This. It’s like Harrison Bergeron, only for wealth instead of intelligence. The results would be just as terrible. It would mean that all of the great achievement that humans have made, which all required wealth in some form or another to fund, would have never happened.
Exactly. To stretch your analogy, the problem isn’t that we as a society have decided that making more pies is better than trying to split what pies we already have more evenly. The problem is that we are disproportionately rewarding the owners of the pie factories rather than the people making the pies.
Technically, I’d say that we’re letting the pie factory owner pass too much of their wealth on to their incompetent children, and failing to dynamically adjust taxes and other economic levers to deal with assortative marriage in the era of women with careers, to maintain a healthy GINI coefficient of about 37.
I don’t know that the OP is talking about societally, but more internal, individual morality.
I mean, is it moral to have excess anything, when there are others in need? Even living a middle class or upper middle class lifestyle implies a certain degree of income that’s surplus to the bare essentials that could theoretically be donated to the less fortunate.
That’s the crux of the issue; is there a line above or below which it’s ok to have some excess for you and yours, if there are others out there starving, shivering, etc…? Progressive taxation and robust safety nets are societal solutions, but they don’t in any way alleviate anyone’s own internal moral struggle about this sort of thing.
I recently watched Titanic Sinks Tonight, an interesting BBC mini series. It featured actors delivering the testimony of survivors and a few experts discussing what would have been going on.
I liked this bit from about 48 minutes here Titanic Sinks Tonight S01E03
Jack Thayer: There was some disturbance loading the last two forward boats. A large crowd of men were pressing to get into them, though there were many crew and men lined up with apparently not a thought at attempting to board the boats without orders.
I saw Bruce Ismay, who had been assisting in loading the last boat, push his way into it.
Really was every man for himself.
Professor Suzannah Lipscomp: Bruce Ismay decides to save himself. He is about the only man on board who can’t be ordered out of that spot by any of the remaining crew.
Enquiry interviewer: You were one of those, as the managing director, responsible for determining the number of lifeboats.
Ismay: Yes, in conjunction with these shipbuilders.
Enquiry interviewer: When you got into the boat, you thought that the Titanic was sinking.
Ismay: I did.
Enquiry interviewer: Did you know that there were some hundreds of people on that ship?
Ismay: Yes.
Enquiry interviewer: Who must go down with her?
Ismay: Yes, I did.
Enquiry interviewer: There’s a load of lifeboats. Has it occurred to you that you, as the responsible managing director, deciding the number of boats, owed your life to every other person on that ship?
Ismay: It has not. I have searched my mind with the deepest care. I’m sure I did nothing that I shouldn’t have done. My conscience is clear. I took a chance of escape when it came to me. I did not seek it.
It is true I am president of the company, but I didn’t consider myself any different from the rest of the passengers. I took no other man’s place.
Professor Suzannah Lipscomp: “I took no man’s place.”
This is palpably untrue, but I think he must believe it. I think that Bruce Ismay comes from a class of society who believes that they have everything they have because of grit and character.
I mean, it’s like being a billionaire today in a world of hungry people. The only way you can live with yourself is to imagine that you deserve it in some way.
And so I think that Bruce Ismay believes, contrary to all rational fact, that he hasn’t taken someone else’s place even though he really must know internally that he has.
IMHO this is what the debate hinges on. For the most part (barring a few entertainers like Lionel Messi, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Taylor Swift, etc.) it isn’t possible to earn that much money with one’s own labor. In other words the vast majority of billionaires didn’t earn that money as a product of their own labor. Of course the fact that they arrived at that point by earning money by means other than their own labor, IMHO, shows a willingness to be ruthless in the pursuit of wealth, and therefore an ability to ignore whatever immoral results may occur as a result of that pursuit.
On the other hand, as I noted in my previous post, I have no problem with some people earning more than others, whether through hard work, talent, having a rare skill, etc. As long as someone actually worked for what they have, then I have no problems with someone being wealthy.
According to Peter Singer, in his essay Famine, Affluence, and Morality, it would be immoral to withhold support.
From Wikipedia
Here is the thrust of Singer’s argument:
- “Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care are bad”.(Famine, Affluence, and Morality - Wikipedia)
- “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, then we ought, morally, to do it”.(Famine, Affluence, and Morality - Wikipedia)
- “It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away”.(Famine, Affluence, and Morality - Wikipedia)
- “The principle makes no distinction between cases in which I am the only person who could possibly do anything and cases in which I am just one among millions in the same position”.(Famine, Affluence, and Morality - Wikipedia)
This idea has really taken root with me.
For a large majority of the world’s poor, that’s where it gets tricky. North Korea is probably the most obvious example, but my guess is that similar situations (that is situations where merely donating money would be at best useless and most likely worse than that) apply in most other places where there is widespread poverty.
