attention and asking those questions.
They've leveraged the culture wars to the point that a good chunk of the rural, economically disadvantaged voters are cool with a northeastern elite billionaire looting the country.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” — Lyndon B. Johnson, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-wh...
The quotation is not condescending to "the lowest white man", but rather is explaining a political/propaganda strategy that was active at the time. Up until that time the racists were inter-mixed between the two parties:
Liberals are going to find it very comforting that they're not one of "the lowest white men". The people the quote is referring to won't be persuaded at all. It solves nothing. There's no solution offered to the propaganda problem. It is the flip side to the culture wars that it is describing.
And the fact that people respond to it by attacking the very groups they've been set against rather than the government and elites manipulating them proves how well it works.
See also the apopleptic rage the rural right went into when Hillary Clinton made her "deplorables" remark. Even though she was clearly and explicitly talking about the white supremacists and racists infiltrating the Trump camp - something she was entirely correct about mind you - they chose to trauma bond with the white supremacists and rally around a billionaire pedophile rather than concede a point to a "liberal" in good faith.
To be fair, this is only true in western countries. It's not true, in for example Russia or China. Or to be more accurate, in Russia and China, no matter how many hundreds of billions you own, you won't be able to bend the party to your will.
Is that the case or is it because people's opinions matter less over there and powerful people rather use their capital to influence 'important' people behind closed doors&we're not aware of it thus assume it doesn't happen?
It's a structural problem in our socio-technical system. You can't separate money and government, because "corruption" to some degree is the default state. Yes there are exceptions, but the opposite if the bad apple concept. You have to get lucky to find the good apples. Which means there is some structural insufficiency in the concept of money and government.
Yes but there are degrees of it and right now we're pivoting towards that power being centralized with the rich once more.
Once upon a time only landowners were able to vote. Eventually that changed as the powerful realized that it was in their interest to share power, because they are vastly outnumbered and can have their riches taken away from them. It feels like we're getting closer and closer to today's rich classes having to learn that lesson again.
There have historically been obstacles and countervailing forces preventing accumulation to get to the point it is now. The classical example is labor organizing, which has been decimated in the last few decades, but that is just one symptom of how improvements in communication and transportation technology (often shorthanded as "globalization" due to the new political forms it has incentivized -- free trade, "decolonization", financialization, etc.) have radically tilted the table toward capital. Money is now transnational, but people, culture, and solidarity are not. There were once very severe practical limits to how closely one could control an expansive international portfolio of capital (mercantilist trade policies, primitive/incompatible/nonexistent financial infrastructure, slow communications, etc.), and those have been relaxed considerably.
Yes that's what money is almost by definition and government has always had that relationship. But realize that money and government are technologies and we can create new versions or even new paradigms.
Not really, because converting resources into power required other humans.
A huge pile of gold isn’t inherently powerful, you need someone willing to accept gold to do what you want. They would also generally be intimately involved in doing the thing, so you paid premiums for dangerous or unpalatable work.
These days technology lets you turn resources into planes, tanks, drones, etc in a way where 100 soldiers with limitless resources probably beat 1000 with a constrained supply line pretty consistently.
You see the same with domestic conflict. Once upon a time, finding and tracking down revolutionaries was a tedious, labor-intensive process that usually resulted in failure. Now those resources can be converted into surveillance that is much more effective, and much less reliant on another human being willing to help.
Which have ignorance as their root cause. Ignorance of the type of people that become ultra wealthy, and ignorance of the odds of becoming one of them.
We should “listen” to these people with the same attitude as we do”listen” to gas station lottery addicts, instead we give them WAY too much credibility.
This sentiment is pretty popular amongst some of the younger working people... they work, pay a lot of taxes for everything, and then get outvoted by pensioners who retired under "old" laws and now get a higher pension than they ever earned while working (i'm talking from a position of government pensions, not the american save-for-yourself style). So, old people vote and decide, and young people get the bill for that.
The "if you contribute more, your vote should be worth more" sentiment would change a lot, because many actually rich people don't really pay a lot of taxes compared to higher middle class (engineers, doctors,..). If your vote was worth eg "log10(your-income-taxes + 1)" (to make buying a lot of votes impossible), more power would go to higher educated and higher paid people and less to people who don't contribute to society (at least not financially). Again, i'm talking about a society where pretty much everyone who works also pays income tax, and you're not cutting out the majority of poor people.
Would it work? Probably not, but i understand the sentiment.
My phrasing of it is that democracy is underpinned by a shared belief in a collective destiny. If we all vote well, we all do well together and if we vote poorly then we all do poorly together, on average.
Thus it feels like breaking that contract to have a substantial block of voters who will not only be recipients of increased benefits without ever having to pay more, but can run benefits programs into the ground and kill them without worry because they’ll die before that happens.
They don’t have any skin in the game. They stand to benefit, but never really lose.
I’ve not really worked that into a functional idea, though. The gist of my thought process is that you shouldn’t be able to vote on things where the delay on systemic issues occurring is beyond your life expectancy. So I could vote to change social security today, but probably not when I retire.
I have no idea how to quantify that delay in any reasonably objective way, though, and that’s where my idea falls apart.
It seems likely to become another political dog and pony show where the parties try to get arbitrary age cutoffs to get a demographic advantage. The idea that it would force parties to cater to younger voters more is interesting but I’m not sure a net positive. The impacts are too wide for me to gauge any kind of third order effects.
In democracy, power comes from demos.
In capitalism, power comes from capital.
Demos doesn't have concentrated capital.
Try starting a new party without capital and backing from people tied to mainstream media.
People never had power. Whenever they've thought they have power (revolutions), they fought for one new power hungry scumbag to replace old power hungry scumbag.
> they fought for one new power hungry scumbag to replace old power hungry scumbag.
Because, as Plato argued, the best rulers are the ones that don’t want to rule, as ruling is a very heavy duty, if not burden.
If you strip corruption, it has no rewards. Instead you have to put up with “scambags” accusing for the things the corruption they would do if they had the power.
Plato was philosopher.
Not sociopath.
For sociopaths, power over other people is only thing that matters. It's not a burden, money is nice, but it's mostly a tool to have more power.
Fascinating to see how many tech people, as soon as they get rich, turn to extreme. Name them all - they mostly all are very active on X, and each new tweet pushes the limits of what was previously deemed unacceptable. I'm rich, so my opinion must be more important, right?
Ed Zitron had a great quote that's relevant to this.
> [they] have filled their skulls with a sense of moral and intellectual superiority - that because they have succeeded at work, they understand society better than others, and can only perceive the world through that lens of privilege
> Fascinating to see how many tech people, as soon as they get rich, turn to extreme. Name them all - they mostly all are very active on X, and each new tweet pushes the limits of what was previously deemed unacceptable.
They have the money and power, but tech people in particualr lack the social graces and awareness that previous generations of rich people needed to operate. They think very highly of themselves, but all that "intelligence" doesn't prevent them from acting stupidly.
> The old timey ones were morons in every kind of human way, too. We know what dumb shit they thought and said.
I'm not saying they were great. I'm just saying they probably spent more of their formative years interacting with real people than messing around with machines, so the tech lords are probably even worse.
They were always capable of these thoughts, money just gave them access to actions as well. Money didn’t turn them extreme IMO, maybe more fearful about losing it.
Money would've allowed them to act any time. But no, this is because of the shifting tide, enabled by an openly elitist government that doesn't give a shit about the layman.
Remember how a few years back, all these billionaires and corporations were all talking about DEI and taking the knee and George Floyd, and (insincerely) shoving it all down everyone's throats?
It just became socially more acceptable for them to show their true colors.
I don't see why these colors would be any more truer than the ones before. I bet they would change again just as quick if winds went back to blowing the other way. The only color they care about is the green of money. And if you asked them why they supported it they'd get all forgetful and not remember ever supporting any of that.
All the stuff all these people post on X is just regurgitation of 4chan circa 2016. The lingo is literally all just /fit/ memes from 10 years ago rebranded.
-maxxing, "mogging", "NGMI", I'm literally going nuts waiting for Gavin to start asking trump "DYEL"?
it is weird how when i first heard of meme it was in the dawkins sense. then people showed me memes and i thought wtf this is just dumb jokes, what a weird transformation of the term (my understanding of it). Then i watched it become an actual vehicle for political ideology, "just jokes" when too far but real ideas the rest of the time.
The left rots from them and the right becomes more extreme and everyone is losing all the time. Meme-banning sites like HN and stackoverflow look brilliant in hindsight, to me, with them knowing what they were doing all along; and now there are so few havens from them.
I know this is also a trope, but id always hoped the human race would be consumed by something more sophisticated. But it seems like memes was all is took.
Yeah, I'm on a gaming Discord where the 30+ year-old game modders who run it had to ban memes. If you don't, you'll end up with 15-year-old kids spamming memes into channels because that's just how they "talk" online.
And the "meme police" who will complain about misusing meme formats seem really regressive and anti-creative to me. Some satirist should skewer all the young adults who think that meme formats need to be defended.
[I also read The Selfish Gene back in the 90s, long before memes were just jokes]
I think too many billionaires convince themselves it was fate and scramble their brains under the weight of figuring out what the greater purpose is for their extraordinary wealth and influence.
The asymptotic equivalent of $20 "burning a hole in your pocket"
Here's to hoping for more batmans and less lex luthors
I think everyone has weird ideas like this, but these rich, well-connected guys don't have to worry about their lives being ruined when they actually share them out loud.
I can't imagine many aerospace manufacturers turning down a contract with SpaceX because Elon said something politically incorrect. James Damore, on the other hand...
This isn't hate towards these rich guys (I think everyone should be able to say shit like this), just pointing out that we as a society hold them to different standards than we do regular people.
But when everyone says stuff like this, they get punched out in a bar, and only the people in the bar hear it at all. When this guy says it, it's news that the whole country hears.
Accumulation of wealth and power becomes an addiction unto itself if left unchecked. At some point, we all have to look in the mirror and ask ourselves if we have enough and start to place importance in other parts of our lives.
But many of the wealthiest people I have known were also the least happy, driven by an insatiable urge to be great, and despite achieving vast success, were never able to feel or accept that they had already achieved it. It was never enough.
Honestly just my experience, but I've found it ironic that finance bros in my circle have gone the other way i.e. the effective altruism, philosophizing, podcasting route. While tech bros are now turning openly elitist, and in some cases, racist.
And before anyone claims it's selection bias from within my left-leaning circle, I was well involved within the Tory circus until recently (a couple of years back).
Maybe an NYC bias here but in my experience finance folks are more closely tied to "well to do" social circles. Summering in the Hamptons, that kind of thing. And that crowd has always had a streak of philanthropy, even if it's as much a status thing as a genuine belief in helping others.
Silicon Valley is very far from all that. More broadly I think it's a reflection of the isolation (physical, cultural, etc) of SV.
I think it might be because the tech bros got into a one-off event where a lot of people did and could've made money (as long as they were somewhat intelligent). Now the writing is on the wall that growth in the future will stall, as the sector takes up a larger portion of the economy,and positions of power will stabilise. Some of them probably believe turning elitist and racist could ensure them a better position for a while.
Maybe I'm trying to rationalise their behaviour too much but it feels like techbros have gotten a scarcity mindset.
This supports my belief that when being a finance bro was the only way to Croesus-level wealth, sociopaths tended to go into finance, so they could transcend societal norms with their wealth. Then, tech came along, making finance bro-level wealth seem quaint. Where did all the sociopaths go...well, you saw for yourself.
I agree, this could strongly be the case. Especially since now the most elite in finance are either working in quant roles and /or megafund private equity, both of which are extremely selective compared to tech. Megafund PE was always and still remains a bastion of conservatism, but quant shops still select for more objective skillsets meritocratically.
Most of the "tech" CEO people we're admiring? as movers and shakers... very few of them actually come from an engineering background.
They're mostly just people attracted to the tech industry as a focus of dynamic high profit capitalism. The technology is only the background buzz.
Many of these businesses (Shopify especially!) -- in particular SaaS businesses -- actually have very weak "tech" innovation, it's really just the deployment of pre-existing engineering solutions (solved by other people usually) at scale in order to run a commercial business that just happens to use a lot of computers.
