Richard Branson, Elon Musk. Even Larry, Sergey and Eric recently acquired a fighter jet.
Then you've got Silvio Berlusconi, who bought himself the Prime Ministership of Italy and spent the whole time having what he called "Bunga Bunga Parties", which is closer to my fantasy at sixteen than my fantasy at nine, but it'll do.
Actually Silvio was "forced" into politics by the demise of his protector, Bettino Craxi (who, incidentally, was instrumental in engineering Silvio's rise to riches). He was into bunga-bunga before, he just carried on despite his 70+ years.
His "billionaire behaviour" was more about buying or building outrageous McMansions around the country, which is typical of his original background (a property developer with shady links to the mafia).
Historically, secession from the union is frowned upon. See: the bloodiest war in US history. On the other hand, my former employer Dean Kamen did jokingly found his own country on North Dumpling Island and signed a non-aggression pact. He seceded when he was denied a permit to build a wind turbine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Dumpling_Island
If that's a legal question then no, no more than I can secede along with my backyard. The fact that your land happens to be surrounded by water doesn't give it any special legal status, the law of the United States does not allow landowners to secede.
If that's a practical question, then all he has to do is to declare independence and then be prepared to win a war against the United States when it chooses to militarily dispute that claim. As Larry Ellison is unlikely to be able to win a war against the United States, I'd say the answer here is also no.
I am quite interested in this subject. What is the legal process of starting a country? Is there any land available in the world which can be bought for starting a new country?
There is no legal process for starting a country, because laws are made by countries, and once you're starting your own there's no legal framework to operate under.
The practical process for starting a country is to control a piece of land militarily, declare yourself independent, and then persuade other countries to recognize your claim. They're incredibly unlikely to do so, unless you can really back that claim up with something. Even countries which are large, have functioning governments and reasonably powerful militaries can't be guaranteed universal acceptance, e.g. Taiwan.
Nobody will sell you land on which to start your own country. Your best bet for land not currently subject to any territorial claims would be Marie Byrd Land:
"There is no legal process for starting a country"
Well, there is no global legal process for starting a country because pretty much all territory is already claimed.
However, plenty of countries have split apart recently (e.g. Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia) and indeed by own "country" of Scotland is about to consider splitting from the UK.
One subtle point: there are sometimes legal processes for declaring independence from a host country.
The most clear example of this is the Statute of Westminster 1931, which the Parliament of the UK passed in order to create a legal process by which its colonies could file for legal independence.
As I understand it, in British law classes, there is often a question asked of students: "If Parliament repealed the Statute of Westminster today, would we (in principle, legally) get all of those colonies back? Does Parliament have the right to repeal the Statute of Westminster and the grants of independence under it, or were they something otherwise unprecedented in law: a surrender, effective forever, of certain legal powers?" Etc.
So yes, there are sometimes legal processes for starting a country, although the U.S. doesn't really have one. The U.S. does allow you to apply for statehood however, so it might be interesting to immediately declare independence (illegally) and then immediately apply to become a state (legally) to see which imperative wins out.
Prince Leonard of the Hutt River Province formed a micronation back in the 1970s. I grew up an hour or two from the Province, most people think it was a bit of a clever hack - he even declared war on Australia at one stage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Hutt_River
iirc (parts of) Somalia doesn't have proper government, so you probably could try to start your country there. I'd recommend getting couple hundred/thousand mercenaries to keep your peace there...
If you'd rule fairly, you even could have a chance of Western world accepting you, as even good dictatorship would be a massive improvement compared to the current conditions.
I'm now wondering what sort of mayhem one could cause with vendor access to every Oracle db the US .gov uses, presumably you could forge orders, reorganize parts of the executive and identify and suborn most of the people who would be in a position to stop you...
If he builds a monorail, I guess it'll be obvious.
HONOLULU – Landowner Castle & Cooke has filed a transfer application with the Public Utilities Commission. Castle & Cooke owns 98 percent of the island’s 141 square miles. The buyer is Lawrence Ellison, co-founder and chief executive officer of Oracle Corporation.
Governor Neil Abercrombie today released the following statement: “It is my understanding that Mr. Ellison has had a long standing interest in Lana'i. His passion for nature, particularly the ocean is well known specifically in the realm of America’s Cup sailing. He is also a businessman whose record of community involvement in medical research and education causes is equally notable.
