Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights
fortune.com> one that would strip voting rights from anyone who pays no income tax
It could be an interesting thought experiment to consider the second and third order consequences, even if, from first principles this is a non-starter in a democratic society.
First off all, what percent of people do not pay any taxes on income? What portion of them are poor vs. hedge fund managers or other super wealthy people who have structured their income in a way as to pay zero or near-zero income taxes? Would the latter be disincentivized from continuing those regimes?
Regardless, if you work at Shopify, you should consider quitting. You do not have to work for a crazy person like that.
> Lütke holds seven per cent of Shopify, according to Forbes, and controls nearly a third of the votes attached to the company’s current shares. Since March 1, 2020, his base salary has been the figure he requested: $1, down from his previous $800,000. [1]
[1] https://financialpost.com/personal-finance/high-net-worth/wh...
So, just so that I'm clear, that means that Lütke himself pays no income tax?
(assuming that he's not paid a salary by anyone else)
No income tax, but capital gains tax. And capital gains tax is a lot less than income tax (hence Buffet’s “my secretary pays more tax than I do”). So the “$1/year” CEOs are simply reducing tax burden.
But, yes, under the proposed scheme, Lütke doesn’t get to vote. One may rest assured that this was a simple mistake. In fact, I’m sure he meant that only those pay capital gains tax get to vote, not income tax.
No capital gains tax is due until gains are realized. Lütke's gains are almost completely unrealized.
Better yet, he gets loans, collateralized against those unrealized gains to the current value of the gains, and then writes off the loan interest against his present and future taxes! Amazing!
Probably not. That strategy is a US strategy that takes advantage of holding the loans until death, then using the step up basis to zero out the unrealized gains and then pay off the loans.
Canada doesn't have that. At death, assets are deemed disposed, so trigger unrealized gains as taxable income on the last tax return. It often results in the estates of upper middle class people paying a lot of taxes.
But not the truly rich like Tobi who have good accountants and lawyers. He'll have moved his stock into a trust that doesn't dissolve on death.
In the U.S., it's about 28% of the populace which pays no taxes (or ends up netting to zero or negative taxation; for example, working families with children are often in a situation where they might owe $2,000 in taxes but also get a credit of $5,000, for a net refund of $3,000.) My 28% figure includes property, sales taxes, etc. but does not include taxes that employers, landlords, and so on pay.
This is all very beneficial for big business including Shopify: businesses can pay lower wages since the government steps in with benefits, including food, cash, housing, energy, medical care, and so on, for people with lower incomes, and then that means they have more money to spend as consumers (relevant to Shopify).
when you say "pays no taxes" do you mean income taxes or any taxes altogether? What about FICA/SECA 15.3% tax? Sales tax? Property tax? Individual income tax only makes up 53% of federal revenues as per https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/gover....
The 28% included payroll taxes, sales tax, property tax and so forth. If you don’t include those, it’s closer to 60%.
Someone with 3 kids earning $26k gets about $10,000 in cash back per year (wiping out $2k in payroll taxes) and $12k of food stamps. Assuming they spend 100% of their cash on either taxable items with 8% sales tax or rent with comparable property tax, that’s still net minus -$5,280.
If we include food stamps and the value of Medicaid at $500 per head per month it’s net minus -$40k. And that doesn’t include things like housing assistance and energy assistance.
Such a person DOES pay gross taxes… they just don’t owe on net.
Somebody with three kids earning 26k is in extreme poverty. If them being a net receiver of government funds is considered a bad thing.... Christ.
Is it not a bad thing in the general case? People who produce net positive value for society subsidize the unsustainable reproduction of those who are a net drain. It is a very sterile perspective, but reality doesn't care about empathy, and you can't feed people with good feelings.
Did anyone say it’s a bad thing? About 15-18% earn at that threshold of under.
With the assistance, though, the amount of net is about the same as someone earning $80k-$100k but gets no assistance at all.
This sounds like you are saying it is a bad thing.
Introducing the shitshow of those state level taxes makes it unworkable, for sure.
So the federal government can disenfranchise anyone they want by issuing that class of taxpayer a refund?
This would be pointless to do for one person, and it would be very curious to see a government reject a massive funding stream from a swath of people like this.
A total refund, that is, $0 in income tax.
Even more interesting (and less deliberately manipulative): The government could make it voluntary. Below $X tax liability, you can choose a total refund - but you can't vote. That would be voting by those who actually care about the vote (or who owe more than $X).
> ...vs. hedge fund managers or other super wealthy people who have structured their income in a way as to pay zero or near-zero income taxes? Would the latter be disincentivized from continuing those regimes?
Oh, you know if something like this was implemented, those people would re-structure their income so they pay $1 in income tax.
Or they wouldn't bother, because they have far more effective ways of influencing the political process than voting. This would be purely about disenfranchising weaker people who could get in the way of them getting even more power.
> even if, from first principles this is a non-starter in a democratic society.
This is a strange phrase - initially you had to either own land (therefore pay tax) or else if you lived in a city and didn't own land but paid sufficient tax[1], to vote in the early United States. Only taxpayers voting was our first principles! We only changed it later.
[1] I'm simplifying slightly because different states handled this differently
Early democracies didn't allow everyone to vote - slaves typically had no voting rights (or any rights at all). However, we've progressed to understand that if you don't provide people with voting rights, they then have to resort to violence instead either through rebellion or insurrection etc. which is why it's considered a very good idea to let women or even people with different coloured skin to vote.
The end-game to stripping voting rights from people is to surely enslave them or kill them as otherwise they will end up using violence to effect change. Personally, I don't understand how most people don't see how evil and twisted some of these "industry leaders" are.
I think it'd be interesting to only allow people a vote if they are jobless and/or poor i.e. the bottom rung of society. That would tilt society so that we would put much more attention on raising the living standards at the bottom rather than aiming to give more power to sociopathic CEOs.
> which is why it's considered a very good idea to let women
There's some revisionism going on here. Women did not want to vote. It was the feminism/communism movement that brought on women suffrage. Had the USSR not succeeded in planting this, we likely wouldn't have ever gotten it.
I've never heard of that and would welcome some sources.
As I understand it, the Women's suffrage movement began mainly in Britain during the late 19th century. The USSR didn't exist until 1922, so I think you've been misinformed.
Arguably, voting rights for some women did exist before then, with Sweden in the 18th century probably being the first. There was also Lydia Taft who was able to vote in colonial America in 1756.
>First off all, what percent of people do not pay any taxes on income?
If you modify this slightly to the percent of people who are not net taxpayers, meaning you subtract transfer payments (including social security, medicare, medicaid) to them from the taxes they pay (including social security, medicare, and medicaid), it's about 60% of the country, which tracks quite closely to the percentage of Americans who could not afford an unexpected $1000 expense.
Most of the country is on a constant financial cliff.
The best analysis I have seen puts it at 28% once you net out sales taxes and property taxes. (There are a lot of people who own property that they live in, but don't work, but they do owe property tax obviously.)
Your 60% figure is reasonable, though, as the gap between 28% and 60% is people who are paying a very, very small net amount, mostly via sales taxes or other taxes that exist like taxes on airplane tickets or hotels.
I’ve spent the last three days writing an inventory management system for a small store, using Codex and Claude Code. I realize that fully replacing online tools like Shopify is a lot more work than that (the payment integrations particularly), but: I sure wouldn’t want to be in the SaaS business right now.
None of the legit ones are at risk from vibecoders.
I don't know what a vibe coder is to you, but I expect there are dozens of experienced software developers on HN who are willing to throw a month of work over the course of a year (and a few hundred dollars of Codex and Claude Code subscriptions/tokens they're already paying for) to write customized software for their friends and loved ones to use. And that while many of these tools will be mediocre or won't get maintained, a non-trivial number will be open sourced and will form a new layer of competition with existing SaaS businesses. (And even if I'm wrong, we're barely a year into the era of coding agents. Wait til 2027 to make big predictions.)
never going to happen. there aren’t dozens but tens of thousands and every knows that everyone is a “coder” now. hence no one will be switching off any of the platforms they are on and these “competitors” will die out or keep paying $20/m to vercel to keep the lights on.
One possibly positive side effect is that by sidelining the working and middle classes, the political landscape would pit the rich against the fuck-you-rich.
It would be interesting to see the class of doctors, lawyers and small business owners fighting against the class of large cap c-suite and the billionaires.
We don’t have to go farther back than 100 years in history to know what this looks like. Poll taxes, land ownership requirements, etc. were pretty common. So were goon squads to beat and murder people who tried to change that. It wasn’t good.
I wouldn't want a lot of the landscape 100 years ago, but I'd happily be disenfranchised if I could get the size of government 100+ years ago (federal government <~2% of GDP in non-wartime)
You might change your mind if you study the economy of the US in the late 1800's. Those boom and bust cycles were intense, making the great depression of the 1930's look unexceptional.
If you want to get rich, you need an healthy, educated, rich and secure customer and employee base. You don't get that with <~2% of GDP spent on health, education, roads, police, courts et cetera.
That landscape you wouldn’t want is in part a product of the small government you covet.
"Great men of history do not introspect, move forward, go!"
The majority of voters who pay no income tax are (heavily Republican) retirees.
> First off all, what percent of people do not pay any taxes on income?
Most corporates, for starters.
Seen in that light, it might not be such a bad idea.
I think you would magically see more (edit: wealthy) people collect an income
> Regardless, if you work at Shopify, you should consider quitting. You do not have to work for a crazy person like that.
Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system. Every part of the system has trade-offs that must be evaluated. You can make a logical argument that any other policy is open to abuse, etc. But why do you have to accuse other people of being “crazy” for having ideas about how to engineer a system?