By finance bros, I meant people who continue to work in finance in some capacity. True, there is often some migration from finance to tech, which is usually composed of characters like the ones you talk of.
I'm far too stupid for that and I'm also privileged so what do I know. Many are more qualified to do so.
I just think that his statement is not acceptable and is clearly dangerous for the society as a whole.
I certainly get to say what is and isn’t acceptable for me. I also don’t get to say what is and isn’t acceptable for others. Don’t understand why your tone is so accusatory.
> one that would strip voting rights from anyone who pays no income tax
It could be an interesting thought experiment to consider the second and third order consequences, even if, from first principles this is a non-starter in a democratic society.
First off all, what percent of people do not pay any taxes on income? What portion of them are poor vs. hedge fund managers or other super wealthy people who have structured their income in a way as to pay zero or near-zero income taxes? Would the latter be disincentivized from continuing those regimes?
Regardless, if you work at Shopify, you should consider quitting. You do not have to work for a crazy person like that.
> Lütke holds seven per cent of Shopify, according to Forbes, and controls nearly a third of the votes attached to the company’s current shares. Since March 1, 2020, his base salary has been the figure he requested: $1, down from his previous $800,000. [1]
No income tax, but capital gains tax. And capital gains tax is a lot less than income tax (hence Buffet’s “my secretary pays more tax than I do”). So the “$1/year” CEOs are simply reducing tax burden.
But, yes, under the proposed scheme, Lütke doesn’t get to vote. One may rest assured that this was a simple mistake. In fact, I’m sure he meant that only those pay capital gains tax get to vote, not income tax.
Better yet, he gets loans, collateralized against those unrealized gains to the current value of the gains, and then writes off the loan interest against his present and future taxes! Amazing!
In the U.S., it's about 28% of the populace which pays no taxes (or ends up netting to zero or negative taxation; for example, working families with children are often in a situation where they might owe $2,000 in taxes but also get a credit of $5,000, for a net refund of $3,000.) My 28% figure includes property, sales taxes, etc. but does not include taxes that employers, landlords, and so on pay.
This is all very beneficial for big business including Shopify: businesses can pay lower wages since the government steps in with benefits, including food, cash, housing, energy, medical care, and so on, for people with lower incomes, and then that means they have more money to spend as consumers (relevant to Shopify).
when you say "pays no taxes" do you mean income taxes or any taxes altogether? What about FICA/SECA 15.3% tax? Sales tax? Property tax? Individual income tax only makes up 53% of federal revenues as per https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover....
This would be pointless to do for one person, and it would be very curious to see a government reject a massive funding stream from a swath of people like this.
Even more interesting (and less deliberately manipulative): The government could make it voluntary. Below $X tax liability, you can choose a total refund - but you can't vote. That would be voting by those who actually care about the vote (or who owe more than $X).
> ...vs. hedge fund managers or other super wealthy people who have structured their income in a way as to pay zero or near-zero income taxes? Would the latter be disincentivized from continuing those regimes?
Oh, you know if something like this was implemented, those people would re-structure their income so they pay $1 in income tax.
Or they wouldn't bother, because they have far more effective ways of influencing the political process than voting. This would be purely about disenfranchising weaker people who could get in the way of them getting even more power.
> even if, from first principles this is a non-starter in a democratic society.
This is a strange phrase - initially you had to either own land (therefore pay tax) or else if you lived in a city and didn't own land but paid sufficient tax[1], to vote in the early United States. Only taxpayers voting was our first principles! We only changed it later.
[1] I'm simplifying slightly because different states handled this differently
I’ve spent the last three days writing an inventory management system for a small store, using Codex and Claude Code. I realize that fully replacing online tools like Shopify is a lot more work than that (the payment integrations particularly), but: I sure wouldn’t want to be in the SaaS business right now.
We don’t have to go farther back than 100 years in history to know what this looks like. Poll taxes, land ownership requirements, etc. were pretty common. So were goon squads to beat and murder people who tried to change that. It wasn’t good.
I wouldn't want a lot of the landscape 100 years ago, but I'd happily be disenfranchised if I could get the size of government 100+ years ago (federal government <~2% of GDP in non-wartime)
You might change your mind if you study the economy of the US in the late 1800's. Those boom and bust cycles were intense, making the great depression of the 1930's look unexceptional.
If you want to get rich, you need an healthy, educated, rich and secure customer and employee base. You don't get that with <~2% of GDP spent on health, education, roads, police, courts et cetera.
One possibly positive side effect is that by sidelining the working and middle classes, the political landscape would pit the rich against the fuck-you-rich.
It would be interesting to see the class of doctors, lawyers and small business owners fighting against the class of large cap c-suite and the billionaires.
> Regardless, if you work at Shopify, you should consider quitting. You do not have to work for a crazy person like that.
Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system. Every part of the system has trade-offs that must be evaluated. You can make a logical argument that any other policy is open to abuse, etc. But why do you have to accuse other people of being “crazy” for having ideas about how to engineer a system?
You mean government and society are an engineering exercise. You can't strip people of power and then say it's a democracy, at least not if words mean things.
>First off all, what percent of people do not pay any taxes on income?
If you modify this slightly to the percent of people who are not net taxpayers, meaning you subtract transfer payments (including social security, medicare, medicaid) to them from the taxes they pay (including social security, medicare, and medicaid), it's about 60% of the country, which tracks quite closely to the percentage of Americans who could not afford an unexpected $1000 expense.
Most of the country is on a constant financial cliff.
The best analysis I have seen puts it at 28% once you net out sales taxes and property taxes. (There are a lot of people who own property that they live in, but don't work, but they do owe property tax obviously.)
Your 60% figure is reasonable, though, as the gap between 28% and 60% is people who are paying a very, very small net amount, mostly via sales taxes or other taxes that exist like taxes on airplane tickets or hotels.
Almost any system that limits participation in democracy will be abused to disenfranchise people that those in power do not want to give a voice.
So you're coming at this from the wrong end. The goal is explicitly to keep the poors from having a voice in politics. The exact policy and enforcement of the system will reflect that. Unintended consequences, like the rich being disenfranchised would not occur.
Trump paid about $750 in taxes in 2016 while still claiming to be a billionaire. I wouldn't consider it a fair share, but would that $750 entitle him to a vote under this plan?
>Trump paid about $750 in taxes in 2016 while still claiming to be a billionaire
Right, because the tax system (generally) taxes income, not wealth. Not taking this into account is like asking "you're millionaire, yet you don't have any income, how come?" to a retiree. According to the new york times article that broke this story, most of it seems to be from his loss making businesses elsewhere. Moreover in recent years he has been paying tax, as those losses have stopped.
Most "normal" people would hit $5-30 million, realize they have enough money for themselves and their descendants to be comfortable in perpetuity with some decent wealth management, and either retire or change careers to a passion project. Going to 100s, 1,000s, or 100,000s of millions inherently filters for people who have either absurd greediness (seeing wealth as a scoreboard) or a desire for power.
This is it, it's absolutely a filter beyond a certain point. I have a family member, far enough removed I'll never see any of it, that sold a business in his early 30s for something like $35-40M. Set his kids up for life with trusts, bought some toys and a second home, and been just sort of hanging out ever since (this was 15-20 years ago). He's happy, has a ton of hobbies, and if you ever suggested he start another business or start putting his name on cap tables he'd laugh his ass off. It would never even occur to him that he should try to double, triple, 10x his money, because he already has 10x more than he'll ever spend.
And for what it's worth his kids are remarkably well adjusted and nice, if a little bit out of touch about what most people deal with.
Same, my father was a doctor and had tons of doctor friends from med school and work. Pretty much all of them just cared about 1. making sure the family was provided for and had excellent education, 2. patient outcomes and 3. being comfy at home.
This is sorta the reasoning behind statements like "billionaires shouldn't exist".
It's not a statement that people shouldn't see fruits of their labor, but that past a certain point, its no longer about the fruits or even the tree, but the power that comes with it. In a democracy, those who get lucky in business are not owed power.
So yeah, billionaires and trillionaires shouldn't exist, because their existence is a side-channel attack on society. Pay enough money and rules don't apply. Past a certain point, that wealth should be heavily scrutinized and audited as if it's nuclear fissile material. Similar to the nuclear material, it can be productive for society, or absolute destruction.
My theory about this, as well as how it seems most powerful are abusers, is that you have to be willing to comprosmise your morality to get into that position in the first place. So it is not that being rich and powerful corrupts you, but you have to already be at least somewhat corrupt to get there at all.
It's both. Getting into the multi-billionaire levels of wealth takes a certain mindset that can probably be easily associated with some neurological disorders and personality traits that one could describe as 'monstrous'. But becoming that rich also disconnects you from the reality of the average person. Your time by necessity to maintain and grow such levels of wealth is going to be spent among other people who are either in a similar position, or want to be in a similar position and are trying to ride the coattails up the wealth ladder. And try as you might to avoid it, it will skew your mental state towards that disconnect unless you take significant effort to avoid the benefits that being at that level of wealth brings to you. Most people who would be willing to eschew said benefits are also probably not the ones trying to seek out such positions of wealth in the first place, so they're going to be severely underrepresented in the wealthy circles.
The sociopath part is what allows one to do what it takes to get ultra rich in the first place. Other than Gates, not one comes to mind who gives anything to charity, for example (yes, I’m sure one or two exists).
And at level that Gates operates charity of itself is form of power and influence. Not rich people spending money on these things is bad. But sometimes I just question motivations as a whole.
my understanding too was that his (ex)wife told him, basically, "what are young going to do with all of this?"
like he has literally everything he needs, and there is this massive number -- do something, anything with it. You have unlimited time, so chose to do something
It's also not uncommon for extravagantly rich people to form family-run charity organizations to distract their nagging wife or family members with a pursuit where they can lord over employees / recipients / organizations without having any profit metrics by which they could be embarrassed by their inferior business chops. This is doubly applicable if you need to distract a nagging hag while you're off banging Russian bridge players.
Gates has spent many fortunes cleaning up his image, but he was one of the nastiest business practice worst monopolists ever.
"During Bill Gates’s tenure leading Microsoft, the company paid out an estimated $8.46 billion in publicly known antitrust settlements, competitor payouts, and government fines."
the US is the most charitable country on earth as a percentage of GDP. There is so much philanthropy that the finance industry is building new businesses just to serve it
Gates is actually quite problematic (Epstein is a lot of the problem). If you need an exception to prove the rule, Buffett is a little easier of a fit.
The first part of your comment is correct, the second part is both wrong and unnecessary glazing of Gates.
There's plenty sociopaths that give to charity, because it's a socially accepted display of wealth, and because it is quite convenient for tax purposes.
The thing about this that's so distasteful is that it removes the basis of enfranchisement from being the inherent worth of a human life and moves it more to "what have you done for me lately". It's pretty gross.
There's numerous examples of commune societies evicting people who refuse to contribute.
The distasteful thing is people refusing to contribute to society, especially for long periods of time. I know many people who have various mental and physical disabilities (some severe) who insist on working. Some able-bodied people can't even match some with severe disabilities. It's sick.
Shouldn't it be the reverse? The vote of people who earn less (and are therefore more disadvantaged in society and rely on fair laws the most) should count more.
Tax and "money paid to the system" is a red herring only an entitled super rich person would think is relevant.
Oh boy! Can I play too? My system, which I call an expansion of antitrust, requires all people to keep their net worth under one billion dollars. Anyone approaching that number must give away assets to stay under. If you go over that, you must be broken up, by, say, beheading, or being drawn and quartered.
I'm not married to that number, if people think it should be half a billion, or 100 million, or whatever, I'll go along with it.
Oh yeah, uh, sure it's hate speech. It's wealthism. One of the worst forms of prejudice. The wealthy live in constant fear for something that's not even their fault... they didn't choose to be wealthy, they were just born that way.
If you're seeing this violent sentiment spill over to HN, just imagine how the general population is starting to feel about billionaires.
The article criticizes “taking us back to the 19th century,” but ironically dropping property qualifications for voting was an innovation of the Jacksonian era of the 1820s-1850s. There is a tendency to all efforts to generalize the franchise together, but that’s illogical. Just because race and sex are illegitimate qualifiers for voting doesn’t mean that all qualifiers for voting are necessarily illegitimate. Are we asserting that psychological science has taught us nothing in 200 years relevant to our evaluation of whether someone who can't hold down a job at a grocery store should be steering democracy to the same degree as a doctor or scientist? (And note this is an argument against interest here, since I belong to what’s clearly now the dumber party.)
