Ontario billionaire under fire for arguing poor people shouldn't be able to vote
It's Shopify's Tobi Lutke.
A reminder that he's behind Build Canada and Build Toronto, and that Build Toronto's Eric Lombardi is running for the Ontario Librral Party leadership as we speak.
133 replies
When you said "under fire" I thought you meant literally, as in there is a squad of soldiers currently training their machine guns on the lad's home.
One could dream
Has he considered that voting is free, but bullets are cheap? If he were smart, he'd be wary of taking the ballot box out of the equation.
This is Canada, nobody is going to shoot him. Getting torn apart by a mob is not out of the equation though.
Slathered in maple syrup, rolled in worms and fed to a bloodthirsty swarm of Canada geese.
I actually find his idea of weighed voting based on tax paid a good idea. But then percentage wise based on both income and wealth. So if you pay 2% tax you get 2 votes, if you pay 50% you get 50 votes.
Awwww too bad billionaires don't / barely pay taxes. No votes for those arrogant rich assholes. Now we can vote to arrest billionaires who don't pay taxes, imprison them for tax evasion and Epstein files and take away their wealth which can be used to improve quality of life of the general public.
But they already do that. Its called lobbying.
No one should vote. Representative democracy by popular vote isn't an effective way to administrate a nation.
Bring back qualified sortition.
For those downvoting, Sortion isn't such a bad idea. Its basically a lottery to put a group of people in charge. I honestly think 100 random Canadians probably would do a better job than career politicians only out for themselves and the corporations funding them.
And importantly, a group of people who have already been identified as qualified for the specific office in question through experience or education.
We need to stop letting bankers and business owners run our country, then act surprised when they run it with profit and economic growth as their primary focus...
We also have the technological infrastructure for more reliable direct democracy. I would love to see everyone over the age a majority issued a smart device (phone, tablet, whatever) where the administration could push plainly worded surveys daily or weekly to solicit public feedback on relevant issues to help direct prioritization.
I like the idea of a Technocracy with highly paid 4 year terms selected by lottery. It should not be hard to be an expert just 10 years works experience or any post-secondary would work. About 25% of the population is what I would call malicious voters. They don't want progress, they just want bad things to happen to people they don't like. The 75% of normal people would cancel their evil out. The end result is you be ruled by the majority and they would have a guaranteed level of knowledge. You need to be highly paid because your term could trash your career if it hit at the wrong time.
I'm also a fan of Technocracy, but I've almost never seen that well received.
It can sound elitist. However in a Technocratic society, education should be provided for free, giving nobody an advantage over anyone else as far as power to rule goes.
If you 10 random people from your city in a room, how many people could come to an agreement on something to improve their collective lives? Direct democracy can be scary but I do trust at least 70% of my equal peers to help everyone. In that system individualism is a failed concept because it gains you nothing.
I'm not sure if I clearly see your point, but what I do understand makes sense.
Education being fully socialized is critically important.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
That is why we need to tax them.
Yes. We need to... tax... them.
Im sorry, im hard of hearing. Did you say Axe them?
Only after we decide what the best BBQ sauce is that goes on a rack of billionaire ribs!
... or otherwise cause them to stop existing. I'm flexible on that.
As flexible as a rope on a tree?
There's ways to make that happen...
Why should billionaires get to vote? They live in an alternate reality.
They shouldn't even exist.
Billionaires are such fucking parasites...
Under fire? Why do you guys keep missing?
They are fighting over what is the best bbq sauce rather than aiming.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
I love it.
I just want world wide wealth caps. 10 million is the max that any person canboen or control. Any additional income after that goes 100% straight to taxes.
This simple rule has wide spread implications from ending poverty to likely ending wars, removing power from narcissist politicians, and souch more
I feel like this is a copypasta from somewhere. I think I saw it before I need to start using it.
I throw it at any thread I find relating to financial inequality.
It’s lazy, but it’s honest work.
I love that term
Under fire? Put him in the fire.
A slow burning fire
Talk like this is almost like they are BEGGING for the guillotines to start rolling out.
They've been begging for decades
Wealthy arrogance is suicidal.
I just want world wide wealth caps. 10 million is the max that any person canboen or control. Any additional income after that goes 100% straight to taxes.
