Look while it might sound horrible of a billionaire to do so, the way the titles work is quite difficult.
You buy the land from someone, and then 6 months down the track a relative turns up and claims they own part of the land etc etc. So pre-empting this, it is better to sue first than be tied up in court cases with people turning up over the next 20 years.
Subjectively him, and that is why I am gathering he is (was) doing it, and I cannot blame him. These are not your "normal" titles, ownership of land is passed down through generations with little record as to the direct ownership of land.
As much as I would like to protect native islanders and their lineage, I don't think it's in anyone's best interest to allow land to idle half in a strange state of title limbo. There are many countries in the Western Hemisphere (and even cities in the US) that are suffering for having poor property ownership recording or the claiming of ownership through inheritance. Haiti comes to mind, along with abandoned buildings in Detroit and Baltimore.
In African villages (in my home country) it works the same. No one has title deeds and you are allocated land by the local headman. Sometimes the process is quick if no one is living on the land. Sometimes it takes a while because some relative has to be traced and consulted so he/she doesn't ask for their land back.
Most of the land is handed down. I must say I do prefer this to dealing with property agent, conveyancer and bank. You get to know your neighbors in the process and the history of the land. It is a more social process and you deal with people directly connected to the land.
Haven't watched this specific video, but from what I've read previously he's suing so that the courts can determine who owns the land so he can fairly pay them. Many people own tiny slices of land that they don't have any practical use for (because of how Hawaiian land gets passed down through generations), and Mark owns the vast majority of the island, so he's trying to fairly compensate the remaining land owners.
Also, he apparently dropped the lawsuit after the uproar.
I got $5 "for free" from the Apple ebook class action settlement, I would rather not have gotten the money and the lawyers gotten less. Sure it's not rational, but it's how I feel.
I am sure the islanders would rather not be forced to part with their land, so a billionaire can live in a private paradise, than receive a fair, or even better than fair forced sale price.
You make it sound as if he is doing them a good deed...
The idea is they don't want their land to be owned by anyone other than the native people... hence the small portions of land split among the indigenous and handed down through generations.
Greed is the primary issue here, and I totally understand their view on it. America has been destroying their island by commercializing a majority of it.
> The idea is they don't want their land to be owned by anyone other than the native people... hence the small portions of land split among the indigenous and handed down through generations
The legal way to do this is for those many owners to put their land in a private or public trust, either to be held indefinitely for public non-commercial use or held in the name of the trustees and their beneficiaries. Trying to do this informally is inefficient and silly.
> trying to do it formally sounds inefficient and silly
Irrespective of how things sound, there is a reason every modern civilization develops a system for recording land ownership early on. Land disputes are historically nasty. Where records are non-existent, they get violent; where records are bad, they jam the courts. There are many systems varying aims; our American one is among the more flexible in the world.
Flipped around, if these ownership claims had been properly recorded a generation ago, the current fiasco wouldn't have happened. Better late than never.
I'd just note that, while I'm nowhere near an expert on the topic, a big part of the problem generally is a fundamental cultural disconnect. Native Hawaiians had a more communal ownership model that appears to strike mainland US culture as fundamentally illegitimate. It tends to manifest now when a billionaire is annoyed that there's no one seller to go to when they want their island. In the past, it was plantation owners.
This is of course nothing new; one argument for displacing mainland Native Americans was that they didn't grok the virtues of private ownership of land. (In reality, the rationalization never matters; in such things, might quite literally manufactures right.)
I mean it's based on established rule of law - which is codified with documentation and process.
That communal ownership doesn't have record keeping or otherwise would seem to be unnecessarily unbalanced towards those with family right. Isn't the idea of family right and inheritance something that people rail against in the states eg. eliminating things like inheritance tax etc... are very popular among some groups because "just because you were born into it doesn't mean you earned it."
> Native Hawaiians had a more communal ownership model that appears to strike mainland US culture as fundamentally illegitimate
You're projecting agreement where there isn't any. The State of Hawai'i could pass a law placing these lands into public trust. Hell, the current owners could get together and do that themselves. That isn't happening because some want to keep the land, some people want to sell, and some might want something else, but nobody is sure who can do what with what.
> one argument for displacing mainland Native Americans was that they didn't grok the virtues of private ownership of land
The courts, here, are trying to assign ownership to the natives. This is strengthening their claims to their land, not diminishing it.