Just to play with this a bit, this proposal instantly and completely ends Republican power. Low-taxed rural poor and retiree votes are gone, entirely. Higher earning coastal white collar and professional workers get 3-5 votes, offset to some degree but far from entirely by the business-owning rich blue collar class. The middle classes get 1. It's fairly obvious what that would mean for representation in the USA.
Second fun point is that he and his oligarch colleagues would find themselves with no votes: I guarantee I pay more income tax than this guy and anyone else in the multiple airplane owning class. Marvelous.
It is of course a fairly revolting idea but one which has some interesting unintended consequences, not least that we might suddenly find the rentier class figuring out how to declare income of $500,001 instead of a loss every year.
You are a lone voice of reason in these comments, presumably because you checks notes read the article.
I will add that voting blocs do shift. In fact, in the last two US presidential elections, retirees actually broke for the Democrat. That could have something to do with Trump or be an actual trend.
Additionally, these rich people do pay a lot of tax, they just do it through different parts of the tax code and at a lower overall rate (by avoiding social security and Medicare taxes by way of earning through long-term capital gains). On the other hand they also own more real estate than you (probably) in desirable locations and pay a lot of property tax they can't avoid.
All that notwithstanding I sense that the root of this discussion that this guy's getting excoriated for, was exploring how to short-circuit the phenomenon wherein older people, voting at higher rates (and holding office long into their old age), secure for themselves preferential benefits at the expense of struggling younger generations. The thread took off in a strange way from there, but... I guess I like where it was trying to go at the outset.
I think this is one of the cases where someone is just so rich that more money stops resulting in any meaningful additional quality of life. Then the only way to increase their quality-of-life differential (relative, not absolute value is the key metric here), is to make other people's lives worse.
It seems like billionaires somehow develop a deep resentment and drive to change the world, whilst not spending any of their money to do it. (I wrote before remembering that lobbying exists.)
Honestly, shopify’s near-monopoly has confused me for at least a decade. Their platform is bad, and has always been bad - at least from the perspective of managing a store - yet no real
challenger has been able to take their crown.
Considering the current gerrymandering, all sorts of regulatory capture, and a two-party system that's captured most voter's sense of identity and packaged it for abuse... I think this discussion is extremely theoretical.
It might actually be a better idea to require a short, in-person civic knowledge test every two years as a condition for voting. If you fail, you can take it again, but you cannot vote until you pass.
Government exists to serve the people. People do not exist so they can pay taxes. This was the very reason the Founding Fathers rebelled against Britain.
In the US the rich already has more public power than the poor... from lobbying to donations to "speech". I guess making it official would save them from all this work and simplify things?
You should have skin in the game to vote (citizenship as a minimum in national elections, for example). It used to be that owning property was that gate (land, specifically, not income). So how do you get an electorate that isn't just interested in voting themselves free stuff?
I honestly don't know. Raising children properly is a sign you're invested in the future, but holy cow would I not want a government test for that. Let's stick with citizenship... If you really want to fix the electorate, you need to fix education, and re-socialize values of merit (individual responsibility, liberty over ease...). Not an easy or simple proposition.
A principled society is superior to a ruled society, we just don't like to pay what's needed for the former and land in the latter as a local minima.
The very rich have forgotten the lessons of the past.
They have forgotten that they also live in the very same physical world as the poor. Most of them don't even live that far from the poor.
Perhaps they don't consider the implications that nobody can fight a mob.
If they were as smart as they want people to think, they would think about these things and perhaps shut up (at least in public!) about making things worse for the poor.
This is hilarious in that many very rich people pay zero income tax today. In this system “all of a sudden” all these people would be paying taxes on exactly 500k. Near zero for them anyway but with an explicit albeit BS claim of funding the majority of government expense. From a bit of quick research the top 1% of earners are about 40% of the tax base.
Everyone gets screwed in this system but especially those paying a good amount of taxes and getting fewer votes like the 200-400k range. Or maybe not especially. This just an outright terrible idea.
People need to stop conflating evil intentions with evil capacity. It is done regularly with Elon, Thiel, etc. As arrogant as they may be on X, they are drooling imbeciles when it comes to politics. Remember Blake Masters? Remember the Wisconsin supreme court election? How is the admin they endorsed doing? Has Lutke thought about how high-income individuals in metro areas vote?
They have failed again and again. There is no reason to believe Lutke's worthless dreams will go unchallenged if they are ever attempted in the first place.
It is interesting to hear how openly some CEOs will just say outright stupid things. Like ok, so you re-do the voting system to give rich people more votes than poor people. Fine. It's done. What's the first order of business amongst the electorate at the next election. Well Elon Musk now has 10 times as many votes as Tobias Lütke, why would Musk not just vote to change the system again, handing more power to himself? And on the basis of what principle would you oppose him?
It's just fundamentally a stupid thing to say, and the fact he says it in public strongly indicates that he's lost contact with anyone who will challenge him on this stuff.
Look, I'm not even a millionaire, and I will never be a billionaire, but in an alternate reality in which I'm a centibillionaire, one of my chief aims would be to limit the political say of the electorate as much as possible, because their voting rights would be one of the biggest threats to my everything.
Moreover, everyone who gains any amount of power becomes protective of it.
That's basic human nature. As a conservative, I under this.
I dont think its a good model for America but if I were starting a country from scratch I might consider it. But I would also do stuff like a heavy death estate tax and disallow most generational wealth transfer.
What would stop people from shifting to different kinds of wealth transfer? Extreme investment in education, squirrely work-arounds, nepotism, etc? I don't see how you can attempt to prevent people from providing as much benefit to their children as possible.
I've heard some good arguments for eliminating a wealth tax and instead treating inheritance as income. There are other forms of money manipulation that should also be treated as income. For example, the borrow-spend-die trick. Other transactions that should go through a "cash" phase include the financial three-card Monty the AI companies are pulling right now. Other manipulations we need to make illegal, such as stock buybacks.
There are some "reasonable" exceptions one could argue for, but as soon as you start making exceptions, you open yourself to abuse of the system. For example, using the tax code to enact social policy. I think it would be more honest for the government to take in all the money as taxes and then turn around and distribute money for socially beneficial programs such as green energy, schools, public health, et cetera. If you look at who screams about this, you'll probably find that most of them are opportunistic people who are afraid somebody will cheat the system better than they do.
This would also be a good opportunity to create an independent, transparent organization that audits where the money goes and provides raw data they use to justify their actions to the public so that others can double-check their conclusions.
I would allow only one Version- which is if junior builds a buisness and that buisness shows potential, the donor buisness (daddy) should be able to pay the taxes taxfree for that buisness.
The problem with allowing only the rich to vote is that they're inherently exploitative of the poor. It's a veiled attempt to want to return to an approximation of slavery.
I was fully on the side of the nerds when pg wrote his pieces about nerds being bullied at school.
The events since 2020 have made me reconsider that. A certain type of nerd should go to an interment camp, preferably in some seasteading dystopia that Thiel wanted.
Let us see what they achieve in their Galt Gulch in isolation.
Somebody needs to introduce some sort of buddy system for billionaires.
This would allow them to air their dumb opinions in private to normal people, where they could be gently mocked like the rest of us.
Currently there seems to be a dangerously quick pipeline for them between a thought passing through their minds, and millions being made aware. God help me if you all knew the things I've said over the years..
2. We already have a gerontocracy. Tying income to vote-weight just solidifies the problem since most people earn more as their career progresses.
3. An alternative: grant voting rights to all under 18, proxied by their parent/legal guardian. This provides better alignment to the interests of the future than good fortune.
Somehow money seem to damage personality. It's the same with David Heinemeier Hansson (who know Tobias Lütke in person), Elon Musk and many other folks.
And by that I mean people who "earn" their wealth through mechanisms that aren't direct income. Heck, give an exception to the tax on the first million of non-income based wealth. But something has to change because their money is their power and they deserve less of it.
Canada already has that exemption on the first CAD 1.25M capital gain, assuming that Shopify qualifies as a Canadian business by staying >50% Canadian for at least 2 years.
But like pretty much everywhere, Canada does not tax unrealized gains. At least they don't have the silly loop-hole that the US does of the step-up in basis on death.
My biggest problem with “tax the rich” is: then what? Build another “high-speed train”? Spend the money on some fake nonprofit run by the same rich people?
Maybe if they made it on effective tax rate. Your vote is weighed based on the percentage of INCOME that is taxed, but everyone gets a vote regardless.
I think I'd just like it done on percentage of overall wealth handed to the government or charity each year.
Handy side effect would be that if Jeff wants to buy some influence for Amazon, he could do it by paying all his warehouse and delivery employees better.
Votes are equal because the belief system is that all people are equal. If you win the lottery, you don't instantly become a more valuable person.
Prior generations understood more clearly that the physical security that underwrites great financial successes is all underwritten in blood. A better heuristic is everyone gets the number of votes equivalent to how many of their lives they could give in a conflict.
Why don't we tax stocks like we do homes with a property tax? Why am I paying property tax on the majority of my net worth, but billionaires are not?
Also, I know all about the buy/borrow/die strategy and I have an idea for that too. Let's tax all loans as income. They are, in fact, income. "B-but they have to be paid back!" That's income again, the bank should pay tax on it.
Except everyone pays taxes. It's in everything that is bought at any given time.
Obviously this asshole does not mean it like that. What he means is that only rich assholes like him should get to vote.
If we are in the phase of just spitballing shit that should be considered unacceptable in a society where we are meant to coexist, I would spitball the idea that the time for his neck to meet the guillotine is long overdue.
There are only 900 billionaires in the U.S. Do you think if they lost their voting rights it would affect the outcome of even a single election whatsoever?
If it includes ability to vote via campaign donations that cause votes, then yes absolutely. Note for instance in the Massie primary, rich donors literally turned money into new votes by prodding a bunch of demented elderly people who never vote in primaries to believe Massie was banging AOC and Ilhan Omar and secretly a democrat (the vote from regular primary voters remained almost unchanged, the delta was almost entirely new voters brought out by a fraudulent propaganda campaign). That's essentially indistinguishable from those rich people having cast the vote themselves.
With the recent trend of flagging pg's articles, it might be time for the HN community to evaluate if they want to continue giving attention, eyeballs and time to something like HN, and YC by proxy. The hostility - not from HN posters but from the rich class, is not something to be taken lightly, and being on HN shows indirect support for unrestrained toxicity. Maybe a lift and shift to elsewhere (Lobste.rs etc) is in order? And make no mistake: on paper this would not really "do" anything, but walking away is a strong symbolic gesture all the same.
I don't understand why we humor this stuff. Our society has lost the ability to simply say "no" to something. We have to argue everything into the weeds, constantly hand wringing about biases and hearing all voices.
You can be biased. I, for one, am biased towards democracy and am comfortable telling people to fuck off when they question it. I don't need to debate it. Just fuck right off.
Social contract is a difficult subject, and people don't think about it enough.
But thanks to this clickbait headline, thousands of readers may come upon an articulation of why current enfranchisement is more desirable than arrangements that preceded it. In other words, it's a chance to learn what's worth defending and how our current situation might be improved.
Please produce your evidence that Mussolini's ascent or style of government was a "society ruled or controlled by people of great wealth", as defined by Wikipedia.
Fascist political philosophy is about racial purity, militarism, autarky, and suppression of dissent through political violence. In fact, one of their methods of enacting such worldview was by appropriating the wealth of rich people to advance their own purposes.
If you read your link, you will discover it's not focused at Mussolini's fascism at all, but still talks about the merge of the government and corporations... Because it's a very important feature of that regime.
I'm referring to how both Lütke and DHH, a Shopify board member, have fascist politics.
The word does have meaning. But underlying that meaning is a philosophy that there is an in group that should have power and many out groups from which power should be stripped. There is a long history of industrial leaders supporting fascist ideology.
Yeah, but please google first on what Mussolini preached. State-owned corporazioni are nothing like privately operated businesses of today. Don’t hang on the word. The correct word you are looking for is plutocrat, indeed.
