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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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Theory — the new unrealized capital gain tax is designed (or will have the effect of) forcing people like Elon Musk to surrender control of corporations resulting in PMC control instead of founder control.

As some detail, there is a proposed 25% tax on unrealized gains for the super wealthy coupled with a 44% tax on realized gains. So let’s say you own 10b of a 100b company. If you do nothing you will owe 2.5b of tax. But if you sell 2.5b, you’d actually owe more! So you end up having to sell a pretty big chunk of your stake. This means that before companies get really large founders have to sell a big chunk of their equity preventing super wealth. It also changes incentive structures for founders making them more likely to cash out.

Once they cash out, PMC will take control. PMC coexists with modern democratic policy. Therefore, the democrat tax proposals help ensure corporations are run by allies.

Perhaps you should be more specific than “PMC,” since most founders are, in fact, professionals and/or managers. Who exactly do you have in mind? Does this tax favor them, rather than just anyone who isn’t super wealthy?

“Preventing super wealth” sounds like a pretty normal Democrat plank. What does the extra theory add?

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The distinction, which is hardly something novel so I'm having trouble believing these objections are offered in good faith, is the PMC are not entrepreneurs, they're employees.

Sam Altman was pretty clear that most of the startup founders Y Combinator funds come from PMC backgrounds. The original interview with Tyler Cowen where he talks about it is now behind a paywall, but this blog post has the key quotes.

ALTMAN: There’s a statement here that’s just bad about the world, but I think if you look at most successful founders, they are pretty smart, upper-middle-class people. They are very rarely the children of super successful people. They are very rarely born in real poverty. They are very rarely the absolute smartest people who otherwise would win a Fields Medal. They are never dumb, but upper-middle-class, pretty smart people that have grit and drive and creativity and vision and edge and a different way of thinking about the world. That is what I think I’m good at spotting, and that is what I think are good founders. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why that’s a sad statement about the world, but there it is.

Part of what Y Combinator has done (and Altman has also written about this at length) is to turn "founding a startup" into gamified meritocratic competition with a facially similar progression to moving through the junior-to-middle ranks at McKinsey or Goldman. Paul Graham (but not Altman) also did pitched early acquisitions as good for founders, which matched the McKinsey/Goldman pitch of "do this for a few years and move onto your real career with cash in your pocket and an impressive CV." The reason to do that is to make "found a startup straight out of Stanford" a more appealing option for PMC strivers, and therefore shift the universe of startup founders in a way which matches YC's comparative advantage.

I don't think salaried employment is part of what defines the PMC. Lawyers, accountants, and (in the US) doctors are core PMC members who (if successful) end up as owner-partners in their practices. Wall Street types get most of their income in what is in effect commission. Genuine entrepreneurship is exceptional for the PMC, but it is exceptional for everyone. And VC money is designed to de-risk entrepreneurship for founders so the amount of skin in a game a founder has is closer to the Biglaw partner who sets up his own boutique firm than the chef who remortgages his house to buy a restaurant.

and (in the US) doctors are core PMC members who

Just as FYI physician owned private practice is very rapidly dying for a variety of reasons (including increased regulatory/administrative burden.