Is there some way to disabuse people of the notion that higher taxes would help here? Taxes don't really affect entity size. In significant ways they do the opposite, because business expenses are deductions, so using profits for expansion becomes more favored over paying them out as dividends the more you increase the tax rate.
What you need here is antitrust enforcement and lower barriers to entry so that there are more companies that are each smaller, and correspondingly more millionaires and fewer billionaires.
Using graduated rates for corporations isn't used because it doesn't work. The formal entity size is disconnected from the business size.
How many entities is "Google"? Is it one or is Search one company and Android another and YouTube another and so on? If they need to get the size of each unit below some threshold they can just file more LLCs.
Just use the size of the parent company, you say? Okay, which is the parent company, Google or Vanguard? If it's Vanguard then every public company exceeds the largest size threshold. If it isn't, they can use something which is formally an investment fund as the parent company and get as big as they want.
And even if you could do it, you would then create a perverse incentive for the government, because then breaking up those large companies into smaller ones would reduce tax revenue. When you should just break them up to begin with and actually solve the problem.
More regulation. Specifically requiring worker-owned means of production: re-organize the AI model companies as mutuals and mandate (by law) that their only customers can be individual-contributor-level workers or worker unions. Ditto with robotics.
Do the math on that one. There are 8 billion people. OpenAI revenue -- not profit -- is ~$25B, which is ~$3/year. That's if they have zero expenses for engineers or land or equipment or electricity, which isn't the case now and never will be. Their current profit is a number of substantial magnitude with a minus sign in front of it.
The funny thing about all of this is that it's basically taking revenue from the major media companies to the benefit of OpenAI's customers more than OpenAI itself, which is exactly the redistribution of wealth people seem to be demanding, but that's not how it gets characterized because the media companies are the ones characterizing it.
And there is some case to be made that disincentivizing human content creation is bad, but what that case really looks like is the argument against having the AI users free ride on an investment made by Sony or Comcast. Then what their proposals end up looking like is a tax paid by everyone where the money goes to those huge corporations. And of all the things we shouldn't do about this, that's the thing we shouldn't do the most.
Its obviously impractical for a number of reasons, I just find it frustrating because based on the last century of IP law that should be what's happening. The big corporations won the fight on file-sharing so they ought to at least be accountable to their own legal arguments.
This doesn't solve any of the problems. It's not a 19th century factory running on leather-belt-harnessed steam engines. There aren't 10,000 workers. There are at most a few dozen "individual-contributor-level workers". You're still concentrating all of that onto a really small number of people. Who, incidentally, have demonstrated time and again that their behavior tends to imitate the big powerful robber barons' behavior of old (because there are relatively few of them and no one to dilute the aggregate back to your preferred leftist mindsets).
Sounds great! If I'm a worker who owns the means of production and I want to sell that stake to someone else, am I allowed to do so? If not, do I actually "own" anything?
No, the means of productions are owned by _the workers_, not by you as an individual. You want to stop working there? You're welcome to trade your spot with another worker.
And before any "uuuuh this can't work uuuh people want to get rich uuuh", you are literally talking about the community that has made open source software, the most commie thing imaginable on earth.
I would look to the past, but only as far back as free market capitalism, to replace the crony capitalism that we have right now in the US. Both have their issues, but nothing compared to communism. There's still time to correct course without that nonsense being involved.
> I would look to the past, but only as far back as free market capitalism, to replace the crony capitalism that we have right now in the US.
Free market capitalism won't save us from a future were automation reaches a point that it creates a large, unemployable underclass. And that's the future the tech and business elite have been promising us (at least until they belatedly realized that was the quiet part they shouldn't be saying out loud).
I'm going to take their word on those promises, when considering regulation to constrain them.
> Both have their issues, but nothing compared to communism. There's still time to correct course without that nonsense being involved.
I would like a communism that is basically capitalism, but with the capital more-or-less evenly distributed among the workers. Keep a lot of the economic system, but replace it with other things: mutuals, worker-owned businesses, maybe 50-50 JVs between labor and investors, some "all of the above" combination, etc.