This simple rule has wide spread implications from ending poverty to likely ending wars, removing power from narcissist politicians, and souch more
Yes. but corruption always exists. Caps just push that wealth underground. There are no simple answers like that.
That won't be as easy as you think. Again, how would you do that if monetary incentives are mostly gone? If nobody is poor enough to help with evil plans, evil plans become really hard.
Heck, add in another simple rule: make all wealth information public. If nobody is poor and nobody really rich, there won't be much incentives to abuse that information and if we know peoples worth, it will be glaringly obvious that somebody is cheating
I know that this is an obvious oversimplification bit small changes like these areuch easier to implement than say "let's all become anarchist and the world will be fine!' because that will never happen.
These small changes keep everything else the same and at least it solves a huge list of problems from people dying from hunger to most crime to most wars to climate change. All of these mentioned are mostly only possible because we allow extreme wealth.
Take extreme wealth away and the world would be so much better
On it's own that won't end poverty, but coupled with something like a basic income it could. It would definitely end all the extreme wealth stupidity, and if it was retroactive nobody could really flee with their wealth, like they might manage to with a lesser wealth tax.
You might want to go up to 15, though. There's bound to be some sympathetic retiree couple with a house in inner Vancouver.
In the 1970's, $1 million and you were rich.Today, it's $10 million and even that is less than a lottery win. The limit would have to be $100 million.
Why?
Why 100 million?
I get that the number of 10 million is arbitrary, hell, I just semi randomly picked it, but a 10 million net worth gets you A LOT more than you actually need.
Why allow 100 million, though? 10 million is more than any person would need to love an actually full life with travel and plenty of whatever, and you could still invest some money in a small company. Want a bigger one? Join a bunch of people and make a bigger one.
100 million gets into the range where youncan project power over others and that is the entire thing that got us where we are. No person should hold large amounts of power, humanity has shown over and over that that is a very bad idea.
Inflationary pressures and regression towards the mean. Whatever the cap is, it will also be a cap on the mean. That is, the cap will pull the mean up towards it. I mentioned lottery prizes. Some have been in the $60 - 70 million dollar range. I think this is an indication that people generally are no attracted to having a wealth in this range, and are comfortable with the idea. That is, people generally think $70 million is something they would like to have, so a cap of $100 million would be more palatable. That cap is just above the limit most middle class people would consider as 'super rich'. As an aside, there are some super-homes that go for $50 million in our large cities. It is more about psychology than economics.
The multimillionaires would end inflation very quickly.
The hell they would. Inflation is what makes them multimillionaires. Once you become that rich, inflation does not affect you. 89%of your income gores to investments, things you WANT to increase in price.
Inflation would steadily decrease their real wealth cap. Wealth includes investments.
Wrong.Inflation increases the value of their investments. The stock market relies completely on inflation to increase profits. Every inflationary increase directly results in increase profits. That is the purpose of inflation.
Right, but I'm talking about the hypothetical in which their wealth is capped at a fixed number of dollars. They'd reach the cap and then raise the ladder up after them.
A 100% income tax means there's no incentive to remove profits from a business beyond that income, since you can't spend any of it, so it will just encourage increased accounting trickery to justify "business expenses" for things like purchasing private islands, sports cars, and luxury vacations.
80% is high enough; for every $10 million they withdraw for personal spending, they keep 2, and the other $8 million would go to pay for the services requested to run the rest of the country that enables them to produce their wealth. (Including all their employees and customers.)
Then we still benefit from the efficiencies inherent in the profit motive while having the ultra wealthy pay their fair share.
That was a wealth tax, not a tax on income. So, nobody would be worth more than 10 million, and earning 10 million is almost out of the question. That means you can't own a huge business by yourself, to start with.
Get a high salary, "lose it" on crypto, retire in Belize.
Well, the "get a high salary" part is definitely doing most of the hard work.
That being said, yes, there'd still be a way, if you're patient, have the income and don't care about legality. There'd be a risk of getting caught, which always scales with the amount you've hidden. But, maybe you're smarter than the next white-collar criminal.
If the point is to flatten out the class system, this policy would do it, though.
