Of course combined with a general education in economics.
I always thought it highly unfair and detrimental to society that some start from zero while a small number of people are handed everything to them.
Please explain to me why my idea is foolish. Because I believe it will make society flourish.
Consistently devaluing everybody else's investment (via new shares) is essentially just mandatory inflation, on top of existing inflation.
Not to sound rude, but this is basic econ stuff. You can't just increase the supply of something and expect the value to keep increasing.
It’s not “everybody else’s”. I am not saying the value of the shares will increase, I am saying the value will be redistributed.
Inflation is a tax on poor already, so why not double-tax the rich via share dilution and Zucman tax.
It's a common trope but no. "The poor" don't live / operate on savings. "The poor", kinda by definition live by earning a paycheck or receiving subsidies and spending it all. As long as you have a stable situation (say, fixed x% inflation day in, day out) then what currency that paycheck is denominated in, is totally irrelevant. Money in minus money out equal still no savings in any dodgy currency. (It's different when there is the chaos of hyper-inflation - where the paycheck of one week cannot buy the groceries of the next.)
Inflation is a tax on people with savings and investments. Not on the poor but on everybody else. Poor retirees, yes.
In reality, most poor people I know does manage to save a tiny, miniscule amount each month. What they can't afford, is investing. Because the amount saved is so tiny, many investment apparatus doesn't apply to their tiny savings (fees just gobble up any gains made on that tiny amount) and they often desperately need the liquidity for their ever unpredictable life circumstances. These factors are ofc made worse in country like US where liquidity is your safety net, not social safety nets.
So, whatever small, tiny amount of savings they have is disproportionately being obliterated by inflation. Because unlike middle class that can throw it in a fund that can keep it above inflation rate, their savings are often cash, taking direct, unmitigated hit of the inflation
Still: inflation not a tax on the poor but a tax on anyone with savings and investments. Some of which are poor, yes.
One might say "liquidity" savings are particularly difficult to protect - but really, many investments are not a great defense either. Defending any investments against inflation is difficult. Among which, "throwing it in a fund" might keep it a little above official inflation numbers - but also might not provide serious return above that, and exposes emergency funds to volatility. So, to me, that doesn't solve the problem of inflation - poor or not. A tool, not a solution.
Top 10% owned 93% of shares in 2023.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market...
The rich are in a position to buy up the shares distributed this way, while the non-rich are mostly in a position to need cash most of the time.
If you want to tax the rich, just be honest about it and tax the fucking rich. Anything less is simply not going to work.
If the "non rich" receive $50,000 in shares when they are born, that will generate a lot of dividends over the years. They would no longer be born into poverty and would no longer need cash "most of the time". Everyone would get richer, except for the already well off.
If you give a rich person 50k in shares, chances are he'll keep it. If you give a poor person 50k in shares, he'll sell it.
The rich person has sufficient immediate resources so that he can afford to take a long view.
The poor person has immediate needs, and thus has a short term view.
Thus one-time wealth transfers are ineffective. Money tends to flow towards money. Those with money are best positioned to start a new business, and extract maximum revenue from that business. Those without money have to earn as employees. Those with money have resources and (especially) time, to educate themselves above their current skillset.
In short, any single redistribution is a short term solution. It will have short term benefits, but in the medium term all the wealth will flow back together again.
This is not a bug in the system. It is the explicit end-goal of capitalism. You can't fix yhe underlying problem by random redistributions.
This is not new. It's been going on for hundreds, or thousands of years. Over and over the cycle repeats. It usually ends in a bloody revolution, with a redistribution. (Think French, Russian revolutions as examples.) Then the wealth simply starts flowing together again.
Socialism (as distinct from communism) such as we see in much of Western Europe, seeks to tax economic activity (as distinct to accumulated wealth) [somewhat mitigated by inheritance taxes] to provide a continuous redistribution.
Capitalism (such as we see in the US) taxes economic activity in order to funnel funds to the wealthy. (Rich companies get rich govt contracts.)
Every person believes their system is the best. This makes changing the system hard. Explaining to a person in the US how the system makes them poor, does not make them vote against the system. It just makes them dream of becoming rich.
Unfortunately "simple" schemes such as yours fo not address the underlying cause, only the symptoms. And for this reason it wouldn't achieve the goals you are hoping for. Which is a pity, because those goals are achievable, and some countries have made strides in that direction.