The problem isn't that he's paying them, it's that he took the land before paying. That's like someone taking your car without your permission and sending you a check in the mail later for a fraction of it's actual worth.
Yeah its almost like we need a different word than "sue" which universally has negative connotations.
He named them in court to force a discovery process because governance structure in Hawaii has no infrastructure to track titles. Hawaii's executive branch has no tool, and Hawaii's legislative branch isn't going to undermine its constituents, so Hawaii's judicial branch is all that there is.
He offered them money for the land when they were able to be identified.
He did it through an LLC and some people regretted it when they found out it was actually the "rich white man" instead of a fellow farmer like they assumed.
Now as for tact? It was calculated and poorly executed. Analogous to when a billionaire landlord tries to evict all the public housing tenants who are all disenfranchised minorities "because they are renters! the law is on my side!". Actions have consequences.
WHY do we have an economic system that allows an individual to own almost an entire Hawaiian island, by virtue of owning majority share of an advertising platform?? The employees certainly don’t get an island of their own, nor the owners or workers at any vendor data centers, or the power plant workers, or the crew that laid fiber or built the routers and wifi access points that get FB onto your screen? This giant funnel that plows billions of dollara into the pockets of a tiny number of people, because they have the piece of paper that says “I own this” and everyone down the line was just ok with it.
The United States was designed to harness competition. It is what was supposed to keep us successful. It has done a very good job.
If there are 20 burger restaurants, the best burger isn't designed by committee. Each will try to improve to stay in the market and the people who decide who survives and who dies is determined by the people choosing which burger to eat.
It works as long as there is competition. One burger restaurant winning all of the business with a great burger, and then using scale to make competition impossible followed by lowering the quality to find minimum cost with maximum profit... that's another outcome of capitalism, and one we're suffering now.
To make it work you need centralized authority that resists corruption and can put it's finger on the scale to encourage the appropriate amount of diversity.
Remember to compare what you don't like about one system with what you wouldn't like about the other. Socialist societies aren't without centralized extreme power, and how you get and keep that power is arguably much worse.
You also don't need to be socialist to fix the inequality problems.
And simply, there are too many mathematical power laws in any society to prevent the few from having a lot. The intensity is what you need to change. It's difficult.
Totally agree and I shouldn’t invoke socialism because that introduces a huge number of other issues which I’m not referring to. My target is the outrageous inequality of wealth and ownership.
The thing is, when you take away "ownership" in the capitalist sense, de facto ownership and wealth still exists, just with different names.
Societies that aren't hierarchical don't really exist on any but the tiniest scales excluding some situations where individual units are nearly self-sufficient.
Please make a difference between a socialist-leaning societal culture and an actual totalitarian government necessary to force everyone to follow socialist policies. The socialism you're thinking of starts when you abolish elections (or make it the law that you have to vote for The Party) and merge the three branches of government. Simply enacting socialist policies for the benefit of the community within the established democratic framework of checks and balances on the power of governing bodies, is not a slippery slope and does not end with actual socialism.
I grew up in socialistic country, and I can tell you, man, I definitely prefer living in US now, where some people got outrageously richer than me by chance. I just don't envy them.
On the other hand all those other people at Facebook have those jobs because Zuckerberg built the company and hired them. How do you prevent Zuckerberg from profiting from doing that without also choking off the funding and investment he needed to grow that company so rapidly in just a few years? If anyone deserves that kind of compensation, isn’t it someone who built a business that provides 20,000 jobs and a free service used by over a billion people every day? Isn’t that the kind of person that, perhaps above most others, knows how to use billions of dollars to do something worthwhile?
How do we make sure he has the resources to build and fund that business, while denying him the funds and resources to do other legal activities as well? Who gets to decide yes you can spend billions on building Facebook, but no you can’t spend it on real estate that’s legal for other people to buy? How do we restrict that by law and ensure the people enforcing those restrictions don’t kill off the next Facebook, or the next holiday resort company, etc? Command economies don’t have much of a track record of economic success.
I say all that without even liking Facebook, I barely use it and am annoyed by a lot of their business practices, but I have no right to tell people which company they should work for or which social network they should use or what company or project allowed by the law that they should or should not fund.
