this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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The issue is a bit more... circular than that.
Certain things, certain ventures, need more money than that. And in a free, capitalist society you want people to be able to achieve such goals and ventures.
Problem is, once you pool that wealth into a company (the very meaning of the word, like companion, meaning "together", or more literally "with others, in a multitude"), imbalances will occur. What if you start it out as a group of 5, each putting in a billion, then the company, without employees, becomes successful, but due to how it worked out, one person was the main brain behind the success so they get a bigger share? Suddenly the company is worth 25 billion, 15bn belonging to the genius, and the rest having 2.5bn stake. How do you regulate that?
Also what if that money is truly for operating costs, because this company is setting up a brand new town, so they're literally paying dozens of construction crews, establishing shops and whatnot for people to use once they move in, and so on? Do you just take any excess wealth away?
Or do you let them continue operating knowing full well that someone in the company will try to use the operational funds as their personal bank account?
The idea of a wealth limit in an optimal society is good, but in our current imperfect crap, it's never going to work, because it will put limits to what we can achieve in general.
Mind you I do agree that billionaires shouldn't exist and should be taxed out of existence but that's not done with a wealth ceiling.
Companies shouldn't be creating towns, period. If we need new cities, their locations and forms should be chosen by the people. By elections. Not by some lone asshole whose only urban planning qualification is that he happens to have a large pile of money.
Towns were just an example of scale - a more realistic example would be, albeit futuristic, is whatever space-faring vessels we'll build, and I don't mean Musk and his rocket toys he keeps blowing up, I mean actual interplanetary and deep space ships, which will cost about the same to build as a small town.
Do you want the right to building those to be retained by the government only? Or would you prefer if the right people with the appropriate resources could do it too?
It is kinda done with a wealth ceiling if you tax the higher wealth more, but yeah let them make infinite money somehow if they are at the top end paying 99% of it back into society.
This doesn't just happen. How did the value go up so much? Are their sales not taxed? Will the liquidation of this value not be taxed?
The core of literally any anti-billionaire economic policy needs to be the taxing of loans made on potential valuations. With that, the numbers you gave are effectively irrelevant because there's no more infinite money glitch. They have to liquidate assets to spend money, and must pay taxes on that.
If a company gets so big that it "needs" billions of dollars to build its own town then that company's profits and decisions should be split among its stakeholders (i.e. all of its employees).
If someone starts a company then they should be rewarded with profits if it succeeds. Contrary to capitalist arguments. The big brains behind companies don't do it to make 15 billion dollars. They do it instead to get obscenely rich, and despite our completely warped views with companies like Tesla and Amazon, "obscenely rich" starts in the hundreds of millions of dollars maybe a billion dollars if someone was an idiot.
On top of that there are thousands of examples throughout history that show that people don't invent things solely to make money and the original big brains behind company innovations were not necessarily profit motivated.