You should try and read more history books than Twitter posts. The blossoming US plutarchy, again, has nothing to do with the political philosophy of Nazism.
But I figure your slogan would work very well on social media.
You should understand language before debating vocabulary. I am quite well read on political philosophy and history, and I will continue to call out fascists when I see people talking like fascists.
Rhetorically, what you're doing is called the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. I personally don't like calling out things like this when I see them because it's not a logical fallacy as much as bad rhetoric, but in this case I think it's warranted.
Paywalled articles seem to enhance the "comment without reading, based on vibes" effect.
From the article:
"Pension recipients should have their financial futures “locked in and guaranteed,” but in return would be reclassified as “dependents” and lose the right to vote—the same way minors can’t vote. A reply from “Eric Thor,” who claimed to be a retired banking executive as well as “armchair economist and policy wonk,” proposed a sliding scale: zero votes for anyone who pays no income tax, one vote for those earning $1–100K, two votes for $100–200K, scaling up in that pattern to a hard cap of five votes for anyone earning $500K or more. The pitch was framed as fairness—reward “representation” for those who “foot the bill” through taxation."
"That was the good system that Lütke endorsed."
Most of the commenters here seem to be responding to...something other than this?
And a husband who works and his wife who doesn't, should she get a vote? The commentators here are responding exactly to the spirit of what was said, there's no confusion on what's really being implied here. Namely, the destruction of the entire basis of democracy, which is one person one vote.
Another way to express the general disgust: that proposal is saying, "we're going to take away your power, but we'll still look after you, pinky promise!"
> the entire basis of democracy, which is one person one vote
This is a relatively recent innovation; most democracies throughout history have not had this property, so it's hardly the "entire basis" of the concept.
It is, however, an interesting and possibly worth goal. The obvious problem (which has been noted by many previously) is that when the people making the decisions are not the ones paying for it the system is unstable (e.g. "three wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner", also "eventually you run out of other people's money").
This is a serious issue and possibly the biggest present threat to our current system. It's worth considering various possible solutions and thinking about what might work and what would likely lead to ruin.
If discussing these issue triggers "disgust" you may want to question if you are actually thinking about what is being said or just reacting emotionally.
50% of Americans think taxes are too high, the other 50% think taxes need to be higher so they’ll get a larger refund.
It’s not a sustainable system. A better solution would be to change tax law so a “payer” can’t receive a larger refund than what they paid. No more credits, only deductions.
I think the title is inaccurate and a bit inflammatory. He's not advocating stripping most Americans of their voting rights. He's advocating stripping a tiny minority of Americans of their voting rights - specifically the minority of Americans that pay no income tax
Actually no. He’s advocating for attaching the amount of taxes you pay to the number of votes you get. Which pretty much erodes everyone’s rights except the ones at the very top. If everyone still has one vote but some have more than one, you’ve effectively stripped their rights.
The suggestion is inflammatory in and of itself. The right to vote is core to democracy. One should expect even the slightest suggestion of abrogating this right, even to a tiny minority, to be met with a vociferous allergic reaction.
Stripping voting rights is a historical leading indicator of a trend to totalitarianism so it has to be nipped in the bud immediately.
Tax tiered votes are ideal in Municipal elections and can be easily implemented. Too many cities in US/Canada run ridiculous social programs, buses, trains and crack dens off the backs of homeowners.
State, Provincial, Federal: terrible idea, to arbitrarily disenfranchise people because they live off the pension from their life's work.
I am not against idea of only net tax payers getting single vote. Say if you use government services or receive money such as grant that is counted against your total. If you own part of corporation that gets such support that is counted again. If you or your corporation gets tax deductions or relief those are counted as double.
Total everything up and if you are net payer you get to vote. If not no vote for you.
We tried this already in America and have decided that disallowing entire groups of people from voting is bad for democracy.
What happens when the federal government passes new tax laws that prevent certain genders, racial groups, etc from having to pay income tax? Are they permanently disenfranchised? This would be a system that I think would rapidly move social progress backwards and concentrate power in the hands of a few groups.
Well you could have stronger constitutional protections. Say certain changes needing unanimous support from voters in referendum. Would lock in things, but would remove risks.
And USA already disallows voting based on age. And somehow lot of people find it acceptable. Surely voting should be right from birth?
Alright, what about laws that only levy income taxes on people making $300k or more? That's eliminates millions of Americans without targeting any protected groups. There's no bulletproof method to allow only some people to vote that wouldn't be abused to disenfranchise others.
Also, surely you don't think a four year old should weigh in on who gets to represent them in Congress? We disallow voting on a minimum age, because children are still developing in all sorts of ways, there is no maximum age that takes away your right to vote when you reach it. You can't equate a minimum age to disenfranchisement.
And really why should not 4 year old get to decide? How come you think it is right to discriminate against them based on their age? As you said there is no limit on those with limited mental faculties due to old age. So why have one for young age? Isn't it clearly an unacceptable form disenfranchisement? Or are you saying some forms of that are absolutely acceptable and even justified?
To a first approximation this creates and enforces a permanent unvoiced underclass. Without any political representation, said underclass's differentiation from actual slavery would be pretty small.
Why are you not against this? A vote isn't a payment in exchange for taxes. It's the mechanism by which the government represents the will of the people. How do you arrange things such that the government acts in the interests of people if it doesn't need to chase their vote? Or are you actually saying that poor people don't deserve a government that acts in their interest?
Even skipping the moral argument, there's a game theory trap here: let's say you run a government and your political enemies are on the poor side and fall into the "no vote" trap more often than your supporters. Obviously the solution to maximizing your share of the vote is to make them even poorer.
Vote is mechanism to decide who gets to distribute those taxes. It seems reasonable that those who contribute get to decide. If they decide to give support fine. If not well...
Then again I suppose it would be fine too if voters decided to socialise absolutely everything including bodies of other voters. After all that would be democracy. And they chose that no protections are needed and everything is common now.
It's not only deciding who gets to distribute those taxes. It's who gets to decide, for example, whether we go to war, and whether you have to serve in the military and get shot at.
What is inherently unreasonable about the idea that only people who pay into the system get a say in how the system operates?
The constitution still guarantees fundamental human rights.
Another idea - everyone is eligible to vote for the presidency and House of Representatives, but only net taxpayers can vote for the Senate.
The idea that there should be some kind of checks and balances on spending taxpayer money, where the people who actually pay the taxes have a special status, isn’t fundamentally incompatible with any principle that I support.
Obviously the current system - where we collect $5T in taxes each year and spend $7T, creating an enormous and ever-growing debt that the system is clearly not able to control - is not working.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”
Yes, and what I outlined is one reasonable way to implement “the consent of the governed”, and still a lot more democratic and inclusive than the system the authors of that statement implemented for the next ~150 years after writing it!
Are you proposing that poor people would not be subject to the laws of the United States, as they would be provided no means to consent? That only the wealthy are to be governed, regulated, etc.?
Money is power. That is the problem with extreme wealth. It provides unaccountable power outside the democratic process. It is not surprising that an already powerful man wants even more power, but I do not understand why anyone else would go along with this.
> It provides unaccountable power outside the democratic process.
Doesn't help when the government isn't maintaining or enforcing guardrails for the ultra wealthy.
This is a war on the middle class. Free and fair elections are the last hope that most have to resolve it peacefully, so of course those are under attack.
> I do not understand why anyone else would go along with this.
I've been asking myself that for 10 years. Through both traditional and social media manipulation, they found a way to get enough people to vote against their best interests, and normalize the behavior, that it doesn't matter if a large portion of the country is still paying attention and asking those questions.
They've leveraged the culture wars to the point that a good chunk of the rural, economically disadvantaged voters are cool with a northeastern elite billionaire looting the country.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” — Lyndon B. Johnson, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-wh...
And the condescending tone of that quote only further strengthens the culture wars--liberals love it.
The quotation is not condescending to "the lowest white man", but rather is explaining a political/propaganda strategy that was active at the time. Up until that time the racists were inter-mixed between the two parties:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixiecrat
but it was the GOP that actively sought to recruit them:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
The quotation was describing the creation of the very culture wars we're still living with today. And the evidence shows that this is still going on:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness
Liberals are going to find it very comforting that they're not one of "the lowest white men". The people the quote is referring to won't be persuaded at all. It solves nothing. There's no solution offered to the propaganda problem. It is the flip side to the culture wars that it is describing.
And the fact that people respond to it by attacking the very groups they've been set against rather than the government and elites manipulating them proves how well it works.
See also the apopleptic rage the rural right went into when Hillary Clinton made her "deplorables" remark. Even though she was clearly and explicitly talking about the white supremacists and racists infiltrating the Trump camp - something she was entirely correct about mind you - they chose to trauma bond with the white supremacists and rally around a billionaire pedophile rather than concede a point to a "liberal" in good faith.
To be fair, this is only true in western countries. It's not true, in for example Russia or China. Or to be more accurate, in Russia and China, no matter how many hundreds of billions you own, you won't be able to bend the party to your will.
Is that the case or is it because people's opinions matter less over there and powerful people rather use their capital to influence 'important' people behind closed doors&we're not aware of it thus assume it doesn't happen?
They did say for democratic processes.
It's a structural problem in our socio-technical system. You can't separate money and government, because "corruption" to some degree is the default state. Yes there are exceptions, but the opposite if the bad apple concept. You have to get lucky to find the good apples. Which means there is some structural insufficiency in the concept of money and government.
FWIW the original meaning of the bad apple idiom is that a single one spoils the whole set
> It's a structural problem in our socio-technical system.
it has always been like this, has it not? almost by definition the more resources you have the more power you have. this is how the universe works.
Yes but there are degrees of it and right now we're pivoting towards that power being centralized with the rich once more.
Once upon a time only landowners were able to vote. Eventually that changed as the powerful realized that it was in their interest to share power, because they are vastly outnumbered and can have their riches taken away from them. It feels like we're getting closer and closer to today's rich classes having to learn that lesson again.
There have historically been obstacles and countervailing forces preventing accumulation to get to the point it is now. The classical example is labor organizing, which has been decimated in the last few decades, but that is just one symptom of how improvements in communication and transportation technology (often shorthanded as "globalization" due to the new political forms it has incentivized -- free trade, "decolonization", financialization, etc.) have radically tilted the table toward capital. Money is now transnational, but people, culture, and solidarity are not. There were once very severe practical limits to how closely one could control an expansive international portfolio of capital (mercantilist trade policies, primitive/incompatible/nonexistent financial infrastructure, slow communications, etc.), and those have been relaxed considerably.
Yes that's what money is almost by definition and government has always had that relationship. But realize that money and government are technologies and we can create new versions or even new paradigms.
Not really, because converting resources into power required other humans.
A huge pile of gold isn’t inherently powerful, you need someone willing to accept gold to do what you want. They would also generally be intimately involved in doing the thing, so you paid premiums for dangerous or unpalatable work.
These days technology lets you turn resources into planes, tanks, drones, etc in a way where 100 soldiers with limitless resources probably beat 1000 with a constrained supply line pretty consistently.
You see the same with domestic conflict. Once upon a time, finding and tracking down revolutionaries was a tedious, labor-intensive process that usually resulted in failure. Now those resources can be converted into surveillance that is much more effective, and much less reliant on another human being willing to help.
> I do not understand why anyone else would go along with this.
Aspirations.
Which have ignorance as their root cause. Ignorance of the type of people that become ultra wealthy, and ignorance of the odds of becoming one of them.
We should “listen” to these people with the same attitude as we do”listen” to gas station lottery addicts, instead we give them WAY too much credibility.
"temporarily embarrassed millionaires"
This sentiment is pretty popular amongst some of the younger working people... they work, pay a lot of taxes for everything, and then get outvoted by pensioners who retired under "old" laws and now get a higher pension than they ever earned while working (i'm talking from a position of government pensions, not the american save-for-yourself style). So, old people vote and decide, and young people get the bill for that.
eg the comments here: https://old.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1u8d9mq/olde...
The "if you contribute more, your vote should be worth more" sentiment would change a lot, because many actually rich people don't really pay a lot of taxes compared to higher middle class (engineers, doctors,..). If your vote was worth eg "log10(your-income-taxes + 1)" (to make buying a lot of votes impossible), more power would go to higher educated and higher paid people and less to people who don't contribute to society (at least not financially). Again, i'm talking about a society where pretty much everyone who works also pays income tax, and you're not cutting out the majority of poor people.