Capitalism is ultimately about the individual freedom of citizens to spend or invest their money as they see fit. How do you justify taking away those freedoms and how to you do so without choking off innovation and growth?
On the other hand it WAS NOT Zuckerberg who built the company and hired 20000 people. Zuckerberg hired the first few, those all built the first stage and hired the next round of prople, who built and hired more. The success of FB or any company is due to their combined efforts. And, it’s built over the efforts of hundreds of thousands more who built the critical infrastructure outside FB.
Of course Zuck should reap more rewards for his founding and leadership role. But not to the tune of 75 billion dollars.
And it should not require billion-dollar paydays to incentivize people to build companies.
If Zuckerberg didn’t exist, Facebook as it stands would not exist. Everyone he hired agreed to be compensated with the terms he decreed. Every person he gave equity, every person whose salary he directly determined, they all agreed to the terms of their employment. No one was forced to work for him or Facebook.
Why should he be forced to relinquish control or equity in his company if literally everyone he worked with agreed to the terms of their employment at his company? Who is the person that should decide “oh, at this point he has enough, he doesn’t deserve more”? You? Some other corrupt government individual?
I just don’t understand why you think that random people should be able to determine the fate of a fortune that someone amassed when they had nothing to do with it.
He pays his taxes. Facebook pays their taxes as required by law. Why do you think that’s not enough? I understand closing loopholes, but you apparently think we should go further? You think that we should set a hard cap on wealth? How would that not create adverse economic incentives?
Yes, taxes should effectively impose a cap on wealth, reaching 99% tax rate at some point (certainly, when you're in the billions). If a founder decides to move on because he can no longer earn a billion... well, we as a society will just have to live with that tragic loss of leadership, and hope that somebody will be brave enough to take over.
Also, I'm not confused about people agreeing to their compensation terms. That's true and not the issue, any more than royalty was "ok" because for many hundreds of years, people were ok with it.
There's a funnel that leads to one human being having over 75-million times more than another. We tolerate this today. And here in the tech world, we make apologies for it (even while many still manage to scoff at Wall St)
The difference is that people voluntarily agreed to the terms of compensation with Facebook.. the same can’t be said of people who deal with royalty existing in their society. People may have been ok with it, but they didn’t have a choice.
Your whole argument seems to come from the viewpoint that wealth is zero-sum.. when it so obviously isn’t.
If someone spends a few million dollars and builds a company worth billions, how do you confiscate almost all those billions of dollars from the company owners without killing the company, or crippling it's ability to raise funds for expansion and growth? The investors in Facebook took risks based on expected rewards and Zuckerberg and nobody else had the strategy and vision to deliver that for them. How can you take most of those rewards away, while still expecting investors to invest millions, build companies and fuel technological advancement and growth?
Until you can answer these questions, how do you expect anyone to take your position seriously?
How do you value the welfare of the people in those corporations, their jobs and prosperity? You start by valuing having a job and having new businesses and services that put food on the table. These are easy things to take for granted in the developed world with our dynamic economies, extensive social services, free basic education and in many countries free health care. You cant tax people and companies to fund these things if those people don't have jobs, or have only subsistence level incomes or the businesses never get started or are starved of capital so they can't grow or adapt.
Countries that tried to do without economies like ours though, such as Soviet Russia, China under Mao, Venezuela and Cuba today, etc didn't do so well. So how do you confiscate the majority of the capital in society that is used to generate all this wealth without killing the goose that's laying the golden eggs? But if you do allow the accumulation of capital so that it can be deployed efficiently, how do you prevent free people in a democracy from using that capital for other things too?
How do you restrict individual freedom for people like Zuckerberg while meeting your social engineering goals?
Still waiting for even a perfunctory attempt to actually answer my questions with anything other than meaningless platitudes.
It seems you have concerns with the idea of trade or labor specializations having different labor prices.
So for your example you call out trench diggers, hardware engineers, assemblers, electrical engineers etc... Each of these groups is getting paid for their services based on market competition. As far as I know, a good portion of those are unionized and the rest are in competitive industries that supply multiple different partners. Eg. very few of those laborers work as direct employees of Facebook - they take relatively short term contracts to execute those tasks and then move on to other customers.
I'm not sure how you see equity being distributed in those cases such that it would be considered fair.
The "modern economic" argument is that the price they are being paid - arguably negotiated against other competitors is market clearing.
