Michael Harmon
Sep 1, 2018 · 2 min read

There’s something new here that the antimonopoly laws didn’t count on: that sheer size alone can enable vast wealth to accumulate at the top while at the same driving down cost to consumers. Monopoly law reasoning is that monopolies must be avoided because a monopoly is then free to jack up their prices. This is not the case, and we don’t have the laws to address them at this point.

I am not sure how this gets solved.

Okay, if you see something wrong with that kind of wealth disparity, then there is undoubtedly something wrong with it. I am curious, though, what it is that you find objectionable. Is it a purely economic objection or do you have an ethical objection as well?

My objection is purely ethical. If everyone else had enough to be clothed fed and housed, I’d be cool with trillionaires. But they don’t and I feel like it deprives those that don’t have all they need of resources that are otherwise wasted on one man. I mean, what is fundamentally wrong with having even the laziest fuckup subsidized with a roof and food when you have a thousand Bezoses, each with more resource than they can personally utilize in 100 lifetimes?

And what do you find wrong with the blunt force solution? Let’s start with something stupid. What would suffer if there were a cap on personal wealth? You could keep making and accounting for money the way we do now, to see who was the most industrious barron and all, but when you reached a certain property value, call it a billion (but it should be a million) you had to spend the balance on public works, like the Jeff Bezos Lowertown sewer system replacement project or elementary school or whatever.

What’s wrong, or inefficient about that? What is ethically objectionable? What is economically objectionable?

    Michael Harmon

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