Would it work? Probably not, but i understand the sentiment.
My phrasing of it is that democracy is underpinned by a shared belief in a collective destiny. If we all vote well, we all do well together and if we vote poorly then we all do poorly together, on average.
Thus it feels like breaking that contract to have a substantial block of voters who will not only be recipients of increased benefits without ever having to pay more, but can run benefits programs into the ground and kill them without worry because they’ll die before that happens.
They don’t have any skin in the game. They stand to benefit, but never really lose.
I’ve not really worked that into a functional idea, though. The gist of my thought process is that you shouldn’t be able to vote on things where the delay on systemic issues occurring is beyond your life expectancy. So I could vote to change social security today, but probably not when I retire.
I have no idea how to quantify that delay in any reasonably objective way, though, and that’s where my idea falls apart.
It seems likely to become another political dog and pony show where the parties try to get arbitrary age cutoffs to get a demographic advantage. The idea that it would force parties to cater to younger voters more is interesting but I’m not sure a net positive. The impacts are too wide for me to gauge any kind of third order effects.
I don’t understand what there is to gain for anyone by making the implicit system we have today explicit?
Maybe it is a clever play to shine light on the problem? (I doubt, but can't entirely discount, it.)
Sorry to knock you out of your cloud.
In democracy, power comes from demos. In capitalism, power comes from capital. Demos doesn't have concentrated capital.
Try starting a new party without capital and backing from people tied to mainstream media.
People never had power. Whenever they've thought they have power (revolutions), they fought for one new power hungry scumbag to replace old power hungry scumbag.
> they fought for one new power hungry scumbag to replace old power hungry scumbag.
Because, as Plato argued, the best rulers are the ones that don’t want to rule, as ruling is a very heavy duty, if not burden.
If you strip corruption, it has no rewards. Instead you have to put up with “scambags” accusing for the things the corruption they would do if they had the power.
Why does this sound familiar?
Plato was philosopher. Not sociopath. For sociopaths, power over other people is only thing that matters. It's not a burden, money is nice, but it's mostly a tool to have more power.
Fascinating to see how many tech people, as soon as they get rich, turn to extreme. Name them all - they mostly all are very active on X, and each new tweet pushes the limits of what was previously deemed unacceptable. I'm rich, so my opinion must be more important, right?
Ed Zitron had a great quote that's relevant to this.
> [they] have filled their skulls with a sense of moral and intellectual superiority - that because they have succeeded at work, they understand society better than others, and can only perceive the world through that lens of privilege
> Fascinating to see how many tech people, as soon as they get rich, turn to extreme. Name them all - they mostly all are very active on X, and each new tweet pushes the limits of what was previously deemed unacceptable.
They have the money and power, but tech people in particualr lack the social graces and awareness that previous generations of rich people needed to operate. They think very highly of themselves, but all that "intelligence" doesn't prevent them from acting stupidly.
The old timey ones were morons in every kind of human way, too. We know what dumb shit they thought and said.
They just didn’t all have instantaneous global reach while sitting on the crapper, like Henry Ford with a Twitter account.
Even the Hearst type ones usually had time and human machinery between the formation of idiotic notions and it reaching other people.
> The old timey ones were morons in every kind of human way, too. We know what dumb shit they thought and said.
I'm not saying they were great. I'm just saying they probably spent more of their formative years interacting with real people than messing around with machines, so the tech lords are probably even worse.
They were always capable of these thoughts, money just gave them access to actions as well. Money didn’t turn them extreme IMO, maybe more fearful about losing it.
Money would've allowed them to act any time. But no, this is because of the shifting tide, enabled by an openly elitist government that doesn't give a shit about the layman.
Remember how a few years back, all these billionaires and corporations were all talking about DEI and taking the knee and George Floyd, and (insincerely) shoving it all down everyone's throats?
It just became socially more acceptable for them to show their true colors.
I don't see why these colors would be any more truer than the ones before. I bet they would change again just as quick if winds went back to blowing the other way. The only color they care about is the green of money. And if you asked them why they supported it they'd get all forgetful and not remember ever supporting any of that.
All the stuff all these people post on X is just regurgitation of 4chan circa 2016. The lingo is literally all just /fit/ memes from 10 years ago rebranded.
-maxxing, "mogging", "NGMI", I'm literally going nuts waiting for Gavin to start asking trump "DYEL"?
> All the stuff all these people post on X is just regurgitation of 4chan circa 2016.
You can trace a lot of what is wrong with 2026 back to the right-wing countercultural movement on 4chan, probably along with meme culture in general.
it is weird how when i first heard of meme it was in the dawkins sense. then people showed me memes and i thought wtf this is just dumb jokes, what a weird transformation of the term (my understanding of it). Then i watched it become an actual vehicle for political ideology, "just jokes" when too far but real ideas the rest of the time.
The left rots from them and the right becomes more extreme and everyone is losing all the time. Meme-banning sites like HN and stackoverflow look brilliant in hindsight, to me, with them knowing what they were doing all along; and now there are so few havens from them.
I know this is also a trope, but id always hoped the human race would be consumed by something more sophisticated. But it seems like memes was all is took.
Yeah, I'm on a gaming Discord where the 30+ year-old game modders who run it had to ban memes. If you don't, you'll end up with 15-year-old kids spamming memes into channels because that's just how they "talk" online.
And the "meme police" who will complain about misusing meme formats seem really regressive and anti-creative to me. Some satirist should skewer all the young adults who think that meme formats need to be defended.
[I also read The Selfish Gene back in the 90s, long before memes were just jokes]
it's not by accident, they're targeting specific demographics for a reason
angry young men will vote to abolish democracy -- and have, in Europe circa 1930s -- if you can convince them it'll benefit them.
step 1 is to start speaking to them in ways they connect with.
put another way, with the boomers dying rapidly, the largest source of MAGA is young men...
I think too many billionaires convince themselves it was fate and scramble their brains under the weight of figuring out what the greater purpose is for their extraordinary wealth and influence.
The asymptotic equivalent of $20 "burning a hole in your pocket"
Here's to hoping for more batmans and less lex luthors
I think everyone has weird ideas like this, but these rich, well-connected guys don't have to worry about their lives being ruined when they actually share them out loud.
I can't imagine many aerospace manufacturers turning down a contract with SpaceX because Elon said something politically incorrect. James Damore, on the other hand...
This isn't hate towards these rich guys (I think everyone should be able to say shit like this), just pointing out that we as a society hold them to different standards than we do regular people.
But when everyone says stuff like this, they get punched out in a bar, and only the people in the bar hear it at all. When this guy says it, it's news that the whole country hears.
the "engineer's disease" writ large.
I am good at solving X and Y, and have deep knowledge in those areas, therefore I'm good at solving problems everywhere.
it's like how people says scientists should run the world but have never seen how utterly tribal and often brutal researchers can be.
Accumulation of wealth and power becomes an addiction unto itself if left unchecked. At some point, we all have to look in the mirror and ask ourselves if we have enough and start to place importance in other parts of our lives.
But many of the wealthiest people I have known were also the least happy, driven by an insatiable urge to be great, and despite achieving vast success, were never able to feel or accept that they had already achieved it. It was never enough.
This has been a studied phenomenon for a bit now:
Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1118373109
Honestly just my experience, but I've found it ironic that finance bros in my circle have gone the other way i.e. the effective altruism, philosophizing, podcasting route. While tech bros are now turning openly elitist, and in some cases, racist.
And before anyone claims it's selection bias from within my left-leaning circle, I was well involved within the Tory circus until recently (a couple of years back).
Maybe an NYC bias here but in my experience finance folks are more closely tied to "well to do" social circles. Summering in the Hamptons, that kind of thing. And that crowd has always had a streak of philanthropy, even if it's as much a status thing as a genuine belief in helping others.
Silicon Valley is very far from all that. More broadly I think it's a reflection of the isolation (physical, cultural, etc) of SV.
Some sorta god complex resulting from dealing with machines that has the sole purpose of answering one’s commands, perhaps?
> effective altruism, philosophizing, podcasting route
all I see is "scam, BS, slop"
I think it might be because the tech bros got into a one-off event where a lot of people did and could've made money (as long as they were somewhat intelligent). Now the writing is on the wall that growth in the future will stall, as the sector takes up a larger portion of the economy,and positions of power will stabilise. Some of them probably believe turning elitist and racist could ensure them a better position for a while.
Maybe I'm trying to rationalise their behaviour too much but it feels like techbros have gotten a scarcity mindset.
This supports my belief that when being a finance bro was the only way to Croesus-level wealth, sociopaths tended to go into finance, so they could transcend societal norms with their wealth. Then, tech came along, making finance bro-level wealth seem quaint. Where did all the sociopaths go...well, you saw for yourself.
I agree, this could strongly be the case. Especially since now the most elite in finance are either working in quant roles and /or megafund private equity, both of which are extremely selective compared to tech. Megafund PE was always and still remains a bastion of conservatism, but quant shops still select for more objective skillsets meritocratically.
Or... hear me out.
"Tech bro" is finance bro.
Most of the "tech" CEO people we're admiring? as movers and shakers... very few of them actually come from an engineering background.
They're mostly just people attracted to the tech industry as a focus of dynamic high profit capitalism. The technology is only the background buzz.
Many of these businesses (Shopify especially!) -- in particular SaaS businesses -- actually have very weak "tech" innovation, it's really just the deployment of pre-existing engineering solutions (solved by other people usually) at scale in order to run a commercial business that just happens to use a lot of computers.
By finance bros, I meant people who continue to work in finance in some capacity. True, there is often some migration from finance to tech, which is usually composed of characters like the ones you talk of.
Well, they did /something/ right ...
Would you say the same about someone who accumulated billions thru the illegal drug trade?
Who is going to say what is and isn't acceptable? You?
Each person says what is and isn't acceptable, it can't really be any other way.
I'm far too stupid for that and I'm also privileged so what do I know. Many are more qualified to do so. I just think that his statement is not acceptable and is clearly dangerous for the society as a whole.
I get to say what I'll tolerate, and what I'll interfere with. We all do.
Yes. That would the point of democracy, if ours wasn't in shambles.
Yes. If the billionaires can do it, why not me?
I certainly get to say what is and isn’t acceptable for me. I also don’t get to say what is and isn’t acceptable for others. Don’t understand why your tone is so accusatory.
Yes?
> one that would strip voting rights from anyone who pays no income tax
It could be an interesting thought experiment to consider the second and third order consequences, even if, from first principles this is a non-starter in a democratic society.
First off all, what percent of people do not pay any taxes on income? What portion of them are poor vs. hedge fund managers or other super wealthy people who have structured their income in a way as to pay zero or near-zero income taxes? Would the latter be disincentivized from continuing those regimes?
Regardless, if you work at Shopify, you should consider quitting. You do not have to work for a crazy person like that.
> Lütke holds seven per cent of Shopify, according to Forbes, and controls nearly a third of the votes attached to the company’s current shares. Since March 1, 2020, his base salary has been the figure he requested: $1, down from his previous $800,000. [1]
[1] https://financialpost.com/personal-finance/high-net-worth/wh...
So, just so that I'm clear, that means that Lütke himself pays no income tax?
(assuming that he's not paid a salary by anyone else)
No income tax, but capital gains tax. And capital gains tax is a lot less than income tax (hence Buffet’s “my secretary pays more tax than I do”). So the “$1/year” CEOs are simply reducing tax burden.
But, yes, under the proposed scheme, Lütke doesn’t get to vote. One may rest assured that this was a simple mistake. In fact, I’m sure he meant that only those pay capital gains tax get to vote, not income tax.
No capital gains tax is due until gains are realized. Lütke's gains are almost completely unrealized.
Better yet, he gets loans, collateralized against those unrealized gains to the current value of the gains, and then writes off the loan interest against his present and future taxes! Amazing!
In the U.S., it's about 28% of the populace which pays no taxes (or ends up netting to zero or negative taxation; for example, working families with children are often in a situation where they might owe $2,000 in taxes but also get a credit of $5,000, for a net refund of $3,000.) My 28% figure includes property, sales taxes, etc. but does not include taxes that employers, landlords, and so on pay.
