If you don’t allow large concentration of wealth by individuals but do allow large concentration of wealth by companies, institutions, etc., would you get inviduals who control or have access to those institutions’ wealth, and who then live like billionaires anyway?
So what is the proposal? Take all the money from billionaires and…give it to who? Are we investing in those communities or just handing over a check?
One proposal is Universal Basic Income (UBI) where individuals are given money with no strings attached. The premise is that more money actually circulating thru the economy, rather that sequestered by the billionaire class or in investments, will yield a healthier, happier, more productive population that is also less costly to govern. It’s been tested in a few small studies with varying results so far. And with the advent of the AI economy, with some predicted workforce disruptions, UBI may be getting more attention now.
We can’t have a good discussion in great debates about morality without defining terms.
I don’t know how you define ‘wealth’ or ‘extreme poverty’ etc. Anyone who argues that it is immoral, to retain wealth probably doesn’t define themselves as one of the wealthy, when another person will define them as such.
People generally want to be moral, until they are personally inconvenienced. I’m not willing to give up my modest home with leaky windows and cracked foundation to live in a worse hovel, just so I can be more moral to help someone I don’t know who is less wealthy than me.
Fortunately, the author of the article in the OP explicitly says he isn’t asking everyone to make themselves paupers.
The money being in institutions means that it’s doing something and part of the economy, which makes it much less destructive economically. An institution consumes more and does more than any individual physically can. A single person can only eat so much food, do so many things in a day and so on, no matter how rich they are.
And also, individuals having too much institutional power is a separate problem than them having too much wealth, and requires separate solutions. Disperse wealth but allow unlimited concentration of institutional control, and you just get Stalin.
Wealth is a proxy for control, and it often comes with strings attached. Nobody sits on cash. If you are the CEO of a startup company, for example, you need to reinvest that equity or risk getting snuffed by competitors. Billionaires tend to have minority stakes, usually the bare minimum to retain control. Most billionaires owe their net worth to other people’s belief that lending money to this person will maximize profit. He who siphons company resources for personal philanthropic projects may lose control. Corporate charters may actually prohibit such behavior, as a condition of the power granted the CEO.
Few people have large amounts of excess that isn’t spoken for. Millionaires tend to have illiquid wealth: retirement accounts, business ownership, real estate. Often these are tied up in personal obligations, either to oneself or dependents. Billionaires tend to have almost all of their wealth tied up in controlling equity. Divesting this illiquid wealth involves significant transaction costs that make it less straightforward, on a case-by-case basis, than the decision to save a drowning child at the cost of getting wet.
~Max
What do billionaires think? Or at least, what do they say?
~Max
I’m not just meaning financial excess.
What I’m talking about is say… going out for a lavish birthday meal at an expensive restaurant with expensive wine, when less than two miles away, there may be someone eating from a dumpster and sleeping under a bridge.
That’s excess- the birthday person could have eaten beans & rice and donated the balance to help the less fortunate.
Where do we draw the line? I mean, I don’t think many of us are claiming that everyone needs to live in minimal accommodations and eat minimally expensive food in order to donate more, but where is that line, and more importantly, WHY is it where it is?
Those are the questions I struggle with. I mean, it does bother me that while I’m merely upper middle class, I have a lot of extra resources that are put to fun/luxury type uses, and that could be used to help others, and I wonder where the line is sometimes.
All that luxury spending does benefit people. It might be the previously unemployed person who was hired by a bakery to make cakes because a bunch of upper middle class people decided that they want a fancy cake to celebrate their birthday. Or the waiter at that fancy restaurant who can now afford a medical bill for a family member that depends on them because they are getting $50 or $100 tips from patrons ordering surf and turf with USDA prime ribeyes and lobster. Or the person who has a job at a specialty camera store that stays in business because a bunch of people come in on a regular basis to buy the latest digital cameras and lenses. And so on. In other words, the kind of spending done by people who earn medium to high 6 figure to low 7 figures. Those high earning professionals aren’t the problem. It’s the wealthy who earned their wealth off the labor of others and refuse to compensate those workers fairly just so that they can look at a larger number on their balance sheet who are the real problem.
