> 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.

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.

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.

> I do not understand why anyone else would go along with this.

Aspirations.

I don’t understand what there is to gain for anyone by making the implicit system we have today explicit?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"?

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.

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).

Well, they did /something/ right ...

Who is going to say what is and isn't acceptable? You?

> 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...

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).

> ...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.

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?

>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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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).

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.

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 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.

> If you go over that, you must be broken up, by, say, beheading, or being drawn and quartered.

How is this not hate speech?

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.

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.

People who do live here also have terrible ideas. Terrible ideas can come from anywhere!

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.

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.

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?

He’s German who lived in Canada for too long.

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.

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?

The way that's gonna go is "We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing."

> 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.

"Eat the Rich"

Words have a well-defined meaning. Fascism, as established by Benito Mussolini, has nothing to do with oligarchy or plutarchy.

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!"

No I think most commenters are responding to that. It's a shitty take from a shitty billionaire.

The majority of americans think their taxes need to be lower, and the taxes for the rich need to be higher.

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.

Yes absolutely, famously American cities run crack dens using municipal taxes.

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.

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.

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.

“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”