No one earns money through just their own labor. Oprah Winfrey has a whole industry of TV production crews and book distributors with their supporting supply chain, Michael Jordan can only be successful in the context of playing on a basketball team within the NBA, Taylor Swift’s Era’s tour employs thousands of people, many of whom are the “Taylor Swift” of their particular profession. Elon Musk’s companies employ tens of thousands of people.
But those people also get paid for their services. Maybe not as much since 40,000 screaming women don’t go to see the guy hanging the lights backstage.
Don’t get me wrong. If you are worth billions or even hundreds of millions of dollars, you should be looking for ways to use that wealth to help the less fortunate.
I would also argue that if CEOs and senior leadership of large corporations are making 1000s of times the average employee’s salary, maybe the market can bear some more legislation that protects workers even if it costs a bit more.
But what these leftist wealth redistribution arguments seem to ignore or fail to understand is that extreme poverty is typically a result of structural economic issues that can’t simply be solved by “throwing money at it”. People who live in extreme poverty often live in regions of the world that are plagued by war, famine, lack of infrastructure or resources. In many cases, even if you gave them a boatload of cash, other than maybe buying a plane ticket somewhere else, there’s not much they can even do with it. And influx of cash does not magically create more doctors, carpenters, or automobile factories.
Redistribution programs can be funds for infrastructure, health care, education and funding government reforms.
In the US we have a lot of redistribution programs (not as much as Europe, but still quite a lot) however much of it isn’t just cash handouts. Its rich people paying taxes so that a family that makes 50k a year can send all their kids to K-12 school for free, so that everyone gets medicare when they turn 65, so that the infrastructure works, etc.
A global wealth redistribution fund would probably focus on paying for education, health care, infrastructure (which would be hard in nations with large amounts of corruption where the funds will just be stolen). Ideally paying for those things will increase human capital and make it easier for those nations to escape poverty.
Having said that, the amount of global wealth is not infinite. I think the net worth of everyone on earth with 30 million or more in liquid assets is about 60 trillion. Even if you took the net worth of everyone on earth with 1 million or more, its about 90 trillion in global wealth. Global GDP is about 120 trillion so confiscating the wealth of everyone with over 1 million dollars is only equal to about 9 months of global GDP.
As far as global income, I ‘think’ a rough estimate to be in the top 1% of global income is about 400k a year. They earn about 20% of global GDP, so about 25 trillion a year. If you redistributed some of that globally, that would make a meaningful, long term fund to fund health care, education, infrastructure, etc. But again how do you ensure that money isn’t just stolen to corruption.
Also that group isn’t just wasteful rich people living off of dividends. A lot of doctors and lawyers and other professionals are in that group.
I guess one could calculate how much money they earned at working by checking their SSN account and total up the yearly earnings since starting work. But what of the money earned by investing? Does that count? My modest 401K and IRA for my retirement were not created from me working, they were created from me investing some of my earnings. A billionaire made their money the same way (excepting inheritances) - there aren’t enough hours in a year for someone to work enough to earn that kind of money from working alone. Where do you draw the line?
Once you have some money to invest, the money starts to work for you, and by a certain point it starts to snowball and I imagine there isn’t much work involved in making more money, and at a certain point you hire someone to manage even that amount of work, and you basically spend your day counting your money and eating bon-bons. The point is, many of us have whatever wealth we have not solely from working, but because we have access to a system that allows us to make money from investing, too. Is that a wrong way to accumulate wealth?
Anyway, yeah, once you have enough wealth to never be able to spend it all, what’s the point in having that much?
No. Somewhere between $15,000 and $50,000, depending on how you’re defining “money”
One way seems to be with apps. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger sold Instagram to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012 when the company had only 13 employees, while Jan Koum and Brian Acton sold WhatsApp to Facebook for $19.3 billion in 2014 with a workforce of just 55 employees. But for people like Bezos or Musk they had 1000’s of employees by the time they were billionaires.
And if we were to use the Bible as an example of a source of morality keeping more than 10% of your wealth is immoral.
Maybe they do. Most billionaires became that way because they built companies that employ thousands, sometimes millions of people and create billions, if not trillions of dollars in value.
I reject the premise of morality the OP proposes. Where is the line of morality? A billion dollars? A hundred million? A couple million? My family owns a second vacation home and a rental property. Is it immoral for us to own three properties while many people can’t afford even one?
