I don't disagree with Varoufakis necessarily on his technofeudalism hypothesis, but he makes several claims in this video that are just ~completely false~ misleading and poorly cited, as far as I can tell, and that annoys me, so I'm just going to do my best to respond to them here as a sort of vent LOL.
1. He claims that Google and Facebook and the like only spend 1% of their revenue paying their employees and that therefore any money that goes to them sort of stays out of the circular economy. As far as I can tell, there are absolutely no sources to back this up available online. Not from Google's official reporting, and not even from him: he himself just states the number, but doesn't explain how or where he got it from. In my search I haven't found a case where he cites it, either. ~All I can really find is that Google's operating expenses are around $261 billion as of this year[1], and their revenue was $385[2] — and since operating expenses are usually at least substantially payroll, it's hard to tell.~ Edit: At least two commenters below did a quick back of the napkin calculation, multiplying the median salary of a Google employee by the number of Google employees to get something like 36 billion, which is about 10% of the companies overall revenue. So maybe that's what he meant. But it would have been good for him to actually — first of all — not get the number an order of magnitude off, and second of all, to actually explain how he got that number!
2. Then he brings up the idea that someone's Tesla was remotely deactivated. This was debunked[3]. Edit: Another commenter pointed out that maybe he meant this story where full self-driving got remotely disabled on a car that was bought secondhand[7]. This does match better the part where he mentioned that the car was sold secondhand before it got deactivated. So there's that. But again, it would have been good if he had actually gotten his facts straight.
3. He brings up this idea that Teslas sell your user data Amazon. This is, at least, roundly contradicted by their legally binding privacy policy, and even according to the Mozilla Foundation there's no evidence of Tesla ever selling driver data to a third party[4] (although they've been very, shall we say, uncareful about it in at least two instances, but those don't resemble anything like what he's claiming). One random user on a Tesla owners' forum got freaked out because they saw the car sending data to "Amazon", but when they checked on the IP addresses, it became clear it was using just sending information to AWS servers, which are almost certainly run and owned by Tesla, not Amazon[5], which is what a technically savvy person would assume to begin with anyway.
4. He argues that Volkswagen electric cars can't compete with Teslas because Volkswagen cars "don't have access to cloud capital", which he says gives Tesla an advantage because they do, based on point 3. But given that there's absolutely no evidence of that anywhere, I feel like his entire argument crumbles, because it becomes very unclear how Tesla is benefiting from cloud capital in a way Volkswagen it is not. *Especially* since according to the Mozilla Foundation, Volkswagen not only gathers much more data about you, but actually actively sells it to third parties for advertising purposes, which they openly admit[6].
"What does VW say they can do with this vast treasure trove of personal information, car data, and inferences they collect on you? Well, they use it to make more money, of course. Because selling cars isn't a big enough business these days, now, your personal information is another gold mine for all car companies to tap into. And tap into it they do. VW says they can use it for their own personalized and targeted advertising purposes or those or their affiliates, business partners, or other third parties. They can share it with third parties who can use it for the commercial purpose of marketing their products and services to you. They also say they can use or disclose your de-identified data for "any purpose." "
Regarding the Tesla disabling, maybe he means the fact that Tesla remotely disabled FSD when someone sold their car. I thought I remembered Tesla disabling the vehicle completely, and I distinctly remember aspects of the story (the vehicle wouldn't do more than some low mph and said to pull over), but I can't find any reference to that story now.
> All I can really find is that Google's operating expenses are around $261 billion as of this year[1], and their revenue was $385[2] — and since operating expenses are usually at least substantially payroll, it's hard to tell
It's unlikely that this is mostly for payroll. From AI I got:
"median total compensation per employee was approximately $279,802 in 2022, and with 183,323 employees at the end of 2024, total estimated compensation (salary + equity + benefits) likely exceeds $50 billion, or ~14–15% of total revenue"
So maybe it's not 1% as in Varoufakis talk but even if it's 15% of revenue that's also quite low. Also keep in mind in this AI reponse it includes equity (stocks) so that in this way employee is becoming investor/shareholder.
He's made a slew of false claims before I turned off the video. Among which is the idea that companies like Facebook are merely valuable because of the "labor we provide". In fact, they make money through advertising and sharing data with advertisers. If socializing was all there was to value, these companies would be redundant. The service provided is content-delivery in various forms, that isn't free and it isn't something "anyone from the CS dept" would do as well.