Ah yes, the most capitalistic country on the planet, where billionaires quite literally buy out public officials isn't capitalistic enough, and isn't "real capitalism".
Watch out, you're almost sounding like the "not real communism" boys.
>Both have their issues, but nothing compared to communism.
Some would say leaving a few million people die of thirst and hunger every year because it's "not profitable to fix it", or having a population of dozens of millions in your own country suffering of mental health problems, inability to get basic healthcare or even living conditions for the past 50 years might be a sign that your favorite system is fundamentally immoral, but hey.
Countries under embargoes are failing?! Countries that cannot get oil, electricity, goods because the most imperialistic country on earth cannot see them succeed are failing ? Well golly gee how could that be
cuba has a longer life expectancy than the US despite all of that btw
> Yes, because communism has always worked out so well in the past.
Yeah, won't anyone think of the poor oligarchs, openly fantasizing about creating a permanent underclass?
And the only thing that didn't work out well in the past was central planning by state-owned businesses with 20th century technology. The structure I proposed is nothing like that.
You realize that the folks with these fortunes are the workers who built the companies, right? If there's one place that's "worked-owned" it's a startup. And the VCs who also ended up with stocks did quite a bit of work along the way-- as well as investing capital.
We're not talking about widows with a pension who are just interested in dividends. This isn't some utility.
It seems like that just supercharges brain drain by incentivizing all the smartest and richest people to just move away to a place with lower taxes and less bureaucracy.
if the trend remains without the USD being the reserve currency then maybe? Id lean as a first guess that easy access to lots of free money is the bigger driver
Not much of an AI thing, just the standard "rich people should have (control over) their resources confiscated" that keeps popping up in various forms.
Higher corporate taxes and local control please, thanks.
Is there some way to disabuse people of the notion that higher taxes would help here? Taxes don't really affect entity size. In significant ways they do the opposite, because business expenses are deductions, so using profits for expansion becomes more favored over paying them out as dividends the more you increase the tax rate.
What you need here is antitrust enforcement and lower barriers to entry so that there are more companies that are each smaller, and correspondingly more millionaires and fewer billionaires.
> Taxes don't really affect entity size.
A progressive tax would, no? You could explicitly tax larger entities more.
Using graduated rates for corporations isn't used because it doesn't work. The formal entity size is disconnected from the business size.
How many entities is "Google"? Is it one or is Search one company and Android another and YouTube another and so on? If they need to get the size of each unit below some threshold they can just file more LLCs.
Just use the size of the parent company, you say? Okay, which is the parent company, Google or Vanguard? If it's Vanguard then every public company exceeds the largest size threshold. If it isn't, they can use something which is formally an investment fund as the parent company and get as big as they want.
And even if you could do it, you would then create a perverse incentive for the government, because then breaking up those large companies into smaller ones would reduce tax revenue. When you should just break them up to begin with and actually solve the problem.
More regulation. Specifically requiring worker-owned means of production: re-organize the AI model companies as mutuals and mandate (by law) that their only customers can be individual-contributor-level workers or worker unions. Ditto with robotics.
>worker-owned means of production
On a similar note I keep thinking that having your "content" used as training material for a model ought to entitle you to a proportional stake.
Do the math on that one. There are 8 billion people. OpenAI revenue -- not profit -- is ~$25B, which is ~$3/year. That's if they have zero expenses for engineers or land or equipment or electricity, which isn't the case now and never will be. Their current profit is a number of substantial magnitude with a minus sign in front of it.
The funny thing about all of this is that it's basically taking revenue from the major media companies to the benefit of OpenAI's customers more than OpenAI itself, which is exactly the redistribution of wealth people seem to be demanding, but that's not how it gets characterized because the media companies are the ones characterizing it.
And there is some case to be made that disincentivizing human content creation is bad, but what that case really looks like is the argument against having the AI users free ride on an investment made by Sony or Comcast. Then what their proposals end up looking like is a tax paid by everyone where the money goes to those huge corporations. And of all the things we shouldn't do about this, that's the thing we shouldn't do the most.