Norway, for example, has the sovereign wealth fund. It gives every citizen a dividend every year. It avoids wealth consolidation simply by distributing the dividends, not thd shares themselves.
(Otherwise, 100% cosigned.)
Although lots of countries have oil, and derive profits from it, Norway (as far as i know) was unique in not spending that income, but rather creating the sovereign wealth fund.
That long-term thinking, which was fundamentally socialist not capitalist though, is exactly what puts them in such a strong position now.
The solution is a recurrent tax on capital, like the Zucman tax.
But first of all, I am not arguing that _poor_ people get ownership shares in the economy, but everyone, at birth. I have no reason to believe that a majority of the population will not be able to manage this wealth.
I argue that if each person receives a nest egg, combined with the economic schooling and support required to manage it, most people would not go spend it but would make it grow.
You even make this point for me,
“ Money tends to flow towards money. Those with money are best positioned to start a new business, and extract maximum revenue from that business. Those without money have to earn as employees. Those with money have resources and (especially) time, to educate themselves above their current skillset.”
That is literally my point. By further boosting the working and middle classes, we will give them(us) the tools to create new businesses, build stronger communities.
My scheme is not targeted at reducing poverty, although that will be a second order effect. I am mainly interested in building a more stable society with overall more prosperity for the common man.
I am neither socialist nor capitalist. I understand both ideologies well.
...Regardless of the feasibility of your proposal, I don't think this tracks?
Your scheme would give money to people. The first-order effect of that is reducing poverty.
Making society more stable is a second-order effect, predicated on that reduction in poverty.
Firstly, there's an assumption that with economic schooling people would understand the benefits of delayed gratification and make decisions based on long-term outcomes.
I would suggest this is unlikely. We need look no further than health to see that people are very good at maximizing short term gain, at the expense of the long term. We know smoking is bad (long term) and yet it remains popular. We know exercise is good, yet it is clearly ignored by many, if not most. We are constantly educated around food choices, yet fast food and processed food dominate despite obvious long term effects. I would argue that economic education would be even less effective than health education.
We could further look at the levels of debt US folk are willing to accept to get short term gains. Some like housing and education offers a long term return. Others, like credit cards or vehicle financing simply trades short term gratification for long-term obligations. Again the prevalence of the long term outcomes does not appear to inhibit short term thinking.
Secondly, while the framing of your solution is a fit to US culture, the root of it is not.
You've suggested "shares in the economy" which "pay dividends". This lines up nicely with US capitalism terminology, but implies the shares can be sold. (And the ability to sell the shares undermines your argument, because once sold the under class is no better than before.)
So let's frame it differently, but also see how doing so makes it profoundly un-American.
Let's skip the "shares" part. Rather let the govt take your shares, and manage it for you. Dividends flow to you from birth. We could call this "basic income". You can't sell your shares (although nothing stops you selling your income.)
Since the govt would need ever more shares, the economy would need to grow larger than the birth rate (doable) and the govt would (over time) become the majority share holder in most companies. (Incidentally the Norwegian wealth fund is mostly invested -outside- Norway, which is useful, but would be impractical for the scale of the US.)
Personally I'm a fan of Basic Income. I believe that as production becomes more automated it is inevitable. But I accept that culturally the US can't do it - the idea of "money for nothing" goes against the very core of American culture.
Consider Covid as a test case. The US govt could afford generous support for citizens including cash. Supply chain woes, coupled with free cash, lead to some inflation. This inflation was lower than other countries. Supply chains recovered faster. Inflation dropped faster than elsewhere. Nevertheless citizens voted that administration out, largely because there was inflation at all. Instead they turned to a candidate who campaigned on raising tarifs (and all the education that the explicit goal of tarifs is to raise domestic prices seems to have been ignored, which is another nail in the economic education approach.)
Ultimately the administration which did offer "free money" (think also student loan debt relief) was punished at the polls for such un-American thinking.
So, let me be clear. I agree that having social support beyond your income is a good thing. Many countries already do it. But selling socialism is difficult in the US (not least because most Americans think socialism is the same as communism.)
- I am not American; I’m from Sweden but live in Switzerland. Generally people are healthy in both countries and have a social democratic slant; Sweden more so than Switzerland. But the Swiss has a better understanding of personal responsibility and wealth management, to some degree.