This is all very beneficial for big business including Shopify: businesses can pay lower wages since the government steps in with benefits, including food, cash, housing, energy, medical care, and so on, for people with lower incomes, and then that means they have more money to spend as consumers (relevant to Shopify).
when you say "pays no taxes" do you mean income taxes or any taxes altogether? What about FICA/SECA 15.3% tax? Sales tax? Property tax? Individual income tax only makes up 53% of federal revenues as per https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover....
Introducing the shitshow of those state level taxes makes it unworkable, for sure.
So the federal government can disenfranchise anyone they want by issuing that class of taxpayer a refund?
This would be pointless to do for one person, and it would be very curious to see a government reject a massive funding stream from a swath of people like this.
A total refund, that is, $0 in income tax.
Even more interesting (and less deliberately manipulative): The government could make it voluntary. Below $X tax liability, you can choose a total refund - but you can't vote. That would be voting by those who actually care about the vote (or who owe more than $X).
> ...vs. hedge fund managers or other super wealthy people who have structured their income in a way as to pay zero or near-zero income taxes? Would the latter be disincentivized from continuing those regimes?
Oh, you know if something like this was implemented, those people would re-structure their income so they pay $1 in income tax.
Or they wouldn't bother, because they have far more effective ways of influencing the political process than voting. This would be purely about disenfranchising weaker people who could get in the way of them getting even more power.
> even if, from first principles this is a non-starter in a democratic society.
This is a strange phrase - initially you had to either own land (therefore pay tax) or else if you lived in a city and didn't own land but paid sufficient tax[1], to vote in the early United States. Only taxpayers voting was our first principles! We only changed it later.
[1] I'm simplifying slightly because different states handled this differently
I’ve spent the last three days writing an inventory management system for a small store, using Codex and Claude Code. I realize that fully replacing online tools like Shopify is a lot more work than that (the payment integrations particularly), but: I sure wouldn’t want to be in the SaaS business right now.
None of the legit ones are at risk from vibecoders.
We don’t have to go farther back than 100 years in history to know what this looks like. Poll taxes, land ownership requirements, etc. were pretty common. So were goon squads to beat and murder people who tried to change that. It wasn’t good.
I wouldn't want a lot of the landscape 100 years ago, but I'd happily be disenfranchised if I could get the size of government 100+ years ago (federal government <~2% of GDP in non-wartime)
You might change your mind if you study the economy of the US in the late 1800's. Those boom and bust cycles were intense, making the great depression of the 1930's look unexceptional.
If you want to get rich, you need an healthy, educated, rich and secure customer and employee base. You don't get that with <~2% of GDP spent on health, education, roads, police, courts et cetera.
That landscape you wouldn’t want is in part a product of the small government you covet.
One possibly positive side effect is that by sidelining the working and middle classes, the political landscape would pit the rich against the fuck-you-rich.
It would be interesting to see the class of doctors, lawyers and small business owners fighting against the class of large cap c-suite and the billionaires.
The majority of voters who pay no income tax are (heavily Republican) retirees.
I think you would magically see more (edit: wealthy) people collect an income
> Regardless, if you work at Shopify, you should consider quitting. You do not have to work for a crazy person like that.
Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system. Every part of the system has trade-offs that must be evaluated. You can make a logical argument that any other policy is open to abuse, etc. But why do you have to accuse other people of being “crazy” for having ideas about how to engineer a system?
You mean government and society are an engineering exercise. You can't strip people of power and then say it's a democracy, at least not if words mean things.
>First off all, what percent of people do not pay any taxes on income?
If you modify this slightly to the percent of people who are not net taxpayers, meaning you subtract transfer payments (including social security, medicare, medicaid) to them from the taxes they pay (including social security, medicare, and medicaid), it's about 60% of the country, which tracks quite closely to the percentage of Americans who could not afford an unexpected $1000 expense.
Most of the country is on a constant financial cliff.
The best analysis I have seen puts it at 28% once you net out sales taxes and property taxes. (There are a lot of people who own property that they live in, but don't work, but they do owe property tax obviously.)
Your 60% figure is reasonable, though, as the gap between 28% and 60% is people who are paying a very, very small net amount, mostly via sales taxes or other taxes that exist like taxes on airplane tickets or hotels.
Almost any system that limits participation in democracy will be abused to disenfranchise people that those in power do not want to give a voice.
So you're coming at this from the wrong end. The goal is explicitly to keep the poors from having a voice in politics. The exact policy and enforcement of the system will reflect that. Unintended consequences, like the rich being disenfranchised would not occur.
To say it differently, if that ends up disenfranchising the powerful, a different argument and set of law would be used
Trump paid about $750 in taxes in 2016 while still claiming to be a billionaire. I wouldn't consider it a fair share, but would that $750 entitle him to a vote under this plan?
>Trump paid about $750 in taxes in 2016 while still claiming to be a billionaire
Right, because the tax system (generally) taxes income, not wealth. Not taking this into account is like asking "you're millionaire, yet you don't have any income, how come?" to a retiree. According to the new york times article that broke this story, most of it seems to be from his loss making businesses elsewhere. Moreover in recent years he has been paying tax, as those losses have stopped.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-tru...
It is legal, but is it "fair"? And should someone who doesn't pay a fair share be entitled to a vote? Is the fairness important?
Do you become a monster when you get ultra rich, or do you need to be a monster to get ultra rich?
Most "normal" people would hit $5-30 million, realize they have enough money for themselves and their descendants to be comfortable in perpetuity with some decent wealth management, and either retire or change careers to a passion project. Going to 100s, 1,000s, or 100,000s of millions inherently filters for people who have either absurd greediness (seeing wealth as a scoreboard) or a desire for power.
This is it, it's absolutely a filter beyond a certain point. I have a family member, far enough removed I'll never see any of it, that sold a business in his early 30s for something like $35-40M. Set his kids up for life with trusts, bought some toys and a second home, and been just sort of hanging out ever since (this was 15-20 years ago). He's happy, has a ton of hobbies, and if you ever suggested he start another business or start putting his name on cap tables he'd laugh his ass off. It would never even occur to him that he should try to double, triple, 10x his money, because he already has 10x more than he'll ever spend.
And for what it's worth his kids are remarkably well adjusted and nice, if a little bit out of touch about what most people deal with.
Same, my father was a doctor and had tons of doctor friends from med school and work. Pretty much all of them just cared about 1. making sure the family was provided for and had excellent education, 2. patient outcomes and 3. being comfy at home.
This is sorta the reasoning behind statements like "billionaires shouldn't exist".
It's not a statement that people shouldn't see fruits of their labor, but that past a certain point, its no longer about the fruits or even the tree, but the power that comes with it. In a democracy, those who get lucky in business are not owed power.
So yeah, billionaires and trillionaires shouldn't exist, because their existence is a side-channel attack on society. Pay enough money and rules don't apply. Past a certain point, that wealth should be heavily scrutinized and audited as if it's nuclear fissile material. Similar to the nuclear material, it can be productive for society, or absolute destruction.
My theory about this, as well as how it seems most powerful are abusers, is that you have to be willing to comprosmise your morality to get into that position in the first place. So it is not that being rich and powerful corrupts you, but you have to already be at least somewhat corrupt to get there at all.
You can't get this far without being greedy in a neurologically abnormal way.
Most people would retire with "enough" long before.
Well, you can also get relatively rich by marrying a monster- aka the state?
How does that work? I don’t get the analogy
essentially: gubrment bad
What? How do you marry a state?
I think maybe it's an awkward attempt at some comment on politicians being able to legally insider trade?
It's both. Getting into the multi-billionaire levels of wealth takes a certain mindset that can probably be easily associated with some neurological disorders and personality traits that one could describe as 'monstrous'. But becoming that rich also disconnects you from the reality of the average person. Your time by necessity to maintain and grow such levels of wealth is going to be spent among other people who are either in a similar position, or want to be in a similar position and are trying to ride the coattails up the wealth ladder. And try as you might to avoid it, it will skew your mental state towards that disconnect unless you take significant effort to avoid the benefits that being at that level of wealth brings to you. Most people who would be willing to eschew said benefits are also probably not the ones trying to seek out such positions of wealth in the first place, so they're going to be severely underrepresented in the wealthy circles.
The latter. We even know what that monster is. It's psychopathy.
The sociopath part is what allows one to do what it takes to get ultra rich in the first place. Other than Gates, not one comes to mind who gives anything to charity, for example (yes, I’m sure one or two exists).
And at level that Gates operates charity of itself is form of power and influence. Not rich people spending money on these things is bad. But sometimes I just question motivations as a whole.
my understanding too was that his (ex)wife told him, basically, "what are young going to do with all of this?"
like he has literally everything he needs, and there is this massive number -- do something, anything with it. You have unlimited time, so chose to do something
It's also not uncommon for extravagantly rich people to form family-run charity organizations to distract their nagging wife or family members with a pursuit where they can lord over employees / recipients / organizations without having any profit metrics by which they could be embarrassed by their inferior business chops. This is doubly applicable if you need to distract a nagging hag while you're off banging Russian bridge players.
Gates has spent many fortunes cleaning up his image, but he was one of the nastiest business practice worst monopolists ever.
"During Bill Gates’s tenure leading Microsoft, the company paid out an estimated $8.46 billion in publicly known antitrust settlements, competitor payouts, and government fines."
basal take, completely incorrect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_charitabl...
the US is the most charitable country on earth as a percentage of GDP. There is so much philanthropy that the finance industry is building new businesses just to serve it
https://fintech.global/2026/04/29/the-philtech-revolution-wh...
What if extreme charity is merely sociopathic status signaling?
Gates is actually quite problematic (Epstein is a lot of the problem). If you need an exception to prove the rule, Buffett is a little easier of a fit.
gates was so noble to even donate prescription medication in secret..
The first part of your comment is correct, the second part is both wrong and unnecessary glazing of Gates.
There's plenty sociopaths that give to charity, because it's a socially accepted display of wealth, and because it is quite convenient for tax purposes.
The thing about this that's so distasteful is that it removes the basis of enfranchisement from being the inherent worth of a human life and moves it more to "what have you done for me lately". It's pretty gross.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, gross is exactly the word for it.
There's numerous examples of commune societies evicting people who refuse to contribute.
The distasteful thing is people refusing to contribute to society, especially for long periods of time. I know many people who have various mental and physical disabilities (some severe) who insist on working. Some able-bodied people can't even match some with severe disabilities. It's sick.
Shouldn't it be the reverse? The vote of people who earn less (and are therefore more disadvantaged in society and rely on fair laws the most) should count more.
Tax and "money paid to the system" is a red herring only an entitled super rich person would think is relevant.
Lutke is a German who has lived in Canada for decades. Why comment on American tax policy ? Seems out of his lane .
These people almost universally believe their opinions and thoughts are uniquely special and always worth bowing to.
They are egotists. It’s one of the biggest parts of who they are.
The guy made an offhand remark. Someone else chose to write a whole article about it, and we all chose to leave hundreds of comments here.
The guy is a massive asshole but I don’t see the issue commenting on other countries policies, that’s what we all do
Maybe he's suggesting it for Canada?
Multiple Canadian billionaires are pro trump and wouldn't mind becoming a 51st state.
There’s no such thing for the billionaire class.
Oh boy! Can I play too? My system, which I call an expansion of antitrust, requires all people to keep their net worth under one billion dollars. Anyone approaching that number must give away assets to stay under. If you go over that, you must be broken up, by, say, beheading, or being drawn and quartered.
I'm not married to that number, if people think it should be half a billion, or 100 million, or whatever, I'll go along with it.
The Catan system
> If you go over that, you must be broken up, by, say, beheading, or being drawn and quartered.
How is this not hate speech?
Hate speech applies to particular characteristics that essentially never include "having lots of money".
Oh yeah, uh, sure it's hate speech. It's wealthism. One of the worst forms of prejudice. The wealthy live in constant fear for something that's not even their fault... they didn't choose to be wealthy, they were just born that way.