Your anger is legitimate, but your line of thinking is misplaced. Going "we should not allow billionaires" leads directly to "we need an authority to limit and redistribute gains". So you make The Authority which has ultimate authority over all political power and economic capital and now you're in a totalitarian state. If there is a singular group that is the only group allowed to have meaningful power, it won't be long before that group has all the power. Everybody is equal, but members of The Party are ten times as equal...
Instead you should be thinking "how do I/we get these obviously capable and motivated people to act in a way that benefits all of us". Zuckerberg didn't steal the money by overt force (what the socialist government used to do to us in East Europe), there was a long line of economic exchanges that benefited both parties in some way, that let him get to where he is. He started high, yes, and he reached even higher. The fact he's now acting churlish should not be cause for you to ask for the abolishment of basic human rights and liberties.
Your line of thinking is misplaced. The Authority is the US Govt and the mechanism is taxation. Explain to me how a drastic increase in taxes on a small number of individuals (effectively capping their income) brings us to a Totalitarian state?
Amassing $75B is not a basic human right or liberty. And this has nothing at all do with someone acting churlish, or conversely with their potential to do wonderful things with that money.
The question is just: as a society, do we allow a roomful of people to own more than half the nation combined? And how does this benefit the country?
> allows an individual to own almost an entire Hawaiian island
I have collected some context about the largest private landowner on each of the Hawaiian islands, which I believe people may find interesting. They are sorted in (decreasing) order by size of the island.
Kamehameha Schools owns ~12% of the ~10,000 square kilometers of (the big island of) Hawai`i.
Alexander & Baldwin owns ~20% of the ~1,900 square kilometers of Maui.
Kamehameha Schools (same as above) owns ~12% of the ~1,500 square kilometers of O`ahu.
The Robinson family owns ~15% of the ~1,400 square kilometers of Kaua`i. (This is probably the island intended by my parent comment, as Mark Zuckerberg owns ~3 square kilometers there, or 1/500th of the island.)
I'm always unsure how to view historic land ownership. It seems a very recent development that humanity has stopped stealing land from one another and it's been great.
But now that we're not doing it anymore, many compare historic actions to today's values and say they were wronged. In many sense they were wronged but there is not a person on earths who ancestors didn't have land stolen from them. It's only the land that was most recently stolen that causes issues.
Given the amount of time that has past and the complexities around the issue I just don't see any solution that could be considered fair. Someone has since purchased the stolen land and views them selves as the rightful owner but the person that should have inherited the land also has a claim to it.
Why is it when a Hawain says "stop moving here" it's okay, but when the right say lets reduce the number of people moving here illegally it's nationalism and racism?
They aren't saying "stop moving here". They're saying "this is our land, if you want it you must first get us to agree to sell it to you." Also, we deposed the Hawaiian government in a military coup back in the late 19th century.
Oh totally agree with the sentiment that they need to agree to sell it first. But in one segment of the video a radio host asks foreigners to "stop moving here". I know it's a bit off topic, I was just shocked to hear it. I thought that was just nationalism. I didn't think that would be celebrated in a video like that one.
I will state upfront that I think Zuckerberg is an asshole for doing this. But the reality is that there are a lot of problems with the way native land gets structured legally.
Customary land accounts for 97% of land in Papua New Guinea. This is basically tribal land. There are more than 800 languages spoken there and about 40% of residents still support themselves in a traditional subsistence tribal lifestyle. In some sense, it is a success in terms of protecting native traditions.
It also means only 3% of the land can be developed. You cannot get a mortgage if a bank cannot take possession of the land. This barrier to accessing funds is a huge obstacle to real estate development on most tribal lands in any country.
Papua New Guinea has terrible intractable poverty and some of the worst domestic violence in the world. The violence there is so bad it is comparable to violence typically only seen in war zones. Violence and poverty tend to fuel one another. People trapped in poverty commit violence because they are frustrated and angry. Violence both destroys resources and makes it unsafe and unwise to try to invest money in development.
Historically, agrarian cultures and more modern cultures tend to displace hunter gatherer societies. Hunter gatherer cultures support only very low population levels. It takes a lot of land to feed each individual under this model.
In order to return to a hunter gatherer model for the world, billions of people would need to die. Modern agriculture is what makes modern life and population levels at all feasible.
