Most of them aren’t born billionaires, but the vast majority are born rich (in the top 1%, let’s say). Which won’t stop them from talking about their “humble beginnings”, of course.
There’s a big difference between “reasonably successful VP at a big company” rich and “billionaire” rich.
We talk about the 1%, but what is interesting is that we don’t really talk about a person being truly wealthy until they start getting into the 0.1% or even 0.01%.
sigh oh dear, here we go again.
The trope of “both sides” is a categorically weak one. The suggestion that both major US parties are owned by billionaires is not an argument in favor of your point. This is arguably why things have gotten so bad. And yes - this is very much your suggestion here.
You came quite close to sticking it here, but your both-sides obsession took it off the rails. Money isn’t bad for democracy *if participants generally control comparable amounts of surplus wealth". As long as billionaires exist (or more generally, as long as a minority of the country holds a majority of wealth), this condition doesn’t hold.
The question here is not “are billionaires bad guys who want to ruin democracy”, nor “is there a preponderance of wealthy people on one political faction.” It is “Do we have a small minority of people who have enough money to affect which choices the majority may elect? Who are those people?” The answer is yes. Though we call them “billionaires” as a shorthand, that basket could include both the 10-figure, 9-figure, and certain 8-figure influences.
This is just another example of a genre that approaches any social question with the a priori conviction that there is a valid nuanced and centrist position to be discovered, which is its own sort of bias.
The problem isn’t so much the billionaires themselves, but the billions. Fortunes of that magnitude are fiscal black holes that suck money unto themselves and would almost be negligent, from their perspective, to not engage in anti-democratic practices by tilting the “rules of the road” to be more advantageous to themselves. A process that can only gather steam as the money attracts power and the power attracts more money.
I agree.
I don’t disagree. OTOH, an argument can be made that a government that prevents someone from becoming a billionaire is putting an undue (and unfair) influence over society.
How many people have been murdered by governments? How many people have been murdered by billionaires?
Billionaires don’t concern me, because they do not have direct power over me. I am only concerned with things that have direct power over me. Like governments.
That’s orthogonal at best to my point. While I do think that there should be a much steeper progressive tax rate, I don’t think that it should be so extreme as to prevent billionaires, nor “punish” them for being wealthy.
Are you concerned about billionaires who have control over governments? The governments you are probably most concerned about, the ones like Russia or China, are largely controlled by billionaires. They have less influence in the US, but they still have significant influence in who gets elected and what they do in office, as well as significant control over public information and perception.
Yes. And that’s why I responded to your comment with, “I don’t disagree.”
Ideally, yes, billionaires would not have any influence over government. But some do, to greater or lesser extents, and I’m not sure if there’s a good way to fix that problem. And if you do “fix” the problem, you might find that situation is now worse. As someone once said, “Be careful what you wish for. It might come true.”
As long as those things stay separate.
Overturning Citizens united would be a good start. Comprehensive campaign finance reform could help. The more money can be removed from politics, the better.
The other part of undue influence that billionaires have is over the public. Some own media companies, who give favorable coverage to that billionaires agenda, sometimes subtly like Bezos and the Washington Post, and sometimes blatantly, like Murdoch and Fox. Some sponsor programs and channels, leading to more favorable coverage of their positions.
That’s a harder problem to tackle, given First Amendment and free speech issues. But, in some ways, it’s more a problem for the people to learn to sort out bullshit. Charlatans and snake-oil salesmen used to have significant influence over the public as well, but we have somehow inoculated ourselves against them and see them for the fakes they are. Their techniques and access have evolved, and so we need to learn to inoculate ourselves again and evolve our own defenses.
The invention of the printing press caused significant social upheaval. For quite some time, you were not allowed to operate one without express approval of the government. They saw how much damage that widespread disinformation could cause, but they also saw how much power they could have by controlling information. This is why the very first thing listed in the bill of rights is the Press, much of Europe still had government control over it, and they saw how oppressive that was.
In a “be careful what you wish for” vein, immediately, yellow papers started popping up, funded by the wealthy, criticizing the government and its officials, and advancing their own agendas. Sometimes true, often times not. It was a free for all for information, after all, how could a person in 1780 fact check?
So evolved journalism as a profession, and journalistic standards. You didn’t have to be a journalist or meet any criteria to publish a paper, but people started recognizing outfits that did, and giving them more credence. You had “papers of record”, where you could be fairly confident that the facts were well vetted, and that other papers of record would be doing their own fact checking on their competitors.
Somehow, this has broken down. Dan Brokaw left in disgrace for not vetting information well enough and presenting it in good faith. Brian Williams left his position because he incorrectly recounted a personal anecdote. Meanwhile, Fox tells lie after lie, and increases their viewership for it.