If you're seeing this violent sentiment spill over to HN, just imagine how the general population is starting to feel about billionaires.
https://archive.is/wS6IH
The article criticizes “taking us back to the 19th century,” but ironically dropping property qualifications for voting was an innovation of the Jacksonian era of the 1820s-1850s. There is a tendency to all efforts to generalize the franchise together, but that’s illogical. Just because race and sex are illegitimate qualifiers for voting doesn’t mean that all qualifiers for voting are necessarily illegitimate. Are we asserting that psychological science has taught us nothing in 200 years relevant to our evaluation of whether someone who can't hold down a job at a grocery store should be steering democracy to the same degree as a doctor or scientist? (And note this is an argument against interest here, since I belong to what’s clearly now the dumber party.)
Just to play with this a bit, this proposal instantly and completely ends Republican power. Low-taxed rural poor and retiree votes are gone, entirely. Higher earning coastal white collar and professional workers get 3-5 votes, offset to some degree but far from entirely by the business-owning rich blue collar class. The middle classes get 1. It's fairly obvious what that would mean for representation in the USA.
Second fun point is that he and his oligarch colleagues would find themselves with no votes: I guarantee I pay more income tax than this guy and anyone else in the multiple airplane owning class. Marvelous.
It is of course a fairly revolting idea but one which has some interesting unintended consequences, not least that we might suddenly find the rentier class figuring out how to declare income of $500,001 instead of a loss every year.
You are a lone voice of reason in these comments, presumably because you checks notes read the article.
I will add that voting blocs do shift. In fact, in the last two US presidential elections, retirees actually broke for the Democrat. That could have something to do with Trump or be an actual trend.
Additionally, these rich people do pay a lot of tax, they just do it through different parts of the tax code and at a lower overall rate (by avoiding social security and Medicare taxes by way of earning through long-term capital gains). On the other hand they also own more real estate than you (probably) in desirable locations and pay a lot of property tax they can't avoid.
All that notwithstanding I sense that the root of this discussion that this guy's getting excoriated for, was exploring how to short-circuit the phenomenon wherein older people, voting at higher rates (and holding office long into their old age), secure for themselves preferential benefits at the expense of struggling younger generations. The thread took off in a strange way from there, but... I guess I like where it was trying to go at the outset.
I have a different idea. How about we weight your vote by your fiscal commonality with the average American? No?
TIL about epistemic trespassing:
It occurs when an expert in one field passes judgment or makes confident claims in another field where they lack true competence or formal training.
No representation without taxation?
I think there is a bigger issue here.
Charging people for their fundamental rights.
It happens in many different ways. Look at all these people that just want to live and they can't even do that without having to pay to exists.
It is getting to be like that movie "In Time" where there is a clock you have to keep funding or you expire.
One note about the headline. He didn't say anything about Americans. That was injected by the editor.
I think this is one of the cases where someone is just so rich that more money stops resulting in any meaningful additional quality of life. Then the only way to increase their quality-of-life differential (relative, not absolute value is the key metric here), is to make other people's lives worse.
It seems like billionaires somehow develop a deep resentment and drive to change the world, whilst not spending any of their money to do it. (I wrote before remembering that lobbying exists.)
Presumably because they don't believe that saying so publicly will result in unacceptable consequences.
We should really make a better shopify already; these guys aren't worth the salt they stand upon.
Honestly, shopify’s near-monopoly has confused me for at least a decade. Their platform is bad, and has always been bad - at least from the perspective of managing a store - yet no real challenger has been able to take their crown.
He‘s been hanging out with his friends quite a lot lately I assume. Same brain farts over and over again.
Considering the current gerrymandering, all sorts of regulatory capture, and a two-party system that's captured most voter's sense of identity and packaged it for abuse... I think this discussion is extremely theoretical.
It might actually be a better idea to require a short, in-person civic knowledge test every two years as a condition for voting. If you fail, you can take it again, but you cannot vote until you pass.
I’m only half joking.
Government exists to serve the people. People do not exist so they can pay taxes. This was the very reason the Founding Fathers rebelled against Britain.
In the US the rich already has more public power than the poor... from lobbying to donations to "speech". I guess making it official would save them from all this work and simplify things?
Its cute how people who don't live here have the worst ideas for how we should run our country, like we don't see what they are trying to do.
People who do live here also have terrible ideas. Terrible ideas can come from anywhere!
Voting should always be universal. The moment you exclude someone, you add the possibility of excluding more people.
Rich people don't have enough power? He must not understand what levers he can already pull to get what he wants.
the why is quite easy, because we are not worthy of having a say in our own governance according to them, so that they may better exploit us
I wonder if he posts from the toilet like Elon.
You should have skin in the game to vote (citizenship as a minimum in national elections, for example). It used to be that owning property was that gate (land, specifically, not income). So how do you get an electorate that isn't just interested in voting themselves free stuff?
I honestly don't know. Raising children properly is a sign you're invested in the future, but holy cow would I not want a government test for that. Let's stick with citizenship... If you really want to fix the electorate, you need to fix education, and re-socialize values of merit (individual responsibility, liberty over ease...). Not an easy or simple proposition.
A principled society is superior to a ruled society, we just don't like to pay what's needed for the former and land in the latter as a local minima.
The very rich have forgotten the lessons of the past.
They have forgotten that they also live in the very same physical world as the poor. Most of them don't even live that far from the poor.
Perhaps they don't consider the implications that nobody can fight a mob.
If they were as smart as they want people to think, they would think about these things and perhaps shut up (at least in public!) about making things worse for the poor.
This is hilarious in that many very rich people pay zero income tax today. In this system “all of a sudden” all these people would be paying taxes on exactly 500k. Near zero for them anyway but with an explicit albeit BS claim of funding the majority of government expense. From a bit of quick research the top 1% of earners are about 40% of the tax base.
Everyone gets screwed in this system but especially those paying a good amount of taxes and getting fewer votes like the 200-400k range. Or maybe not especially. This just an outright terrible idea.
People need to stop conflating evil intentions with evil capacity. It is done regularly with Elon, Thiel, etc. As arrogant as they may be on X, they are drooling imbeciles when it comes to politics. Remember Blake Masters? Remember the Wisconsin supreme court election? How is the admin they endorsed doing? Has Lutke thought about how high-income individuals in metro areas vote?
They have failed again and again. There is no reason to believe Lutke's worthless dreams will go unchallenged if they are ever attempted in the first place.
Ah, a German Canadian endorsing changes to the U.S. taxation system.
It is interesting to hear how openly some CEOs will just say outright stupid things. Like ok, so you re-do the voting system to give rich people more votes than poor people. Fine. It's done. What's the first order of business amongst the electorate at the next election. Well Elon Musk now has 10 times as many votes as Tobias Lütke, why would Musk not just vote to change the system again, handing more power to himself? And on the basis of what principle would you oppose him?
It's just fundamentally a stupid thing to say, and the fact he says it in public strongly indicates that he's lost contact with anyone who will challenge him on this stuff.
Look, I'm not even a millionaire, and I will never be a billionaire, but in an alternate reality in which I'm a centibillionaire, one of my chief aims would be to limit the political say of the electorate as much as possible, because their voting rights would be one of the biggest threats to my everything.
Moreover, everyone who gains any amount of power becomes protective of it.
That's basic human nature. As a conservative, I under this.
I dont think its a good model for America but if I were starting a country from scratch I might consider it. But I would also do stuff like a heavy death estate tax and disallow most generational wealth transfer.
What would stop people from shifting to different kinds of wealth transfer? Extreme investment in education, squirrely work-arounds, nepotism, etc? I don't see how you can attempt to prevent people from providing as much benefit to their children as possible.
I've heard some good arguments for eliminating a wealth tax and instead treating inheritance as income. There are other forms of money manipulation that should also be treated as income. For example, the borrow-spend-die trick. Other transactions that should go through a "cash" phase include the financial three-card Monty the AI companies are pulling right now. Other manipulations we need to make illegal, such as stock buybacks.
There are some "reasonable" exceptions one could argue for, but as soon as you start making exceptions, you open yourself to abuse of the system. For example, using the tax code to enact social policy. I think it would be more honest for the government to take in all the money as taxes and then turn around and distribute money for socially beneficial programs such as green energy, schools, public health, et cetera. If you look at who screams about this, you'll probably find that most of them are opportunistic people who are afraid somebody will cheat the system better than they do.
This would also be a good opportunity to create an independent, transparent organization that audits where the money goes and provides raw data they use to justify their actions to the public so that others can double-check their conclusions.
#IfIWereKing
I would allow only one Version- which is if junior builds a buisness and that buisness shows potential, the donor buisness (daddy) should be able to pay the taxes taxfree for that buisness.
And the fall of Shopify begins now.
He's been a turd that any reasonable person would endorse stripping of his wealth for years.
Hasn't affected the bottom line one whit.
He’s working on it. Never let a narcissist know you figured him out. They will continue.
The problem with allowing only the rich to vote is that they're inherently exploitative of the poor. It's a veiled attempt to want to return to an approximation of slavery.
I was fully on the side of the nerds when pg wrote his pieces about nerds being bullied at school.
The events since 2020 have made me reconsider that. A certain type of nerd should go to an interment camp, preferably in some seasteading dystopia that Thiel wanted.
Let us see what they achieve in their Galt Gulch in isolation.
How much more evidence do we need that there is in fact a class war going on and the rich are winning?
The biggest con they ever pulled off is making working class people (and yes, that includes you, fellow tech workers!) hate unions.
Unions are the only way workers can fight back - they may be able to tell individuals what to do, but they can't control the collective.
This is also why they're so feverishly trying to build AI - they finally want to have workers that have no way of organizing.
why indeed one must wonder? any ideas?
Somebody needs to introduce some sort of buddy system for billionaires.
This would allow them to air their dumb opinions in private to normal people, where they could be gently mocked like the rest of us.
Currently there seems to be a dangerously quick pipeline for them between a thought passing through their minds, and millions being made aware. God help me if you all knew the things I've said over the years..
1. This CEO is a Canadian.
2. We already have a gerontocracy. Tying income to vote-weight just solidifies the problem since most people earn more as their career progresses.
3. An alternative: grant voting rights to all under 18, proxied by their parent/legal guardian. This provides better alignment to the interests of the future than good fortune.
I bet you that if their dear leader suggested this, most of the people would vote to have their voting rights be taken away.
Somehow money seem to damage personality. It's the same with David Heinemeier Hansson (who know Tobias Lütke in person), Elon Musk and many other folks.
Tax the rich.
And by that I mean people who "earn" their wealth through mechanisms that aren't direct income. Heck, give an exception to the tax on the first million of non-income based wealth. But something has to change because their money is their power and they deserve less of it.
Canada already has that exemption on the first CAD 1.25M capital gain, assuming that Shopify qualifies as a Canadian business by staying >50% Canadian for at least 2 years.
But like pretty much everywhere, Canada does not tax unrealized gains. At least they don't have the silly loop-hole that the US does of the step-up in basis on death.
My biggest problem with “tax the rich” is: then what? Build another “high-speed train”? Spend the money on some fake nonprofit run by the same rich people?
based, solid opinion
Journalism is terrible nowadays - Tobi was commenting on the Canadian political system, not American.
Makes sense. The biggest sin an American can commit is being poor. Welcome to Calvinism.
The article is paywalled, but isn’t he Canadian? Who cares what he thinks.
He’s German who lived in Canada for too long.
Another example of why we will have to eat the rich or die trying
Why did a billionaire propose biasing the voting system towards the rich? Gee I wonder.
Maybe if they made it on effective tax rate. Your vote is weighed based on the percentage of INCOME that is taxed, but everyone gets a vote regardless.
I think I'd just like it done on percentage of overall wealth handed to the government or charity each year.
Handy side effect would be that if Jeff wants to buy some influence for Amazon, he could do it by paying all his warehouse and delivery employees better.
Votes are equal because the belief system is that all people are equal. If you win the lottery, you don't instantly become a more valuable person.
Prior generations understood more clearly that the physical security that underwrites great financial successes is all underwritten in blood. A better heuristic is everyone gets the number of votes equivalent to how many of their lives they could give in a conflict.
Cool cool cool. Now let's hear from the people who endorse stripping him of his wealth.
Hear me out...
Why don't we tax stocks like we do homes with a property tax? Why am I paying property tax on the majority of my net worth, but billionaires are not?
Also, I know all about the buy/borrow/die strategy and I have an idea for that too. Let's tax all loans as income. They are, in fact, income. "B-but they have to be paid back!" That's income again, the bank should pay tax on it.