One quote that I’ve thought about over the years, from Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson:
There’s a temptation to think of money that I spend on something as being “used up,” while money that I give away merely changes hands and can still be used by the person I gave it to. Of course, money that is spent also changes hands; it’s only used up from my own personal point of view: it’s no longer mine to use on something else.
It has been a while, but I believe Aristotle and Aquinas would ask: if you went without the birthday celebration, would you be sad, and if so why? The question is not whether a lavish birthday celebration is absolutely necessary to live (as it is with ascetiscism). There is more to life than hunger, warmth, and sleep. People also need recognition and occasional celebration.
It becomes a vicious act when the choice is detrimental to you personally. If your reason for celebrating is to put others down, you should not order. If you cannot afford the meal, you should not order it. If you are already full, you should not order it. If you are already satisfied with birthday celebrations, or feel no natural desire to celebrate, you probably should not order. If your conscience does not allow you to enjoy your meal knowing of others suffering nearby, then you should not order (without sharing).
But if you are constantly unable to enjoy life due to the suffering of others, you need to fix your conscience.
~Max
I think part of the problem is that we have entire industries like private equity that contribute nothing and simply acquire assets so they can squeeze as much profit out of them as possible.
Pretty much ANY business owner “earns their wealth off the labor of others”.
The question at play there is what is fair, to BOTH sides. By that I mean that there’s the idea of a living wage and what all plays into that, but then there’s also the fact that business owners often can’t afford to pay that much money for low skill and experience jobs and expect to stay in business in highly competitive markets. Now if they can afford it, and the main obstacle is the shareholders expecting a higher profit margin, then yeah, that’s where the immoral part comes in, IMO.
But ultimately in my example above, I wasn’t talking about benefiting society, but rather squaring your own internal morality. Where is that line for each person? What is and isn’t moral? It’s like the question of whether it’s a moral or ethical thing to disregard maintenance instructions when a product has an unlimited replacement guarantee, knowing you may be causing more frequent replacements. It’s about your internal moral/ethical compass, not the effects on the company or society.
That seems to be something people don’t always understand; something can have zero effect on the outside world in the final analysis, but still be utterly immoral and unethical. It’s not measured by the external effect.
The wealth IS the morality! It is a signal from the market, and presumably God, that society values my contributions and has rewarded me accordingly!
Ok, maybe not.
Only a very narrow portion of the economy, the portion devoted to luxury goods. Spreading the wealth among the general public helps the economy in general, not just a small slice of it.
Naah - Over 80 % of businesses in the U.S. are one-person or non-employer firms - essentially single-owner operations with no paid staff.
Technically yes. But on the other hand in practice there really isn’t any such thing as “spreading the wealth among the general public” when it comes to any one given consumer. Whether I buy my dinner at the most expensive steak house in town, a taco truck in the barrio, or anywhere in between, I’m still only spending at one place. Same thing if I buy a watch at my nearest Rolex store or from a vendor at a flea market, and so on. Even if I only buy high end luxury goods 100% of the time, the waiter at that high end steak house or sales person working on commission at the Rolex store probably doesn’t. The money will make its way around as long as it doesn’t end up getting hoarded by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
On the contrary, that’s exactly how you ensure that money is spread throughout the economy. Because millions of individuals will buy from pretty much every segment of the consumer economy. As opposed to it just going to jewelers and yacht manufacturers and so on.
If the goal is to get excess money to those that need it, then there are certainly different efficiencies based on how you spend it. Spending $20 for iMusic will have a different impact than $20 at a food truck; $20 to a responsible charity will be even better. Charities have overhead costs and these are subject to their own efficiencies.