I might argue that if any single individual is in the position to collect $10M+/year, the economic system is already dysfunctional. That individual is operating as a gatekeeper rather than a value center and the position they occupy needs to be broken up and reorganized.
I could imagine a top surgeon or pro athlete legitimately earning that much from their own labor alone.
Tops are a dime a dozen. Bottom surgery is where the big money is at.
Entertainers and life savers are very different categories of value to society.
They also dress differently
Why is everyone that has worked on Ruby on Rails a total and utter douchebag? should be studied how that one project seems to have spawned some of the biggest bigoted asshole douches in the tech industry.
Lutke is a moron just like DHH is a moron and surprise surprise they're both from RoR.
Obligatory reminder that the inventor of Javascript is a homophobe and a crypto scammer. We never needed it! Download NoScript today!
Maybe naming projects based on expensive pebbles attracts people with an affinity for signs of wealth?
I used to work at Shopify. Wouldn't recommend it.
Anything you can share without doxxing yourself too much?
This is the same company that simps for PP and MAGA
Hang em
My brother was one of the first 10 or so hires of Shopify so seeing the little company grow into the massive company it is now in the 2010s made me like this guy a lot. He seemed to treat the team with respect and recognized/rewarded them for their work.
Then he totally ended up being yet another shitty billionaire (MAGA supporter iirc).
Thankfully, my brother quit before Toby's dickishness was made obvious, and so he remains the nicest, down-to-earth guy that I know.
Billionaire people shouldn't be able to vote.
They have power through capital already, they don't need more.
Classism is usually brought up as a word when identity politics writers want to pay lip service to it. But this is classism.
A class war tool?
"Poors under fire for thinking that killing billionaires should be legal".
He’s right though. The oligarchs having to own news and social media to get the election outcomes they want, and then also having to lobby those politicians to enact the right policies is incredibly inefficient. It would be simpler if the politicians were unelected and simply payrolled employees of the owner class.
That sounds an awful lot like Feudalism in the making.
Pretty clear sign that democracy is an impediment to capitalism.
It used to be that only property owners could vote. The laws all favoured the property owners.
It is so frustrating when I become responsible for the neighborhood problems
Edit that was for a different thread but fuck it
They keep talking like that and “the poors” might have to do something about it. There’s a historical precedent. At the end of the day there a lot more of us than there will ever be of them.
Every single billionaire admits they've been lucky. They aren't special, they're just lucky to have more than their fair share.
That's not my experience. I've only ever heard them claim that they worked hard to get what they have. Admitting that luck was involved would mean they don't deserve to be that wealthy, and they would never admit that.
oh yeah, they all admit to some luck, hard work, being opportunistic and luck. it goes without saying, at least in that you have to be born with suitable conditions, come accross the right people, get the right information, etc. billions of people "work hard", but there aren't enough billions to flow to everyone working hard.
Oh?
Oh.
Assuming Tobi Lutke makes at least 8% roi on his investments, he could give every homeless person in canada 20grand a year using just the interest.
Yeah, solving homelessness actually wouldn't cost that much. Juuust enough that nobody wants to pay for it. And then there's the matter of putting them somewhere, when NIMBYs are everywhere...
He should be on fire, not "under fire".
I do understand the frustration with the fact that people who are working have less time to be politically active than retirees, but I don't really see any way around it. The flip side is that a lot of great volunteers retire into community service and have a lot of extra time to help the community because they no longer work.
Doing political things, like attending town hall meetings or party fundraisers, could count for tax rebates like donations do, and a certain amount of days off work each year could be required to be available for such things.
Election days could be national holidays, and local election days local holidays.
If being poor or being required to work is really that much of an issue, I'm sure a billionaire could afford 60k UBI for ten thousand people.
Having a day off for elections (or even a half day) feels like it should be a pretty low hanging fruit to really improve voter turnout
Better idea - only the middle class can vote.
No, EVERYBODY can vote. It is your most basic right as an American citizen, and it should never be removed for any reason.
We should be automatically registered to vote on the day we are born, and that automatically validates on your 18th birthday. You literally have to do nothing, no IDs, nothing. You have the right to vote simply by being an American citizen, period.
And your right to vote shouldn't be removed for any reason at all. Even serial killers in prison should be able to vote. Prisoners need representation as much as anyone, probably more.