To call it "labor" to share boomer-humor memes and use Marketplace (i.e. users doing what they want on FB) is stretching the term. As with youtube, the prolific creators on instagram and the like also make piles of money. Yet it's being framed as though they're putting all this effort for the company's benefit only.
Agreed. But I figured that slippery equivocation was obvious: the value provided by the big cloud platforms is an insane amount of engineering and system administration work to provide a reliable and large scale way for people to connect and share data, that's why we all go there, as well as, as you say, advertisements. The idea that any random CS department could replicate the Amazon Marketplace or AWS, or Facebook's infrastructure, is absurd.
The people that blame capitalism are often wrong...they attribute to capitalism what is actually the fault of a lack of regulation. Capitalism has a ton of advantages that a socialist system would not have, the negatives are easy enough to deal with but while the rich rule the world, there is little interest.
Wealth and income limits for individuals and companies are a start. No one needs to be a billionaire, and they sure as hell didn't earn it.
Not sure what 'blaming capitalism' has to do with the content of the video in the link we're supposedly discussing. (Advantages ... for whom?) It's speaker says that our situation is post-capitalist, and that we're in a feudalist economy now.
Context: the speaker Lea Ypi is a professor of political philosophy. She grew up in socialist Albania, and here she's talking about how during her studies of political philosophy in Rome, her Western "socialist" classmates had a fantasy about socialism, and didn't want to hear about her experience growing up in socialism/about the socialist countries that have failed.
I have a feeling you're doing the same, just with a different -ism.
> they attribute to capitalism what is actually the fault of a lack of regulation
Regulation works in a theoretical world where the rules of the game are set by an outsider entity, which is powerful enough to enforce said rules and yet completely separate from economic power.
In real life, players affect the rules: lobbying, marketing, media ownership, cronyism…
> easy enough to deal with but while the rich rule the world, there is little interest.
Then it’s not easy enough to deal with is it? And capitalism seems to have created this situation so you could are the that this is inherent in the system.
I mean, the solutions are easy, getting people to vote for them is a problem, although a problem more specific to the US.
> And capitalism seems to have created this situation so you could are the that this is inherent in the system.
I wouldn't say that, given most countries capitalist systems were able to deal with or avoid that situation altogether. Rather than this problem being inherent to capitalism, it seems it is the result of specific events that unfolded in the US. Really, it can all be traced back to Reagan.
Just a thought but you could probably argue that the US is the largest and most advanced of the capitalist systems in the world, and that makes it somewhat of a bellwether for the future of other capitalist countries.
I think the US is rather unique from other capitalist countries in having such a large portion of its population being so poorly educated. This simply isn't the case in EU or Commonwealth countries - in the US its led people to vote against their own interests, allowing companies to lobby for things that benefit the companies and hurt people, in an ever increasing trend. I don't think it's to do with the size of the country, but the education level of the population.
Looking at the wiki page, PISA seems to have some criticisms, one being it seems very gameable. I'm not really familiar with it.
It might be interesting to try and find some more objective support of my claim, and I'll try and post anything worth posting, but anecdotally...the difference between the US and other developed countries is night and day. It's so incredibly easy to run into people in the US who genuinely astoundingly lack the basic knowledge that in other countries it is taken for granted that adults hold.
There's a reason other countries talk shows don't have segments like asking random pedestrians to name any country, literally any country on a world map, so they can laugh when they fail.
This is just plain old Liberalism, a mixed-market economy. Socialism can mean two different things: a) when the govt spends and does literally anything, b) eliminating Capitalism, by way of having everything controlled by the "public" (really, the State, as even ancoms will just reinvent government by another name).
There's often some bait-and-switch semantic games employed to sell people on the latter.
Even wealth taxes are ineffectual and have been tried, but wealth limits is pants-on-head stupid. If you want to redistribute wealth, you need to generate it first. If wealth were zero sum we'd still be fighting in caves over sticks. This is the most anti-liberal and anti-prosperity idea next to "degrowth".
Inequality is mostly a red herring and not a core issue in and of itself. Public spending as % of GDP has only really been going up for over a century, and we expect UBI and the like to be in our future. Meanwhile we're already seeing what those excesses can lead to in France if we're not careful.