You mean government and society are an engineering exercise. You can't strip people of power and then say it's a democracy, at least not if words mean things.
Words do “mean” things. But the word “democracy” refers to a broader category of government systems, of which democracy with universal adult franchise constitutes a subset of the broader concept. The ancient Greeks practiced democracy, but universal adult franchise was a much later development.
I don't think "crazy" is the best word, but maybe "malicious", "evil", "megalomaniac" or something similar would be more appropriate.
However, I would describe the idea itself as being "crazy" as it seems like something that could very easily be abused. There's a long history of voting laws being twisted to deny certain groups of people (e.g. slaves, women) and of course, there's the old U.S. intelligence tests that they used to give to black people to validate whether they would be allowed to vote (spoiler: the tests were ambiguous enough to invalidate everyone subjected to them).
Imagine if this was implemented and then some bright spark announces that Starbucks workers no longer have to pay income tax. Then, following the election, an immediate decree is made that Starbucks workers are now the property of Starbucks and are not considered to have individual rights.
It’s fallacious reasoning to say that, just because some distinctions for voting are illegitimate, therefore all distinctions are illegitimate. We already have distinctions: kids can’t vote, non-citizen foreigners can’t vote, felons often can’t vote.
> It’s fallacious reasoning to say that, just because some distinctions for voting are illegitimate, therefore all distinctions are illegitimate
I agree, but that's not really the argument here. My argument is that it is very easy to abuse certain distinctions and so we should not seriously entertain those distinctions. Proof of worth or intelligence can be easily gamed to prevent certain classes of people from voting,
> Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system.
God, tech people should have stayed in basements.
The person you're quoting is a lawyer.
A lawyer who has, in the past, said only property owners and people with at least two grandparents born in the US should be allowed to vote (which excludes him by the second criteria). He's been an advocate for disenfranchisement for a while now.
I do believe the “we have to strip voting rights from the poor in order to save the poor” framing expressed in this thread is new, however.
It is new, but it's not that surprising given his stated positions in the past.
If you think poor people know what’s best for them, how do you think we should decide vaccine schedules for kids? We should have online voting on it with universal franchise, right? We have the technology now. If you don’t agree we should do that, explain why you think we should gatekeep such an important decision instead of letting people decide what’s best for them?
Sorry, did you intend to link this reply to a different comment?
* * *
I'm just pointing out that you have advocated, repeatedly, for the disenfranchisement of people (including yourself, which leads to a question: Do you practice your current right to vote, or stand by your conviction that you don't deserve that right and so don't vote?. And your plan for disenfranchisement includes cutting you off from the vote, but not your children, but could disenfranchise your grandchildren.
How that'd work:
You were not born in the US (per many, many past comments you've made here). Your wife was (also per many, many comments). Your parents were not, but your wife's parents were, so your children get the right to vote (they have two grandparents born in the US).
If your child marries an immigrant or the child of immigrants, then their children would be deprived of the right to vote despite the fact that one of their parents had the right to vote. Your grandchildren would only have 1 grandparent (your wife, their grandmother) born in the US, so you think they wouldn't deserve the right to vote.
How is this possibly a reasonable system? Have you told your children yet that if they don't marry the right kind of people that you don't think their children (your own grandchildren) deserve the right to vote? You're no better than the Jim Crow pushers of old.
I was a basement dwelling tech person first. I don’t know when techies got soft, but back in my day we were like “remove all the warning labels and let god sort it out.”
Like any engineering exercise, there are ideas within the bounds of reasonable debate and ideas that are so bad they should be immediately dismissed and those advocating for them excluded from further discussion until they can participate like intelligent adults.
If I'm a civil engineer designing a bridge, I think it's perfectly reasonable to call someone crazy if their plan is to build it out of Popsicle sticks and unicorn tears. Or more appropriate for this discussion, from the bones of poor people. Wasting time on their nonsense not only makes it harder to reach our actual goal of building a bridge, but reinforces the nonsense notion that all ideas are equally valid or worthy of consideration just because someone voiced them.
The difference is that you can prove with math and physics that building bridge out of popsicle sticks is crazy. Whereas your point here is based on emotional appeals (“bones of poor people”) and religious dogma. Poor people are the ones who suffer the most from dysfunctional government. Every unit of inefficiency or dysfunction in public services—every late bus or bad teacher—is a tax on the people who can least afford it.
You seem to imply that allowing poor people to vote leads to a dysfunctional government, whereas it seems clear to me that allowing corporations to influence politics is far, far worse.
You’re not thinking it through. Corporate money influences politics because campaigns are expensive. And campaigns are expensive because advertising to vast swaths of low information voters is expensive.
Say you cut out the third of the electorate that’s most susceptible to advertising. That would increase everyone else’s voting power by 50%. But it would greatly reduce the actual power of rich people, because the remaining electorate would be much harder to influence by buying advertising.
The other thing is that narrowing the electorate by a third would be less elitist than the systems the Wilsonians came up with in response to the Jacksonians. Today, everyone votes, but votes don’t matter very much because the government is actually run by a small elite of credentialed experts and civil servants, and lawyers. APA litigation has a far outsized impact compared to voting.
Almost any system that limits participation in democracy will be abused to disenfranchise people that those in power do not want to give a voice.
So you're coming at this from the wrong end. The goal is explicitly to keep the poors from having a voice in politics. The exact policy and enforcement of the system will reflect that. Unintended consequences, like the rich being disenfranchised would not occur.
To say it differently, if that ends up disenfranchising the powerful, a different argument and set of law would be used
Trump paid about $750 in taxes in 2016 while still claiming to be a billionaire. I wouldn't consider it a fair share, but would that $750 entitle him to a vote under this plan?
>Trump paid about $750 in taxes in 2016 while still claiming to be a billionaire
Right, because the tax system (generally) taxes income, not wealth. Not taking this into account is like asking "you're millionaire, yet you don't have any income, how come?" to a retiree. According to the new york times article that broke this story, most of it seems to be from his loss making businesses elsewhere. Moreover in recent years he has been paying tax, as those losses have stopped.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-tru...
It is legal, but is it "fair"? And should someone who doesn't pay a fair share be entitled to a vote? Is the fairness important?
The thing about this that's so distasteful is that it removes the basis of enfranchisement from being the inherent worth of a human life and moves it more to "what have you done for me lately". It's pretty gross.
There's numerous examples of commune societies evicting people who refuse to contribute.
The distasteful thing is people refusing to contribute to society, especially for long periods of time. I know many people who have various mental and physical disabilities (some severe) who insist on working. Some able-bodied people can't even match some with severe disabilities. It's sick.
Working a McJob to make some CEO and their investors rich is not a virtue. The Protestant work ethic really is a toxic ideology that can't die soon enough. It's the very basis of exploitation.
When you choose to not work as an able-bodied person you're really insisting that your community should be forced to give you resources while you contribute nothing.
Any collectivist commune would kick you out for this.
It's also interesting you use the McJob angle, because when you consider the price of a Big Mac, labor is by far the largest contributor of cost, not profit.
A Big Mac's cost is 30% labor, 25% ingredients and only 5% net profit. The remainder is operating costs. Seems like a pretty good deal for the people making the Big Mac, they're getting 6x more than the franchisee gets.
Yes, that is also gross.
It also lets my manager decide whether I get to vote or not.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, gross is exactly the word for it.
> A reply from “Eric Thor,” who claimed to be a retired banking executive as well as “armchair economist and policy wonk,” proposed a sliding scale: zero votes for anyone who pays no income tax, one vote for those earning $1–100K, two votes for $100–200K, scaling up in that pattern to a hard cap of five votes for anyone earning $500K or more.
hell yeah, dude, I LOVE that I can lose my health insurance if my manager's manager decides he doesn't like the cut of my jib. Why shouldn't I lose my right to vote, too?
Oh boy! Can I play too? My system, which I call an expansion of antitrust, requires all people to keep their net worth under one billion dollars. Anyone approaching that number must give away assets to stay under. If you go over that, you must be broken up, by, say, beheading, or being drawn and quartered.
I'm not married to that number, if people think it should be half a billion, or 100 million, or whatever, I'll go along with it.
Rather than a fixed amount of net worth, I'd rather it was linked to something like the minimum wage (e.g. minimum wage x 10 million) or the net worth of the poorest 10%. There should be some mechanism to prevent runaway wealth hoarders from stealing power and resources from the rest of us.
The Catan system
Lutke is a German who has lived in Canada for decades. Why comment on American tax policy ? Seems out of his lane .
These people almost universally believe their opinions and thoughts are uniquely special and always worth bowing to.
They are egotists. It’s one of the biggest parts of who they are.
The guy made an offhand remark. Someone else chose to write a whole article about it, and we all chose to leave hundreds of comments here.
The guy is a massive asshole but I don’t see the issue commenting on other countries policies, that’s what we all do
Maybe he's suggesting it for Canada?
Multiple Canadian billionaires are pro trump and wouldn't mind becoming a 51st state.
There’s no such thing for the billionaire class.
Shouldn't it be the reverse? The vote of people who earn less (and are therefore more disadvantaged in society and rely on fair laws the most) should count more.
Tax and "money paid to the system" is a red herring only an entitled super rich person would think is relevant.
It's an interesting idea only if you've never studied how democracy came to be.
The best definition of democracy that I've ever heard is that democracy is war by other means.
When you take away someone's right to vote, or make their vote less important than someone else's, you take away the only non-violent means they have to affect change.
Democracy is an agreement to put aside our weapons and resolve conflict peacefully. Take that away and you end up with violent revolution.
The very rich have forgotten the lessons of the past.