The right to vote should be sacrosanct, and even the discussion of suppressing votes by candidates should be illegal. That is not a subject for debate.
OTOH, the idea that corporation can vote is an abomination, and politicians who attempt such nonsense should be dealt with harshly. Hear that Delaware?
True, but this is Canada
This is a Canadian site. Canadians are SO not interested in the 'basic rights' of Americans. You just do not understand democracy. You vote for who is going to be the dictator for the next four years.
I already politely apologized for missing which sub I was in.
As you can perhaps tell, Canadians are rather sensitive about American politics and the American governance system right now. Something about Trump insisting we become the 51st State. There is absolutely no way in hell Canadians would agree to be governed under the American electoral system.
Every Canadian citizen over 18 is allowed to vote, no voter registration necessary, no need to qualify or establish our right to vote. What is required (and even then there are alternative pathways to vote) is that we get on the voter's list for a particular riding. This is to prevent multiple votes by an individual voting in multiple ridings. At the polling station, you are crossed off the list so you can only vote once. However, every attempt is made to ensure you are on a voters' list. Previously, enumerators went door to door (EVERY door in the country) to list EVERY eligible voter in the household. If there was no answer, they returned to that door as often as necessary in order to get an answer. The enumerators were paid per voter they put on the list, so there was definitely an incentive to get every voter. Then, the list was scrutinized by every political party to ensure every eligible voter was on the list, and there were no 'fake' voters on it. It was displayed publicly (usually on a telephone pole) so everyone in the community could check it over. Yes, that was VERY expensive. but it ensured the voters list was as accurate as humanly possible. Now, the voter's list is kept current through our Federal tax form. On that form, we can indicate that we want Revenue Canada to submit our updated information to Elections Canada (an neutral agency, totally independent of the government, that is charged with the responsibility to run our elections) in order to keep the voters list accurate. If someone does not file an Income Tax Form, there are alternative ways to get on the list. It is very unusual for someone who wants to vote to not get on the list. Under no circumstances would we ever give up this basic right to vote in order to comply with the American 'restrict the vote fudge the system' process.
We like our system, we are quite proud of it, and very protective of preserving it. It is one of the few things that can actually get Canadians to respond very rudely if an outsider tries to tell us how we should run our elections.
Sincere thanks for the education! Once again, your system leaves ours in the dust.
Again, my post was aimed at Americans, because I just responded to a post, without taking the time to see who the larger audience was. At least you got to see that not all Americans are cool with all the nonsense that's happening down here, and want to see changes.
I know that it is very, very difficult to get Americans to consider that there is a better system than the one they have, so the kudos are much appreciated. I just wish, as an advocate for true democracy, that more Americans could become more world-aware.
Another fucking American telling Canadians what's what
Ah, fuck, sorry boys, this was my rant for American voting. I wasn't paying attention to what sub I was in.
For what it's worth, it's the way it should be in Canada, too, but that up to you.
I love Canada, you're good folks.
In Canada we very much have a middle class. Mostly because of two income households.
Whoop, forgot what instance I was on. Deleted. Thanks for the call out.
The middle class already decides most elections because politicians target the middle class as a voting bloc.
This is why housing prices always seem to trend up: middle class wealth is concentrated in their family home.
This is also why there’s so much government funding for universities (public universities). The middle class disproportionately benefit from it. Taxes on working class people to pay for higher education that their own children don’t benefit from are regressive taxes. Basically a wealth transfer from the working class to the middle class.
In Canad, there is no wealth transfer from the lower class to the middle class through taxes. The wealth transfer all occurs at the retail and rental sectors.
I live in Canada. That’s not true. Higher education is heavily subsidized here, yet many of the paths (STEM majors at the top schools) are essentially closed for all but the most gifted of working class students.
Once you realize how skewed education is based on socioeconomic status, you see how little the working class benefit from having their tax dollars go to pay for higher education.
Income level is highly correlated with high school grades. Students from poor households are far more likely to fall below standards on reading, writing, mathematics, and science.
Except for East Asian students in the Canadian system. There is obviously something more than economic status that is going on. It is also a cultural thing. In households were education is a priority and expectations are higher, such as the East Asian culture, the gap is diminished.