Holding the land as a group sounds like a nice ideal, but it has a really poor track record for actually fostering some kind of high quality of (modern) life.
I don't know what the answer is. I am some small part Cherokee. I have kind of a romantic attachment to the idea of preserving native culture and practices. But this particular real estate practice seems to do more harm than good.
I wish I had a brilliant answer for how to preserve native land and also foster development. But those two things seem to be diametrically opposed and fundamentally incompatible.
Someone who knows a good answer, pretty please step forward and tell me otherwise. I would love to learn that I am wrong.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadYou buy the land from someone, and then 6 months down the track a relative turns up and claims they own part of the land etc etc. So pre-empting this, it is better to sue first than be tied up in court cases with people turning up over the next 20 years.
Better for who though?
Subjectively him, and that is why I am gathering he is (was) doing it, and I cannot blame him. These are not your "normal" titles, ownership of land is passed down through generations with little record as to the direct ownership of land.
Settling land ownership disputes early and clearly is in the common interest.
Everybody but the lawyers.
As much as I would like to protect native islanders and their lineage, I don't think it's in anyone's best interest to allow land to idle half in a strange state of title limbo. There are many countries in the Western Hemisphere (and even cities in the US) that are suffering for having poor property ownership recording or the claiming of ownership through inheritance. Haiti comes to mind, along with abandoned buildings in Detroit and Baltimore.
His body language and his communication skills don't do him any favors.
Also, the man builds his own private mansions with walls, avoids taxes and then tell Europeans to take million refugees. This man is sleazy hypocrite.
Most of the land is handed down. I must say I do prefer this to dealing with property agent, conveyancer and bank. You get to know your neighbors in the process and the history of the land. It is a more social process and you deal with people directly connected to the land.
Also, he apparently dropped the lawsuit after the uproar.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/01/27/zuckerbe...
I am sure the islanders would rather not be forced to part with their land, so a billionaire can live in a private paradise, than receive a fair, or even better than fair forced sale price.
You make it sound as if he is doing them a good deed...
The idea is they don't want their land to be owned by anyone other than the native people... hence the small portions of land split among the indigenous and handed down through generations.
Greed is the primary issue here, and I totally understand their view on it. America has been destroying their island by commercializing a majority of it.
The legal way to do this is for those many owners to put their land in a private or public trust, either to be held indefinitely for public non-commercial use or held in the name of the trustees and their beneficiaries. Trying to do this informally is inefficient and silly.
Irrespective of how things sound, there is a reason every modern civilization develops a system for recording land ownership early on. Land disputes are historically nasty. Where records are non-existent, they get violent; where records are bad, they jam the courts. There are many systems varying aims; our American one is among the more flexible in the world.
Flipped around, if these ownership claims had been properly recorded a generation ago, the current fiasco wouldn't have happened. Better late than never.
Isn't that racist?
This is of course nothing new; one argument for displacing mainland Native Americans was that they didn't grok the virtues of private ownership of land. (In reality, the rationalization never matters; in such things, might quite literally manufactures right.)
That communal ownership doesn't have record keeping or otherwise would seem to be unnecessarily unbalanced towards those with family right. Isn't the idea of family right and inheritance something that people rail against in the states eg. eliminating things like inheritance tax etc... are very popular among some groups because "just because you were born into it doesn't mean you earned it."
Seems to be some cognitive dissonance here.
You're projecting agreement where there isn't any. The State of Hawai'i could pass a law placing these lands into public trust. Hell, the current owners could get together and do that themselves. That isn't happening because some want to keep the land, some people want to sell, and some might want something else, but nobody is sure who can do what with what.
> one argument for displacing mainland Native Americans was that they didn't grok the virtues of private ownership of land
The courts, here, are trying to assign ownership to the natives. This is strengthening their claims to their land, not diminishing it.
He named them in court to force a discovery process because governance structure in Hawaii has no infrastructure to track titles. Hawaii's executive branch has no tool, and Hawaii's legislative branch isn't going to undermine its constituents, so Hawaii's judicial branch is all that there is.
He offered them money for the land when they were able to be identified.
He did it through an LLC and some people regretted it when they found out it was actually the "rich white man" instead of a fellow farmer like they assumed.
Now as for tact? It was calculated and poorly executed. Analogous to when a billionaire landlord tries to evict all the public housing tenants who are all disenfranchised minorities "because they are renters! the law is on my side!". Actions have consequences.