“We look forward to welcoming Mr. Ellison in the near future.”
I wonder if it would be legal for him to erect a 20' high electric fence (with barbed wire on top) around the lands of the town, so they can't get out on his property.
Even if it was currently allowed, I am 100% sure that if he tried it there would be outrage and the government would step in and stop it (and changes the laws to disallow it).
Almost all the property on the island was acquired by Dole as a pineapple plantation back in Ye Olden Days when it was easy for Dole to do that sort of thing (1920s), and somehow the property has never gotten broken up in the decades since then, so Ellison just bought it from the til-now-current owner, who owns it via a chain of purchases from Dole and subsidiaries.
This isn't a post about any economic theory or about debating the morality of the fixed pie fallacy. It's about knee-jerk moralistic responses to complex phenomena.
It's just weird to see such things pop up on HN these days.
It goes against the spirit of this community (satisfying intellectual curiosity) because even though a knee jerk reaction has its place, it can't help you find the answers. It just muddies up the waters.
We're not really seeing this efficiency, though. For all the money being funneled into a small set of people, most of whom are not entrepreneurs but well-connected parasites, there's very little coming of value out of it.
Take human transportation. We're abysmal at it. Sure, we've gotten great at sending bits around, but for a person to travel from New York to London still costs several hundred dollars. The average person who works in New York commutes for about 35 minutes each way, and the inefficacy of our transport systems (all around the world) is reflected in ridiculous real estate prices. All of this is an unmitigated disaster, and the concentration of wealth isn't solving any of it.
(For local transport, the solution is to tax landowners at extremely high rates and use the proceeds to build the world's best public transportation system in every major city, thus bringing housing costs down by increasing the available supply. The long-distance problem is harder and requires innovations in our energy policy.)
There are big, real problems for humanity to solve, and rich people living out dreams based on what they saw in "kid-gets-rich" movies written decades ago do not solve them.
The comment changed that I replied to. My view was wealth concentration == inefficient use of resources (on the whole, exceptions being self-made entrepreneurs)
"We're not really seeing this efficiency, though. For all the money being funneled into a small set of people, most of whom are not entrepreneurs but well-connected parasites, there's very little coming of value out of it."
Wow, that's such an absurdly broad, unprovable statement. You're talking about millions of people around the planet that qualify as millionaires (most of which are in the developing sections of the Asia Pacific region). So would you care to be very specific when slandering millions of people? Is Larry Page, or Jeff Bezos a parasite? How about Ellison? How about Gates? How about Sheldon Adelson, who built his empire from nothing and employs 40,000 people. How about Steve Jobs, was he a parasite? Who did Larry Ellison steal his wealth from in building the first major relational database company? How about the founders of Twitter, they're scumbag parasites, right? They're worth hundreds of millions. How about the founder of the 99 Cent stores? Was Sam Walton a big evil parasite? And on and on the list goes.
Oh but you didn't mean THOSE rich people. So which very specific ones did you mean? Care to go down the Forbes 400 and name them all? No? Because for every one you can name, I can name ten that are not parasites.
On the Walton example, Sam Walton has been dead for a while now. A number of Walton heirs and heiresses are on the Forbes 400 list, but they did not work for their money.
The resources won't be used efficiently if the few with all the power/money can press their priorities on the rest of the populace. In the US, this takes the form of billionaires heavily influencing government policy, both through party funding to draw up the legislature and propaganda to win votes. In looser countries, this effect is even more direct.
You have to count on benevolent tyrants if you allow wealth concentration to run its course. That's hoping for a lot.
Monarchy may be making a big comeback. And that's a GOOD thing. Try taking a break from jerking your knees and read "Democracy: The God that Failed", by Hans-Hermann Hoppe:
MONARCHY, DEMOCRACY, AND THE IDEA OF NATURAL ORDER
From the vantage point of elementary economic theory and in light
of historical evidence, then, a revisionist view of modern history results.
The Whig theory of history, according to which mankind marches continually forward toward ever higher levels of progress, is incorrect.
From the viewpoint of those who prefer less exploitation over more and
who value farsightedness and individual responsibility above short-
sightedness and irresponsibility, the historic transition from monarchy
to democracy represents not progress but civilizational decline. Nor
does this verdict change if more or other indicators are included. Quite
to the contrary. Without question the most important indicator of exploitation and present-orientedness not discussed above is war. Yet if this
indicator were included the relative performance of democratic republican government appears to be even worse, not better. In addition to
increased exploitation and social decay, the transition from monarchy to
democracy has brought a change from limited warfare to total war, and
the twentieth century, the age of democracy, must be ranked also among
the most murderous periods in all of history.
