I came across this post by Brivael Le Pogam on X:
I’ll assume you’re acting in good faith, because your reasoning is intuitive and 90% of people share it. But it rests on three factual errors, and it’s worth looking at them calmly.
Error 1: Elon’s fortune isn’t a pile of cash. It’s ownership of factories, rockets, and satellites. “Taking half his money,” in concrete terms, means forcing the sale of half of SpaceX and Tesla. The money doesn’t come out of a safe; it comes from the companies themselves, which fall under the control of foreign funds or states. You’re not redistributing cash; you’re dismantling a tool of production. It’s the difference between harvesting apples and chopping down the apple tree.
M. Le Pogam goes on to politely describe two other errors that his interlocutor is making regarding how the richest person in the world got that rich, and how an astonishing percentage of the the poorest people in the world have been lifted out of absolute poverty in my lifetime.
His post is well worth reading for the eloquence of his arguments. But there is another, quite separate reason to give it your attention. You see, Brivael Le Pogam never actually wrote “I’ll assume you’re acting in good faith, because your reasoning is intuitive and 90% of people share it.” He wrote, “Je vais partir du principe que tu es de bonne foi, parce que ton raisonnement est intuitif et que 90% des gens le partagent.” The thought behind them was in French, but the English words I read and admired for their eloquence were written by a computer program. Over the last couple of years we have quietly reached and passed the point where automatic translation is, for most practical purposes, invisible.
Elon Musk is not perfect – there are no perfect human beings, but he is clearly a person who is generally doing good.
Indeed he is a good test – if people (such as the Economist magazine people) attack Elon Musk – what they are really doing is showing what THEY are, i.e. showing that they themselves are on the side of evil – not Mr Musk.
I blame Walt Disney, or whichever of his employees created the Scrooge McDuck character. For the idea that the exceptionally wealthy are hoarding the wealth in the the way SMcD hoarded piles of gold, jewels and cash has bedevilled public thinking on taxation ever since.
Elon Musk doesn’t have $1tn in cash. He probably doesn’t have 0.1% of that in cash. He may even have a net debt in cash terms, in that he borrows money secured on his stock holdings, so whatever cash he holds is more than cancelled out by the borrowings that gave him the cash in the first place. The irony is that Elon is supposedly the wealthiest man in the world, yet most of his companies are loss making and were he to have to live on dividends paid out of their profits he’d be strictly a low level millionaire.
I also blame the media for the way they report such things, and I’m sure it is not a coincidence that their style reporting of how people who own large corporate assets ‘have $Xbn’ is assisting those who wish to tax wealth into the ground.
I think that there is also a misconception about corporations that supposedly make huge profits. Chains like McDonalds and supermarket chains actually make miniscule profits but on a massive scale.
What the foolish person to whom Brivael was replying does not seem to understand is that his concern to “solves a ton of problems in the world” is the exact opposite of true. First of all he is a trillionaire in theory, but if he actually sold his stock to try to get a trillion dollars (or pay some exorbitant tax bill) the value of his stock would immediately crash, he would no longer be a trillionaire and thousands of people working for him would lose their livelihoods.
Moreover even if the government did manage to tax all that money from him they would piss it away on crap not actually help people. Because that is what governments do.
But that isn’t the most important point — the work he is doing in robotics and AI in particular (though his other work is important too) are a thing that is actually going to “solve a ton of problems.” To give one simple example, robotics are five or ten years (Elon says three, so you can be sure that’s wrong 😉) when they are better, more dexterous and better trained than the best surgeons in the world. These surgeons can be dispatched for very little cost to places all around the world that don’t have access to that kind of medicine and save many lives. I’m not a doctor, and certainly not a surgeon though I have written a lot of software used in the operating room and know a lot of surgeons. One of the challenges of that profession is that if you are a patient you are literally trusting them with your life. So a surgeon can’t have a bad day. He can’t be a bit off today. It isn’t even enough to be HIS very best every day, really, as a surgeon you have to be THE very best every day. Surgery by robots offers us this option. Not only do they download the wealth of knowledge of all surgeons, but as the whole network of robotic surgeons around the world improves and learns, they can instantly share that information with all the other surgeons in the world. And so, some kid in a small African village can have his brain tumor removed by literally the best neurosurgeon in the world.