They have forgotten that they also live in the very same physical world as the poor. Most of them don't even live that far from the poor.
Perhaps they don't consider the implications that nobody can fight a mob.
If they were as smart as they want people to think, they would think about these things and perhaps shut up (at least in public!) about making things worse for the poor.
The eventual flagging of this post makes me so sad for our civilization, of which this website is a HUGE part.
I believe there was a very interesting conversation happening here.
Just to play with this a bit, this proposal instantly and completely ends Republican power. Low-taxed rural poor and retiree votes are gone, entirely. Higher earning coastal white collar and professional workers get 3-5 votes, offset to some degree but far from entirely by the business-owning rich blue collar class. The middle classes get 1. It's fairly obvious what that would mean for representation in the USA.
Second fun point is that he and his oligarch colleagues would find themselves with no votes: I guarantee I pay more income tax than this guy and anyone else in the multiple airplane owning class. Marvelous.
It is of course a fairly revolting idea but one which has some interesting unintended consequences, not least that we might suddenly find the rentier class figuring out how to declare income of $500,001 instead of a loss every year.
You are a lone voice of reason in these comments, presumably because you checks notes read the article.
I will add that voting blocs do shift. In fact, in the last two US presidential elections, retirees actually broke for the Democrat. That could have something to do with Trump or be an actual trend.
Additionally, these rich people do pay a lot of tax, they just do it through different parts of the tax code and at a lower overall rate (by avoiding social security and Medicare taxes by way of earning through long-term capital gains). On the other hand they also own more real estate than you (probably) in desirable locations and pay a lot of property tax they can't avoid.
All that notwithstanding I sense that the root of this discussion that this guy's getting excoriated for, was exploring how to short-circuit the phenomenon wherein older people, voting at higher rates (and holding office long into their old age), secure for themselves preferential benefits at the expense of struggling younger generations. The thread took off in a strange way from there, but... I guess I like where it was trying to go at the outset.
TIL about epistemic trespassing:
It occurs when an expert in one field passes judgment or makes confident claims in another field where they lack true competence or formal training.
I wonder if he posts from the toilet like Elon.
You should have skin in the game to vote (citizenship as a minimum in national elections, for example). It used to be that owning property was that gate (land, specifically, not income). So how do you get an electorate that isn't just interested in voting themselves free stuff?
I honestly don't know. Raising children properly is a sign you're invested in the future, but holy cow would I not want a government test for that. Let's stick with citizenship... If you really want to fix the electorate, you need to fix education, and re-socialize values of merit (individual responsibility, liberty over ease...). Not an easy or simple proposition.
A principled society is superior to a ruled society, we just don't like to pay what's needed for the former and land in the latter as a local minima.
I have a different idea. How about we weight your vote by your fiscal commonality with the average American? No?
I think this is one of the cases where someone is just so rich that more money stops resulting in any meaningful additional quality of life. Then the only way to increase their quality-of-life differential (relative, not absolute value is the key metric here), is to make other people's lives worse.
It seems like billionaires somehow develop a deep resentment and drive to change the world, whilst not spending any of their money to do it. (I wrote before remembering that lobbying exists.)
One note about the headline. He didn't say anything about Americans. That was injected by the editor.
We should really make a better shopify already; these guys aren't worth the salt they stand upon.
Honestly, shopify’s near-monopoly has confused me for at least a decade. Their platform is bad, and has always been bad - at least from the perspective of managing a store - yet no real challenger has been able to take their crown.
The issue, I suspect, is payment processing and KYC. To operate at their scale requires not only the cooperation of various PCI partners (who are not obligated to cooperate) it also involves massive liability. A better question to ask is for whom would the investment of building a new Shopify be worth it. I suspect the answer is “not anyone who is using Shopify”.
The problem with allowing only the rich to vote is that they're inherently exploitative of the poor. It's a veiled attempt to want to return to an approximation of slavery.
I remember meeting (then) Tobi at an inspiring "punk" Ruby event in 2007 in Toronto, RubyFringe, and thinking he seemed like a mildly spoken decent guy.
How times have changed.
No representation without taxation?
Government exists to serve the people. People do not exist so they can pay taxes. This was the very reason the Founding Fathers rebelled against Britain.
1. This CEO is a Canadian.
2. We already have a gerontocracy. Tying income to vote-weight just solidifies the problem since most people earn more as their career progresses.
3. An alternative: grant voting rights to all under 18, proxied by their parent/legal guardian. This provides better alignment to the interests of the future than good fortune.
I think there is a bigger issue here.
Charging people for their fundamental rights.
It happens in many different ways. Look at all these people that just want to live and they can't even do that without having to pay to exists.
It is getting to be like that movie "In Time" where there is a clock you have to keep funding or you expire.
Presumably because they don't believe that saying so publicly will result in unacceptable consequences.
He‘s been hanging out with his friends quite a lot lately I assume. Same brain farts over and over again.
Tax the rich.
And by that I mean people who "earn" their wealth through mechanisms that aren't direct income. Heck, give an exception to the tax on the first million of non-income based wealth. But something has to change because their money is their power and they deserve less of it.
Canada already has that exemption on the first CAD 1.25M capital gain, assuming that Shopify qualifies as a Canadian business by staying >50% Canadian for at least 2 years.
But like pretty much everywhere, Canada does not tax unrealized gains. At least they don't have the silly loop-hole that the US does of the step-up in basis on death.
My biggest problem with “tax the rich” is: then what? Build another “high-speed train”? Spend the money on some fake nonprofit run by the same rich people?
Are these really the only ways of spending tax income you're aware of?
Considering the current gerrymandering, all sorts of regulatory capture, and a two-party system that's captured most voter's sense of identity and packaged it for abuse... I think this discussion is extremely theoretical.
I dont think its a good model for America but if I were starting a country from scratch I might consider it. But I would also do stuff like a heavy death estate tax and disallow most generational wealth transfer.
What would stop people from shifting to different kinds of wealth transfer? Extreme investment in education, squirrely work-arounds, nepotism, etc? I don't see how you can attempt to prevent people from providing as much benefit to their children as possible.
I've heard some good arguments for eliminating a wealth tax and instead treating inheritance as income. There are other forms of money manipulation that should also be treated as income. For example, the borrow-spend-die trick. Other transactions that should go through a "cash" phase include the financial three-card Monty the AI companies are pulling right now. Other manipulations we need to make illegal, such as stock buybacks.
There are some "reasonable" exceptions one could argue for, but as soon as you start making exceptions, you open yourself to abuse of the system. For example, using the tax code to enact social policy. I think it would be more honest for the government to take in all the money as taxes and then turn around and distribute money for socially beneficial programs such as green energy, schools, public health, et cetera. If you look at who screams about this, you'll probably find that most of them are opportunistic people who are afraid somebody will cheat the system better than they do.
This would also be a good opportunity to create an independent, transparent organization that audits where the money goes and provides raw data they use to justify their actions to the public so that others can double-check their conclusions.
#IfIWereKing
I would allow only one Version- which is if junior builds a buisness and that buisness shows potential, the donor buisness (daddy) should be able to pay the taxes taxfree for that buisness.
It might actually be a better idea to require a short, in-person civic knowledge test every two years as a condition for voting. If you fail, you can take it again, but you cannot vote until you pass.
I’m only half joking.
In the US the rich already has more public power than the poor... from lobbying to donations to "speech". I guess making it official would save them from all this work and simplify things?
Except everyone pays taxes. It's in everything that is bought at any given time.
Obviously this asshole does not mean it like that. What he means is that only rich assholes like him should get to vote.
If we are in the phase of just spitballing shit that should be considered unacceptable in a society where we are meant to coexist, I would spitball the idea that the time for his neck to meet the guillotine is long overdue.
Look, I'm not even a millionaire, and I will never be a billionaire, but in an alternate reality in which I'm a centibillionaire, one of my chief aims would be to limit the political say of the electorate as much as possible, because their voting rights would be one of the biggest threats to my everything.
Moreover, everyone who gains any amount of power becomes protective of it.
That's basic human nature. As a conservative, I under this.
Its cute how people who don't live here have the worst ideas for how we should run our country, like we don't see what they are trying to do.
People who do live here also have terrible ideas. Terrible ideas can come from anywhere!
It is interesting to hear how openly some CEOs will just say outright stupid things. Like ok, so you re-do the voting system to give rich people more votes than poor people. Fine. It's done. What's the first order of business amongst the electorate at the next election. Well Elon Musk now has 10 times as many votes as Tobias Lütke, why would Musk not just vote to change the system again, handing more power to himself? And on the basis of what principle would you oppose him?
It's just fundamentally a stupid thing to say, and the fact he says it in public strongly indicates that he's lost contact with anyone who will challenge him on this stuff.
Rich people don't have enough power? He must not understand what levers he can already pull to get what he wants.
I bet you that if their dear leader suggested this, most of the people would vote to have their voting rights be taken away.
How much more evidence do we need that there is in fact a class war going on and the rich are winning?
The biggest con they ever pulled off is making working class people (and yes, that includes you, fellow tech workers!) hate unions.
Unions are the only way workers can fight back - they may be able to tell individuals what to do, but they can't control the collective.
This is also why they're so feverishly trying to build AI - they finally want to have workers that have no way of organizing.
Yeah, this one rich dude made an offhand comment! If that’s not concrete evidence of a massive conspiracy, nothing is!
Because there's literally only one comment by one rich dude! No need to look at any further evidence, case closed!
Yeah ignore the Oracle CEO saying everyone will be on their best behavior because AI surveillance will keep people in check [0].
