Elon Musk talks about taxes, billionaires and government, he says it is a corporation in the limit with the biggest monopoly on legal violence
Text:
[Elon]
In general, if we don't cut government spending, something really bad is going to happen.
This is crazy, our spending is so far in excess of revenue it's insane.
You could zero out all the billionaires in the country (USA) there's all this anti-billionaire bs, well if you zero out all the billionaires you still wouldn't solve the deficit.
[Speaker] .... How do you tax someone like you? How do you tax billionaires?
[Elon]
I pay a lot of tax, my marginal tax rate is like 53% so that's not trivial and there's asset based taxes, sales tax and estate tax. Generally I think the estate tax is a good tax.
If you think of assets beyond a certain level that are far beyond somebody's ability to consume then at certain point really what you're doing is capital allocation, so it's not money for personal expenditure what you're doing is capitol allocation, and it does not make sense to take the job of capitol allocation away from people that demonstrated great skill at capitol allocation, and give it to entity that has demonstrated very poor skill in capitol allocation, which is the government.
Think of the government essentially as a corporation in the limit, the government is simply the biggest corporation with a monopoly on violence, and where you have no recourse. So how much money you want to give to that entity?
Government is a corporation in the limit, it is the most corporate thing, it is maximum corporation but it's also a monopoly and also it's the only that is allowed legally to do violence so why would you want to give a corporation with no competition that can't even go bankrupt more money. It's not necessarily that I think the government shouldn't exist or that there are not good things that the government can do or things that are necessary to do.
For example a science program where we send a probe to mars and the value of that is a small amount of value for all citizens but it would be inefficient to collect ten dollars from every citizen for a mars probe, therefore it's better to have the government to do something like that, like a heavy science program rather than try to collect small amounts of money from everyone. I'm not someone who is an extreme libertarian and thinks the government shouldn't do anything I just think we should minimize what the government is, because the government's efficiency at spending is just going to be lower than a competitive commercial company by a lot.
If you look at East Germany vs West Germany or North Korea vs South Korea and look at GDP per capita, the difference is gigantic. A random line was drawn depending on where the red army was or where the allied troops were and East Germany's productivity was at least five times worse than West Germany, it's not like West Germany was some ? of capitalisms, they were quite socialist really so it may be as much as an order of magnitude difference between the efficiency of a competitive private company vs the government.
Original clip from the video: 'Tesla as the World’s Biggest Robot Company:' Elon Musk on AI and U.S. Innovation | WSJ Wall Street Journal [ Ссылка ]