People came to rely on platforms too much. “If it’s in the papers, it must be true.” That was a reasonable assumption through much of our country’s history, because we built up that journalistic integrity. When television news and journalism first became a thing, much of those people came from newspapers, and continued that culture. People came to rely on what they heard on TV as much as they did in the paper, to the point of naively believing that they can’t say it if it’s not true.
It didn’t have to stay that way, and it didn’t stay that way. Cable news networks with 24 hour schedules turned from news to editorializing. What was a small part of the paper became a large part of the televised news. And that editorializing crossed over the network, shaping what and how the news was reported. That can be bad enough when the news organization has a motive of increasing its viewership, but it becomes dangerous and weaponized when they have a political agenda.
When billionaires start or buy media companies in order to advance their agenda, they can have significant effect over who gets elected and what they do in office. Somehow we need to be able to tell if a media outlet has journalistic standards or not, and some billionaires are doing their best to make that difficult.
TL;DR: You say governments kill people, I say that without Murdoch, our government would have killed a lot less people.
I will just say that we’d have a better society if for every billionaire there were a thousand millionaires instead.
Oh, and a few times in the column, Cecil mentions “the obvious case” (meaning a billionaire), and then goes on to talk about someone else. Whom was he considering the obvious harmful billionaire?
Actually, Musk’s subway venture was definitely not a bust, if you understand its purpose (to seed skepticism toward government investments in public transit, which Musk derides for obvious reasons (a competing and superior solution to various auto-related negative externalities).
Even though Musk’s implementation didn’t pan out, his legion followers now believe “Gosh, if not even Musk could make transit work, it must be real hard! Surely too hard for municipalities and governments to attempt! They should just quit!”
Which, of course, works out great for car manufacturer. (Oh, and incidentally, the same grift is playing out with a certain social media company. “Gosh, who knew running Twitter was so darned hard! If even Musk struggles with it so much, no wonder my posts aren’t getting the view count I’m expecting!” etc etc
We learned… what, exactly? We already knew subways work. We already knew public transit works, if it gets the proper investments. What do you think Musk’s venture taught us here?
I thought “Musk’s subway venture” was the Hyperloop. Did he also (attempt) to invest in a more conventional subway project?
Sort of. Here’s a non-paywalled article describing the failure Cecil alluded to. Basically Musk’s proposal was to dig new underground transit tunnels which would be serviced by autonomous electric vehicles. He pretended to do this for a while and eventually abandoned it with nothing to show but a 1.7 mile tunnel in Las Vegas, which uses human drivers, only goes 30mph, and is itself subject to the same delays and congestion that it purported to solve.
But Musk did succeed in siphoning off hundreds of millions in funding that would have otherwise been invested in public transit, his direct and most hated competition, so it’s not exactly correct to say he failed.
As I alluded above, nobody learned anything from that venture, except as an illustration of Musk’s strategy “shoot for the moon, and even if you miss, you might ratfuck your competition.”
I got the impression this was a reference to Trump himself.
Is there in fact a single public transit system in the United States that is financially self-supporting and doesn’t require government subsidies? And before you reply “but roads and highways are a massive subsidy” let me say that’s not the point. The point is that no one could even try to operate a transit system as a private business. Subways operate in very large hyperdense urban areas like New York City which would choke on their own traffic if they didn’t. In sparser areas public transit is a sop to the working poor who need it to get to their jobs.
If you have to appeal to externalities to justify something, it’s not the slam-dunk obvious best choice.
I’ll see your “that’s not the point” and raise you one: transit isn’t supposed to be financially self-supporting, it’s supposed to reduce wasted time due to traffic, wasted space due to parking, and health harm due to emissions and accidents. Transit is not supposed to be run like a business. It is a public good, paid for by the public.
Not sure what to say to this… I guess sorry you hate the working poor, and also, suburban traffic is absolutely a thing. Where I live, the surburban traffic is actually worse than urban traffic because:
- The suburbs are the feeders to the higher volume arteries and interstates, yet
- They do not have the capacity or planning or design to mitigate any of it, just random plonking down of roads.
This is a meaningless non-statement.
And if you have to ignore/make someone else pay for all your externalities, as in ICE cars on the public road, then that choice is ALSO not the slam-dunk obvious best choice.
It took over a century for New York City to build the 2nd Avenue line and that’s only a few dozen blocks of conventional subway. Did anyone ever really believe anyone was going to build a space train to rocket into Penn Station at Mach 10?
Which means the person who started the business loses everything they put into it and is probably personally devastated by it. Most businesses, after all, are not yet-another-corporation-started-by-a-billionaire.