Its obviously impractical for a number of reasons, I just find it frustrating because based on the last century of IP law that should be what's happening. The big corporations won the fight on file-sharing so they ought to at least be accountable to their own legal arguments.
This doesn't solve any of the problems. It's not a 19th century factory running on leather-belt-harnessed steam engines. There aren't 10,000 workers. There are at most a few dozen "individual-contributor-level workers". You're still concentrating all of that onto a really small number of people. Who, incidentally, have demonstrated time and again that their behavior tends to imitate the big powerful robber barons' behavior of old (because there are relatively few of them and no one to dilute the aggregate back to your preferred leftist mindsets).
You've really lost the plot.
> worker-owned means of production
Sounds great! If I'm a worker who owns the means of production and I want to sell that stake to someone else, am I allowed to do so? If not, do I actually "own" anything?
No, the means of productions are owned by _the workers_, not by you as an individual. You want to stop working there? You're welcome to trade your spot with another worker.
And before any "uuuuh this can't work uuuh people want to get rich uuuh", you are literally talking about the community that has made open source software, the most commie thing imaginable on earth.
Yes, because communism has always worked out so well in the past.
it seems to be working quite well in the present, if you look at china
...after they abandoned communism ("let some people and some regions get rich first") and liberalized their economy?
Capitalism is failing us right now. Why are you looking in the past?
I would look to the past, but only as far back as free market capitalism, to replace the crony capitalism that we have right now in the US. Both have their issues, but nothing compared to communism. There's still time to correct course without that nonsense being involved.
> I would look to the past, but only as far back as free market capitalism, to replace the crony capitalism that we have right now in the US.
Free market capitalism won't save us from a future were automation reaches a point that it creates a large, unemployable underclass. And that's the future the tech and business elite have been promising us (at least until they belatedly realized that was the quiet part they shouldn't be saying out loud).
I'm going to take their word on those promises, when considering regulation to constrain them.
> Both have their issues, but nothing compared to communism. There's still time to correct course without that nonsense being involved.
I would like a communism that is basically capitalism, but with the capital more-or-less evenly distributed among the workers. Keep a lot of the economic system, but replace it with other things: mutuals, worker-owned businesses, maybe 50-50 JVs between labor and investors, some "all of the above" combination, etc.
Ah yes, the most capitalistic country on the planet, where billionaires quite literally buy out public officials isn't capitalistic enough, and isn't "real capitalism".
Watch out, you're almost sounding like the "not real communism" boys.
>Both have their issues, but nothing compared to communism.
Some would say leaving a few million people die of thirst and hunger every year because it's "not profitable to fix it", or having a population of dozens of millions in your own country suffering of mental health problems, inability to get basic healthcare or even living conditions for the past 50 years might be a sign that your favorite system is fundamentally immoral, but hey.
You should move to Venezuela or Cuba. Then see how it's "failing".
Countries under embargoes are failing?! Countries that cannot get oil, electricity, goods because the most imperialistic country on earth cannot see them succeed are failing ? Well golly gee how could that be
cuba has a longer life expectancy than the US despite all of that btw
Late-stage capitalism has always worked out so well in the future.
> Yes, because communism has always worked out so well in the past.
Yeah, won't anyone think of the poor oligarchs, openly fantasizing about creating a permanent underclass?
And the only thing that didn't work out well in the past was central planning by state-owned businesses with 20th century technology. The structure I proposed is nothing like that.
You realize that the folks with these fortunes are the workers who built the companies, right? If there's one place that's "worked-owned" it's a startup. And the VCs who also ended up with stocks did quite a bit of work along the way-- as well as investing capital.
We're not talking about widows with a pension who are just interested in dividends. This isn't some utility.
Isn’t this basically the situation in Europe?
It seems like that just supercharges brain drain by incentivizing all the smartest and richest people to just move away to a place with lower taxes and less bureaucracy.
i dont think we know enough to say it does.
if the trend remains without the USD being the reserve currency then maybe? Id lean as a first guess that easy access to lots of free money is the bigger driver
Not much of an AI thing, just the standard "rich people should have (control over) their resources confiscated" that keeps popping up in various forms.