It’s Shopify’s Tobi Lutke.
A reminder that he’s behind Build Canada and Build Toronto, and that Build Toronto’s Eric Lombardi is running for the Ontario Librral Party leadership as we speak.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
That is why we need to tax them.
Yes. We need to… tax… them.
Im sorry, im hard of hearing. Did you say Axe them?
Only after we decide what the best BBQ sauce is that goes on a rack of billionaire ribs!
… or otherwise cause them to stop existing. I’m flexible on that.
As flexible as a rope on a tree?
There’s ways to make that happen…
Talk like this is almost like they are BEGGING for the guillotines to start rolling out.
They’ve been begging for decades
Wealthy arrogance is suicidal.
Why should billionaires get to vote? They live in an alternate reality.
They shouldn’t even exist.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
Financial obesity
I love it.
I just want world wide wealth caps. 10 million is the max that any person canboen or control. Any additional income after that goes 100% straight to taxes.
This simple rule has wide spread implications from ending poverty to likely ending wars, removing power from narcissist politicians, and souch more
I feel like this is a copypasta from somewhere. I think I saw it before I need to start using it.
I throw it at any thread I find relating to financial inequality.
It’s lazy, but it’s honest work.
I love that term
Billionaires are such fucking parasites…
When you said “under fire” I thought you meant literally, as in there is a squad of soldiers currently training their machine guns on the lad’s home.
One could dream
Has he considered that voting is free, but bullets are cheap? If he were smart, he’d be wary of taking the ballot box out of the equation.
This is Canada, nobody is going to shoot him. Getting torn apart by a mob is not out of the equation though.
Slathered in maple syrup, rolled in worms and fed to a bloodthirsty swarm of Canada geese.
Under fire? Why do you guys keep missing?
They are fighting over what is the best bbq sauce rather than aiming.
I just want world wide wealth caps. 10 million is the max that any person canboen or control. Any additional income after that goes 100% straight to taxes.
This simple rule has wide spread implications from ending poverty to likely ending wars, removing power from narcissist politicians, and souch more
Yes. but corruption always exists. Caps just push that wealth underground. There are no simple answers like that.
That won’t be as easy as you think. Again, how would you do that if monetary incentives are mostly gone? If nobody is poor enough to help with evil plans, evil plans become really hard.
Heck, add in another simple rule: make all wealth information public. If nobody is poor and nobody really rich, there won’t be much incentives to abuse that information and if we know peoples worth, it will be glaringly obvious that somebody is cheating
I know that this is an obvious oversimplification bit small changes like these areuch easier to implement than say "let’s all become anarchist and the world will be fine!’ because that will never happen.
These small changes keep everything else the same and at least it solves a huge list of problems from people dying from hunger to most crime to most wars to climate change. All of these mentioned are mostly only possible because we allow extreme wealth.
Take extreme wealth away and the world would be so much better
On it’s own that won’t end poverty, but coupled with something like a basic income it could. It would definitely end all the extreme wealth stupidity, and if it was retroactive nobody could really flee with their wealth, like they might manage to with a lesser wealth tax.
You might want to go up to 15, though. There’s bound to be some sympathetic retiree couple with a house in inner Vancouver.
In the 1970’s, $1 million and you were rich.Today, it’s $10 million and even that is less than a lottery win. The limit would have to be $100 million.
Why?
Why 100 million?
I get that the number of 10 million is arbitrary, hell, I just semi randomly picked it, but a 10 million net worth gets you A LOT more than you actually need.
Why allow 100 million, though? 10 million is more than any person would need to love an actually full life with travel and plenty of whatever, and you could still invest some money in a small company. Want a bigger one? Join a bunch of people and make a bigger one.
100 million gets into the range where youncan project power over others and that is the entire thing that got us where we are. No person should hold large amounts of power, humanity has shown over and over that that is a very bad idea.