That knee jerk objection must have taken you all of two seconds to come up with!
Like most interesting ideas, this one is NON-obvious. Try at least looking at the Amazon page for the book, or check out Lew Rockwell's enthusiastic endorsement of Hoppe's work, if you are part of the tl;dr crowd. It's FAR from ridiculous.
> It's just weird to see such things pop up on HN these days.
That's just what you get when you mix people of different ideologies and get them talking about economics/politics. That's why we try and avoid those topics.
It could be bad. Wealth that moves through the economy tends to keep people employed. Now, take all the money that's being spent and therefore paying N people, and put it in a room. That's bad, I think.
Sure it is. If we have an economy of ten people, it is inherently bad for one person to control 100% of the wealth while 9 people starve to death. That is, in fact, inherently bad.
To put it another way, we know that the marginal utility of wealth decreases as wealth increases. Therefore under the standard principle of greatest good for the greatest number, social good is maximized when wealth is evenly distributed.
The space race was an incredible concentration of wealth and it turned out many technical advances which improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis.
Sure does. It's the concentration of wealth into the hands of a government, which is made up of people.
Oh, you're only talking about the concentrating of wealth into private hands? I reject that arbitrary separation. It still matters where wealth is concentrated, even if you choose to disregard such so long as it's controlled by people in government positions.
You don't think the $236 billion paid out to federal civilian workers every year is concentrating of wealth? Yeah right.
According to the USA Today:
"By 2009, there were 383,000 federal civilian workers with salaries of more than $100,000"
That's not concentration of wealth?
How about: "In 2010, federal worker compensation averaged $126,141, or double the private-sector average of $62,757."
Government is ultimately accountable to the people. Private individuals are not.
Talking about the middle class as the concentration of wealth is laughable. It's the super-rich's wealth that is the concentration, because all that power is held by a small group that have interests and priorities different than the vast majority. A large middle class, by definition, is a bulwark against this, because they are a large amount of people with interests more in line with the general populace. They need health care, good roads, various government agencies. The super-rich really, really don't.
Also, if you think a $100,000 salary in the US is rich, you're wrong. It's very nice, but it's not "rich".
Oh, look how counter-intuitive this reasoning is! It must therefore be deeply insightful.
Except it requires throwing out most normal definitions of "concentration" and "wealth", and requires the belief that government is the "other" rather than government (in a democracy) being some reasonable approximation of public will (I'm not suggesting that government can't, or hasn't frequently within history become a horrible other -- but one has to adopt a rather extreme anti-government position to subsequently see the current U.S. government as the enemy, and equate accountable government power with unaccountable private power).
Which federal employee can spend 0.5% of their wealth and completely change the outcome of an election to the Senate? Or 0.1% of their wealth and get subtle legislation written at a 10x ROI? Or spend 0.05 % of their wealth and fund three professorships at a university whose primary role is to intellectually buttress their own self-serving ideology?
Trillions of dollars controlled by a few hundred men and women in the lower house of the Congress. And even fewer on the subcommittees that controls each of Pentagon spending, welfare benefits, and salary budgets.
... and they can be removed from these positions every two or six years. And they have to glad-hand and defend their positions and votes regularly. And even if you contend that they might be bribed or engage in dubious deals, their compensation for doing so is orders of magnitude less than the kinds of lobbying returns found by industries that generate billions of revenue each year.
Seriously, billionaires and those who have ownership and direct control over billion-dollar-enterprises are accountable to no one. History has shown that wealthy interests have repeatedly exploited their advantages politically and financially to the detriment of everyone else (yes, governments fail too, but rarely democratic ones). You are telling me that I should be more concerned about the power society has decided to give to their elected representatives, and relatively less concerned about the influence of an increasingly wealthy elite, who, with every additional dollar at their disposal, render less powerful everyone else?
In this case however it would be more like 10 people having $1, then one of them building something and all of them agreeing its worth $100. The other 10 haven't lost anything in the one becoming much wealthier.