- I am not opposed to the general idea of an UBI. The main problem I see it will concentrate even more power to the people in charge of government, while my proposal gives the individual agency to pursue their dreams. Ideally both would be implemented together.
- you have not yet provided an argument why my pet social reform would be detrimental to society, it appears your argument is that most poor people would spend their small wealth on basic necessities. I believe that may very well be the case. But I also believe that a large minority would be lifted from strictly selling their labour and be given a chance to fund their own enterprise.
Long term, I still believe this is the best way to disrupt the constant concentration of wealth, together with an UBI.
My argument was indeed around the late-capitialistic environment of the US. Talk of cultural barriers to your approach are in that context. (And i believe are valid.)
The European context is different. Socialism is better understood there, and indeed far more accepted in things like universal health care, unemployment support and so on.
And while wealth inequality exists in Europe (they basically invented aristocracy) there's a difference in flavor there compared to the US.
The release of capital to allow those without it to start a new business would be enormously valuable. I've worked with impoverished entrepreneurs and it often takes very little capital to bump them up a significant level.
I'm not convinced that simply allocating capital to people at birth, long before they need it to accomplish something, would be efficient. Perhaps making capital more accessible in later life would be more effective?
The need for dividends as income along the way is reduced somewhat as in a European context there are already social income streams in place (obvious locations vary and ymmv.)
I do believe this plus an UBI should be the way forward for humanity. But it seems the way we are heading is back to feudalism.
Ownership distributions of critical companies have been tried: post-soviet companies were privatized and their shares distributed "fairly" among the population. We know what happend to them afterwards (ownership did not stay distributed for long and I'm not sure it was due to lack of general education).
Ultimately isnt the point of private companies (publicaly listed companies included) that it creates a 'us vs them' situation where not everyone is meant to benefits equaly?
The fine article, and France, are concerned with keeping that country from helping itself from the pot (spending) beyond its means.
Just make it like a volume knob. Turn it up, slowly, see what happens. If bad things happen, turn it back down.
Their company already don't produce much in France, it's all imported. They are paying minimal taxes already on what they produce and sell outside of France. And they don't pay taxes personally. So what would we lose if they leave?
For the things that are actually made in France, it's because they have to. They would have moved it already otherwise. So it's physical assets and people that can't be moved or sourced elsewhere. So what they have to produce there, they will still do. Their real estate, their logistic chain vehicles, and their local workshops will stay here. Even if they would sell part of it in fact, the actual physical stuff would stay here.
And what they sell here, they will still do: they are not going to exit the French market just because they can't be physically here so it's not going to affect the economy that much. What, less jet and luxury hotels revenue? It's ok.
And of course, we can increase taxes on their companies so that they get less revenue to compensate for their exile. We tax trading or exporting French-based company stocks so that they can't move that around without paying first.
Besides, once a stock is bought from the IPO, moving it from hand to hand is not investing more money into the company in any way. It's not going back into the economy.
They can move with their bank accounts and bonds, why do we care? It's not something that goes into our economy. They made sure of it.
Nearly every single one has quietly crawled their way back into those respective cities. Agglomeration effects baby!
Listen, I am sure there is some level of taxation at which the rich will in fact decamp and go somewhere else, but empirically we are nowhere near it, nor does it appear that any of the mainstream proposals (either for increased high-bracket tax rates or wealth taxes) get anywhere near it.
For example, MA instituted a 4% surtax on all incomes over $1M and... and the population of payers actually increased 25% since instituting it[1].
[1] https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/04/28/massachusetts-millionai...
This was obviously going to happen when you have a static number and inflation keeps going up. Inflation between 2022 and 2025 has been huge. Perhaps not 25% huge, but a large part of this "growth of payers" is just due to inflation.
Heck the opposite is true - it's why high inflation is so despised, specifically because prices outrun income growth.
Their US factory was never profitable.
Here's a non-exhaustive list of ways the wealth of multiple people can be pooled: creating a joint account, investment clubs, general/limited partnerships, LLCs, crowdfunding platforms, and syndicates (you're on the website of one right now).
There's also government-backed pooling/funding vehicles and banks engaging in various forms of investment, funding, loans. Any existing corporation is also capable of investing themselves.
Government backed funds.. generally don't invest in businesses. There are exceptions - strategic investments for wartime materials and such.