Or Thiel saying that "democracy and freedom are no longer compatible". I wonder who's freedom to do what he's talking about? Surely he's concerned about the little man? [1]
Or Elon Musk cutting USAID and causing all sorts of death and destruction around the world [2] while enriching himself from government coffers. [3]
Or Marc Andreessen calling the concept of "social responsibility" an "enemy of progress". [4] Sure wonder what his idea of progress is! I'm sure it's great for everyone given that it's opposed to even the notion of social responsibility!
And that's just in our little tech world! If you venture out a bit further, you'll find many more gems, like Tim Gurner complaining that workers have gotten "arrogant" and continuing to say: "We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around." [5]
Sure, it's all just one rich dude making an offhand comment. Or maybe all of them making offhand comments all the time?
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/16/oracle-ceo-larry-ellison-s...
[1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/07/elon-musk...
[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/06/13/business/musk-trillionair...
[4] https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
[5] https://x.com/kenklippenstein/status/1701658625280704599
Voting should always be universal. The moment you exclude someone, you add the possibility of excluding more people.
And the fall of Shopify begins now.
He's been a turd that any reasonable person would endorse stripping of his wealth for years.
Hasn't affected the bottom line one whit.
He’s working on it. Never let a narcissist know you figured him out. They will continue.
This is hilarious in that many very rich people pay zero income tax today. In this system “all of a sudden” all these people would be paying taxes on exactly 500k. Near zero for them anyway but with an explicit albeit BS claim of funding the majority of government expense. From a bit of quick research the top 1% of earners are about 40% of the tax base.
Everyone gets screwed in this system but especially those paying a good amount of taxes and getting fewer votes like the 200-400k range. Or maybe not especially. This just an outright terrible idea.
People need to stop conflating evil intentions with evil capacity. It is done regularly with Elon, Thiel, etc. As arrogant as they may be on X, they are drooling imbeciles when it comes to politics. Remember Blake Masters? Remember the Wisconsin supreme court election? How is the admin they endorsed doing? Has Lutke thought about how high-income individuals in metro areas vote?
They have failed again and again. There is no reason to believe Lutke's worthless dreams will go unchallenged if they are ever attempted in the first place.
Ah, a German Canadian endorsing changes to the U.S. taxation system.
I don't understand why we humor this stuff. Our society has lost the ability to simply say "no" to something. We have to argue everything into the weeds, constantly hand wringing about biases and hearing all voices.
You can be biased. I, for one, am biased towards democracy and am comfortable telling people to fuck off when they question it. I don't need to debate it. Just fuck right off.
> I don't understand why we humor this stuff
Social contract is a difficult subject, and people don't think about it enough.
But thanks to this clickbait headline, thousands of readers may come upon an articulation of why current enfranchisement is more desirable than arrangements that preceded it. In other words, it's a chance to learn what's worth defending and how our current situation might be improved.
Hear me out...
Why don't we tax stocks like we do homes with a property tax? Why am I paying property tax on the majority of my net worth, but billionaires are not?
Also, I know all about the buy/borrow/die strategy and I have an idea for that too. Let's tax all loans as income. They are, in fact, income. "B-but they have to be paid back!" That's income again, the bank should pay tax on it.
the why is quite easy, because we are not worthy of having a say in our own governance according to them, so that they may better exploit us
Fascinating to see how many tech people, as soon as they get rich, turn to extreme. Name them all - they mostly all are very active on X, and each new tweet pushes the limits of what was previously deemed unacceptable. I'm rich, so my opinion must be more important, right?
Ed Zitron had a great quote that's relevant to this.
> [they] have filled their skulls with a sense of moral and intellectual superiority - that because they have succeeded at work, they understand society better than others, and can only perceive the world through that lens of privilege
It's because you don't see any of the ones that didn't turn to extreme. They're just extremely forgettable, by design.
When was the last time you saw Craig Silverstein or Steve Wozniak or Urs Hoelzle or David Cheriton or Jan Koum or Jawed Karim in the news? You don't, because they don't seek fame. At most you might see them on the donor list of local museums or cultural attractions (which they are, abundantly). Even Marissa Mayer, who was very much seeking the spotlight until she got the Yahoo CEO job, has basically fucked off to the sunset and now just runs some extravagant haunted houses in Palo Alto and helps fund the Junior Museum.
There's plenty of tech wealth that's very quiet, basically keeps to itself, and limits itself to some quiet local philanthropy. But by definition, you don't hear about quiet wealth.
> Fascinating to see how many tech people, as soon as they get rich, turn to extreme. Name them all - they mostly all are very active on X, and each new tweet pushes the limits of what was previously deemed unacceptable.
They have the money and power, but tech people in particualr lack the social graces and awareness that previous generations of rich people needed to operate. They think very highly of themselves, but all that "intelligence" doesn't prevent them from acting stupidly.
The old timey ones were morons in every kind of human way, too. We know what dumb shit they thought and said.
They just didn’t all have instantaneous global reach while sitting on the crapper, like Henry Ford with a Twitter account.
Even the Hearst type ones usually had time and human machinery between the formation of idiotic notions and it reaching other people.
> The old timey ones were morons in every kind of human way, too. We know what dumb shit they thought and said.
I'm not saying they were great. I'm just saying they probably spent more of their formative years interacting with real people than messing around with machines, so the tech lords are probably even worse.
All the stuff all these people post on X is just regurgitation of 4chan circa 2016. The lingo is literally all just /fit/ memes from 10 years ago rebranded.
-maxxing, "mogging", "NGMI", I'm literally going nuts waiting for Gavin to start asking trump "DYEL"?
> All the stuff all these people post on X is just regurgitation of 4chan circa 2016.
You can trace a lot of what is wrong with 2026 back to the right-wing countercultural movement on 4chan, probably along with meme culture in general.
it is weird how when i first heard of meme it was in the dawkins sense. then people showed me memes and i thought wtf this is just dumb jokes, what a weird transformation of the term (my understanding of it). Then i watched it become an actual vehicle for political ideology, "just jokes" when too far but real ideas the rest of the time.
The left rots from them and the right becomes more extreme and everyone is losing all the time. Meme-banning sites like HN and stackoverflow look brilliant in hindsight, to me, with them knowing what they were doing all along; and now there are so few havens from them.
I know this is also a trope, but id always hoped the human race would be consumed by something more sophisticated. But it seems like memes was all is took.
Yeah, I'm on a gaming Discord where the 30+ year-old game modders who run it had to ban memes. If you don't, you'll end up with 15-year-old kids spamming memes into channels because that's just how they "talk" online.
And the "meme police" who will complain about misusing meme formats seem really regressive and anti-creative to me. Some satirist should skewer all the young adults who think that meme formats need to be defended.
[I also read The Selfish Gene back in the 90s, long before memes were just jokes]
it's not by accident, they're targeting specific demographics for a reason
angry young men will vote to abolish democracy -- and have, in Europe circa 1930s -- if you can convince them it'll benefit them.
step 1 is to start speaking to them in ways they connect with.
put another way, with the boomers dying rapidly, the largest source of MAGA is young men...
Why is the left doing the opposite?
There is no place for a young man who views masculinity through a traditional lens on the left.
This is itself a 4chan meme. They also view neo-liberals as "the left", while most leftists definitely do not.
Worrying about "woke", "no place for a young man", trans anything... none of these are actual problems, just 4chan/ultra-right boogeymen.
Voting statistics by sex show that it is a problem.
How so? First of all there aren't many leftists you can actually vote for. Second, nothing is stopping men or women from voting for leftists, and indeed both do in the rare instances they're on a ballot.
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." -Lord Acton (1887)
It's simple. I think a large percentage of the population (maybe even most) are truly, innately bad. By "bad" I mean that they would always choose to benefit themselves over the wellbeing of others. Social constructs and the need for social acceptance keeps most of those tendencies at bay, but when a person gets enough money and power, they're able to express/project all of that badness and with little consequence to boot. There are endless examples of this throughout history. Right now, tech is giving a small percentage of the population outsized power and influence. We shouldn't be surprised with the result. Humanity is what it is.
Accumulation of wealth and power becomes an addiction unto itself if left unchecked. At some point, we all have to look in the mirror and ask ourselves if we have enough and start to place importance in other parts of our lives.
But many of the wealthiest people I have known were also the least happy, driven by an insatiable urge to be great, and despite achieving vast success, were never able to feel or accept that they had already achieved it. It was never enough.
They were always capable of these thoughts, money just gave them access to actions as well. Money didn’t turn them extreme IMO, maybe more fearful about losing it.
Money would've allowed them to act any time. But no, this is because of the shifting tide, enabled by an openly elitist government that doesn't give a shit about the layman.
Remember how a few years back, all these billionaires and corporations were all talking about DEI and taking the knee and George Floyd, and (insincerely) shoving it all down everyone's throats?
It just became socially more acceptable for them to show their true colors.
I don't see why these colors would be any more truer than the ones before. I bet they would change again just as quick if winds went back to blowing the other way. The only color they care about is the green of money. And if you asked them why they supported it they'd get all forgetful and not remember ever supporting any of that.
It will be very difficult for them to backtrack on their crap now without losing face, since many of them have gone off the far end. Elon was once a darling of the left, with sizeable donations to Obama and Clinton, and even Biden.
It seems for Elon, the point he went right happened as follows:
> On August 5, 2021, Biden signed an Executive Order targeting that half of cars sold in 2030 should be electric.[254] General Motors CEO Mary Barra was in attendance.[254] Musk commented, "seems odd that Tesla wasn't invited."[255] Barra said in 2024 Musk never forgave not being invited.[256][257] In 2025, former vice president Kamala Harris said that she believed that not inviting Musk was a "big mistake."[258][259] In September 2021, Musk criticized Biden as "not the friendliest administration."[258] In December 2021, Musk publicly expressed opposition to the Build Back Better Act.