The marginal utility of consuming wealth for one's personal use diminishes, but empirically that is not what the wealthiest people do. They give their wealth away in intelligently measured ways. It's quite possible that giving 10 million random middle-class Americans more of Bill Gates' money would do less good than Bill Gates has done with it trying to solve the whole malaria problem.
So all wealthy people are Bill Gates now? Even in the US that's laughable. Start to venture into the rest of the world, and it's a pretty ridiculous notion.
jellicle addresses your first claim well. As for the second, it is because there is a government, elected by the people (ie. everyone), that imposes laws on everyone, that Ellison will not be able to abuse his ownership dramatically. Were Ellison an independent count in 10th century West Frankia (France), I would not be betting on his generosity.
Nothing. However, wealth concentration makes it more likely, all things being equal. Your claim is that wealth concentration doesn't matter in this case. I disagree with that.
After being "discovered" by Europeans, the island was used for ranching. Most of it was owned by one guy, Walter Gibson. Then James Dole (of Dole food company) turned the island into the world's largest pineapple plantation. Castle & Cooke acquired Dole, then changed their name to Dole, then spun off a new company called Castle & Cooke, which was bought by the CEO of Dole, David Murdoch. Murdoch just sold his 98% of the island to Ellison. Currently there is only one town on the island, population 2,000.
There are also two pretty nice resorts and a couple of golf courses. It is a weird ecology compared to the rest of Hawaii; Maui gets most of its rain so it is rather dry and has pine forests and a lot of deer.
The Louisiana Purchase is another example. Quite a number of states were bought in that deal.
Washington DC isn't a state because it was decided that it would work best to have the national capital in a special non-state enclave, so as not to make any one state more important than the others.
(And yes, the Louisiana Purchase, at 828,000 square miles, is larger than Alaska, at 663,268. Though the nominal price was higher -- $15 million vs. $7.2).
The Louisiana Purchase was a scam that went awry. Napoleon "sold it" so he could raise money for his European campaign. The plan was to sell it to the Americans then take it back through force after he successfully conquered Europe.
Sorry, I don't. Just an opinionated, french father-in-law steeped in french history and colonialism.
One of the things I quickly learned after leaving the US is that American historical events are viewed very differently in different sides of the world. Maybe some of the french HNers can give the french perspective.
My understanding is just the interpretation of US history books and one grumpy, old frenchman.
Really? By my understanding it was more of a fire sale--between trying to conquer Europe and the slave revolt in Haiti, Napoleon was convinced that it wasn't worthwhile to hold onto useless colonies in America when he could have all of Europe in his grasp.
As much as i would like to say it means he performs experiments on orphans in a super villain like way, i'm pretty sure they're referring to this http://www.ellisonfoundation.org/
And actually, the orphan thing is more of a reddit joke. I'm sure Mr. Ellison is a pretty amazing guy.
I should point out that, although Lanai was formed millions of years ago by a volcano, there aren't actually any active volcanoes on that island. The only active ones are on the Big Island (also known as Hawaii).
There's always someone coming in with facts that ruins the wonderful ideas. I'm going to pretend it is an active volcano and Larry Ellison is actually Hank Scorpio.
Another article says that the asking price had been previously reported as between 0.5 and 0.6 billion.
Let's keep this in perspective. It may have a nice view, but it's only ninety thousand acres. That wouldn't even put him in the top hundred landholders in the US.
Fun fact: Nicole Kidman's family owns twenty-two million acres of land.
The list is by acreage and not value, though. Which makes Bezos' position on the list pretty funny, since the neighborhood Amazon is based in--South Lake Union--is owned by Paul Allen.
Would this mean that he becomes the "ruler" of the island. I don't see it mentioned on the wikipedia page, does the island have any form of government or do the residents control everything? That also raises the question can he remove people from the island? I would assume that the condition of the sale means that people can't just be evicted/deported (not sure the correct term here) but maybe not.
So to do anything on the island (eg: build a house, create a road, build an underground bunker...) he would need to get permission from the Maui County government?
Thanks for the info re: Maui, I skipped over the part where it's part of the united states.
Perhaps, but he wouldn't have had a chance to protest about the stupid ongoing attempt to incorporate a pointless, one-use extra character into the English language.
The Hawaiian language has never had a written form apart from the English alphabet, so why they think they can go round sticking new characters into it is beyond me. I already know how to pronounce "Hawaii", you don't need a freaking apostrophe in there to remind me.
