Should the gov allow a small % of the population to to concrete a large amount of wealth? I don’t mean businesses but rather individuals. Should a single person be allowed to be in control of so much wealth? I can think of a number of reasons why. It stagnates the rate that money is being spent if a small portion of the population holds most of the money while not spending or investing it. It also lets CEO, executives, and anyone of power to buy back their own stocks with the welfare the gov handed out to them with the intention they’ll expand or invest (seeing as that’s legal and all). So is it a net positive for us overall to allow billionaires to exist? The way I see it is, is that it’s unethical for there to be billionaires while there is still poverty in the US. With all the wealth we have, and all the complexities of taxation and subsidization which result in the prices of our milk for example to be fixated, why should we allow individuals to amass so much power as to hold billions of dollars while that money could be spent, or to feed people. Is there a good reason we should allow absolute capitalism and allow predatory tactics to push a small % of the population towards the top while everyone under them suffers and makes up the difference? I mean if Americans really hate even the mention of socialism so much maybe they should stop taxing the rich, deregulating businesses/workplaces, and see how much better off their lives will be right?
I agree. We should liquidate the kulaks as a class and accelerate collectivization.
We can either give the billionaires yet more tax cuts; or send them to the death camps. Those are the only two choices. Got it. Close the thread.
Obligatory: “It’s basically just immoral to be rich” by Nathan J. Robinson.
So… yeah. The existence of billionaires is kind of a moral abomination in a world where so many are homeless. One particular story that struck me recently - Ken Griffin recently broke the record for “most expensive home in America” when he bought a penthouse in Central Park for $238M. This is less than a block away from a homeless shelter, which the local residents have been vigorously protesting. And my immediate thought is, “How many homes could you build for $238 million? How many homeless people could you put up in that many homes?”
I’d rather everyone be obscenely wealthy. But the existence of such obscene wealth immediately contrasted with the existence of those who cannot even afford a roof over their heads (0.17% on any given night, millions of people) or enough to eat (upwards of 40 million) or who cannot afford crucial medical care (upwards of 40 million)… It’s disturbing. Think of how many lives could be saved if that money was spent on health care, instead of on a freakin’ megayacht with an IMax movie theater.
Honestly, if you haven’t had guillotines on the mind lately, you may not have been paying attention. Not that it’s likely to ever get that bad, but when the same news cycle contains the following two items:
“Amazon workers working in sweatshop conditions for low wages”
and
“Amazon CEO (richest man on earth) claims he can’t think of anything to do with his money except go to space”
…Well, I can’t help but wonder if we shouldn’t send said CEO to space with a one-way ticket and no spacesuit. And I think we’d all be better off if the super-rich had that nagging fear in the back of their mind, “Shit, if I throw around my weight carelessly, I might end up like Marie Antoinette”, because it might lead to them becoming slightly less terrible people. That kind of uprising is essentially the only check on their power they have, and as we’ve all seen, their wealth and power can lead them to become gigantic dicks. So yeah, they should be afraid. We do not need more Sheldon Adelsons.
Can you explain what billionaires do with the money that they don’t spend or invest?
What welfare handouts do you mean? Do you believe that buying stocks, including your own, is not investment?
What do milk subsidies have to do with billionaires?
Regards,
Shodan
Someone else having more than me doesn’t make me worse off. The pie isn’t fixed; it’s not like they took all that wealth from me. It’s not so much that we should allow wealth; we shouldn’t be able to disallow it.
That doesn’t mean that tax policy shouldn’t consider marginal benefit or where the money is.
He ascribes the disparity to slavery but I would guess the relatively recent rascist housing policies that prevented minorities from aquiring real estate are of more immediate relevance. I have a book on this somewhere but can’t remember the title off hand.
I read somewhere that some people are OK with the really rich people like Bloomberg, Gates , Bezos, etc. but on the other hand they are not OK with local people like Drs, lawyers being rich even though they are not super rich. That does not make sense to me.
Yes and no. The pie isn’t fixed, but it isn’t boundless either. If the pie grows and only one man’s slice gets bigger, it can be argued that he did impact your wealth by arranging the growth to be directed only to his own slice.
My thought is not disallowing growth, but making a conscious decision, as a society, as to who gets to direct where the growth in wealth flows. The problem with no central thought is that whoever has the power to direct growth, gets the growth, and by getting more wealth, they garner more power to direct future gains.
You know something about parallel Earths you’re not telling the rest of us?
Maybe not you, personally…
That article isn’t about billionaires though; the article literally says:
Which is a bit absurd; the implication there is that every dollar anyone makes that we’re not using to directly support ourselves and our own, and that we don’t use for charity for someone else is immoral.