He literally switched sides for something so trivial, but went deeper and deeper till he went full retard.
This has been a studied phenomenon for a bit now:
Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior
> Fascinating to see how many tech people, as soon as they get rich, turn to extreme.
This is just because the latest people to have gotten crazy-rich came from tech. IMHO, the same can be said of all people who became emperors in a minute. (which is a whole new thing)
We are all just humans, and none of us are evolved for this. This could happen to anyone of us... could it not?
I think many of us have seen the changes that occur when this happens. Again, we are just not evolved for this. How could we be? The number of people that this happens to is a tiny fraction of the species, and so those who experience this, get really weird.
I think too many billionaires convince themselves it was fate and scramble their brains under the weight of figuring out what the greater purpose is for their extraordinary wealth and influence.
The asymptotic equivalent of $20 "burning a hole in your pocket"
Here's to hoping for more batmans and less lex luthors
the "engineer's disease" writ large.
I am good at solving X and Y, and have deep knowledge in those areas, therefore I'm good at solving problems everywhere.
it's like how people says scientists should run the world but have never seen how utterly tribal and often brutal researchers can be.
I think everyone has weird ideas like this, but these rich, well-connected guys don't have to worry about their lives being ruined when they actually share them out loud.
I can't imagine many aerospace manufacturers turning down a contract with SpaceX because Elon said something politically incorrect. James Damore, on the other hand...
This isn't hate towards these rich guys (I think everyone should be able to say shit like this), just pointing out that we as a society hold them to different standards than we do regular people.
But when everyone says stuff like this, they get punched out in a bar, and only the people in the bar hear it at all. When this guy says it, it's news that the whole country hears.
A sample of some, uh, politically incorrect stuff Musk said recently:
* "Anyone who opposes remigration is a traitor"
* "She is a traitor to the West, plain and simple" (in reference to his recent interviewer)
* "Deal with traitors before invaders. They are committing high treason."
* "First the traitors, then the invaders" (screenshot from Citizen Vigilante pointing gun at camera)
We’re at the point where Musk (and others) are regurgitating literal Klansman rhetoric, in addition to the usual anti-democratic stuff. This is extremely far from normal.
Honestly just my experience, but I've found it ironic that finance bros in my circle have gone the other way i.e. the effective altruism, philosophizing, podcasting route. While tech bros are now turning openly elitist, and in some cases, racist.
And before anyone claims it's selection bias from within my left-leaning circle, I was well involved within the Tory circus until recently (a couple of years back).
Some sorta god complex resulting from dealing with machines that has the sole purpose of answering one’s commands, perhaps?
Maybe an NYC bias here but in my experience finance folks are more closely tied to "well to do" social circles. Summering in the Hamptons, that kind of thing. And that crowd has always had a streak of philanthropy, even if it's as much a status thing as a genuine belief in helping others.
Silicon Valley is very far from all that. More broadly I think it's a reflection of the isolation (physical, cultural, etc) of SV.
This supports my belief that when being a finance bro was the only way to Croesus-level wealth, sociopaths tended to go into finance, so they could transcend societal norms with their wealth. Then, tech came along, making finance bro-level wealth seem quaint. Where did all the sociopaths go...well, you saw for yourself.
I agree, this could strongly be the case. Especially since now the most elite in finance are either working in quant roles and /or megafund private equity, both of which are extremely selective compared to tech. Megafund PE was always and still remains a bastion of conservatism, but quant shops still select for more objective skillsets meritocratically.
Or... hear me out.
"Tech bro" is finance bro.
Most of the "tech" CEO people we're admiring? as movers and shakers... very few of them actually come from an engineering background.
They're mostly just people attracted to the tech industry as a focus of dynamic high profit capitalism. The technology is only the background buzz.
Many of these businesses (Shopify especially!) -- in particular SaaS businesses -- actually have very weak "tech" innovation, it's really just the deployment of pre-existing engineering solutions (solved by other people usually) at scale in order to run a commercial business that just happens to use a lot of computers.
By finance bros, I meant people who continue to work in finance in some capacity. True, there is often some migration from finance to tech, which is usually composed of characters like the ones you talk of.
> effective altruism, philosophizing, podcasting route
all I see is "scam, BS, slop"
I think it might be because the tech bros got into a one-off event where a lot of people did and could've made money (as long as they were somewhat intelligent). Now the writing is on the wall that growth in the future will stall, as the sector takes up a larger portion of the economy,and positions of power will stabilise. Some of them probably believe turning elitist and racist could ensure them a better position for a while.
Maybe I'm trying to rationalise their behaviour too much but it feels like techbros have gotten a scarcity mindset.
Well, they did /something/ right ...
Would you say the same about someone who accumulated billions thru the illegal drug trade?
Who is going to say what is and isn't acceptable? You?
Each person says what is and isn't acceptable, it can't really be any other way.
I'm far too stupid for that and I'm also privileged so what do I know. Many are more qualified to do so. I just think that his statement is not acceptable and is clearly dangerous for the society as a whole.
The Overton window.
You don't get to shift it without raising questions about your motives.
Yes. That would the point of democracy, if ours wasn't in shambles.
I get to say what I'll tolerate, and what I'll interfere with. We all do.
I certainly get to say what is and isn’t acceptable for me. I also don’t get to say what is and isn’t acceptable for others. Don’t understand why your tone is so accusatory.
Yes. If the billionaires can do it, why not me?
Yes?
Somehow money seem to damage personality. It's the same with David Heinemeier Hansson (who know Tobias Lütke in person), Elon Musk and many other folks.
I'd say "eat the rich", but he probably tastes like shit. Best to bury him by the side of the road.
Down vote me all you want, how does that billionaire taste sliding down your throat?
Cool cool cool. Now let's hear from the people who endorse stripping him of his wealth.
How about that: If you are a billionaire you lose your voting rights because you are already powerful enough and don’t need that extra power
The way that's gonna go is "We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing."
There are only 900 billionaires in the U.S. Do you think if they lost their voting rights it would affect the outcome of even a single election whatsoever?
If it includes ability to vote via campaign donations that cause votes, then yes absolutely. Note for instance in the Massie primary, rich donors literally turned money into new votes by prodding a bunch of demented elderly people who never vote in primaries to believe Massie was banging AOC and Ilhan Omar and secretly a democrat (the vote from regular primary voters remained almost unchanged, the delta was almost entirely new voters brought out by a fraudulent propaganda campaign). That's essentially indistinguishable from those rich people having cast the vote themselves.
It’s always other people who are brainwashed by the propaganda, huh?
I mean if all the people that voted last primary voted basically the same you have some sort of control group, the only significant delta in that primary was a huge group of very elderly people that don't vote in the primaries except this time that showed up after they were targeted for a hilariously false campaign with Isreali AIPAC money.
If the control group changed as well I'd agree with you, but the delta here was basically a huge group of demented people that were specifically targeted to show up in a one-off. It's hardly just disingenuously brushed away as some "other people" that just changed their mind after labeling the other guy's opinion as propaganda because they disagreed.
It‘s not about the outcome of an election but about putting a symbolic to their power.
Billionaires can do what they what without real consequences, this would hurt even if it has no real effect. More psychological
So put in the enormous effort needed to change the Constitution all towards a goal of some superficial and ineffective measure instead of taking a fraction of that effort and putting it towards actual concrete things that might improve society like better health care, better education, infrastructure.
Got it.
You would be surprised how effective such small measure are.
Just look how they react when someone "lesser" denies unconditional consent.
Musk vs. Unsworth comes to mind.
And Elon, if you somehow read that: we all know that pedo guy isn’t South African slang
Paywalled articles seem to enhance the "comment without reading, based on vibes" effect.
From the article:
"Pension recipients should have their financial futures “locked in and guaranteed,” but in return would be reclassified as “dependents” and lose the right to vote—the same way minors can’t vote. A reply from “Eric Thor,” who claimed to be a retired banking executive as well as “armchair economist and policy wonk,” proposed a sliding scale: zero votes for anyone who pays no income tax, one vote for those earning $1–100K, two votes for $100–200K, scaling up in that pattern to a hard cap of five votes for anyone earning $500K or more. The pitch was framed as fairness—reward “representation” for those who “foot the bill” through taxation."
"That was the good system that Lütke endorsed."
Most of the commenters here seem to be responding to...something other than this?
And a husband who works and his wife who doesn't, should she get a vote? The commentators here are responding exactly to the spirit of what was said, there's no confusion on what's really being implied here. Namely, the destruction of the entire basis of democracy, which is one person one vote.
Another way to express the general disgust: that proposal is saying, "we're going to take away your power, but we'll still look after you, pinky promise!"
I've already heard discussions in the last year that married women shouldn't vote. Their husbands would cast two votes. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22household+voting%22
> the entire basis of democracy, which is one person one vote
This is a relatively recent innovation; most democracies throughout history have not had this property, so it's hardly the "entire basis" of the concept.
It is, however, an interesting and possibly worth goal. The obvious problem (which has been noted by many previously) is that when the people making the decisions are not the ones paying for it the system is unstable (e.g. "three wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner", also "eventually you run out of other people's money").
This is a serious issue and possibly the biggest present threat to our current system. It's worth considering various possible solutions and thinking about what might work and what would likely lead to ruin.
If discussing these issue triggers "disgust" you may want to question if you are actually thinking about what is being said or just reacting emotionally.
The billionaires are the sheep, and people with less than $100k in annual income are the wolves in this contrived scenario?
> This is a serious issue and possibly the biggest present threat to our current system
Is it?
