Shopify’s CEO has this Proportional Voting Thing Right (Almost)
Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify, thinks “weighted voting proportional to the level of income tax you pay,” is a good system. Drop “income” out of that and he’s right!
The problem is, like many others who have reached a level of wealth in the billions, he sees everything as a business venture. But government is not a business, it’s a mechanism for providing services.
I’d like to suggest that proportional voting is a good idea, but the basis for weighting votes should be the amount of burden a taxpayer absorbs in running it. The “all taxes suck” right wing propaganda think tanks love to point out that for the average Canadian “tax freedom day” falls somewhere near the middle of the year, so let’s use that as a baseline.
While people who earn less than the average pay less income taxes, they pay a disproportionately large amount of tax when you consider that “all taxes combined, hidden or otherwise” version that the anti-tax people tout. For an example, let’s take someone who buys 2,000 litres of gas over the course of a year at an average $1.50/l. That’s $3,000 spent on gas. The anti-tax people happily point out that half or more of that is hidden taxes, so we’ll call that $1,500 in taxes for the year. For someone who makes $150,000 a year, that’s 1% of gross income. For someone making just $50,000 it’s 3%. Even at higher marginal income tax rates, “tax freedom day” can come a lot earlier in the year if you’re a high income earner. The propaganda pushers try to convince average people that they’re being hosed, but their agenda is more money for the wealthy, fewer services for those who need them.
Let’s look at that “level of tax you pay” not in absolute dollars, but rather in the percentage of your total tax load compared to income. Let’s give that “average” Canadian 50 votes to work with, then more to the people who pay more, less to those who pay less. In this scenario, we’ll use Tobias’ salary from 2024: 205.5 million. If he can demonstrate that his total tax load for the year was in the range of $155 million, he can have his 50 votes too, but I’m willing to wager that all he’d get is a few votes—at best. Maybe we round up so he gets at least one.
Your say in how the government is formed should be proportional to how much you have to bear on a percentage basis, not an absolute dollar value. Letting the people who depend on the services the government provide have a bigger say in who runs it sounds like a darn fine idea to me. I’m willing to bet most people would be a lot happier with the results. Not Tobias though. He can go cry on a super yacht or something.
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