We should not allow billionaires.
Of course, that's probably also a good way to get systems and things which are...well, designed by committee.
If there are 20 burger restaurants, the best burger isn't designed by committee. Each will try to improve to stay in the market and the people who decide who survives and who dies is determined by the people choosing which burger to eat.
It works as long as there is competition. One burger restaurant winning all of the business with a great burger, and then using scale to make competition impossible followed by lowering the quality to find minimum cost with maximum profit... that's another outcome of capitalism, and one we're suffering now.
To make it work you need centralized authority that resists corruption and can put it's finger on the scale to encourage the appropriate amount of diversity.
You also don't need to be socialist to fix the inequality problems.
And simply, there are too many mathematical power laws in any society to prevent the few from having a lot. The intensity is what you need to change. It's difficult.
Assuming you’re not living in a socialist democracy but rather a dictatorship, I feel they often become confused and just wanted to point that out.
Norway has more billionaires per capita than the US.
Societies that aren't hierarchical don't really exist on any but the tiniest scales excluding some situations where individual units are nearly self-sufficient.
Please make a difference between a socialist-leaning societal culture and an actual totalitarian government necessary to force everyone to follow socialist policies. The socialism you're thinking of starts when you abolish elections (or make it the law that you have to vote for The Party) and merge the three branches of government. Simply enacting socialist policies for the benefit of the community within the established democratic framework of checks and balances on the power of governing bodies, is not a slippery slope and does not end with actual socialism.
How do we make sure he has the resources to build and fund that business, while denying him the funds and resources to do other legal activities as well? Who gets to decide yes you can spend billions on building Facebook, but no you can’t spend it on real estate that’s legal for other people to buy? How do we restrict that by law and ensure the people enforcing those restrictions don’t kill off the next Facebook, or the next holiday resort company, etc? Command economies don’t have much of a track record of economic success.
I say all that without even liking Facebook, I barely use it and am annoyed by a lot of their business practices, but I have no right to tell people which company they should work for or which social network they should use or what company or project allowed by the law that they should or should not fund.
Capitalism is ultimately about the individual freedom of citizens to spend or invest their money as they see fit. How do you justify taking away those freedoms and how to you do so without choking off innovation and growth?
Of course Zuck should reap more rewards for his founding and leadership role. But not to the tune of 75 billion dollars.
And it should not require billion-dollar paydays to incentivize people to build companies.
Why should he be forced to relinquish control or equity in his company if literally everyone he worked with agreed to the terms of their employment at his company? Who is the person that should decide “oh, at this point he has enough, he doesn’t deserve more”? You? Some other corrupt government individual?
I just don’t understand why you think that random people should be able to determine the fate of a fortune that someone amassed when they had nothing to do with it.
He pays his taxes. Facebook pays their taxes as required by law. Why do you think that’s not enough? I understand closing loopholes, but you apparently think we should go further? You think that we should set a hard cap on wealth? How would that not create adverse economic incentives?
Also, I'm not confused about people agreeing to their compensation terms. That's true and not the issue, any more than royalty was "ok" because for many hundreds of years, people were ok with it.
There's a funnel that leads to one human being having over 75-million times more than another. We tolerate this today. And here in the tech world, we make apologies for it (even while many still manage to scoff at Wall St)
Your whole argument seems to come from the viewpoint that wealth is zero-sum.. when it so obviously isn’t.
Until you can answer these questions, how do you expect anyone to take your position seriously?
Countries that tried to do without economies like ours though, such as Soviet Russia, China under Mao, Venezuela and Cuba today, etc didn't do so well. So how do you confiscate the majority of the capital in society that is used to generate all this wealth without killing the goose that's laying the golden eggs? But if you do allow the accumulation of capital so that it can be deployed efficiently, how do you prevent free people in a democracy from using that capital for other things too?
How do you restrict individual freedom for people like Zuckerberg while meeting your social engineering goals?
Still waiting for even a perfunctory attempt to actually answer my questions with anything other than meaningless platitudes.
I’d rather have a worse performing economy with low income disparity than what we have, without a second thought.
Advancements are made regardless of the fantastical sums awarded just the very few on top.