No I think most commenters are responding to that. It's a shitty take from a shitty billionaire.
Somebody needs to introduce some sort of buddy system for billionaires.
This would allow them to air their dumb opinions in private to normal people, where they could be gently mocked like the rest of us.
Currently there seems to be a dangerously quick pipeline for them between a thought passing through their minds, and millions being made aware. God help me if you all knew the things I've said over the years..
why indeed one must wonder? any ideas?
Why did a billionaire propose biasing the voting system towards the rich? Gee I wonder.
Maybe if they made it on effective tax rate. Your vote is weighed based on the percentage of INCOME that is taxed, but everyone gets a vote regardless.
Votes are equal because the belief system is that all people are equal. If you win the lottery, you don't instantly become a more valuable person.
Prior generations understood more clearly that the physical security that underwrites great financial successes is all underwritten in blood. A better heuristic is everyone gets the number of votes equivalent to how many of their lives they could give in a conflict.
I think I'd just like it done on percentage of overall wealth handed to the government or charity each year.
Handy side effect would be that if Jeff wants to buy some influence for Amazon, he could do it by paying all his warehouse and delivery employees better.
The beyond-3-SDs right side of the bell curve makes the rules and plays with them. It controls policy and law, shapes public opinions and enjoys capitalism.
The only correct POV is theirs: there is no middle and lower class (having 1000 or 5000 more wealth than someone categorizes both of them as subordinate anyway), only the elite and the plebes.
Journalism is terrible nowadays - Tobi was commenting on the Canadian political system, not American.
The article is paywalled, but isn’t he Canadian? Who cares what he thinks.
He’s German who lived in Canada for too long.
Makes sense. The biggest sin an American can commit is being poor. Welcome to Calvinism.
Money is power. That is the problem with extreme wealth. It provides unaccountable power outside the democratic process. It is not surprising that an already powerful man wants even more power, but I do not understand why anyone else would go along with this.
> It provides unaccountable power outside the democratic process.
Doesn't help when the government isn't maintaining or enforcing guardrails for the ultra wealthy.
This is a war on the middle class. Free and fair elections are the last hope that most have to resolve it peacefully, so of course those are under attack.
> I do not understand why anyone else would go along with this.
I've been asking myself that for 10 years. Through both traditional and social media manipulation, they found a way to get enough people to vote against their best interests, and normalize the behavior, that it doesn't matter if a large portion of the country is still paying attention and asking those questions.
They've leveraged the culture wars to the point that a good chunk of the rural, economically disadvantaged voters are cool with a northeastern elite billionaire looting the country.
“If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.” — Lyndon B. Johnson, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lbj-convince-the-lowest-wh...
And the condescending tone of that quote only further strengthens the culture wars--liberals love it.
The quotation is not condescending to "the lowest white man", but rather is explaining a political/propaganda strategy that was active at the time. Up until that time the racists were inter-mixed between the two parties:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixiecrat
but it was the GOP that actively sought to recruit them:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
The quotation was describing the creation of the very culture wars we're still living with today. And the evidence shows that this is still going on:
And the fact that people respond to it by attacking the very groups they've been set against rather than the government and elites manipulating them proves how well it works.
See also the apopleptic rage the rural right went into when Hillary Clinton made her "deplorables" remark. Even though she was clearly and explicitly talking about the white supremacists and racists infiltrating the Trump camp - something she was entirely correct about mind you - they chose to trauma bond with the white supremacists and rally around a billionaire pedophile rather than concede a point to a "liberal" in good faith.
Liberals are going to find it very comforting that they're not one of "the lowest white men". The people the quote is referring to won't be persuaded at all. It solves nothing. There's no solution offered to the propaganda problem. It is the flip side to the culture wars that it is describing.
This sentiment is pretty popular amongst some of the younger working people... they work, pay a lot of taxes for everything, and then get outvoted by pensioners who retired under "old" laws and now get a higher pension than they ever earned while working (i'm talking from a position of government pensions, not the american save-for-yourself style). So, old people vote and decide, and young people get the bill for that.
eg the comments here: https://old.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1u8d9mq/olde...
The "if you contribute more, your vote should be worth more" sentiment would change a lot, because many actually rich people don't really pay a lot of taxes compared to higher middle class (engineers, doctors,..). If your vote was worth eg "log10(your-income-taxes + 1)" (to make buying a lot of votes impossible), more power would go to higher educated and higher paid people and less to people who don't contribute to society (at least not financially). Again, i'm talking about a society where pretty much everyone who works also pays income tax, and you're not cutting out the majority of poor people.
Would it work? Probably not, but i understand the sentiment.
My phrasing of it is that democracy is underpinned by a shared belief in a collective destiny. If we all vote well, we all do well together and if we vote poorly then we all do poorly together, on average.
Thus it feels like breaking that contract to have a substantial block of voters who will not only be recipients of increased benefits without ever having to pay more, but can run benefits programs into the ground and kill them without worry because they’ll die before that happens.
They don’t have any skin in the game. They stand to benefit, but never really lose.
I’ve not really worked that into a functional idea, though. The gist of my thought process is that you shouldn’t be able to vote on things where the delay on systemic issues occurring is beyond your life expectancy. So I could vote to change social security today, but probably not when I retire.
I have no idea how to quantify that delay in any reasonably objective way, though, and that’s where my idea falls apart.
It seems likely to become another political dog and pony show where the parties try to get arbitrary age cutoffs to get a demographic advantage. The idea that it would force parties to cater to younger voters more is interesting but I’m not sure a net positive. The impacts are too wide for me to gauge any kind of third order effects.
It's a structural problem in our socio-technical system. You can't separate money and government, because "corruption" to some degree is the default state. Yes there are exceptions, but the opposite if the bad apple concept. You have to get lucky to find the good apples. Which means there is some structural insufficiency in the concept of money and government.
FWIW the original meaning of the bad apple idiom is that a single one spoils the whole set
> It's a structural problem in our socio-technical system.
it has always been like this, has it not? almost by definition the more resources you have the more power you have. this is how the universe works.
There have historically been obstacles and countervailing forces preventing accumulation to get to the point it is now. The classical example is labor organizing, which has been decimated in the last few decades, but that is just one symptom of how improvements in communication and transportation technology (often shorthanded as "globalization" due to the new political forms it has incentivized -- free trade, "decolonization", financialization, etc.) have radically tilted the table toward capital. Money is now transnational, but people, culture, and solidarity are not. There were once very severe practical limits to how closely one could control an expansive international portfolio of capital (mercantilist trade policies, primitive/incompatible/nonexistent financial infrastructure, slow communications, etc.), and those have been relaxed considerably.
> Money is now transnational, but people, culture, and solidarity are not
What does this mean? Trade means money has been transnational for thousands of years, at least since the Iron Age, or if you’re more expansive and include non-coined money, since the Bronze Age, with the globalized trading societies around the Mediterranean.
I -- just some working stiff in flyover country, USA -- can buy African stocks from my phone while on the shitter at work. Until quite recently, if I wanted to invest in a meaningful way in Africa, I would have had to basically be an elite of some kind in a European power, and even then only in that power's sphere of influence. Even then, that would probably be almost my entire career and, to make a real go of it, I would have had to move there, and all transactions would have taken place at the speed of physical goods on boats.
And that's just what I can do from my Etrade account. It's even more effortless if you have teams of accountants in various jurisdictions pushing paper around for you.
Yes but there are degrees of it and right now we're pivoting towards that power being centralized with the rich once more.
Once upon a time only landowners were able to vote. Eventually that changed as the powerful realized that it was in their interest to share power, because they are vastly outnumbered and can have their riches taken away from them. It feels like we're getting closer and closer to today's rich classes having to learn that lesson again.
Yes that's what money is almost by definition and government has always had that relationship. But realize that money and government are technologies and we can create new versions or even new paradigms.
> But realize that money and government are technologies and we can create new versions or even new paradigms.
I'm intrigued. What is a paradigm to replace money?
Musk is predicting that in around 10 years' time money would no longer be relevant, but doesn't have a framing of what would make up for the things that money does. I think he misunderstands money.
Not really, because converting resources into power required other humans.
A huge pile of gold isn’t inherently powerful, you need someone willing to accept gold to do what you want. They would also generally be intimately involved in doing the thing, so you paid premiums for dangerous or unpalatable work.
These days technology lets you turn resources into planes, tanks, drones, etc in a way where 100 soldiers with limitless resources probably beat 1000 with a constrained supply line pretty consistently.
You see the same with domestic conflict. Once upon a time, finding and tracking down revolutionaries was a tedious, labor-intensive process that usually resulted in failure. Now those resources can be converted into surveillance that is much more effective, and much less reliant on another human being willing to help.
To be fair, this is only true in western countries. It's not true, in for example Russia or China. Or to be more accurate, in Russia and China, no matter how many hundreds of billions you own, you won't be able to bend the party to your will.
Is that the case or is it because people's opinions matter less over there and powerful people rather use their capital to influence 'important' people behind closed doors&we're not aware of it thus assume it doesn't happen?
They did say for democratic processes.
I don't think you know Russia that well. The overlap between the oligarch class and the government itself is massive. It's speculated that Putin himself may be one of the richest people on Earth, because he and his allies have placed themselves at the peak of their government and their economy.
Now, it's not a complete overlap between the government and the rich, and there are points where the two sides may disagree - some oligarchs have been imprisoned and killed before. But if you as an oligarch know how to say the right things and associate with the right people, you'll be allowed to do almost anything you want with impunity. It's an incredibly corrupt might-makes-right society where the hierarchies of political and economic power have already settled and aligned with one another. Most oligarchs don't get to dictate what happens in the government, but their arguments are basically the only ones that they even listen to.