Banks are also.. backed and run by wealthy individuals. This is less "big fish" focused because the bank itself is the owner of the assets and pays a salary to it's executives, but traditionally the person who ran and backed the bank WAS the local wealthy person.
When we look at governments where there aren't really private investors (ie the wealthy) those governments just can't fund things quickly or effectively.
Capitalism is an engine. Liquidity is momentum. Having liquidity leads to more liquidity and wealth, liquidity allows you to get other operations running.
There is no magical government bucket of money. No magical government investors.
For the US as a whole only about 10-15% of startup capital ultimately comes from private investors (of which only some are ultra wealthy). The majority comes from institutions (so ultimately mostly from pension funds)[1]
Ycombinator obviously also sources capital from institutional investors, though we do not know to what degree.
Can't wait to find out where we're gonna move goalposts now - please don't keep me in suspense.
[1] https://www.pragmaticcoders.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/P...
If they are moving businesses away then that could cause the job loss and other bad effects.
So maybe tax the first kind of wealth more?
A boy is born into the Colonel Sanderson's plantation. Young eyes see thousands in stooped labor on vast fields disappearing to the horizon.
attention is finite. land is finite. resources are finite. access to qualified doctors is finite. access to food is finite (something we'll realize at the next great famine). access to water is finite. your time living on earth is finite (and shorter the less money you have).
we operate at a scale where that matters nowadays.
And note that being an IQ denier would transform your question in an insult to intelligence.
What are you trying to get at? Could you be more direct? I'm having trouble making sense of this post.
How their daily lives will cross vs common experiences with substantial opportunities creators be permanently aborted?
How that wouldn't produce irreversible consequences in a population?
You could say, oh wait, just loosing one Elon has zero impact in a population and yet whole humanity might not become multiplanetary without that one guy in the country that had created the conditions for that raising a ton of talented guys up.
But Social Darwinism is an ugly way to see the world.
There is a disconnect between those two ideas. The tax doesn't need to reduce their wealth. Wealthy people generally continue to make money, usually without even having to try or work.
As a random example, Elon Musk was worth roughly $50B 10 years ago, vs about $500B today. That's a $450B gain in wealth, the vast, vast majority of which was untaxed in any way.
We're not talking about taxing $450B from Elon. We're talking about taxing a small percentage of that.
Then I don't understand why most of the rhetoric behind this idea focuses on reducing inequality. If Elon Musk was now worth $100B instead of $500B, how does that make any practical difference?
I’m genuinely confused.
No one is advocating for pure wealth equality or communism. Just making the very obvious assertion that wealth has been concentrating more and more into the hands of a few and that we’re out of balance.
And again that’s just a number you tossed out for a single person. Literally one single person who would still be worth $100,000,000,000.00. One hundred billion dollars...the amount that Jeff Bezos was worth as the wealthiest person on the planet in 2017, just 8 years ago.
The simple reality is that wealth is more consolidated now than at any point in the US’s history. The wealthy are allowed to amass billions and billions of dollars without paying taxes on it, while the rest of us shoulder the burden.
Something has to change.
Bluntly, you’re misunderstanding the basic math of a wealth tax.
Consider that we already tax unrealized gains on real estate as an annually paid tax. The suggestion is to do the exact same thing for other types of assets. That’s it. It’s very simple, and we’re not talking about making billionaires poor. Just trying to make it so that people can't go from $1B to $100B net worth and pay no taxes, while the rest of us fork over 25%+ of our measly 6-figure incomes every year.
Speaking as an American who lives in California (so not directly relevant to the article in question, but 'wealth exodus' is often brought up to scare people about wealth taxes here as well):
Fucking Good. Bye Felicia. Hope they all move to Florida and/or Texas. We'll still be absolute fine here without them.
But also institute land value taxes so they can't be here while pretending to not be here
However, the reason that most municipalities around here will bend over backwards to attract wealthy residents/businesses is because of their chronically underfunded liabilities (pensions, retirement healthcare benefits, etc).
Meditate on how good your openness to that idea was.
If taxes never get removed, then that's proposing perpetual incremental taxes and forcing the discussion to how much will these go up this week or the next week or the next one until they are 100% (slavery / you will own noting and...)
I don't know why what Bernard Arnault says is on HN, he has no competencies in economy.