There are no incorporated cities in Hawaii, just the counties. Honolulu (i.e. Oahu) is called "the city and county of Honolulu" and the rest are just "county of ___". (Also learned from Wikipedia that there is fifth county that consists of a single isolated peninsula on Maui).
Lanai is part of the United States and under Hawaiian state law, he can't even close the island to outsiders (all beaches must be accessible to the public in Hawaii).
That said, he is the only true land owner there (Four Season's though must have some kind of long-term lease) and iirc, most of the ~2K people who live there don't have any kind of long-term leases and can be evicted. Of course, to maintain an island that large, you do need people.
That is incorrect. He bought 98% of the island - the town of Lanai City is on the remaining 2% of the island. Aside from those who live at one of the resorts on island, the majority of Lanai's residents live in Lanai City and own their own property. Some of the families there have been in the same home for generations. I'm sure there are a few people on leasehold land who could now be evicted at any time by Ellison, but they could just have easily have been evicted by Castle & Cook previously.
I can imagine they're perfectly safe unless they start to make crazy amounts of money leveraging their space on Mr. Ellison's island in which case he'd either find a way to cut himself into the action or try to have them evicted.
Ah, this must be "the island owned by an American gentleman" as it was called by our BnB host on a neighbor island, followed by a warning not to try and dock there.
Just so long as he promises to film a video montage of him enjoying it and presents it to us during a keynote at OpenWorld/JavaOne, like he does with his yacht.
From an environmental perspective, a single landowner like this, who isn't going to put it to intensive development or use, is probably the best thing which could happen to a place like Lanai, other than becoming a park or nature preserve of some sort.
You can get a "recreation permit" for one small part of the area (Midway Atoll), so the entire area is not closed off, but for the most part it's all "protected".
There are more, but I assume you know how to use Google?
True, but nobody really lives within proximity of them to have any reason to open them up to the public.
If they did, it would probably become poacher central because nobody would be there to stop them. (Come to think of it, maybe it is like that right now, who knows?)
What kind of assurances do we have that he won't develop it?
Seems like the ONLY assurance is to have it under the state or federal park program.
Note that this was not public land -- it had been owned by the Hawaiian Pineapple Company and then Castle & Cooke, so this is not a public to private ownership transfer.
I live in California, US and I keep seeing news paper articles warning each year that our State Government is short on cash and considering sale of State Land...
I also read of the added costs of cleanup after the latest meth-lab/pot-farm bust finds terrible accumulated waste and in some cases, caustic chemicals left behind... Illegal operations have little incentive to be kind to the land.
It's private property, why should you get any assurance?
A state or federal park program is about as far away from an assurance as you could get. The feds and states sell off land all the time for development, and given the entire US Government system is bankrupt, that trend will accelerate.
He might develop some of it, but not intensively -- he's not going to build 100k condos or anything like that (why would he bother?). It's presumably going to be a high end/exclusive place for him, like Necker Island is for Branson.
I once read that Ellison had very little wealth outside of his Oracle holdings. In fact, that he had borrowed against his stock in order to make the vast majority of his enormous purchases. Does that mean there will be one hell of a fire sale in Hawaii should Oracle hit the skids? And what sort of mind must one have to borrow upwards of a billion dollars rather than just sell some shares?
It's a common financial strategy among the fabulously-wealthy. Selling shares would incur all kinds of taxes, but he can get a line of credit with a reasonable interest rate quite easily, pay no income taxes, and actually deduct the interest he pays from his taxes. So he carries a lot of debt but it's all backed by assets and paying the interest is tolerable.
Yes, if that's what he's doing, then in the event that his assets utterly evaporate he'll be in a spot of bother. But it's a pretty well-trod path, and probably some non-trivial portion of his assets are quite stable and reliable and not terribly volatile. I won't pretend to know the precise details of his situation, but living off a line of credit isn't at all uncommon and perhaps isn't even unreasonable (from the perspective of financial self-interest alone) for a person in his position.
Funny, though - Were I in his position, I'd just sell the stock, pay the taxes and own whatever it was I wanted to own. Perhaps that says something about why I am not in his position.
I thought HN is a site for news which are interesting for hacker and computer fanatics. Turned out that information, which would better fit in a boulevard magazin, are also published here.
Welcome to the new HN where people whom have worked there entire lives aren't entitled to the money they've earned (we are the 99% xD Anarchism ftw down with government! =^_^=) and every article has to have at least 10 posts sucking Google's cock.