I don’t understand what there is to gain for anyone by making the implicit system we have today explicit?
Maybe it is a clever play to shine light on the problem? (I doubt, but can't entirely discount, it.)
> I do not understand why anyone else would go along with this.
Aspirations.
Which have ignorance as their root cause. Ignorance of the type of people that become ultra wealthy, and ignorance of the odds of becoming one of them.
We should “listen” to these people with the same attitude as we do”listen” to gas station lottery addicts, instead we give them WAY too much credibility.
I don't buy that. You can't convince me someone shopping at Dollar General has aspirations of becoming Elon-Musk-wealthy.
"That guy has lots of money so he must be successful, clever, and probably correct, so I'm going to support them" is still an aspiration - and you probably should realise that there are people in dollar stores that think "One day, that could be me."
"temporarily embarrassed millionaires"
Sorry to knock you out of your cloud.
In democracy, power comes from demos. In capitalism, power comes from capital. Demos doesn't have concentrated capital.
Try starting a new party without capital and backing from people tied to mainstream media.
People never had power. Whenever they've thought they have power (revolutions), they fought for one new power hungry scumbag to replace old power hungry scumbag.
> they fought for one new power hungry scumbag to replace old power hungry scumbag.
Because, as Plato argued, the best rulers are the ones that don’t want to rule, as ruling is a very heavy duty, if not burden.
If you strip corruption, it has no rewards. Instead you have to put up with “scambags” accusing for the things the corruption they would do if they had the power.
Why does this sound familiar?
Plato was philosopher. Not sociopath. For sociopaths, power over other people is only thing that matters. It's not a burden, money is nice, but it's mostly a tool to have more power.
Another example of why we will have to eat the rich or die trying
based, solid opinion
"Let them eat cake!"
"Eat the Rich"
Shopify seems to have a fascist problem.
Words have a well-defined meaning. Fascism, as established by Benito Mussolini, has nothing to do with oligarchy or plutarchy.
It sure as shit has to do with corporatism!
I'm referring to how both Lütke and DHH, a Shopify board member, have fascist politics.
The word does have meaning. But underlying that meaning is a philosophy that there is an in group that should have power and many out groups from which power should be stripped. There is a long history of industrial leaders supporting fascist ideology.
Shopify's former COO Kaz Nejatian and his wife Candice Malcolm are behind True North and Juno News, sketchy far right media outlets.
Yeah, but please google first on what Mussolini preached. State-owned corporazioni are nothing like privately operated businesses of today. Don’t hang on the word. The correct word you are looking for is plutocrat, indeed.
The word I wanted to reach for was Nazi but I toned it down
Whatever you’re reaching for, you’re reaching for a wrong thing. Go back to school, crème de la crème of the society my ass.
No idea why people downvote you when you’re right.
Only American-style political discourse is accepted on the Internet, where either you're with us or you're against us.
Fascism, as established by Mussolini is very deeply related to plutarchy.
Please produce your evidence that Mussolini's ascent or style of government was a "society ruled or controlled by people of great wealth", as defined by Wikipedia.
Fascist political philosophy is about racial purity, militarism, autarky, and suppression of dissent through political violence. In fact, one of their methods of enacting such worldview was by appropriating the wealth of rich people to advance their own purposes.
Please educate yourself, it's free: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
If you read your link, you will discover it's not focused at Mussolini's fascism at all, but still talks about the merge of the government and corporations... Because it's a very important feature of that regime.
Maybe try it next time.
> the merge of the government and corporations
This is not plutarchy, the direction of control is going the other way.
The other way being corporate managers joining the party to gain market power?
"Corruption, but the other way around" doesn't exist.
With the recent trend of flagging pg's articles, it might be time for the HN community to evaluate if they want to continue giving attention, eyeballs and time to something like HN, and YC by proxy. The hostility - not from HN posters but from the rich class, is not something to be taken lightly, and being on HN shows indirect support for unrestrained toxicity. Maybe a lift and shift to elsewhere (Lobste.rs etc) is in order? And make no mistake: on paper this would not really "do" anything, but walking away is a strong symbolic gesture all the same.
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Most "normal" people would hit $5-30 million, realize they have enough money for themselves and their descendants to be comfortable in perpetuity with some decent wealth management, and either retire or change careers to a passion project. Going to 100s, 1,000s, or 100,000s of millions inherently filters for people who have either absurd greediness (seeing wealth as a scoreboard) or a desire for power.
This is sorta the reasoning behind statements like "billionaires shouldn't exist".
It's not a statement that people shouldn't see fruits of their labor, but that past a certain point, its no longer about the fruits or even the tree, but the power that comes with it. In a democracy, those who get lucky in business are not owed power.
So yeah, billionaires and trillionaires shouldn't exist, because their existence is a side-channel attack on society. Pay enough money and rules don't apply. Past a certain point, that wealth should be heavily scrutinized and audited as if it's nuclear fissile material. Similar to the nuclear material, it can be productive for society, or absolute destruction.
Why don't we just cap every dev at 75k like Europe? Not sure how this argument helps society have the drive to be an outlier and create value.
An absurd argument - 75k over a 20 year career as a dev is only $1.5 million (before living expenses and tax), which is a fraction of the $5 million lower bound in my original comment.
I find it very hard to believe that there will be no motivation to create value if you can't possess more than $999,999,999.99
Love to get absurd strawman arguments from the billionaire bootlickers.
"Creating value" only means something if you can eat a spreadsheet.
This is it, it's absolutely a filter beyond a certain point. I have a family member, far enough removed I'll never see any of it, that sold a business in his early 30s for something like $35-40M. Set his kids up for life with trusts, bought some toys and a second home, and been just sort of hanging out ever since (this was 15-20 years ago). He's happy, has a ton of hobbies, and if you ever suggested he start another business or start putting his name on cap tables he'd laugh his ass off. It would never even occur to him that he should try to double, triple, 10x his money, because he already has 10x more than he'll ever spend.
And for what it's worth his kids are remarkably well adjusted and nice, if a little bit out of touch about what most people deal with.
Same, my father was a doctor and had tons of doctor friends from med school and work. Pretty much all of them just cared about 1. making sure the family was provided for and had excellent education, 2. patient outcomes and 3. being comfy at home.
Whereas I have an uncle, a retired CEO, with perhaps the same amount of money. The man is a monster. However, per my cousin, I can't say for sure just when that nature revealed itself but certainly no later than 20 years into his career.
I totally understand the point you're trying to make, but also...if your friend put their $40M in an S&P500 index 20 years ago, it'd be worth $238M today. So more like 6x rather than 10x, but still, not bad.
The people I know personally with that level of wealth will typically set up family trusts to do that and manage how the wealth is distributed to the family, generally some stipend for living expenses + covering education and healthcare costs. The original people setting up the trust give up direct access to that portion of the money for the benefit of their heirs and beneficiaries. i.e. it's no longer "their" money in the personal sense.
My theory about this, as well as how it seems most powerful are abusers, is that you have to be willing to comprosmise your morality to get into that position in the first place. So it is not that being rich and powerful corrupts you, but you have to already be at least somewhat corrupt to get there at all.
Do sociopaths even have a natural sense of morality?
Morality and empathy are orthogonal ideas, I see no reason why someone with antisocial personality disorder couldn't develop a moral philosophy.
You can't get this far without being greedy in a neurologically abnormal way.
Most people would retire with "enough" long before.
It's both. Getting into the multi-billionaire levels of wealth takes a certain mindset that can probably be easily associated with some neurological disorders and personality traits that one could describe as 'monstrous'. But becoming that rich also disconnects you from the reality of the average person. Your time by necessity to maintain and grow such levels of wealth is going to be spent among other people who are either in a similar position, or want to be in a similar position and are trying to ride the coattails up the wealth ladder. And try as you might to avoid it, it will skew your mental state towards that disconnect unless you take significant effort to avoid the benefits that being at that level of wealth brings to you. Most people who would be willing to eschew said benefits are also probably not the ones trying to seek out such positions of wealth in the first place, so they're going to be severely underrepresented in the wealthy circles.
Well, you can also get relatively rich by marrying a monster- aka the state?
How does that work? I don’t get the analogy
essentially: gubrment bad
What? How do you marry a state?
I think maybe it's an awkward attempt at some comment on politicians being able to legally insider trade?
The latter. We even know what that monster is. It's psychopathy.
The sociopath part is what allows one to do what it takes to get ultra rich in the first place. Other than Gates, not one comes to mind who gives anything to charity, for example (yes, I’m sure one or two exists).
And at level that Gates operates charity of itself is form of power and influence. Not rich people spending money on these things is bad. But sometimes I just question motivations as a whole.
my understanding too was that his (ex)wife told him, basically, "what are young going to do with all of this?"
like he has literally everything he needs, and there is this massive number -- do something, anything with it. You have unlimited time, so chose to do something
It's also not uncommon for extravagantly rich people to form family-run charity organizations to distract their nagging wife or family members with a pursuit where they can lord over employees / recipients / organizations without having any profit metrics by which they could be embarrassed by their inferior business chops. This is doubly applicable if you need to distract a nagging hag while you're off banging Russian bridge players.
Gates has spent many fortunes cleaning up his image, but he was one of the nastiest business practice worst monopolists ever.
"During Bill Gates’s tenure leading Microsoft, the company paid out an estimated $8.46 billion in publicly known antitrust settlements, competitor payouts, and government fines."