>Inequality is mostly a red herring and not a core issue in and of itself.
The problem is not inequality itself, is that an entity that grows without a ceiling will eventually reach a size such that rules can’t be enforced on it. From that point on, laws are wet paper.
Anti-trust laws exist for a reason. Mitigating monopoly is key and already accounted for. There's no reason to believe corporations can inevitably grow themselves into that position, and as history shows, no one can predict which ones will be the most valuable (let alone valuable) in the future.
As for individuals, dynasty dissipates and breaks up in wealth. A rich person doesn't live forever, and seldom do competing offspring manage to generate as much. Their pile shrinks as they spend it away.
Notwithstanding that, name a dollar figure above Bezos' wealth at which suddenly he can operate outside the law. We can already see what concentrated power looks like; it is entrenched and intertwined with government, not operating outside its bounds. See: Xi Ping, Putin and others. Power often comes with wealth, but wealth in itself doesn't lead to that level of power, at least in the Liberal world.
>Notwithstanding that, name a dollar figure above Bezos' wealth at which suddenly he can operate outside the law.
Above? He already does. He does not need to break the law in a literal sense: he can have teams of lawyers exploiting their way into not paying taxes faster than the state can patch the laws, avoid antitrust through lobbying, he owns a newspaper to influence public opinion and elections if needed…
>wealth in itself doesn't lead to that level of power, at least in the Liberal world.
How many presidential pardons have been bought so far in the US this term?
> he can have teams of lawyers exploiting their way into not paying taxes faster than the state can patch the laws
This is unsubstantiated.
> avoid antitrust through lobbying
Lobbying does not guarantee any result, it is literally just asking the government for something you want. And, why does Amazon need to be subject to anti-trust? By far their most profitable product is AWS, and it has a ton of competitors.
> How many presidential pardons have been bought so far in the US this term?
This says a lot about Trump, but pardons? That's it?
> As an European I have to say, perhaps the American approach is better.
It's not better, it's just more attractive. The EU isn't the only country with regulations, every single other western country does, every single other first world country does.
The US allows greed to flourish at the expensive of it's people. That might be better for the people developing the tech, but it isn't better for society in the longrun.
> The US allows greed to flourish at the expensive of it's people. That might be better for the people developing the tech, but it isn't better for society in the longrun.
Are you finding the EU to be even remotely greed-free?
The comment does not say that EU does not have greed, rather that it recognizes this basic human tendency and puts up regulations to mitigate it where it can. The US on the other hand just lets it run rampant.
Who cares how well the businesses do? Only the wealthy in the US benefit from that. I’ll gladly swap and go to Europe where I don’t have to worry about falling into medical debt if I am unlucky.
Europe is increasingly heading in this direction too, at least it is here in the UK. The lobbiests and their stooge populists are increasingly in charge here too.
As someone who lives in the heart of Silicon Valley, there are HUGE downsides to letting industry write their own tax law / loopholes and playing one jurisdiction against the other for special tax incentives.
The local governments in this area are mostly starved of funds, despite having the world’s largest companies who pay their executives and rare talent among the highest compensation in the world.
The big tech companies can afford to hire private security with staff larger than the local police departments.
And they NEED that security to keep the homeless people in tents and broke down RVs from parking on their property.
The homeless and jobless end up breaking into the houses of everyone who can’t afford private security. If they don’t become thieves or druggies, then they are a broken husk of a person.
When companies don’t like the neighborhood, they pick up and move to the next hot city and the cycle repeats there.
This isn’t the fault of big tech alone, but don’t pretend like the US has figured out how to balance society and taxation.
The last thing CA or SF are is starved of revenue.
Lack of effective utilization of said revenue is by far the issue here, as can be seen by looking at peer states/cities/countries spending analogous amounts of money.
Yet you can still have a very decent middle class educated person existence with no anxiety of debt or illness. If you think you can just go to the us and be in the 1% by all means do and be happy (at the expense of the majority of others).
Otherwise stay, and enjoy social democracy’s unsung success in guaranteeing stable live to hundreds of millions by making it hard to get to the capitalistic excesses of the us.
What? The EU has super-rich, especially if you compare to the average incomes of the country rather than to the global top.