So if I go downstairs here in a minute and buy myself a soda instead of using that $1.50 to contribute to some charity, I’m doing something immoral? Where do you draw that line? Is buying your own family good stuff immoral if you could buy merely adequate stuff and donate the balance?
Billionaires are just the far end of that- at what point does having excess resources beyond your basic needs become immoral for not sharing them with the wider world? Who decides what your basic needs are? Is buying expensive shoes because Sam Vimes Theory of Economic Injustice is true immoral if others have no shoes?
That’s really the thing here- where is that line drawn? I don’t think many of us disagree with the notion of progressive taxation, but it’s also important for economic reasons to allow some large accumulation of wealth- not only for capital investment purposes, but as an aspirational message- just why would someone strive to build a business and grow it and put in all that work, employ all those people and everything that comes with it, if not to get rich? Where do we set the progressive tax brackets?
So the wealth has remained the same over time, just moved around?
I think the idea is that people like Bezos, Gates and Zuckerberg feel really distant and have no relational effect on oneself, whereas the surgeon who earns half a million a year is someone you directly interact with and “know,” and so the income inequality hits harder to home and pisses of oneself more.
Society doesn’t make decisions. Individuals make decisions. Wealth distribution is a consequence of those decisions.
Peter and Paul and Mary have $3 each. Peter and Paul give $2 dollar to Mary for a ham sandwich, she has $4, they have $1 each. Now Peter and Paul get together and demand wealth equality and confiscate the money they gave to her voluntarily. It makes no sense.
As we speak, countless individuals are throwing money at Jeff Bezos for his services. It is a tidal wave of money voluntarily being dumped on Bezos every day. So now that same group is going to take it back because it is unfair? Makes no sense.
“Wealth” is a polite fiction. No billionaire has ever created something ex nihilo.
Wealth is subjective, yes. Is that what you mean that it is a fiction?
Ok so if you don’t creat something ex nihilo you should not have a rightful claim to it?
This is a fair critique, and one the article itself struggles with. And the discussion of where the line is is a valid one to have - should I feel bad spending 300 bucks on a Switch when that could easily save a life or two in [del]subsaharan africa[/del] rural virginia? But regardless of where you see the line, billionaires are so fucking far on the other side of it that it’s basically impossible to ignore how fucked up it is. The moment when you’re paying $100,000,000 for a fucking luxury yacht with an IMAX theater in it, or $234,000,000 for a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park, or $300,000,000 for the entire island of Lanai… You have fucked up. You have utterly failed as a moral human being. Shame on you.
Every time this subject comes up, I’m reminded of Scott Suskind’s genius article, “Dead Children Currency”.
I leave that question to an article I read on the BBC site today: woman spends £250,000 on a luxury doghouse for her Great Danes complete with spa and plasma TV.
This does sound sort of ridiculous, but clearly it is not ridiculous enough. After all, at least one person thought it would be a good idea. Clearly, saying “doghouse that costs 250,000 pounds” does not carry the appropriate punch of “do not buy this.”
And that’s why I recommend switching to a dead-child-based currency. “Doghouse that costs 250,000 pounds” might not carry the proper punch. “Doghouse that costs 500 dead children” does. Using dead children as a unit of currency carries a built-in awareness of opportunity costs. Yes, you can buy that doghouse, if you really think it’s more important than spending that same money to save five hundred Haitian kids’ lives. Go on! Dogs watching plasma TV! That sounds adorable!
And of course, this excellent stinger:
One of America’s top pro-life groups, Focus on the Family, spends two hundred thousand dead children a year pushing its message of conservatism and opposition to abortion. Take a second to fully appreciate the irony there.
If you portray center left policy like progressive taxes as communism, all you do is make communism seem desirable to people.
These scare tactics don’t work on people under age 40. And it’s absurd to compare an estate tax or wealth tax to putting land owning farmers in concentration camps.
If every time the Republicans supported private schools or right to work laws, the left said ‘this is what the nazis did’, all it does it make the nazis seem non threatening.
In a way that makes sense. People can’t comprehend how much a billion dollars is. But a doctor who makes $500,000, people can grasp that. That means the doctor makes in a month what a lot of people earn in a year. But people in that income bracket already pay ~40% of their income in taxes because their wages are taxed as income.
…Hold on a minute. What part of my service did Jeff Bezos personally provide? Did he create the goods I purchased? No. Did he package the goods I purchased? No. Did he deliver the goods I purchased? No.
I’m sure at some point he had something to do with that service. But the reason he’s a billionaire is not because he worked a million times harder than one of his employees. It’s because he was able to extract a ton of value from his employees. Because each of his employees put in work that made him X amount of dollars, and he skimmed Y dollars off the top before paying them. It’s got very little to do with your facile example with the ham sandwich.
Nobody earns a billion dollars.