Inflationary pressures and regression towards the mean. Whatever the cap is, it will also be a cap on the mean. That is, the cap will pull the mean up towards it. I mentioned lottery prizes. Some have been in the $60 - 70 million dollar range. I think this is an indication that people generally are no attracted to having a wealth in this range, and are comfortable with the idea. That is, people generally think $70 million is something they would like to have, so a cap of $100 million would be more palatable. That cap is just above the limit most middle class people would consider as ‘super rich’. As an aside, there are some super-homes that go for $50 million in our large cities. It is more about psychology than economics.
The multimillionaires would end inflation very quickly.
The hell they would. Inflation is what makes them multimillionaires. Once you become that rich, inflation does not affect you. 89%of your income gores to investments, things you WANT to increase in price.
Inflation would steadily decrease their real wealth cap. Wealth includes investments.
Wrong.Inflation increases the value of their investments. The stock market relies completely on inflation to increase profits. Every inflationary increase directly results in increase profits. That is the purpose of inflation.
Right, but I’m talking about the hypothetical in which their wealth is capped at a fixed number of dollars. They’d reach the cap and then raise the ladder up after them.
A 100% income tax means there’s no incentive to remove profits from a business beyond that income, since you can’t spend any of it, so it will just encourage increased accounting trickery to justify “business expenses” for things like purchasing private islands, sports cars, and luxury vacations.
80% is high enough; for every $10 million they withdraw for personal spending, they keep 2, and the other $8 million would go to pay for the services requested to run the rest of the country that enables them to produce their wealth. (Including all their employees and customers.)
Then we still benefit from the efficiencies inherent in the profit motive while having the ultra wealthy pay their fair share.
That was a wealth tax, not a tax on income. So, nobody would be worth more than 10 million, and earning 10 million is almost out of the question. That means you can’t own a huge business by yourself, to start with.
Get a high salary, “lose it” on crypto, retire in Belize.
Well, the “get a high salary” part is definitely doing most of the hard work.
That being said, yes, there’d still be a way, if you’re patient, have the income and don’t care about legality. There’d be a risk of getting caught, which always scales with the amount you’ve hidden. But, maybe you’re smarter than the next white-collar criminal.
If the point is to flatten out the class system, this policy would do it, though.
I might argue that if any single individual is in the position to collect $10M+/year, the economic system is already dysfunctional. That individual is operating as a gatekeeper rather than a value center and the position they occupy needs to be broken up and reorganized.
I could imagine a top surgeon or pro athlete legitimately earning that much from their own labor alone.
a top surgeon
Tops are a dime a dozen. Bottom surgery is where the big money is at.
a top surgeon or pro athlete
Entertainers and life savers are very different categories of value to society.
They also dress differently
I used to work at Shopify. Wouldn’t recommend it.
Anything you can share without doxxing yourself too much?
My brother was one of the first 10 or so hires of Shopify so seeing the little company grow into the massive company it is now in the 2010s made me like this guy a lot. He seemed to treat the team with respect and recognized/rewarded them for their work.
Then he totally ended up being yet another shitty billionaire (MAGA supporter iirc).
Thankfully, my brother quit before Toby’s dickishness was made obvious, and so he remains the nicest, down-to-earth guy that I know.
Hang em
Why is everyone that has worked on Ruby on Rails a total and utter douchebag? should be studied how that one project seems to have spawned some of the biggest bigoted asshole douches in the tech industry.
Lutke is a moron just like DHH is a moron and surprise surprise they’re both from RoR.
Maybe naming projects based on expensive pebbles attracts people with an affinity for signs of wealth?
Obligatory reminder that the inventor of Javascript is a homophobe and a crypto scammer. We never needed it! Download NoScript today!
Under fire? Put him in the fire.
A slow burning fire
He’s right though. The oligarchs having to own news and social media to get the election outcomes they want, and then also having to lobby those politicians to enact the right policies is incredibly inefficient. It would be simpler if the politicians were unelected and simply payrolled employees of the owner class.
That sounds an awful lot like Feudalism in the making.
Pretty clear sign that democracy is an impediment to capitalism.