And yes, because of the tax situation these people are often not resident in the EU. London, Paris and Geneva have small neighborhoods of oil sheik families, for example. Brussels has entire neighborhoods effectively only accessible to EU appointees. Amsterdam ... and so on and so forth.
I didn’t say we didn’t have inequality or super rich people or that we’re perfect.
Yet we don’t have Musk, the Koch Brothers, Larry Ellison and swarms of fentanyl addicts folded in half in the street a few miles away from their residences.
remember EU had Nokia and Skype and that was before overregulation. What happenned? Both got sold out because EU doesn't have money printer and petrodollar. EU cannot compete even if it would reduce taxes and decrease regulation because they cannot protect their best tech companies from being bought by dozen of billions of printed papers. Most even such companies are on US stock exchange because that's another different money printer.
Consider that "successful" has evolved from innovating products that make our lives better to a strong focus on ad tech, surveillance, social media, and slop.
Which country doesn’t tax their companies or people? Whether it be tariffs, income taxes, sales taxes, VAT, property taxes, minerals taxes, etc., all countries tax.
Taxes are a necessary evil for society and order. The USA tried to have zero ability to tax the states/people and that only lasted about 10 years before that national government failed and they tried another constitution with more national government powers.
You aren’t arguing “against taxes”, you just have a different opinion on the taxation regime and the coefficients. The sooner you recognize that, the faster your discussions with other humans might actually yield productive results.
(which is why many of EU's rich are domiciled there, which also means they're not counted in the EU's GINI coefficient. Almost no US citizens do the same, because of how the tax system works)
Hard to take you seriously unless the EU rich domiciled there, stayed there permanently, and didn't get the benefits of their home EU countries, benefits that come from taxes they do not pay into.
Apart from the market (obviously), the companies also enjoy infrastructure, resources (mostly finite) and they also produce byproducts that the society has to deal with (pollution, addiction of population etc).
So who pays for these? What you are suggesting is government subsidies of companies. This sounds like communism to me.
It didn't. Or rather it did, but not for the obvious reasons.
Taxes are not required for spending. Spending isn't required for spending, because ultimately government money is a proxy for power differentials and collective strategy.
Money defines which behaviours and which demographics are rewarded, and which are starved and punished. There are numbers and flow dynamics, but it's primarily a social credit system, not a substance.
Taxes are really a way to control the relative power of some groups over others - a form of regulation.
So when you have events like the New Deal and high taxes on the super rich, that means the economy is tuned towards diminishing power differentials, expanding infrastructure, and access to opportunity.
Low taxes on the super rich means expanding power differentials, more rigid hierarchy, diminishing collective infrastructure, and decreasing access to opportunity.
Likewise with provision of public services. If healthcare is cheap, guaranteed, and widely distributed, that increases individual agency and diminishes hierarchy.
If it's expensive and rationed by/for corporate monopolies, it increases hierarchy and diminishes agency.
I don't disagree with Varoufakis necessarily on his technofeudalism hypothesis, but he makes several claims in this video that are just ~completely false~ misleading and poorly cited, as far as I can tell, and that annoys me, so I'm just going to do my best to respond to them here as a sort of vent LOL.
1. He claims that Google and Facebook and the like only spend 1% of their revenue paying their employees and that therefore any money that goes to them sort of stays out of the circular economy. As far as I can tell, there are absolutely no sources to back this up available online. Not from Google's official reporting, and not even from him: he himself just states the number, but doesn't explain how or where he got it from. In my search I haven't found a case where he cites it, either. ~All I can really find is that Google's operating expenses are around $261 billion as of this year[1], and their revenue was $385[2] — and since operating expenses are usually at least substantially payroll, it's hard to tell.~ Edit: At least two commenters below did a quick back of the napkin calculation, multiplying the median salary of a Google employee by the number of Google employees to get something like 36 billion, which is about 10% of the companies overall revenue. So maybe that's what he meant. But it would have been good for him to actually — first of all — not get the number an order of magnitude off, and second of all, to actually explain how he got that number!
2. Then he brings up the idea that someone's Tesla was remotely deactivated. This was debunked[3]. Edit: Another commenter pointed out that maybe he meant this story where full self-driving got remotely disabled on a car that was bought secondhand[7]. This does match better the part where he mentioned that the car was sold secondhand before it got deactivated. So there's that. But again, it would have been good if he had actually gotten his facts straight.
