Pardon me, but what the hell does a pig need with a medium of exchange?
The Sultan of Brunei is said to have a personal fortune of $20 billion. His nation has a GDP of $13 billion, so he has more than a year’s GDP. But his subjects do not complain, since they pay no personal income tax.
About half the work force in Bruinei is overseas workers, doing most of the unskilled work, and they are paid more than they can make at home, so they don’t complain either.
The country is prosperous with a modern infrastructure, so the sultan is not depriving the population of any benefits. Apparently, his wealth is not “too much”.
You don’t see any contradiction at all between the 2nd and 3rd points??? Wow.
Note that overseas workers are treated like garbage in most places. Basically slavery. You don’t have a healthy country when a lot of your population leaves it to become peons.
Why doesn’t the Sultan make sure everyone gets educated and skilled? Personally set up factories and offices? Etc.
One day the oil will run out (or not pay enough to keep things going like Venezuela) and we’ll see a whole different thing happen there due the awful rule of the Sultan.
The SoB is far from a good example.
So the underpowered, amenity-lacking cars I mentioned are OK because they were not made in Communist countries, but the underpowered, amenity-lacking Trabant is bad because it is from a Communist country? And what about the Volkswagen, which was designed and initially built under a fascist regime that operated pretty much the same as the Soviet Union? Is that one still OK?
So the choice is binary? There’s only rampant Capitalism, or Communism?
You’ll notice that few people tend to engage with posters who express a perspective that’s outside of that binary. The defenders of capitalism are accustomed to debating against defenders of communism and vice versa, and they both tend to skip over posts that don’t fall into either camp.
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anyone defending Communism here.
If you think Nazi Germany operated economically similar to the USSR you need to read more. Commercial goods were important to the German government who actually cared if their populous were happy.
The Trabant was nothing like the small economic cars of the West and any cursory examination of features and evolution should make that clear.
Money = Power
and I would hope that even Starving Artist would agree that it is possible for a person to have too much power.
I’m talking about the authoritarianism of both regimes.
You mean like unibody construction, which U.S. carmakers didn’t really embrace until the '80s? (I recall the land yachts of the '70s being body-on-frame.) Plastic body panels, like the Saturn didn’t come out with until the '90s? I’m not saying the Trabant was a good car. Personally, I wouldn’t want one. But the ‘The Trabant proves Communism is the most evil system in the world, and Detroit Iron proves Amurika is Numero Uno’ line is just so much jingoistic posturing.
I would think that the availability and lack of options between western and eastern car(s); waiting lists; and choice would make a powerful statement as to the failure of the communist model. Then there were food lines and a serious shortage of consumer goods.
The USSR was far more authoritarian than Nazi Germany. Public opinion could influence Nazi policy. A quick example was the scraping of the T4 euthanasia program due to public outrage. No one could deter Stalin.
Getting back to the OP, I think a limit of $1 billion in personal wealth would be a fair limit. With a billion dollars you can do almost anything you could possibly want.
Agreed that anyone can do most anything they need to with $1 Billion.
But let’s look at a particular example.
Bill Gates
He is currently reportedly worth $91 billion, so well above the $1B threshold given above. But that money is largely invested in Microsoft stock.
As recently as 5 yrs ago, the stock was selling at less that $27 per share. So assume that as a starting point and that would allow him to own 37 million shares. By the end of the year, it had gone up $10 per share. So now he has 370 million more than in January 2013. I assume under this he would have to sell shares (approx 10 million) to stay under the $1B mark. In the grand scheme of things selling 10 million might not be huge for the overall stock but it could be.
Then the next year, it goes up another $10 a share. So again, he has to sell stock to get back down to the $1 Billion mark. By the end of 2015 it has gone up another $8 a share. Again more stock. At the end of 5 yrs, it has gone up $60 a share total.
When he started 5 yrs ago, he would have held 37 million shares and now he would hold 11.5 million shares. Then lets say his CEOs forward thinking goes awry and the stock drops back down to $27 a share. He would go from having a billion to having 310 million. Sure that is still a lot of money, but it kinda sucks when all you had done previously is own stock in a very great booming company.
And what if the company was not publically traded. If the company that one person owns exceeds $1B do assets have to be sold? I know you stipulated that personal assets exceeded $1 billion, but if that one person is the sole owner of the company where do personal assets end and corporate ones begin?
Even publically traded, Bill Gates has so much stock because he built the company and has never sold the stock.
While Bill Gates may have $91 billion in stock, he does not have $91 billion in the bank to do whatever he wants with it.
Wages have barely budged since 1980 when adjusted for inflation but costs have gone up which means people have less money than they did in most income brackets. The top income brackets have prospered in the last 40 years.
Several years ago political scientists did study on congress and whenever the desires of the middle class and the wealthy diverged, Congress sided with the wealthy desires 100% of the time. Literally every single time. The only time the middle class’s needs were addressed was when they happened to coincide with wealthy needs. You can google this, It was pretty famous at the time.
The middle class is shrinking and living off debt. This isn’t natural. It’s being engineered by policy.
Worded as the OP, then no.