You might say — “There is no way I’d let a robot operate on me.” Let me ask you — if you were going to have LASIK surgery to fix your eyes, which would you prefer, the current robots that do it that can control the laser pulses within hundreds of nanometer distance, with microsecond accuracy, or a human doctor with a hand laser? Imagine that same level of precision and repeatability applied to hernia repair, or carcinoma resection, or heart valve replacement.
If “useless king” seriously think that the government will use that trillion dollars more effectively, do more good, than someone like Musk (or for that matter Bezos, or Brin or even as I hold my nose Gates), he really has no clue as to how the world works.
Fraser: you “have written a lot of software used in the operating room”.
In connection with our discussions about AI, let me ask you: is any of that software about medical imaging?
(Or anything that could be defined as AI.)
“… he really has no clue as to how the world works.”
That statement pretty much describes every socialist that I have ever met. Their entire worldview is based on misconceptions and childishly simplistic solutions to complex problems.
“Moreover even if the government did manage to tax all that money from him they would piss it away on crap not actually help people. Because that is what governments do.”
Absolutely. So after the politicians have siphoned half of this money into their own pockets and spaffed away the rest on various vanity projects until they have run out of money, what then? They can’t rob the billionairs again can they, there aren’t any. Most of the fools who think this way are decidedly middle class, how many rounds of state sponsored kleptomania do they suppose will be required before they themselves become “The Rich” and everything that they own is the next target for confiscation?
Reply
“after the politicians have siphoned half of this money into their own pockets and spaffed away the rest on various vanity projects until they have run out of money, what then? ”
There was someone who did a video on the whole ‘expropriating the wealth of billionaires’ thing and conclusively showed that even if you taxed away all of the US’s corporate and billionaire wealth, it would only fund the US government for about one year. And then would be gone, never to be seen again, as who would bother trying to create any more after that? Admittedly this was a few years ago when the idea of a trillionaire was a gleam in Elon Musk’s eye, but equally US government spending was a lot lower too, so it probably evens up to the same amount of time it would last.
Edit: it was 15 years ago, Iowahawk did the maths and Bill Whittle the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=661pi6K-8WQ
I feel I must disagree. They were assembled by a computer program from words written by people. Without access to vast amounts of human created training data, all a computer could do would be to run the text though a french/English dictionary and clean up the grammar. To say they were written by a computer is say that a record player can play the piano.
@Snorri Godhi
In connection with our discussions about AI, let me ask you: is any of that software about medical imaging?
I did not write software to do AI analysis of images, but I worked with the guys who did. It was exceptionally cool technology that reduced harm to patients and dramatically reduced risk to surgical staff by massively reducing the amount of X Rays they needed.
@jim
There was someone who did a video on the whole ‘expropriating the wealth of billionaires’
The data is readily available. The top 100 richest people in the USA have a net worth of about $5 trillion. If they sold it all the stock prices of their companies would crash, probably 50%. So taxing 100% of the wealth of the top richest people in the country would net maybe, generously, $3 trillion. The federal budget is $7 trillion and tax revenues without this change are about $5 trillion. Of course all that selling off of the companies would crash the economy creating massive unemployment so those federal tax receipts would go way down, maybe also to $3 trillion. So it would pay the deficit (not the spending, just the deficit) for about a year. And then the country would be in ruins, and all the creative people would have left and nobody would ever invest a single dollar in the United States again.
Of course if you left the money with the guys running the AI companies, we could realistically expect to see 10% or 20% growth in GDP annually for the next five years, making everyone insanely rich and liquidating the US national debt.
So, in summary, it probably isn’t a good idea.☠
I read this article today which points out that the IPO not only made Musk a trillionaire, it also created 400 new billionaires and 4400 new millionaires, most of them line staff workers whoy have been with SpaceX for a decade. As the article points out, the only people Bernie Sanders made a millionaire was himself.
BTW if you expand it out to the top 1000 richest people in the country you can extend your 12 months paying the deficit by about three months. If you go with the top 10,000 you get another month. IT is hard to fathom just how much money the federal government spends.