3. He brings up this idea that Teslas sell your user data Amazon. This is, at least, roundly contradicted by their legally binding privacy policy, and even according to the Mozilla Foundation there's no evidence of Tesla ever selling driver data to a third party[4] (although they've been very, shall we say, uncareful about it in at least two instances, but those don't resemble anything like what he's claiming). One random user on a Tesla owners' forum got freaked out because they saw the car sending data to "Amazon", but when they checked on the IP addresses, it became clear it was using just sending information to AWS servers, which are almost certainly run and owned by Tesla, not Amazon[5], which is what a technically savvy person would assume to begin with anyway.
4. He argues that Volkswagen electric cars can't compete with Teslas because Volkswagen cars "don't have access to cloud capital", which he says gives Tesla an advantage because they do, based on point 3. But given that there's absolutely no evidence of that anywhere, I feel like his entire argument crumbles, because it becomes very unclear how Tesla is benefiting from cloud capital in a way Volkswagen it is not. *Especially* since according to the Mozilla Foundation, Volkswagen not only gathers much more data about you, but actually actively sells it to third parties for advertising purposes, which they openly admit[6].
[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/ope... [2]: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/reve... [3]: https://www.theverge.com/tesla/757594/tesla-cybertruck-deact... [4]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/tesl... [5]: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/uploaded-data-to-ama... [6]: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/volk...
"What does VW say they can do with this vast treasure trove of personal information, car data, and inferences they collect on you? Well, they use it to make more money, of course. Because selling cars isn't a big enough business these days, now, your personal information is another gold mine for all car companies to tap into. And tap into it they do. VW says they can use it for their own personalized and targeted advertising purposes or those or their affiliates, business partners, or other third parties. They can share it with third parties who can use it for the commercial purpose of marketing their products and services to you. They also say they can use or disclose your de-identified data for "any purpose." "
[7]: https://www.jalopnik.com/tesla-remotely-removes-autopilot-fe...
Regarding the Tesla disabling, maybe he means the fact that Tesla remotely disabled FSD when someone sold their car. I thought I remembered Tesla disabling the vehicle completely, and I distinctly remember aspects of the story (the vehicle wouldn't do more than some low mph and said to pull over), but I can't find any reference to that story now.
Ah, okay. Idk how I would've found that based just on what he said. Found the story you're talking about for future reference: https://www.jalopnik.com/tesla-remotely-removes-autopilot-fe...
This is the autopilot one, I thought I saw one about disabling the entire bebjicke vehicle, but I can't find a trace of it.
> All I can really find is that Google's operating expenses are around $261 billion as of this year[1], and their revenue was $385[2] — and since operating expenses are usually at least substantially payroll, it's hard to tell
It's unlikely that this is mostly for payroll. From AI I got:
"median total compensation per employee was approximately $279,802 in 2022, and with 183,323 employees at the end of 2024, total estimated compensation (salary + equity + benefits) likely exceeds $50 billion, or ~14–15% of total revenue"
So maybe it's not 1% as in Varoufakis talk but even if it's 15% of revenue that's also quite low. Also keep in mind in this AI reponse it includes equity (stocks) so that in this way employee is becoming investor/shareholder.
Fair enough! I was wary of doing the calculation that way for reasons that seem retroactively pretty dumb, so I'll take the L on that one.
Google has 180k employees, let's assume 200k average salary, that's 36 bil, 10% of the revenue you posted.
He's made a slew of false claims before I turned off the video. Among which is the idea that companies like Facebook are merely valuable because of the "labor we provide". In fact, they make money through advertising and sharing data with advertisers. If socializing was all there was to value, these companies would be redundant. The service provided is content-delivery in various forms, that isn't free and it isn't something "anyone from the CS dept" would do as well.
To call it "labor" to share boomer-humor memes and use Marketplace (i.e. users doing what they want on FB) is stretching the term. As with youtube, the prolific creators on instagram and the like also make piles of money. Yet it's being framed as though they're putting all this effort for the company's benefit only.
Agreed. But I figured that slippery equivocation was obvious: the value provided by the big cloud platforms is an insane amount of engineering and system administration work to provide a reliable and large scale way for people to connect and share data, that's why we all go there, as well as, as you say, advertisements. The idea that any random CS department could replicate the Amazon Marketplace or AWS, or Facebook's infrastructure, is absurd.