No dumb rich-hate here, simply that Bernard Arnault is definitely not best person to talk about the subject.
Biased, sure - like most of the french population where being opinionated is normal. Clueless, no.
Its understanding having proportion in mind is: How strongly you're breaking the economy.
In the same way fundraising for a start-up is friction. Nations are exercises in economies of scale.
It's clearly not a synonym.
Oh that all billionaires were this undevious.
They tend to be removed because the richer people convince the poor they need to be removed.
/s
Is that actually true though? Or just something a mouthpiece of the wealthy has put out in some shonky report?
The argument is even a small wealth tax is actually an astronomically high tax (a 2% wealth tax is approximately equal to an additional 50% capital gains tax), and so rich people are highly motivated to move their money out of the country or to a form of investment which isn't taxed. Wealth taxes tend to raise basically no money compared to what they wanted, and in return there is less investment in the country hurting the economy.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-03/wealth... -> https://archive.ph/jhxzr
The wealthy abandoned France in 2000 and moved to Switzerland.
They abandoned France in 2009 and moved to... Switzerland.
They abandoned France in 2014 and moved to... Russia.
They abandoned France in 2020 and moved to... USA.
For nearly 2 decades there has been this steady rollout of the news saying the wealthy will abandon there socialist-democratic country for somewhere else. But most of them tend to stick around. A few abandon their dumb project and find their way back even.
It’s empty bluster.
In reality, the wealthy consistently learn that cooperation is better than betrayal, either through cooperation against a common enemy (like WW2), or bloody violence (like the Coal Wars).
It’s very much a “we’re not trapped in here with you, you’re trapped in here with us” kind of mindset, at least while we exist solely on a single planet (and even should we colonize Mars or elsewhere, it’ll take decades for such a separation to be feasible). People and governments just have to remember that we willingly abdicated that power to the wealthy in the first place, and we can take it back if desired.
Good news for the wealthy, though, is that the working class generally doesn’t seek lifestyles of mega mansions and ultra yachts so much as a decent home, healthy work/life balance, and time off for hobbies and/or family, all of which is pennies to provide.
https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/does-taxing-the-rich-cause-mil...
And, like 'trickle-down economics', a very convenient myth for the rich.
The latest destination for some rich foreigners is Italy due to the lump sum tax on foreign income (200k) for the first 10 years of moving there.
But Italy also has a 2‰ wealth tax since 2013 or so.
All these news are always exagerated.
The problem is the floor (cost of living, standard of living) is too low for too many people.
If you're talking about a spherical economy in a vacuum, no, there isn't.
When we actually turn our attention to the real world, we find that, in fact, there is. Because when the people at the top have sufficiently disproportionate power (and wealth is a kind of power), they use that power to increase the inequality by any means necessary. That includes, fairly prominently, redirecting resources that would otherwise have gone to ensuring the floor stays high to raising their own ceilings.
So it's not a binary—either there is perfect equality or everything goes to shit—but the levels of inequality we have today are demonstrably bad for society.
Few people care about "the economy" writ large, they just care about their little corner of it. This applies to both rich and poor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires#Ann...
And that does not even include the number of rich families who own vast amounts of real estate which they cannot take with them. If the argument is "they'll increase the rent" then implement rent caps (and crack down on fake renters who run AirBnB ops or sublet).
The image of taxman as thief has never been clearer.
Wealth tax is just one approach, but even top income tax rates used to be much higher in the US, and you could argue that politicians since LBJ and Reagan have failed the median citizen completely in that regard (nice visualization: https://mystack.wyman.us/p/tax-brackets-and-rates-1913-2024).
Wealth tax seems a step in the right direction.
Add some other deductions to what counts as income and sudden the rate becomes all but a joke.
I find the notion that you should pay less tax on capital gains asinine, too; it makes no sense to me that people should have to pay less tax on income that they didn't even work for.
My belief is that people were blind to growing income inequality and flawed taxation schemes because there was enough growth to paper over the resulting issues, but this stops being the case.
Specifically housing, I'd argue, has not become so expensive because of greedy construction workers (or immigrants, or regulation) but because average homeowners have to compete against an increasingly wealthy upper-class that sees real estate as a pure investment/rent extraction mechanism.
World War II was pretty effective at redistributing income (among those that survived). Lets hope it doesn't take World War III.