I believe society is better served if the structure of society prevents people from building “too much” wealth-where the limits are deliberately vague. A progressive income tax, societal rules, regulations and laws that steer the benefits of work to all those performing the work, the general growth in wealth throughout the society so that no one can get way far ahead, all these forces should be in place to keep the rich from leaving everyone behind.
Simply passing a (tax) law to effect one half of the equation is not a good solution. It simply suppresses for a time the problems built into the society.
In spite of appearances, the US and most societies have these forces in place. The few outliers (Gates, Buffet, Bezos, Slim, the Rothschild family, etc) are not enough to invalidate my claim. There are a few super-rich, but for the rest of the 7 billion of us, they don’t matter. What we have to avoid, for the good of society as a whole, is a large group of millionaires and a larger group of very poor that don’t understand or interact positively with each other. Most societies have drifted in that direction, but aren’t in serious trouble because of it-yet.
you keep looking for real world examples-well all such are colored by the propaganda put out by all sides in society, but here is one: global warming.
The large-scale use of fossil fuels has resulted in global warming. Hopefully you won’t argue the point as the specific example isn’t important here. Society as a whole would be better off if the climate wasn’t warming so fast. There are alternatives, perhaps costly and uncomfortable alternatives but there are alternatives, to the large-scale use of fossil fuels. Such usage is supported by the use of large amounts of money from wealthy people and businesses who reap short-term benefits from such usage. If money hadn’t colored the debate, that would mean that society, to benefit itself, would have switched policies long ago. We didn’t. Why? A few people had lots of economic power.
There are other examples. Infrastructure spending. Species loss. War. To name a few.
Not if you what you want to do is colonize Mars. Just ask Musk or Bezos:
I don’t believe on the face of it that someone can be too rich, assuming they acquire their wealth legally.
Also I believe that there are people who are rich but don’t deserve it, but you’ll have that with capitalism. And that is not what was asked.
All of the solutions I can think of would be called communism by the right (participatory economics, anarchism, libertarian socialism, and social democracy with confiscatory tax rates). I guess there’s always good old monarchism.
Money is a way of communicating information in a market. See the calculation problem or the socialist calculation debate. A history of money you might like is Debt: The First 5000 Years by Graeber, an anarchist anthropologist.
If you advocate a gift economy there’s no need to buy anything. There’s labor vouchers, but they come under heat from all directions.
Debatable. There’s an enormous amount of unmet work, but it’s not profitable, so it doesn’t get done – like cleaning up the environment, infrastructure upkeep, education, healthcare, spending time with the elderly, or lots of other domestic or emotional labor. Capitalism sucks when it comes to valuing public goods.
There’s a proliferation of “bullshit jobs,” as Graeber is fond of saying. Some people back in the early 20th century thought we’d be working 10 hour weeks by now, but the growing depth of middle management seems bottomless.
The Protestant work ethic is one hell of a spook, and it might not die until white collar jobs are eliminated en masse by automation, which will probably happen before blue collar work, since it’s easier to automate data analysis than making a plumbing or electrician robot. Imagine when doctors, hedge fund managers, accountants, and all those people with law degrees doing doc review are priced out of the job.
I recall years ago reading some old classical liberal’s defense of extreme wealth inequality and it was pretty nuts – the splendor of their riches will invigorate those who see it, and the rich will test out luxury goods and make them cheap for the poors.
Any proper lefty should be concerned with systemic issues, but what always blows me away is the individual psychology behind extreme wealth. It seems like the more money you have the more your brain melts, which seems even more evident in the age of Twitter. It’s somewhat cathartic to see that guys like Notch are miserable pricks.
Let’s ignore the exploitation so often needed to accumulate that much wealth. Imagine having 999 million dollars and thinking you’ll finally be happy with another million. Imagine seeing the immense suffering in the world and sitting on billions of dollars. These people are sociopaths. The ones with big charity foundations are trying to fix with the left hand what they broke with the right, as Zizek likes to say. There has to be a better way for society to allocate resources than hoping some Silicon Valley doofus will deign to help us mere mortals.
If the Democrats were an actual left party, it probably wouldn’t take much of a media press to make average Americans want to guillotine the Walton family. That goofy Koch kid and his dumb shirts should be easy fodder when it comes time to argue for inheritance taxes. Won’t happen, of course.
Especially amusing since Detroit made crap until the Japanese whupped their asses in the late '70s early '80s. They only got smart when the sales figures said they had to.
A certain degree of wealth *requires causing the suffering of others.
Your everyday millionaire - not so much. You might get there with a lot of hard work, and a lot of luck.
Jeff Bezos, individual net worth $105 Billion with a B, on the other hand: Profits by decimating entire industries (His company is 50% of all purchases on the Internet at this point, now expanding his monopoly into the real-world), micromanages his delivery drivers so precisely to the second that the only way they can meet his schedules is to pee in glass jars while driving, and oh, most importantly - keeps ambulances parked outside his fulfillment centers because it’s cheaper than paying for air conditioning to prevent his overworked, underpaid employees from having heatstrokes.
Bezos, quite literally, does not care if his workers drop dead. As long as he saves a penny per unit to contribute to his ever increasing billions. When your wealth reaches the level that in order to continue significantly expanding it, human lives are expendable and/or human suffering is a line item, then yeah, you’re too rich.