The people that blame capitalism are often wrong...they attribute to capitalism what is actually the fault of a lack of regulation. Capitalism has a ton of advantages that a socialist system would not have, the negatives are easy enough to deal with but while the rich rule the world, there is little interest.
Wealth and income limits for individuals and companies are a start. No one needs to be a billionaire, and they sure as hell didn't earn it.
Not sure what 'blaming capitalism' has to do with the content of the video in the link we're supposedly discussing. (Advantages ... for whom?) It's speaker says that our situation is post-capitalist, and that we're in a feudalist economy now.
I really wonder how you define "capitalism" such a that the capital owners aren't one of the most important actors.
I'm not really sure how you've interpreted my comment - can you expand on your point, please?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz1UqXySpvY&t=2214s
Context: the speaker Lea Ypi is a professor of political philosophy. She grew up in socialist Albania, and here she's talking about how during her studies of political philosophy in Rome, her Western "socialist" classmates had a fantasy about socialism, and didn't want to hear about her experience growing up in socialism/about the socialist countries that have failed.
I have a feeling you're doing the same, just with a different -ism.
> they attribute to capitalism what is actually the fault of a lack of regulation
Regulation works in a theoretical world where the rules of the game are set by an outsider entity, which is powerful enough to enforce said rules and yet completely separate from economic power.
In real life, players affect the rules: lobbying, marketing, media ownership, cronyism…
> easy enough to deal with but while the rich rule the world, there is little interest.
Then it’s not easy enough to deal with is it? And capitalism seems to have created this situation so you could are the that this is inherent in the system.
> Then it’s not easy enough to deal with is it?
I mean, the solutions are easy, getting people to vote for them is a problem, although a problem more specific to the US.
> And capitalism seems to have created this situation so you could are the that this is inherent in the system.
I wouldn't say that, given most countries capitalist systems were able to deal with or avoid that situation altogether. Rather than this problem being inherent to capitalism, it seems it is the result of specific events that unfolded in the US. Really, it can all be traced back to Reagan.
Just a thought but you could probably argue that the US is the largest and most advanced of the capitalist systems in the world, and that makes it somewhat of a bellwether for the future of other capitalist countries.
I think the US is rather unique from other capitalist countries in having such a large portion of its population being so poorly educated. This simply isn't the case in EU or Commonwealth countries - in the US its led people to vote against their own interests, allowing companies to lobby for things that benefit the companies and hurt people, in an ever increasing trend. I don't think it's to do with the size of the country, but the education level of the population.
Hm, this doesn't seemed to be backed up by, say, PISA scores [1], by which the US looks very similar to its OECD peers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...
Looking at the wiki page, PISA seems to have some criticisms, one being it seems very gameable. I'm not really familiar with it.
It might be interesting to try and find some more objective support of my claim, and I'll try and post anything worth posting, but anecdotally...the difference between the US and other developed countries is night and day. It's so incredibly easy to run into people in the US who genuinely astoundingly lack the basic knowledge that in other countries it is taken for granted that adults hold.
There's a reason other countries talk shows don't have segments like asking random pedestrians to name any country, literally any country on a world map, so they can laugh when they fail.
When you add regulations to capitalism you will, in due course, get socialism.
This is just plain old Liberalism, a mixed-market economy. Socialism can mean two different things: a) when the govt spends and does literally anything, b) eliminating Capitalism, by way of having everything controlled by the "public" (really, the State, as even ancoms will just reinvent government by another name).
There's often some bait-and-switch semantic games employed to sell people on the latter.
Even wealth taxes are ineffectual and have been tried, but wealth limits is pants-on-head stupid. If you want to redistribute wealth, you need to generate it first. If wealth were zero sum we'd still be fighting in caves over sticks. This is the most anti-liberal and anti-prosperity idea next to "degrowth".
Inequality is mostly a red herring and not a core issue in and of itself. Public spending as % of GDP has only really been going up for over a century, and we expect UBI and the like to be in our future. Meanwhile we're already seeing what those excesses can lead to in France if we're not careful.
>Inequality is mostly a red herring and not a core issue in and of itself.