The podcast Best of the Left has a recent episode titled “Wealth inequality is bad for society and there’s no good counter-argument.” The episode’s description reads
“Being a bad person who doesn’t care about others is helpful in one’s pursuit of becoming wealthy. However, becoming wealthy is also helpful in becoming a bad person who doesn’t care about others, not that anyone sets out with this as a goal but it is a natural byproduct of wealth and the normal functioning of our market economy. What this means is that the nature of money, market dynamics, and wealth to corrode morality is a systemic problem, not a collection of individual failings, and should be addressed as such.”
Like all its episodes, the podcast assembles arguments and segments from several different shows, all of which are cited and can be listened to on their own as well. I do not expect the podcast to change anyone’s mind, but some may find it interesting and useful as they reflect on the OP.
This used to be a slam-dunk yes for me, but I’m rather torn on the subject. There’s the obvious question of where you draw the line, and my answer to that is “I know it when I see it.” After all, were talking about morality, not policy. I see enough rich people spend their money on dumb shit that it’s pretty easy for me to point to them and say, “That’s immoral.”
But I’ve also been the beneficiary of other people’s wealth. And we’d be in some fucking trouble if not for that. We’re not exactly living in the lap of luxury, we live in a manufactured home and drive used Hondas, but we do have some luxury and pretty soon there’s a good chance our kid is going to private school because public school can manage neither his disability nor his giftedness. I crunched the numbers and we could afford it with some pain. Probably quite a bit of pain.
But we don’t have to suffer, because my husband is related to generous people. Fair? Not even close. Welcome? Well, yeah. These are hard times made easier by generational wealth.
Experiencing the transformational nature of wealth has made me re-examine some assumptions about what wealth is best used for. I’m not even sure how to answer that question, having never been wealthy. But we’re setting up a trust for our son because we do want to pass any future wealth on and ensure he is taken care of no matter his limitations. The drive to take care of your progeny is a strong one, and in our family it extends to great-grandkids.
The problem is you can’t predict what their needs will be, so there is a tendency to hoard money. The answer to how much money should be put aside for our son after we die is as much money as possible. I will tell you right now we don’t donate as much money as we should. I suspect most people do not. The more money you have the more it magnifies that ethical quandary, but we all have to face the same basic question. Then there’s my job. I could have done anything I wanted for a living and I chose to work for non-profits, and I kind of view that paycut as a way of giving back to my community, in addition to the actual work I do. I kind of did it because I care about people a lot, but I’m also not a person of great initiative, and having it be my career would ensure I was always doing something to make the world better even when I was being fucking lazy about everything else.
I think generosity with money can make a real difference for people - it has made a difference for us - but the question of who it’s supposed to make a difference for still vexes me. If someone puts their grandkid through school is it less transformative than doing it for a stranger? Does it matter whether you spend money to help a family member or spend it on a sixth car? I think it does. But beyond that, if you’re steadily making the world better, I’m not sure it matters how.
Meh. The system is overwhelmingly biased to benefit people who are wealthy. It’s not like, by parking money you already have into an investment account you are actually doing anything meaningful or noteworthy, you are just benefitting from a system designed to benefit you. It’s not like people put money into businesses out of the kindness of their hearts. They do it to make more money. Also, these major companies are almost entirely engaged in wage suppression tactics and exploiting employees for all that they can squeeze out of them AND passing on costs to consumers to fatten their profit margins.
Intent matters to me.
While I have minimal problem with moderate differences in wealth, I don’t think that billionaires should be allowed to exist. I’d be inclined to say something like “no more than ten mission dollars in assets are allowed for a single person” (number picked at semi-random).
Large concentration of wealth by individuals is very destructive to the economy, as well as being immoral.
And generally the biggest “structural economic issue” is that the rich already have most of the money. Nothing is solvable until that money is removed and put to actual use. Even if all you did was confiscate it and throw it randomly into the street as cash, that would be better for the economy than letting some wealthy parasite squat on it for the rest of their lives.
“Most” is absolute rubbish. That whole statement’s misleading.
Even among self-made billionaires, most did not build companies that are mass employers, and especially companies that employ millions are extreme outliers. In practice, billionaire wealth grows much faster through ownership and asset appreciation than through job creation - Zuckerberg’s net worth increased by over $25 billion in a single year while Meta employed roughly 80–90 thousand people and didn’t change staff complement much, and Bezos gained tens of billions in wealth during periods when Amazon’s headcount was flat or shrinking. Even at extreme cases like Amazon, millions of jobs correspond to a few hundred billion dollars in personal wealth, while many billionaires gain billions per year with companies employing only thousands—or even hundreds—of people.
And that’s not even mentioning the third of billionaires who straight-up just inherited that wealth .
If the very wealthy were good for the economy, then they wouldn’t have most of the money. But they do.
It’s outright impossible for them to be good for the economy, there’s literally not enough money in there that’s out of their hands.