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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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!"
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.
Stripping voting rights is a historical leading indicator of a trend to totalitarianism so it has to be nipped in the bud immediately.
Moreover, everyone who gains any amount of power becomes protective of it.
That's basic human nature. As a conservative, I under this.
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
Hasn't affected the bottom line one whit.
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.
The events since 2020 have made me reconsider that. A certain type of nerd should go to an interment camp, preferably in some seasteading dystopia that Thiel wanted.
Let us see what they achieve in their Galt Gulch in isolation.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fascist political philosophy is about racial purity, militarism, autarky, and suppression of dissent. In fact, one of their methods of enacting such world was by appropriating the wealth of rich people to advance their own purposes.
But I figure your slogan would work very well on social media.
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.
[1] https://financialpost.com/personal-finance/high-net-worth/wh...
(assuming that he's not paid a salary by anyone else)
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
I’m only half joking.
They are egotists. It’s one of the biggest parts of who they are.
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.
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.
How is this not hate speech?
State, Provincial, Federal: terrible idea, to arbitrarily disenfranchise people because they live off the pension from their life's work.
See, but if we break those stupid geezers we can get their land easier.
Social programs, buses, and trains enable any of that development at all.
When you cut after school programs and social hangouts, kids get into trouble.
Buses and trains multiply the economic potential of an area.
If all you have are the vague class of "home owners", who do you have in your grocery stores? Who fixes your roof? Certainly not you.
All you'd have is an armed quasi-military of cops protecting your depreciating homes from the mobs of scorned citizens waiting to burn your shit down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Total everything up and if you are net payer you get to vote. If not no vote for you.
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.
And USA already disallows voting based on age. And somehow lot of people find it acceptable. Surely voting should be right from birth?
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.
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.
Doesn't help when the government doesn't maintain or enforce 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.
Aspirations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> [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
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.
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.
-maxxing, "mogging", "NGMI", I'm literally going nuts waiting for Gavin to start asking trump "DYEL"?
The asymptotic equivalent of $20 "burning a hole in your pocket"
Here's to hoping for more batmans and less lex luthors
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 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.
Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior
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).
Silicon Valley is very far from all that. More broadly I think it's a reflection of the isolation (physical, cultural, etc) of SV.
Maybe I'm trying to rationalise their behaviour too much but it feels like techbros have gotten a scarcity mindset.
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.
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.
Most people would retire with "enough" long before.
"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."
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
"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.