As long as you’re not planning to live someplace like Indian Creek Island! Javanka just bought some property there for $39 million, which turns out to be just the land – they still have to build something on it. And cheap land too, for Indian Creek. The only land I see for sale there currently is $100 million for what looks like a double lot. And then, of course, in order not to be shamed by the neighbors, you’d need to spend at least $20 million on a yacht.
Your guy with $50-$100 million would be broke there within a month!
Are you equally angry about Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s worth? She has inherited a lot of money from her family. She didn’t do anything to be eligible to inherit it. She has made a lot of money from acting, but she didn’t write any of her shows. So if it’s a matter of how much work someone has put in versus how much they are worth, you should be more bothered by Louis-Dreyfus than by Seinfeld.
I support a pretty substantial wealth tax but even I think this is a lame pitting. There’s no reason to lose your shit over one person not giving away a lot of money. Even Bill Gates. We’re fucked as a country, even beyond political violence and repression and the worsening climate crisis, if we can’t get a hold on the national debt pretty soon, but any one person’s wealth and income won’t make a difference. Even Bill Gates can only make a substantial improvement to the way of life for humanity by making the right kinds of huge investments, and who knows if Seinfeld has the resources or ability to do the same.
If anybody is under the misguided notion that billionaires can be anything other than sociopaths, needs to watch Capital in the 21st century on Netflix.
I appreciate philanthropy, but it’s important to understand that philanthropy is also a form of capitalist propaganda:
We don’t need government to help people improve people’s lives. Look what we’ve done with all our money - and we’ve done it more efficiently than any government bureaucracy could do.
One problem with philanthropy is that it goes not necessarily where the greatest need is, but wherever the philanthropist decides to put his money. I would agree that the Gates foundation supports good causes, but even so, there are other needs likely not met or addressed by the foundation.
Another problem is that philanthropy, as good as it is, does nothing to limit the unholy level of influence that a handful of people can have on our economic, social, and political systems – in fact, it might actually make these billionaires even more influential, not less.
I think it’s entirely possible for billionaires to be good people with good intentions. The problem is that, even good souls like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are flying so far above us that they generally have a very limited capacity to truly relate to and understand what life is like for people living in those cities 35,000 feet below them.
Beyond that, as the billionaire class accumulates wealth, the rest of the economy become dependent on the financial decisions that are made by these extremely wealthy group of individuals. They decide what gets invested. They have out-sized influence over our politics and our media (the flow of ideas in an open society).
Giving away half one’s wealth is exactly what the Giving Pledge asks people to do. And here is a fairly long list of people who have signed on to do that.
But I see a problem with large foundations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Googling, it has an endowment of something like $50 billion. Bill plans to leave it his fortune, or most of it, which is something like $100 billion. And Warren Buffett plans to leave his fortune, or most of it, to the Gates Foundation. That’s another $80 billion. So we’re talking about something like $200 billion. Even if those leading the foundation have all the best intentions, that kind of money is inherently corrupting.
And I’m not a fan of giving money to some place like Harvard, Yale or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. All worthy groups, but also all extremely wealthy already. The Washington Post ran an article (paywall warning) a few months ago about an idea called “effective altruism, a movement devoted to improving the world in the most logical, evidence-based way possible.”
And the article quotes an Oxford professor who estimates that a single person living alone in the US earning more than $58,000 is in the global one percent. So congratulations; if you’re reading this you are probably in the one percent globally (certainly I am). So stop focusing on the Jerry Seinfelds of the world; what are you personally doing to make the world a better place?
I tend to agree with you. To my wife’s constant dismay, rather than weep happy tears at all the feel-good stories of individuals starting concerns in order to address the endless incredibly basic needs of so many – particularly since COVID …
I tend to say that – like a restaurant that forces customers to subsidize pathetic wages via the tipping system – our country forces the very few to try to provide food, clothing, shelter, and health care to the very unfortunate … in the wealthiest country on Earth.
It’s back to privatizing profit and socializing loss, as I like to put it.
And for those concerns that do not try to bootstrap it and commit to being short-term … they build infrastructure. And with infrastructure you become an institution. And the Prime Directive tends to be to protect the institution above all else.
By not helping to assure the very minimum for all of our citizens, the free market – much as conservatives accuse liberals of – is forced to serve a set of basic human needs that could probably be met better and cheaper through collective action.
But … this being the Pit … YEAH ! FUCK JERRY SEINFELD !!
On second thought, you actually raise a fair point: he has studied the problems many of us have not, myself included. But the reverse side to that coin is that he is aware of the suffering of the people he’s interested in helping.
To be clear, I think billionaires are capable of being great human beings, great citizens. Being rich doesn’t strip someone of their humanity. But the masses of people need to have public institutions that they can collectively have influence and control over, and philanthropy doesn’t make that any less true.
Philanthropy is great at potentially supplementing these public institutions, filling in the gaps that public institutions cannot. But it never replaces the need for these institutions and public assistance and the need to fund them - and the ones who are most responsible for funding them are the members of the billionaire class.
Ugh, that little village of billionaires near Surfside Fla disgusts me. One road in, through a modest neighborhood, to the guard shack to reach your sinking island where residents aren’t allowed by ordinance to even walk or ride a bike on the perimeter roads. And they have a security system that will follow and report on perceived threats from the water. So if you’re paddle boarding or boating within their sonar sights you will be marked and studied maybe requiring an intervention from their private security force.
Exactly, billionaires inevitably spend money to advance their own interests and have a preference for solving problems privately, not in the ways that suit the best interests of everyone. Bill Gates uses his money to promote charter schools which waste money and hurt students. Charter schools, on balance, are worse than government schools. They solve a problem that could be solved in other ways.
Tax billionaire and let the people decide how the money should be spent. Not doing so is undemocratic. You can’t have billionaires in a democracy.
Also rich entertainers are like lottery winners except the lottery they won was genetic or being in the right place at the right time. Not a big deal.
I’m fine with a wealth tax. It’s one of the reasons I supported Liz Warren, though I doubt she could have pushed it through congress. But I don’t see why Jerry Seinfeld is a bad guy here. He was a moderately successful comedian who got NBC to support a sitcom different from anything else on the air at the time: No hugging, no one learns anything, no Very Special Episodes. It wasn’t really a show about nothing–some of the plots were as zany as anything on I Love Lucy–but it was different. It could have flopped. It did not flop, but became a success, earning NBC a lot of money. Jerry negotiated with NBC for a chunk of that money and became wealthy, as did Larry David and the main cast. He gave some of it away but kept a lot for himself, as he is entitled to do under current law. Not really seeing the outrage here. There are far worse people with far more money.
Fuck you anyway because this is the Pit, but you’re okay.