Comment on There are Minimum Wages, Why Not a Maximum Wage?
Maggoty@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoWow, just running off into the wild blue yonder there. First of all, they already do all of that. A properly funded IRS would be able to go after them. There is only so much they can do.
Second who needs a 3 billion dollar payday? 10 million, just a hair shy of an entire order of magnitude less; is enough to fly first class, own a mansion, own the luxury cars, attend every major sporting league championship, vacation in Bora Bora resorts half the year, and just generally party your way through the entire rest of life.
Heck once you reach 1 million in stocks you can generally just stop working and live a normal life off the dividends alone.
You’re out here defending literal bond villain levels of money. A billion dollars could employ a 100 people at 100k and leave you 990 million dollars left. That’s enough money to actually have a private militia. (100k is the going rate for good guard contracts with combat experience)
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Don’t mistake my argument for a defence of billionaires. I don’t care for them any more than anyone else here. I just want to make sure that any changes we make to the law actually work and accomplish their intended goal. Poorly-thought-out laws are worse than doing nothing: they can backfire.
To give an example, the government of Canada passed a law called the Online News Act. This law targeted Google and Facebook with a special tax, called a link tax, that would force them to pay every time they or one of their users linked to a Canadian news site. The money collected by these link taxes would then go to pay to support Canadian news agencies in general.
The law backfired. Google struck a deal with the largest Canadian newspapers to pay them a flat fee but Facebook went ahead and blocked every single link to a news site for all users in Canada. This left thousands of small, local, Canadian newspapers high and dry (they were getting most of their traffic from Facebook posts linking to them). A law intended to benefit Canadian news publishers ended up putting most of them out of business.
The point of my previous example is to show that if a company is privately held (not traded on the stock market) then how much it is actually worth is not clear or obvious at all. This makes imposition of the $1B maximum wealth limit extremely difficult to properly implement.
Maggoty@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Or, if that’s your only concern, you make sure there’s a provision stating a company’s worth isn’t an issue unless someone is using it to fund their lifestyle.