165 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 228 ms ] thread> You know what I'd do if I had a billion dollars....
Then you've got Silvio Berlusconi, who bought himself the Prime Ministership of Italy and spent the whole time having what he called "Bunga Bunga Parties", which is closer to my fantasy at sixteen than my fantasy at nine, but it'll do.
His "billionaire behaviour" was more about buying or building outrageous McMansions around the country, which is typical of his original background (a property developer with shady links to the mafia).
Edit: Oh, right.
If that's a practical question, then all he has to do is to declare independence and then be prepared to win a war against the United States when it chooses to militarily dispute that claim. As Larry Ellison is unlikely to be able to win a war against the United States, I'd say the answer here is also no.
The practical process for starting a country is to control a piece of land militarily, declare yourself independent, and then persuade other countries to recognize your claim. They're incredibly unlikely to do so, unless you can really back that claim up with something. Even countries which are large, have functioning governments and reasonably powerful militaries can't be guaranteed universal acceptance, e.g. Taiwan.
Nobody will sell you land on which to start your own country. Your best bet for land not currently subject to any territorial claims would be Marie Byrd Land:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Byrd_Land
a Mongolia-sized slice of unclaimed land in Antarctica. You'd still have a tough time getting anyone to accept your claim, though. Also, it's cold.
Well, there is no global legal process for starting a country because pretty much all territory is already claimed.
However, plenty of countries have split apart recently (e.g. Czechoslovakia into the Czech Republic and Slovakia) and indeed by own "country" of Scotland is about to consider splitting from the UK.
The most clear example of this is the Statute of Westminster 1931, which the Parliament of the UK passed in order to create a legal process by which its colonies could file for legal independence.
As I understand it, in British law classes, there is often a question asked of students: "If Parliament repealed the Statute of Westminster today, would we (in principle, legally) get all of those colonies back? Does Parliament have the right to repeal the Statute of Westminster and the grants of independence under it, or were they something otherwise unprecedented in law: a surrender, effective forever, of certain legal powers?" Etc.
So yes, there are sometimes legal processes for starting a country, although the U.S. doesn't really have one. The U.S. does allow you to apply for statehood however, so it might be interesting to immediately declare independence (illegally) and then immediately apply to become a state (legally) to see which imperative wins out.
If you'd rule fairly, you even could have a chance of Western world accepting you, as even good dictatorship would be a massive improvement compared to the current conditions.
I wonder… "Hey Operations? It's Larry. Shut down all Oracle and Java applications running inside .gov networks. Right now. Every single one."
;-)
If he builds a monorail, I guess it'll be obvious.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hawaii....
HONOLULU – Landowner Castle & Cooke has filed a transfer application with the Public Utilities Commission. Castle & Cooke owns 98 percent of the island’s 141 square miles. The buyer is Lawrence Ellison, co-founder and chief executive officer of Oracle Corporation.
Governor Neil Abercrombie today released the following statement: “It is my understanding that Mr. Ellison has had a long standing interest in Lana'i. His passion for nature, particularly the ocean is well known specifically in the realm of America’s Cup sailing. He is also a businessman whose record of community involvement in medical research and education causes is equally notable.
“We look forward to welcoming Mr. Ellison in the near future.”
---
Meta Comment
This isn't a post about any economic theory or about debating the morality of the fixed pie fallacy. It's about knee-jerk moralistic responses to complex phenomena.
It's just weird to see such things pop up on HN these days.
It goes against the spirit of this community (satisfying intellectual curiosity) because even though a knee jerk reaction has its place, it can't help you find the answers. It just muddies up the waters.
Take human transportation. We're abysmal at it. Sure, we've gotten great at sending bits around, but for a person to travel from New York to London still costs several hundred dollars. The average person who works in New York commutes for about 35 minutes each way, and the inefficacy of our transport systems (all around the world) is reflected in ridiculous real estate prices. All of this is an unmitigated disaster, and the concentration of wealth isn't solving any of it.
(For local transport, the solution is to tax landowners at extremely high rates and use the proceeds to build the world's best public transportation system in every major city, thus bringing housing costs down by increasing the available supply. The long-distance problem is harder and requires innovations in our energy policy.)
There are big, real problems for humanity to solve, and rich people living out dreams based on what they saw in "kid-gets-rich" movies written decades ago do not solve them.
