Hard work is often necessary but not sufficient. You can work very hard moving a pile of sand with a pair of tweezers but you’re not going to get wealthy doing that.
The people who simply think that because they worked hard wealth should just come to them are going to remain confused until they figure out that what you work on is also important.
I think the newspapers and books alone still probably made Waterson a decent amount of money. More than enough to live comfortably forever. I remember Scott Adams (of Dilbert) once saying his syndication deal was something like $6 million per year, I'm sure Calvin and Hobbes was at least comparable and the books certainly sold well. Newspapers used to be absolute cash cows.
Words exist in a context. "User was banned from a site" and "Book is banned" have different connotations. You have to be purposely obtuse to conflate these.
just like how you can figure out when tom/dan say "we've banned this account" doesn't mean "banned this account from the internet", you can use similar context clues to figure out "banned book" doesn't mean "banned across the world and is now illegal".
I mean, when you're like "I have to make a hidden wifi server in a light bulb to distribute these books" that does kind of imply some dystopian totalitarian state that will put you to death for reading those books or something and not the reality that they are given their own highlighted section in literally every single bookstore in existence.
Did you read the article? The author doesn’t say anything like that.
It’s pretty clear this was mostly a fun idea with a bit of “could be useful in this scenario” motivation, which they mention came from reading a short story.
None of the other workers know how to build a house. The electrician doesn't know how to build a house. The carpenter doesn't know how to build a house. The guy hanging drywall doesn't know how to build a house.
They know how to do one piece and finding and coordinating all those people (something else they don't know how to do) is work on its own that is valuable.
Who is going to cap how much a company is allowed to be worth? Or how much of the company you start you are allowed to own? Why should anyone have the power to do that? That is a far more evil power than any billionaire has.
So "enough of us" can take anything by forcing the asset to be valued at an artificially high value, force them to sell it for taxes, and then reduce the price down again to keep it ourselves?
No, it's called rule OF law. Not rule BY law. We create a law, like property rights, and we work within that framework. We don't suddenly decide that property rights don't matter any more because someone happens to have stuff we particularly want to take. That's how dictatorships work.
It would seem quite an essential liberty for a democratic polity to be able to impose this thing called "taxes". I suppose it's up to you to decide whether that is compatible with the rule of law and property rights.
We already have taxes, the vast majority of which are paid by the wealthy. Taxes are not a cap on allowable net worth. That is a different thing altogether. That is economic suicide.
Most of the rah rah billionaires shouldn't be allowed people are just proposing a wealth tax from what I've been told. If I'm wrong I'm open to hearing about it.
Wealth taxes are also economic suicide but most of the "rah rah billionaires shouldn't be allowed" people seem to have absolutely no idea how anything works and think billionaires have billions of dollars sitting in their checking accounts and they could easily write an "end homelessness" check but just don't because they're mean.
I don't really care to advocate much for wealth taxes since I don't particularly like them over other options. I just don't think imposing wealth taxes (even if they're progressive to the point that it's higher than the average growth rate of, e.g., equities, or maybe even just the risk-free rate when wealth is in the billions) is something that ought to be considered "how dictatorships work".
So you know, agree to disagree, I'm not going to argue anything other than that I don't particularly care for the framing of it as dictatorial or mob rule because the same can be done for other taxes. Which I have done and it doesn't appear you wish to dispute anyway.
Once again, OP is proposing not a tax but a wealth cap. A tax takes a percentage of whatever - income, wealth, transaction. It does not impose a limit on how much you are allowed to have. That is an entirely different phenomenon. We do have a whole constitutional amendment about the government unreasonably seizing your property and saying "well if it's more than this amount the government gets to take it all" is an unreasonable seizure of property.
I assume by OP you mean chipotle_coyote, which, reading their comment again, does not propose any specific policies and in fact explicitly disclaims knowing the specific best policy for the policy outcomes that they desire, which is anything that adresses the level of wealth inequality we currently have.
It literally says “what if people could only make a hundred million dollars?” I agree they do not provide any specific details about how to implement that, because it is an incredibly stupid idea that would be impossible to implement. He does say he doesn’t know what the best policy is. Well, I am here to give a hint: not that.
Someone working a job they freely chose is not being exploited. This word is losing all meaning. Amazon pays more with better benefits than most other warehouse jobs.
> Someone working a job they freely chose is not being exploited.
This article from 2022 has something to say about that:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/22/amazon-wo...
Amazon is right to be worried – its staff turnover rate is astronomical. Before the pandemic, Amazon was losing about 3% of its workforce weekly, or 150% annually. By contrast the annual average turnover in transportation, warehousing and utilities was 49% in 2021 and in retail it was 64.6%, less than half of Amazon’s turnover.
Sure if people could just pick whatever they want we'd all be sitting on the beach having drinks with supermodels, but then who's going to make the drinks?
People can pick among various jobs. If they picked warehouse worker that was the best option available to them. Taking it away means they have to choose something worse.
And a job is not a lifetime commitment. Warehouse worker may be a stop on the way to something else. I worked in a warehouse for a while, now I don't. People are not static blobs.
Maybe it's Amazon's predatory pricing and regulatory capture that drove most other nicer job opportunities out of business.
I used to work retail selling software and games as a teen. It was a nice starter job talking about the things I liked most. There were 7 places I could do that back in the day. Now the kids have only 3 such options in my area. Many areas now have none.
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