There are plenty of low income Asian students who do not do so well in school. They just don’t live in Canada. Asian students who live in Canada are from a highly selected group of migrant families.
They may determine the outcome of elections, but they don't determine what outcomes the outcome chases. That's the lobbyists
The outcomes are what favour them though.
People who have a good job, plenty of vacation days, 2 cars, own their own home, couple of kids, money saved for school and retirement… these folks are not all that upset about billionaires.
They may be dumb, but they are also affected by housing prices, oil prices, service cuts, taxes raised. They still don't get politicians that do good for them, just like rest of the bottom 50%
They aren't better off because of who is elected even if you are accurate and they are the ones that determine the outcome of the elections. The elected politicians still don't persue the interests of the middle-class. The middleclass may simply be the most complacent because they are too afraid of becoming one of the Poors they seem to hate so much
Crabs in a goddamned bucket
That’s the thing though. Beyond a certain point, people don’t care that much about being “better off.” If they have it all, they have it all, and they’re content. I don’t think they’re afraid either. Fear is mostly the burden of the working class.
I don't think you have that many middle-class friends, judging by your opinion here. I could be totally off base on that presumption but I don't understand how you can hold that view if you do. That would be my failing then.
Middle-class isn't a month vacation every year anywhere they want. It isn't even retiring early. It's not getting the best version of everything. It still comes with cares concerns worries stresses challenges and a host of other afflictions that can almost always be solved by more money, just like everyone who is not as well off as the middle class.
It's a certain amount of comfortable survival, enough to also do more than a few things just because you want to and you have the means, but it's not a place that has no view of a higher place, it's just not always having your feet in the muck. Water waiting to drown you with a higher tide than usual or a moment of loss of vigilance and diligence to do the things you MUST do just to keep your head above water
At least that's been what I've come to given my life's windings
Monkey's paw curls a finger
Only wealthy business owners who are not royalty can vote
He's not necessarily wrong, there are certainly issues with democracy (stares at the US and Trump), it's just that we haven't figured out a better system yet.
He is totally wrong. Flat out completely wrong. and he's an asshole.
"I should get more votes because I'm rich!" is wrong. "My vote should be more equal" is wrong.
I'm not saying he's right, I'm just having a discussion about related topics.
I didn't down vote you, and you didn't say he's right but you did say "He's not necessarily wrong". My intent was to deny your assertion, he is completely wrong.
Oh we have. He's just not gonna like it. It's expanding democracy to the place where everything happens - the workplace. Worker democracy where Tobi's vote is equal to every other worker at Shopify.
Unions are great, but they don't really figure into country governance?
Didn't mean unions. Unions are a solution for traditional corporations. I'm talking about one-worker-one-vote co-op ownership model. Mondragon-style. If that's the dominant firm ownetship model, Tobi would have never become a billionaire as Shopify workers would have always voted to distribute the profits much more equally amongst themselves with a bit more for him. If they thought he deserved it. Therefore Tobi wouldn't have gotten the wealth needed to lobby the political system to work for his interests instead of his employees who have way more political votes.
Actually unions have historically also served a role in country governance by using their financial and collective power to counter-lobby the political system in the interest of their members. But they never got powerful enough in North America and there are some reasons to believe they tend to lose in the long run to capital owners even when they get the upper hand for a while.
E: Wasn't my downvote.
I would actually suggest you look at Shopify’s governance, Shopify employees/insiders primarily outvoted Wall Street to give Tobi “founder shares” that have outsized vote power.
I think as a whole, Shopify has paid much higher than other Canadian companies and employees have placed a lot of trust in Tobi specifically over the years.
Fun fact: early Shopify did have direct profit sharing, x% of profit was rewarded back to employees based on their votes on an internal board (called Unicorn), but eventually it was demonetized.
Yeah, I was considering working for them at one point. I only noticed the political activism of their exec layer (not just Tobi) during the LPC leadership election. Around the time when they launched Build Canada to advocate for the usual set of pro-corporate policies wrapped in an "Abundance" foil. Which sucks.
That's the thing though - the purpose of proper worker democracy is that when someone is voted worthy of a power - they get it. Once they're not - it's taken away.