Fraser Orr – yes, trying to take the wealth of the rich would not help the poor, it would make poverty vastly worse.
The left know this – they have known this in America since at least the very early 20th century when Mayor Curley of Boston taxed and regulated many business enterprises out of the city – many left or just went bust.
Mayor Curley was many things but he was NOT stupid – he knew very well that he was not reducing poverty, that his policies were increasing poverty – and that was what he was COUNTING ON.
Mayor Curley was counting on an increase in poverty – because the poor would become dependent on the government and so would vote for him, Mayor Curley. If they had good jobs in successful business enterprises – why would they vote for him? Prosperity was no good – for HIM.
It is called “The Curley Effect” – the worse things get, the better for the activists who made them get worse.
The people behind, for example, the policies being followed in California – know all this, they know.
In the last section of his book “Socialism” (published more than a century ago now) Ludwig Von Mises wrote a section called “Destructuionism” – showing the destructive effects of “Social Reform” – higher government spending, taxes, regulations, state owned enterprises, and so on.
The mistake Mises made was, like F.A. Hayek, to assume that the left (the leaders of the left – not the ordinary dupes) did not know-all-this – they did know, and they do know.
For example, Herbert Spencer explained the terrible effects of Progressive Social Reform, how it made poverty worse than it-would-otherwise-be, back in the 1880s (“Man Versus The State”) – the leading Fabians, such as Beatrice and Sydney Webb, were well aware of this.
They knew – and the leaders of the left know now.
They lust after POWER – total and unlimited POWER. And strong and independent families have no need of such an unlimited state – so strong and independent families, must by a mixture of economic and CULTURAL policies, be-destroyed.
When the population is atomised to desperate individuals who have no real community and no real family, and can not maintain themselves – then they will submit to, indeed demand, an absolute (unlimited) state – total and absolute power for the leftist rulers.
Although rigging elections does help things along.
For example, Los Angeles – where the choice for Mayor is now between two totalitarians who are filled with hatred for liberty. That is the “choice” produced by election fraud on a truly massive scale.
And, at the Los Angeles County level, we are expected to believe that the people voted for an even higher Sales Tax – if anyone really believes that most real voters supported this tax increase, I have a nice bridge to sell you.
The most important country in the West is the United States – and the three largest cities in the United States are New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
And the position of these three cities is, due to the economic and cultural domination of the left in these three cities, hopeless – without hope, the three largest cities in the most important Western country are going to fall apart.
This is important – they are the three largest cities, in the most important Western country, and they are going to fall apart.
Someone on the Diabetes UK Support Forum is recommending a book called We Need To Tax Billionairs by Gabriel Zucman. It is part of a very long thread and I can’t work out how to post a link that doesn’t include the whole thing. The guy who posted it also has a profile that includes his they/them pronouns.
I watched a YouTube video about the guy who created the Swatch brand and pretty much single handedly saved the Swiss watch industry. I can’t actually remember his name now but he died as a self made billionaire. How many other people would have been significantly poorer if he just hadn’t bothered?
Stonyground.
It is not a secret that higher top rates of Income Tax AND higher rates of Capital Gains Tax produce LESS revenue over time – less, not more, revenue.
The leaders of the left are well aware of this – they are well aware that the higher top tax rates they support produce LESS revenue over time.
So their motivation for supporting higher top tax rates is clearly not to get more money to “help the poor”.
There is nothing new in this – for example the Medici family in Florence established high tax rates – not to “help the poor”, but to prevent rival families becoming rich and challenging their rule.
New York City and the State of California have the highest tax rates in the United States – are these places known for equality? Of course not – they are known for radical, extreme, inequality.
It was the same in Florence at the start of the 1700s – a few very rich people (the ruling family) and a mass of beggars, in the late 1700s radical reductions in the top tax rates radically changed the situation.
The Papal States were even more radical – Pope Gregory (the one after whom the present calendar is named) declared that anyone who could not prove “just title” to their property would have it confiscated.
The leftist dream! Many rich people losing their lands and homes.
And after this were the Papal States known for lack of poverty?
No – they were known for having some of the worst poverty in Europe.
Aristotle condemned the policy of tax-and-spend 14 centuries ago – pointing out that it did not reduce poverty, quite the opposite.