The problem is not inequality itself, is that an entity that grows without a ceiling will eventually reach a size such that rules can’t be enforced on it. From that point on, laws are wet paper.
Anti-trust laws exist for a reason. Mitigating monopoly is key and already accounted for. There's no reason to believe corporations can inevitably grow themselves into that position, and as history shows, no one can predict which ones will be the most valuable (let alone valuable) in the future.
As for individuals, dynasty dissipates and breaks up in wealth. A rich person doesn't live forever, and seldom do competing offspring manage to generate as much. Their pile shrinks as they spend it away.
Notwithstanding that, name a dollar figure above Bezos' wealth at which suddenly he can operate outside the law. We can already see what concentrated power looks like; it is entrenched and intertwined with government, not operating outside its bounds. See: Xi Ping, Putin and others. Power often comes with wealth, but wealth in itself doesn't lead to that level of power, at least in the Liberal world.
>Notwithstanding that, name a dollar figure above Bezos' wealth at which suddenly he can operate outside the law.
Above? He already does. He does not need to break the law in a literal sense: he can have teams of lawyers exploiting their way into not paying taxes faster than the state can patch the laws, avoid antitrust through lobbying, he owns a newspaper to influence public opinion and elections if needed…
>wealth in itself doesn't lead to that level of power, at least in the Liberal world.
How many presidential pardons have been bought so far in the US this term?
> he can have teams of lawyers exploiting their way into not paying taxes faster than the state can patch the laws
This is unsubstantiated.
> avoid antitrust through lobbying
Lobbying does not guarantee any result, it is literally just asking the government for something you want. And, why does Amazon need to be subject to anti-trust? By far their most profitable product is AWS, and it has a ton of competitors.
> How many presidential pardons have been bought so far in the US this term?
This says a lot about Trump, but pardons? That's it?
>This is unsubstantiated.
It is substantiated enough to have its own article on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_tax_avoidance
>This says a lot about Trump, but pardons? That's it?
Do we really need an enumeration of cases where corporations and the rich and are intertwined with political power in the west?
If political pardons are too tame, or trump is considered an anomaly, we can just point in the general direction of Iraq.
America has a hugely succesful tech sector and low taxes and minimal regulations.
Europe has a weak tech sector and relatively high taxes and high regulations.
As an European I have to say, perhaps the American approach is better.
But he, feel free to tax that tech sector into oblivion. If Europe ever gets it's shit together, we would love to take over the crown.
I wonder if the average person in America is feeling the benefits of a huge tech sector.
> As an European I have to say, perhaps the American approach is better.
It's not better, it's just more attractive. The EU isn't the only country with regulations, every single other western country does, every single other first world country does.
The US allows greed to flourish at the expensive of it's people. That might be better for the people developing the tech, but it isn't better for society in the longrun.
> The US allows greed to flourish at the expensive of it's people. That might be better for the people developing the tech, but it isn't better for society in the longrun.
Are you finding the EU to be even remotely greed-free?
The comment does not say that EU does not have greed, rather that it recognizes this basic human tendency and puts up regulations to mitigate it where it can. The US on the other hand just lets it run rampant.
Exactly.
Who cares how well the businesses do? Only the wealthy in the US benefit from that. I’ll gladly swap and go to Europe where I don’t have to worry about falling into medical debt if I am unlucky.
Europe is increasingly heading in this direction too, at least it is here in the UK. The lobbiests and their stooge populists are increasingly in charge here too.
As someone who lives in the heart of Silicon Valley, there are HUGE downsides to letting industry write their own tax law / loopholes and playing one jurisdiction against the other for special tax incentives.
The local governments in this area are mostly starved of funds, despite having the world’s largest companies who pay their executives and rare talent among the highest compensation in the world.
The big tech companies can afford to hire private security with staff larger than the local police departments.
And they NEED that security to keep the homeless people in tents and broke down RVs from parking on their property.
The homeless and jobless end up breaking into the houses of everyone who can’t afford private security. If they don’t become thieves or druggies, then they are a broken husk of a person.
When companies don’t like the neighborhood, they pick up and move to the next hot city and the cycle repeats there.
This isn’t the fault of big tech alone, but don’t pretend like the US has figured out how to balance society and taxation.
The last thing CA or SF are is starved of revenue.