Except everyone pays taxes. It's in everything that is bought at any given time.
Obviously this asshole does not mean it like that. What he means is that only rich assholes like him should get to vote.
If we are in the phase of just spitballing shit that should be considered unacceptable in a society where we are meant to coexist, I would spitball the idea that the time for his neck to meet the guillotine is long overdue.
How about that: If you are a billionaire you lose your voting rights because you are already powerful enough and don’t need that extra power
There are only 900 billionaires in the U.S. Do you think if they lost their voting rights it would affect the outcome of even a single election whatsoever?
If it includes ability to vote via campaign donations that cause votes, then yes absolutely. Note for instance in the Massie primary, rich donors literally turned money into new votes by prodding a bunch of demented elderly people who never vote in primaries to believe Massie was banging AOC and Ilhan Omar and secretly a democrat (the vote from regular primary voters remained almost unchanged, the delta was almost entirely new voters brought out by a fraudulent propaganda campaign). That's essentially indistinguishable from those rich people having cast the vote themselves.
It‘s not about the outcome of an election but about putting a symbolic to their power.
Billionaires can do what they what without real consequences, this would hurt even if it has no real effect. More psychological
The way that's gonna go is "We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing."
With the recent trend of flagging pg's articles, it might be time for the HN community to evaluate if they want to continue giving attention, eyeballs and time to something like HN, and YC by proxy. The hostility - not from HN posters but from the rich class, is not something to be taken lightly, and being on HN shows indirect support for unrestrained toxicity. Maybe a lift and shift to elsewhere (Lobste.rs etc) is in order? And make no mistake: on paper this would not really "do" anything, but walking away is a strong symbolic gesture all the same.
I don't understand why we humor this stuff. Our society has lost the ability to simply say "no" to something. We have to argue everything into the weeds, constantly hand wringing about biases and hearing all voices.
You can be biased. I, for one, am biased towards democracy and am comfortable telling people to fuck off when they question it. I don't need to debate it. Just fuck right off.
> I don't understand why we humor this stuff
Social contract is a difficult subject, and people don't think about it enough.
But thanks to this clickbait headline, thousands of readers may come upon an articulation of why current enfranchisement is more desirable than arrangements that preceded it. In other words, it's a chance to learn what's worth defending and how our current situation might be improved.
"Let them eat cake!"
"Eat the Rich"
Shopify seems to have a fascist problem.
Words have a well-defined meaning. Fascism, as established by Benito Mussolini, has nothing to do with oligarchy or plutarchy.
Fascism, as established by Mussolini is very deeply related to plutarchy.
Please produce your evidence that Mussolini's ascent or style of government was a "society ruled or controlled by people of great wealth", as defined by Wikipedia.
Fascist political philosophy is about racial purity, militarism, autarky, and suppression of dissent through political violence. In fact, one of their methods of enacting such worldview was by appropriating the wealth of rich people to advance their own purposes.
Please educate yourself, it's free: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
If you read your link, you will discover it's not focused at Mussolini's fascism at all, but still talks about the merge of the government and corporations... Because it's a very important feature of that regime.
Maybe try it next time.
No idea why people downvote you when you’re right.
Only American-style political discourse is accepted on the Internet, where either you're with us or you're against us.
It sure as shit has to do with corporatism!
I'm referring to how both Lütke and DHH, a Shopify board member, have fascist politics.
The word does have meaning. But underlying that meaning is a philosophy that there is an in group that should have power and many out groups from which power should be stripped. There is a long history of industrial leaders supporting fascist ideology.
Shopify's former COO Kaz Nejatian and his wife Candice Malcolm are behind True North and Juno News, sketchy far right media outlets.
Yeah, but please google first on what Mussolini preached. State-owned corporazioni are nothing like privately operated businesses of today. Don’t hang on the word. The correct word you are looking for is plutocrat, indeed.
The word I wanted to reach for was Nazi but I toned it down
Whatever you’re reaching for, you’re reaching for a wrong thing. Go back to school, crème de la crème of the society my ass.
You should try and read more history books than Twitter posts. The blossoming US plutarchy, again, has nothing to do with the political philosophy of Nazism.
But I figure your slogan would work very well on social media.
You should understand language before debating vocabulary. I am quite well read on political philosophy and history, and I will continue to call out fascists when I see people talking like fascists.
Rhetorically, what you're doing is called the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. I personally don't like calling out things like this when I see them because it's not a logical fallacy as much as bad rhetoric, but in this case I think it's warranted.
How can you call people fascists when you clearly do not understand what the word means.
Paywalled articles seem to enhance the "comment without reading, based on vibes" effect.
From the article:
"Pension recipients should have their financial futures “locked in and guaranteed,” but in return would be reclassified as “dependents” and lose the right to vote—the same way minors can’t vote. A reply from “Eric Thor,” who claimed to be a retired banking executive as well as “armchair economist and policy wonk,” proposed a sliding scale: zero votes for anyone who pays no income tax, one vote for those earning $1–100K, two votes for $100–200K, scaling up in that pattern to a hard cap of five votes for anyone earning $500K or more. The pitch was framed as fairness—reward “representation” for those who “foot the bill” through taxation."
"That was the good system that Lütke endorsed."
Most of the commenters here seem to be responding to...something other than this?
And a husband who works and his wife who doesn't, should she get a vote? The commentators here are responding exactly to the spirit of what was said, there's no confusion on what's really being implied here. Namely, the destruction of the entire basis of democracy, which is one person one vote.
Another way to express the general disgust: that proposal is saying, "we're going to take away your power, but we'll still look after you, pinky promise!"
I've already heard discussions in the last year that married women shouldn't vote. Their husbands would cast two votes. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22household+voting%22
> the entire basis of democracy, which is one person one vote
This is a relatively recent innovation; most democracies throughout history have not had this property, so it's hardly the "entire basis" of the concept.
It is, however, an interesting and possibly worth goal. The obvious problem (which has been noted by many previously) is that when the people making the decisions are not the ones paying for it the system is unstable (e.g. "three wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner", also "eventually you run out of other people's money").
This is a serious issue and possibly the biggest present threat to our current system. It's worth considering various possible solutions and thinking about what might work and what would likely lead to ruin.
If discussing these issue triggers "disgust" you may want to question if you are actually thinking about what is being said or just reacting emotionally.
The billionaires are the sheep, and people with less than $100k in annual income are the wolves in this contrived scenario?
> This is a serious issue and possibly the biggest present threat to our current system
Is it?
No I think most commenters are responding to that. It's a shitty take from a shitty billionaire.
50% of Americans think taxes are too high, the other 50% think taxes need to be higher so they’ll get a larger refund.
It’s not a sustainable system. A better solution would be to change tax law so a “payer” can’t receive a larger refund than what they paid. No more credits, only deductions.
The majority of americans think their taxes need to be lower, and the taxes for the rich need to be higher.
Majority of Americans pay little to no taxes.
By percentage of income, or by dollar value? By dollar value, that seems possible. By % of income? Does not seem possible.
I think the title is inaccurate and a bit inflammatory. He's not advocating stripping most Americans of their voting rights. He's advocating stripping a tiny minority of Americans of their voting rights - specifically the minority of Americans that pay no income tax
Actually no. He’s advocating for attaching the amount of taxes you pay to the number of votes you get. Which pretty much erodes everyone’s rights except the ones at the very top. If everyone still has one vote but some have more than one, you’ve effectively stripped their rights.
The suggestion is inflammatory in and of itself. The right to vote is core to democracy. One should expect even the slightest suggestion of abrogating this right, even to a tiny minority, to be met with a vociferous allergic reaction.
Stripping voting rights is a historical leading indicator of a trend to totalitarianism so it has to be nipped in the bud immediately.
He's advocating stripping rights, periodt.
Tax tiered votes are ideal in Municipal elections and can be easily implemented. Too many cities in US/Canada run ridiculous social programs, buses, trains and crack dens off the backs of homeowners.
State, Provincial, Federal: terrible idea, to arbitrarily disenfranchise people because they live off the pension from their life's work.
Yes absolutely, famously American cities run crack dens using municipal taxes.
The Cabrini Green of yesteryear comes to mind. Some of the 60s-90s era public housing were straight up high-rise sniper dens.
This statement is borderline sociopathic.
Social programs, buses, and trains enable any of that development at all.
When you cut after school programs and social hangouts, kids get into trouble.
Buses and trains multiply the economic potential of an area.
If all you have are the vague class of "home owners", who do you have in your grocery stores? Who fixes your roof? Certainly not you.
All you'd have is an armed quasi-military of cops protecting your depreciating homes from the mobs of scorned citizens waiting to burn your shit down.
> State, Provincial, Federal: terrible idea, to arbitrarily disenfranchise people because they live off the pension from their life's work.
See, but if we break those stupid geezers we can get their land easier.
I am not against idea of only net tax payers getting single vote. Say if you use government services or receive money such as grant that is counted against your total. If you own part of corporation that gets such support that is counted again. If you or your corporation gets tax deductions or relief those are counted as double.
Total everything up and if you are net payer you get to vote. If not no vote for you.
We tried this already in America and have decided that disallowing entire groups of people from voting is bad for democracy.
What happens when the federal government passes new tax laws that prevent certain genders, racial groups, etc from having to pay income tax? Are they permanently disenfranchised? This would be a system that I think would rapidly move social progress backwards and concentrate power in the hands of a few groups.
Well you could have stronger constitutional protections. Say certain changes needing unanimous support from voters in referendum. Would lock in things, but would remove risks.
And USA already disallows voting based on age. And somehow lot of people find it acceptable. Surely voting should be right from birth?
Alright, what about laws that only levy income taxes on people making $300k or more? That's eliminates millions of Americans without targeting any protected groups. There's no bulletproof method to allow only some people to vote that wouldn't be abused to disenfranchise others.
Also, surely you don't think a four year old should weigh in on who gets to represent them in Congress? We disallow voting on a minimum age, because children are still developing in all sorts of ways, there is no maximum age that takes away your right to vote when you reach it. You can't equate a minimum age to disenfranchisement.
That is why I said taxes. Not just income tax.
And really why should not 4 year old get to decide? How come you think it is right to discriminate against them based on their age? As you said there is no limit on those with limited mental faculties due to old age. So why have one for young age? Isn't it clearly an unacceptable form disenfranchisement? Or are you saying some forms of that are absolutely acceptable and even justified?
To a first approximation this creates and enforces a permanent unvoiced underclass. Without any political representation, said underclass's differentiation from actual slavery would be pretty small.
Why are you not against this? A vote isn't a payment in exchange for taxes. It's the mechanism by which the government represents the will of the people. How do you arrange things such that the government acts in the interests of people if it doesn't need to chase their vote? Or are you actually saying that poor people don't deserve a government that acts in their interest?
Even skipping the moral argument, there's a game theory trap here: let's say you run a government and your political enemies are on the poor side and fall into the "no vote" trap more often than your supporters. Obviously the solution to maximizing your share of the vote is to make them even poorer.
Vote is mechanism to decide who gets to distribute those taxes. It seems reasonable that those who contribute get to decide. If they decide to give support fine. If not well...
Then again I suppose it would be fine too if voters decided to socialise absolutely everything including bodies of other voters. After all that would be democracy. And they chose that no protections are needed and everything is common now.
It's not only deciding who gets to distribute those taxes. It's who gets to decide, for example, whether we go to war, and whether you have to serve in the military and get shot at.
What is inherently unreasonable about the idea that only people who pay into the system get a say in how the system operates?
The constitution still guarantees fundamental human rights.
Another idea - everyone is eligible to vote for the presidency and House of Representatives, but only net taxpayers can vote for the Senate.
The idea that there should be some kind of checks and balances on spending taxpayer money, where the people who actually pay the taxes have a special status, isn’t fundamentally incompatible with any principle that I support.
Obviously the current system - where we collect $5T in taxes each year and spend $7T, creating an enormous and ever-growing debt that the system is clearly not able to control - is not working.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”
Yes, and what I outlined is one reasonable way to implement “the consent of the governed”, and still a lot more democratic and inclusive than the system the authors of that statement implemented for the next ~150 years after writing it!
Are you proposing that poor people would not be subject to the laws of the United States, as they would be provided no means to consent? That only the wealthy are to be governed, regulated, etc.?