"We're not really seeing this efficiency, though. For all the money being funneled into a small set of people, most of whom are not entrepreneurs but well-connected parasites, there's very little coming of value out of it."
Wow, that's such an absurdly broad, unprovable statement. You're talking about millions of people around the planet that qualify as millionaires (most of which are in the developing sections of the Asia Pacific region). So would you care to be very specific when slandering millions of people? Is Larry Page, or Jeff Bezos a parasite? How about Ellison? How about Gates? How about Sheldon Adelson, who built his empire from nothing and employs 40,000 people. How about Steve Jobs, was he a parasite? Who did Larry Ellison steal his wealth from in building the first major relational database company? How about the founders of Twitter, they're scumbag parasites, right? They're worth hundreds of millions. How about the founder of the 99 Cent stores? Was Sam Walton a big evil parasite? And on and on the list goes.
Oh but you didn't mean THOSE rich people. So which very specific ones did you mean? Care to go down the Forbes 400 and name them all? No? Because for every one you can name, I can name ten that are not parasites.
You have to count on benevolent tyrants if you allow wealth concentration to run its course. That's hoping for a lot.
MONARCHY, DEMOCRACY, AND THE IDEA OF NATURAL ORDER From the vantage point of elementary economic theory and in light of historical evidence, then, a revisionist view of modern history results. The Whig theory of history, according to which mankind marches continually forward toward ever higher levels of progress, is incorrect. From the viewpoint of those who prefer less exploitation over more and who value farsightedness and individual responsibility above short- sightedness and irresponsibility, the historic transition from monarchy to democracy represents not progress but civilizational decline. Nor does this verdict change if more or other indicators are included. Quite to the contrary. Without question the most important indicator of exploitation and present-orientedness not discussed above is war. Yet if this indicator were included the relative performance of democratic republican government appears to be even worse, not better. In addition to increased exploitation and social decay, the transition from monarchy to democracy has brought a change from limited warfare to total war, and the twentieth century, the age of democracy, must be ranked also among the most murderous periods in all of history.
Long live King Larry of Lanai!
Ridiculous
Like most interesting ideas, this one is NON-obvious. Try at least looking at the Amazon page for the book, or check out Lew Rockwell's enthusiastic endorsement of Hoppe's work, if you are part of the tl;dr crowd. It's FAR from ridiculous.
That's just what you get when you mix people of different ideologies and get them talking about economics/politics. That's why we try and avoid those topics.
To put it another way, we know that the marginal utility of wealth decreases as wealth increases. Therefore under the standard principle of greatest good for the greatest number, social good is maximized when wealth is evenly distributed.
Oh, you're only talking about the concentrating of wealth into private hands? I reject that arbitrary separation. It still matters where wealth is concentrated, even if you choose to disregard such so long as it's controlled by people in government positions.
You don't think the $236 billion paid out to federal civilian workers every year is concentrating of wealth? Yeah right.
According to the USA Today:
"By 2009, there were 383,000 federal civilian workers with salaries of more than $100,000"
That's not concentration of wealth?
How about: "In 2010, federal worker compensation averaged $126,141, or double the private-sector average of $62,757."
Still not concentration of wealth?
Talking about the middle class as the concentration of wealth is laughable. It's the super-rich's wealth that is the concentration, because all that power is held by a small group that have interests and priorities different than the vast majority. A large middle class, by definition, is a bulwark against this, because they are a large amount of people with interests more in line with the general populace. They need health care, good roads, various government agencies. The super-rich really, really don't.
Also, if you think a $100,000 salary in the US is rich, you're wrong. It's very nice, but it's not "rich".
Except it requires throwing out most normal definitions of "concentration" and "wealth", and requires the belief that government is the "other" rather than government (in a democracy) being some reasonable approximation of public will (I'm not suggesting that government can't, or hasn't frequently within history become a horrible other -- but one has to adopt a rather extreme anti-government position to subsequently see the current U.S. government as the enemy, and equate accountable government power with unaccountable private power).
Which federal employee can spend 0.5% of their wealth and completely change the outcome of an election to the Senate? Or 0.1% of their wealth and get subtle legislation written at a 10x ROI? Or spend 0.05 % of their wealth and fund three professorships at a university whose primary role is to intellectually buttress their own self-serving ideology?