Lack of effective utilization of said revenue is by far the issue here, as can be seen by looking at peer states/cities/countries spending analogous amounts of money.
Yet you can still have a very decent middle class educated person existence with no anxiety of debt or illness. If you think you can just go to the us and be in the 1% by all means do and be happy (at the expense of the majority of others). Otherwise stay, and enjoy social democracy’s unsung success in guaranteeing stable live to hundreds of millions by making it hard to get to the capitalistic excesses of the us.
What? The EU has super-rich, especially if you compare to the average incomes of the country rather than to the global top.
And yes, because of the tax situation these people are often not resident in the EU. London, Paris and Geneva have small neighborhoods of oil sheik families, for example. Brussels has entire neighborhoods effectively only accessible to EU appointees. Amsterdam ... and so on and so forth.
I didn’t say we didn’t have inequality or super rich people or that we’re perfect. Yet we don’t have Musk, the Koch Brothers, Larry Ellison and swarms of fentanyl addicts folded in half in the street a few miles away from their residences.
remember EU had Nokia and Skype and that was before overregulation. What happenned? Both got sold out because EU doesn't have money printer and petrodollar. EU cannot compete even if it would reduce taxes and decrease regulation because they cannot protect their best tech companies from being bought by dozen of billions of printed papers. Most even such companies are on US stock exchange because that's another different money printer.
And Qimonda (Infineon/Siemens) - DRAM manufacturer. They could have prioritized EU for supply.
Consider that "successful" has evolved from innovating products that make our lives better to a strong focus on ad tech, surveillance, social media, and slop.
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Every time I argue against taxes on HN I'm told that my view is wrong and that if we try it just one more time it'll definitely work this time.
Which country doesn’t tax their companies or people? Whether it be tariffs, income taxes, sales taxes, VAT, property taxes, minerals taxes, etc., all countries tax.
Taxes are a necessary evil for society and order. The USA tried to have zero ability to tax the states/people and that only lasted about 10 years before that national government failed and they tried another constitution with more national government powers.
You aren’t arguing “against taxes”, you just have a different opinion on the taxation regime and the coefficients. The sooner you recognize that, the faster your discussions with other humans might actually yield productive results.
The UAE.
(which is why many of EU's rich are domiciled there, which also means they're not counted in the EU's GINI coefficient. Almost no US citizens do the same, because of how the tax system works)
The UAE has a CT (corporate tax) of 9% since 2023 [0, page 8]
This provides an overview [1]
For 2026 "The UAE's tax system is getting stricter. Not in rates. In enforcement." [2]
[0] https://mof.gov.ae/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Federal-Decree...
[1] https://mof.gov.ae/en/public-finance/tax/corporate-tax/
[2] https://www.kayrouzandassociates.com/insights/uae-tax-change...
Hard to take you seriously unless the EU rich domiciled there, stayed there permanently, and didn't get the benefits of their home EU countries, benefits that come from taxes they do not pay into.
That’s your model country?
do you have your own private army to protect you in a taxless world?
Apart from the market (obviously), the companies also enjoy infrastructure, resources (mostly finite) and they also produce byproducts that the society has to deal with (pollution, addiction of population etc).
So who pays for these? What you are suggesting is government subsidies of companies. This sounds like communism to me.
What is your view on taxes?
It worked in the past.
It didn't. Or rather it did, but not for the obvious reasons.
Taxes are not required for spending. Spending isn't required for spending, because ultimately government money is a proxy for power differentials and collective strategy.
Money defines which behaviours and which demographics are rewarded, and which are starved and punished. There are numbers and flow dynamics, but it's primarily a social credit system, not a substance.
Taxes are really a way to control the relative power of some groups over others - a form of regulation.
So when you have events like the New Deal and high taxes on the super rich, that means the economy is tuned towards diminishing power differentials, expanding infrastructure, and access to opportunity.
Low taxes on the super rich means expanding power differentials, more rigid hierarchy, diminishing collective infrastructure, and decreasing access to opportunity.
Likewise with provision of public services. If healthcare is cheap, guaranteed, and widely distributed, that increases individual agency and diminishes hierarchy.
If it's expensive and rationed by/for corporate monopolies, it increases hierarchy and diminishes agency.
How would at tax on HN even work? Does it have revenue?