I think early tech attempts to do pseudodemocracy were mostly a reflection of the tight labour market. The real power rarely extended beyond the founders and sometimes the very first employees. Now that there's a (perceived?) oversupply of labour, things have flipped rather fast. Not saying some people didn't believe in the pseudodemocracies they were creating, rather their beliefs were created by the labour market. Also in part by having been in the same classrooms with their future employees. It's a bit harder to get convinced they deserve less when you know they're just as capable.
Speaking of pay, half a lifetime ago I used to think that this or that tech firm "overpays" given the labour market rates at the time. With my current understanding of the system I believe we're generating outsized value and we're very often woefully underpaid. For example a back-of-the-napkin shows that Google pays shareholders more than US $500K per emoyee over what it pays. For Shopify, that's US $200-250K. Under a one-worker-one-vote, most of that would go in workers' pockets. And that's before voting for cutting the exec layer compensation much closer to Earth and redistributing that too.
I definitely agree things are over saturated right now.
I don’t know how, but I’ve met a lot people from Apple Google Meta and Netflix (less so Netflix actually), earning huge salaries to do nothing at all and have very few actual skills. I have no idea how things got like that, but it’s on hiring managers at these companies.
I agree employees should be paid proportional to the value they bring in. It’s one reason I don’t like strict salary bands and hate tenure based seniority. Briefly tech was the only field doing that.
Once everyone formalized their bands it got a lot harder to get raises, and the bands are completely disconnected from value. Plus, companies are making bands based on private survey data from companies only shared with other companies (smells like system price fixing/collusion in the labour market to me).
But once you’ve added salary bands and all that the workers might as well form a union. There’s no employee agency to lose anymore anyways.
I wouldn’t be opposed to more worker democracy, but I’m also a bit traumatized from shitty unions. So I don’t know what the answer is. I’m never going to work for a union that does tenure based seniority for example — I just can’t stand the “I got here first” mentality.
Yeah, it's annoying to have a good faith discussion being treated like a competition by outsiders.
I agree with you, but it wouldn't really fix the issues with democracy that we're seeing in the US, including but not limited to a (intentional) collapse of education leading to really uninformed voters.
Don't you even worry abt it.
The problem with the US system is how easily corruptible it is by people like Tobi Lutke. Not because one person is afforded one vote.
If anything the American "situation" is proof of too little democracy. Their system is archaic, incredibly difficult to reform, with ridiculously tiny winning coalitions compared to the selectorate, with winner-take-all cosmic level elections, and with all sorts of anti-democratic "safeguards" (remove the quotes if you're a rich white guy) baked in right from the start of their republic.
Yeah, but it's very much a 'there but for the grace of God go I' situation. There's really nothing preventing any other democracy from ending up the same way, given enough time and unchecked Sino-Russo propaganda.
I can think of something. The call by the way is coming from inside the house... From the billionaire class.
I could name one Communism, you know where the community works together to better the community. I hold a political belief a little further to the right than communism, because I still like the idea of having a country so I fall left of Socialism.
So hey look at that I named two/three political systems that are better than Socialist Democracy vs capitalist democracy, Communist Democracy some would argue that is the same as a socialist democracy, or true stateless Communism.
Devils advocate, but given this was a two word response to another tweet, it's possible that something was misinterpreted here. For instance that response could be about billionaires who pay no taxes losing their right to vote (which I can get onboard with). This kind of just feels like rage bait.
Counter-argument: the interpretation is not out of character for Tobias. He's got a history of assholery, and does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
I would generally agree with you, but here I don’t.
Tobi has always been blunt and kinda rude, but he was smart, usually right (and readily admitted when he wasn’t), and willing to do hard things that other people wouldn’t.
He’s done more for Canadian tech than anyone else in the last 15 years and it’s not even close.
So he is worth hearing out even with initial hard disagreement.
This one is pretty hard to defend. It’s an obviously bad take, especially for someone who preaches systems thinking. It’s too short for it to be nuanced.
We all post dumb shit sometimes and when you’re famous it’s amplified, but this one is very dumb. I wish for the good of Shopify and himself that Tobi would spend less time on twitter… this is just bad for business.
In my opinion, Tobi changed sometime in the last few years since Covid and it’s been hard to agree with him much since.