So for your example you call out trench diggers, hardware engineers, assemblers, electrical engineers etc... Each of these groups is getting paid for their services based on market competition. As far as I know, a good portion of those are unionized and the rest are in competitive industries that supply multiple different partners. Eg. very few of those laborers work as direct employees of Facebook - they take relatively short term contracts to execute those tasks and then move on to other customers.
I'm not sure how you see equity being distributed in those cases such that it would be considered fair.
The "modern economic" argument is that the price they are being paid - arguably negotiated against other competitors is market clearing.
Instead you should be thinking "how do I/we get these obviously capable and motivated people to act in a way that benefits all of us". Zuckerberg didn't steal the money by overt force (what the socialist government used to do to us in East Europe), there was a long line of economic exchanges that benefited both parties in some way, that let him get to where he is. He started high, yes, and he reached even higher. The fact he's now acting churlish should not be cause for you to ask for the abolishment of basic human rights and liberties.
Amassing $75B is not a basic human right or liberty. And this has nothing at all do with someone acting churlish, or conversely with their potential to do wonderful things with that money.
The question is just: as a society, do we allow a roomful of people to own more than half the nation combined? And how does this benefit the country?
I say No — the disparity must be reined in.
I have collected some context about the largest private landowner on each of the Hawaiian islands, which I believe people may find interesting. They are sorted in (decreasing) order by size of the island.
Kamehameha Schools owns ~12% of the ~10,000 square kilometers of (the big island of) Hawai`i.
Alexander & Baldwin owns ~20% of the ~1,900 square kilometers of Maui.
Kamehameha Schools (same as above) owns ~12% of the ~1,500 square kilometers of O`ahu.
The Robinson family owns ~15% of the ~1,400 square kilometers of Kaua`i. (This is probably the island intended by my parent comment, as Mark Zuckerberg owns ~3 square kilometers there, or 1/500th of the island.)
Molokai Ranch owns ~35% of the ~700 square kilometers of Moloka`i. It is currently for sale for $260 million: http://www.businessinsider.com/hawaiian-island-for-sale-molo...
Larry Ellison owns ~97% of the ~360 square kilometers of Lana`i (under the name "Pulama Lanai").
The Robinson family (same as above) owns ~99% of the 180 square kilometers of Ni`ihau.
There are no private landowners on the ~115 square kilometers of the smallest of the eight traditional Hawaiian islands, Kaho`olawe.
But now that we're not doing it anymore, many compare historic actions to today's values and say they were wronged. In many sense they were wronged but there is not a person on earths who ancestors didn't have land stolen from them. It's only the land that was most recently stolen that causes issues.
Given the amount of time that has past and the complexities around the issue I just don't see any solution that could be considered fair. Someone has since purchased the stolen land and views them selves as the rightful owner but the person that should have inherited the land also has a claim to it.
Customary land accounts for 97% of land in Papua New Guinea. This is basically tribal land. There are more than 800 languages spoken there and about 40% of residents still support themselves in a traditional subsistence tribal lifestyle. In some sense, it is a success in terms of protecting native traditions.
It also means only 3% of the land can be developed. You cannot get a mortgage if a bank cannot take possession of the land. This barrier to accessing funds is a huge obstacle to real estate development on most tribal lands in any country.
Papua New Guinea has terrible intractable poverty and some of the worst domestic violence in the world. The violence there is so bad it is comparable to violence typically only seen in war zones. Violence and poverty tend to fuel one another. People trapped in poverty commit violence because they are frustrated and angry. Violence both destroys resources and makes it unsafe and unwise to try to invest money in development.
Historically, agrarian cultures and more modern cultures tend to displace hunter gatherer societies. Hunter gatherer cultures support only very low population levels. It takes a lot of land to feed each individual under this model.
In order to return to a hunter gatherer model for the world, billions of people would need to die. Modern agriculture is what makes modern life and population levels at all feasible.
Holding the land as a group sounds like a nice ideal, but it has a really poor track record for actually fostering some kind of high quality of (modern) life.
I don't know what the answer is. I am some small part Cherokee. I have kind of a romantic attachment to the idea of preserving native culture and practices. But this particular real estate practice seems to do more harm than good.
I wish I had a brilliant answer for how to preserve native land and also foster development. But those two things seem to be diametrically opposed and fundamentally incompatible.
Someone who knows a good answer, pretty please step forward and tell me otherwise. I would love to learn that I am wrong.