Gates is actually quite problematic (Epstein is a lot of the problem). If you need an exception to prove the rule, Buffett is a little easier of a fit.
gates was so noble to even donate prescription medication in secret..
basal take, completely incorrect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_charitabl...
the US is the most charitable country on earth as a percentage of GDP. There is so much philanthropy that the finance industry is building new businesses just to serve it
https://fintech.global/2026/04/29/the-philtech-revolution-wh...
Does this include giving money to churches in USA?
What if extreme charity is merely sociopathic status signaling?
The first part of your comment is correct, the second part is both wrong and unnecessary glazing of Gates.
There's plenty sociopaths that give to charity, because it's a socially accepted display of wealth, and because it is quite convenient for tax purposes.
50% of Americans think taxes are too high, the other 50% think taxes need to be higher so they’ll get a larger refund.
It’s not a sustainable system. A better solution would be to change tax law so a “payer” can’t receive a larger refund than what they paid. No more credits, only deductions.
The majority of americans think their taxes need to be lower, and the taxes for the rich need to be higher.
Majority of Americans pay little to no taxes.
By percentage of income, or by dollar value? By dollar value, that seems possible. By % of income? Does not seem possible.
Top 50% of taxpayers paid about 97% of all federal individual income taxes. Therefore bottom 50% pay nothing or next to nothing.
So you’re counting by dollar amount.
Because find me a person who thinks 25% of their income is “next to nothing”
Meanwhile, a tax avoiding billionaire will double their net worth and take out an asset-backed loan of 100mil to live off and then pay ~0% of that in taxes.
I think the title is inaccurate and a bit inflammatory. He's not advocating stripping most Americans of their voting rights. He's advocating stripping a tiny minority of Americans of their voting rights - specifically the minority of Americans that pay no income tax
The suggestion is inflammatory in and of itself. The right to vote is core to democracy. One should expect even the slightest suggestion of abrogating this right, even to a tiny minority, to be met with a vociferous allergic reaction.
Stripping voting rights is a historical leading indicator of a trend to totalitarianism so it has to be nipped in the bud immediately.
I disagree. I don't think there's any historical data showing a correlation between loss of voting rights of a % of the population with totalitarianism. I think among the few countries where it has been tried would be Canada stripping Japanese of voting rights in WWII. Of course this was bad, but at the same time it doesn't seem to have, at least not in most people's view, turned Canada into a totalitarian states.
In my opinion the real trend towards totalitarianism is inability to talk freely about ideas
It's easy and popular to talk about how important democracy or voting rights are. And that makes it a bit annoying because it deprives the possibility of freely exploring other ideas. There's no possibility of free speech or free exchange of ideas so long as portion of the population thinks we have to immediately nip dangerous ideas in the bud without exploration.
> among the few countries where it has been tried would be Canada stripping Japanese of voting rights in WWII. Of course this was bad
That's the point.
> There's no possibility of free speech or free exchange of ideas so long as portion of the population thinks we have to immediately nip dangerous ideas in the bud without exploration.
The "nipping dangerous ideas in the bud" language relates to those ideas being implemented, not being discussed.
Find us a person who honestly believes there a class of citizens (other than convicted felons, minors, and mentally incompetent) shouldn't have a right to vote who doesn't want to use it for political gains.
>Find us a person who honestly believes there a class of citizens (other than convicted felons, minors, and mentally incompetent) shouldn't have a right to vote who doesn't want to use it for political gains.
Easy the philosophers Plato and Socrates who believed that only philosophers and those who sought wisdom should have a say in the affairs of the sate. I mean philosophy is full of ideas of how nations should be organized and it's interesting because there's no dogma around it and no villainizing disagreements
>e "nipping dangerous ideas in the bud" language relates to those ideas being implemented, not being discussed.
Great because last I checked Tobais Lutke was discussing the idea not implementing it
> Plato and Socrates who believed that only philosophers and those who sought wisdom should have a say in the affairs of the sate [sic]
Plato and Socrates obviously weren’t democrats. Also, neither of them is still alive.
> philosophy is full of ideas of how nations should be organized and it's interesting because there's no dogma around it and no villainizing disagreements
That’s because philosophy is abstract. Nobody of any importance is seriously claiming that we should have philosopher-kings leading Western societies. It’s too distant a threat.
> last I checked Tobais Lutke was discussing the idea not implementing it
Lutke was only discussing the idea, but that doesn’t mean it should be paid any heed. It’s also completely fair game to publicly shame him for such ideas.
Actually no. He’s advocating for attaching the amount of taxes you pay to the number of votes you get. Which pretty much erodes everyone’s rights except the ones at the very top. If everyone still has one vote but some have more than one, you’ve effectively stripped their rights.
He's advocating stripping rights, periodt.
The article criticizes “taking us back to the 19th century,” but ironically dropping property qualifications for voting was an innovation of the Jacksonian era of the 1820s-1850s. There is a tendency to all efforts to generalize the franchise together, but that’s illogical. Just because race and sex are illegitimate qualifiers for voting doesn’t mean that all qualifiers for voting are necessarily illegitimate. Are we asserting that psychological science has taught us nothing in 200 years relevant to our evaluation of whether someone who can't hold down a job at a grocery store should be steering democracy to the same degree as a doctor or scientist? (And note this is an argument against interest here, since I belong to what’s clearly now the dumber party.)
The fundamental problem is that almost any qualifiers you add that dictate voting rights gives those with voting rights a powerful incentive to run the country according to their own interests while ensuring those qualifiers continue to only apply to their in-group.
Would I rather live in a country run by scientists than deadbeats? Probably. But that's based on the idea that we live in a reasonably free society with social mobility where the difference between scientist and deadbeat is at least partially down to intelligence and work ethic. Hand all the power to the "scientists" though and it's not obvious that distinction would continue to be true past a few generations, because later generations of "scientist" didn't come up through the same free and equal society. I buy that the first generation of all-powerful scientists legitimately will want to turn the grocery store bagger into a future scientist. History suggests later generations will have no such interest.
I am not against idea of only net tax payers getting single vote. Say if you use government services or receive money such as grant that is counted against your total. If you own part of corporation that gets such support that is counted again. If you or your corporation gets tax deductions or relief those are counted as double.
Total everything up and if you are net payer you get to vote. If not no vote for you.
Why are you not against this? A vote isn't a payment in exchange for taxes. It's the mechanism by which the government represents the will of the people. How do you arrange things such that the government acts in the interests of people if it doesn't need to chase their vote? Or are you actually saying that poor people don't deserve a government that acts in their interest?
Even skipping the moral argument, there's a game theory trap here: let's say you run a government and your political enemies are on the poor side and fall into the "no vote" trap more often than your supporters. Obviously the solution to maximizing your share of the vote is to make them even poorer.
Vote is mechanism to decide who gets to distribute those taxes. It seems reasonable that those who contribute get to decide. If they decide to give support fine. If not well...
Then again I suppose it would be fine too if voters decided to socialise absolutely everything including bodies of other voters. After all that would be democracy. And they chose that no protections are needed and everything is common now.
You're still misunderstanding what a "vote" is in your laser focus on "taxes". Take "taxes" out of the mix. What's the point of voting at all, in your view? Why bother with it as a concept vs. whatever governmental form you prefer? It's so that the government does what the people want instead of what the leaders want, right?
So why does that principle change when some people are poor or when the tax structure is progressive?
It's not only deciding who gets to distribute those taxes. It's who gets to decide, for example, whether we go to war, and whether you have to serve in the military and get shot at.
We tried this already in America and have decided that disallowing entire groups of people from voting is bad for democracy.
What happens when the federal government passes new tax laws that prevent certain genders, racial groups, etc from having to pay income tax? Are they permanently disenfranchised? This would be a system that I think would rapidly move social progress backwards and concentrate power in the hands of a few groups.
Well you could have stronger constitutional protections. Say certain changes needing unanimous support from voters in referendum. Would lock in things, but would remove risks.
And USA already disallows voting based on age. And somehow lot of people find it acceptable. Surely voting should be right from birth?
Alright, what about laws that only levy income taxes on people making $300k or more? That's eliminates millions of Americans without targeting any protected groups. There's no bulletproof method to allow only some people to vote that wouldn't be abused to disenfranchise others.
Also, surely you don't think a four year old should weigh in on who gets to represent them in Congress? We disallow voting on a minimum age, because children are still developing in all sorts of ways, there is no maximum age that takes away your right to vote when you reach it. You can't equate a minimum age to disenfranchisement.
That is why I said taxes. Not just income tax.
And really why should not 4 year old get to decide? How come you think it is right to discriminate against them based on their age? As you said there is no limit on those with limited mental faculties due to old age. So why have one for young age? Isn't it clearly an unacceptable form disenfranchisement? Or are you saying some forms of that are absolutely acceptable and even justified?
To a first approximation this creates and enforces a permanent unvoiced underclass. Without any political representation, said underclass's differentiation from actual slavery would be pretty small.
What is inherently unreasonable about the idea that only people who pay into the system get a say in how the system operates?
The constitution still guarantees fundamental human rights.
Another idea - everyone is eligible to vote for the presidency and House of Representatives, but only net taxpayers can vote for the Senate.
The idea that there should be some kind of checks and balances on spending taxpayer money, where the people who actually pay the taxes have a special status, isn’t fundamentally incompatible with any principle that I support.
Obviously the current system - where we collect $5T in taxes each year and spend $7T, creating an enormous and ever-growing debt that the system is clearly not able to control - is not working.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”
Yes, and what I outlined is one reasonable way to implement “the consent of the governed”, and still a lot more democratic and inclusive than the system the authors of that statement implemented for the next ~150 years after writing it!
Are you proposing that poor people would not be subject to the laws of the United States, as they would be provided no means to consent? That only the wealthy are to be governed, regulated, etc.?