Seriously, billionaires and those who have ownership and direct control over billion-dollar-enterprises are accountable to no one. History has shown that wealthy interests have repeatedly exploited their advantages politically and financially to the detriment of everyone else (yes, governments fail too, but rarely democratic ones). You are telling me that I should be more concerned about the power society has decided to give to their elected representatives, and relatively less concerned about the influence of an increasingly wealthy elite, who, with every additional dollar at their disposal, render less powerful everyone else?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Hawaiian_Kingd...
I assume that's why Washington DC isn't a state?
Washington DC isn't a state because it was decided that it would work best to have the national capital in a special non-state enclave, so as not to make any one state more important than the others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Purchase
(And yes, the Louisiana Purchase, at 828,000 square miles, is larger than Alaska, at 663,268. Though the nominal price was higher -- $15 million vs. $7.2).
Ellison was robbed blind.
One of the things I quickly learned after leaving the US is that American historical events are viewed very differently in different sides of the world. Maybe some of the french HNers can give the french perspective.
My understanding is just the interpretation of US history books and one grumpy, old frenchman.
Hear, hear.
And actually, the orphan thing is more of a reddit joke. I'm sure Mr. Ellison is a pretty amazing guy.
Watch out if he installs a monorail and buys a white cat !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_Hawaiian_volcanoes
He may not always be right but it was amusing to watch Apotheker travel the earth to avoid a subpoena.
Let's keep this in perspective. It may have a nice view, but it's only ninety thousand acres. That wouldn't even put him in the top hundred landholders in the US.
Fun fact: Nicole Kidman's family owns twenty-two million acres of land.
Check out http://www.landreport.com/americas-100-largest-landowners/ for the U.S. Largest is John Malone: 2.2M acres in Colorado, Wyoming, the Dakotas.
http://208.106.193.21/documents/property_pdfs/Top100Landowne...
The list Jeff Bezos as #27 with 290,000 acres. Huh.
He doesn't even have his own county -- the land is in Maui County.
Thanks for the info re: Maui, I skipped over the part where it's part of the united states.
and no, I didn't put the okina(s) in. Fuck that noise.
The Hawaiian language has never had a written form apart from the English alphabet, so why they think they can go round sticking new characters into it is beyond me. I already know how to pronounce "Hawaii", you don't need a freaking apostrophe in there to remind me.
That said, he is the only true land owner there (Four Season's though must have some kind of long-term lease) and iirc, most of the ~2K people who live there don't have any kind of long-term leases and can be evicted. Of course, to maintain an island that large, you do need people.
Not quite as hot or sunny but the scenery is nicer and you are surrounded by Canadians!
[1] http://www.autoblog.com/2012/06/02/1962-ferrari-250-gto-made...
That's a damn shame.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/06/20/...
You can get a "recreation permit" for one small part of the area (Midway Atoll), so the entire area is not closed off, but for the most part it's all "protected".
There are more, but I assume you know how to use Google?
If they did, it would probably become poacher central because nobody would be there to stop them. (Come to think of it, maybe it is like that right now, who knows?)
Seems like the ONLY assurance is to have it under the state or federal park program.
Note that this was not public land -- it had been owned by the Hawaiian Pineapple Company and then Castle & Cooke, so this is not a public to private ownership transfer.
Wikipedia has the details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanai
I also read of the added costs of cleanup after the latest meth-lab/pot-farm bust finds terrible accumulated waste and in some cases, caustic chemicals left behind... Illegal operations have little incentive to be kind to the land.
A state or federal park program is about as far away from an assurance as you could get. The feds and states sell off land all the time for development, and given the entire US Government system is bankrupt, that trend will accelerate.
Its amazing to me that its so easy for people to justify that.
Larry Ellison is a crook, an asshole, and a liability to the technology community.
Oracle is a scam. But then again, so are most things in this so-called 'civilization'.
Yes, if that's what he's doing, then in the event that his assets utterly evaporate he'll be in a spot of bother. But it's a pretty well-trod path, and probably some non-trivial portion of his assets are quite stable and reliable and not terribly volatile. I won't pretend to know the precise details of his situation, but living off a line of credit isn't at all uncommon and perhaps isn't even unreasonable (from the perspective of financial self-interest alone) for a person in his position.
I'd say he's cash flowin' just fine.
Fun side fact: Steve Ballmer earns nearly half a billion dollars every year from dividends via his Microsoft stake.
Enjoy your stay.