Many people feel that it’s not true that anyone can become rich if they want to. The reality in America is that a lot of people are rich not due to any effort of their own but because they were born in a wealthy family. This runs against the American sense of fair play; they feel that people shouldn’t have a lifelong advantage due to accident of birth.
Some people admittedly go beyond that. They take opposition to unearned wealth and project it into opposition to all wealth.
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely”
Does the above quote impugn the character of the absolutely powerful?
Bloomberg’s character fault is not that he’s rich, but that apparently he expects to just get his way for whatever he wants without involving others in the process. This happens with many–though not all–rich people.
That kind of attitude and approach doesn’t work well for good governance, (just look at Trump).
Funny you should say that. IMHO, one of Bloomberg’s better moments in the debate was when he said how he understands the value of working in teams, rather than making unilateral decisions. I could be naive, but it really sounded like he was pretty good at that, and he cited his successful business experiences (in contrast to Trump’s) as tied to this.
Wealth comes from work, so anyone who has a billion dollars has stolen from workers.
It’s not possible to do a billion dollars worth of work.
I’m talking about the last debate, not in general.
You commie you
Wealth does not come from work–seriously, this has been discredited many times–a person who has a Billion dollars has a good or service worth, well, a billion dollars. It is possible to sell a billion dollars worth of stuff.
Anyone who has a billion dollars has acquired it by inheritance, stealing, or force, and all billionaires are parasites on the economy. There is simply no individual who has legitimately done something worth that amount of money, in all cases their profits rely on taking the fruits of someone else’s labor. And billionaires don’t just possess their ill-gotten gains; they spend a great deal of effort pushing for laws to help them keep grasping their hoards, to keep workers from getting their share of profits (Bloomberg is very anti-union, for example), and to keep tax shelters and tax cuts going so they can keep it. They’re really like a dragon sitting on a vast horde of coins that doesn’t have any use for the piles of treasure, but is willing to strike you down if you think that money should do anything but serve as a bed for their ego.
And what’s worse, they hoard this pointlessly immense wealth not while people are just living ordinary lives around them, but while people are dying or miserable from easily treated medical conditions, suffering from simple hunger, or working multiple jobs just to stay functional. While people like Boomberg sit around gloating over their vast ledger sheet, there are poor kids being shamed and threatened with foster care for accumulating ‘school lunch debt’ and people dropping dead because they can’t afford insulin. Flint, Michigan still doesn’t have drinkable water. Most of people suffering PTSD from being assaulted by police under his stop and frisk policies can’t afford treatment. The kind of person who lays around on a hoard of wealth while children are laboring to attempt to pay for lunches for other children and people make gofundme accounts just to survive is just not a good person.
Bloomberg’s offer to give away half of his money really underscores just how awful billionaires are. Imagine you picked a random person and gave them a vast sum of money, enough to live the rest of their days in complete luxury (servants preparing meals and cleaning your multiple mansions, vacations wherever you want in a yacht, health care, and so on), and also added a vault that was just packed with a ton of even more money that they’d never be able to actually spend even while throwing wild parties and bathing in champagne. How many of them do you think would cling desperately to the vault, and how many do you think would start using the money that is completely meaningless to their lifestyle to help people? And the fact that he’s only doing it for publicity makes it even worse in my book - he could have given to charity at any time before he decided to run for president, so he’s not even doing it out of any kind of desire to health people, but instead for pure personal gain.
But it is possible to have an idea or an invention worth a billion dollars.
What if I had an invention that was worth 100 trillion dollars.
Is that all derived from me?
Should it all go to me?
Depending on the numbers it can change. A society doesn’t have to incorporate someone who will bankrupt or hurt that society.
How many people do we have right now that can “hurt society” vs say, 20 years ago?
Never seen any evidence of this - can you provide a cite for a company, agency, individual, or whatever signing a contract to pay someone a billion dollars for an idea? “Billion dollar ideas” involve an awful lot of other people actually doing work, the use of an awful lot of general public infrastructure, and especially the use of laws and the court system to actually go from ‘idea’ to ‘billion dollars’.
It’s true that he has created coalitions beyond his own organizations, (U.S. mayors for climate change, etc.), but what I mean is that within his own operations–the presidential campaign being an example–it seems that he thinks the only buy-in necessary to get things done is of the monetary type–he doesn’t need ideas from anyone else. In that sense, he’s kind of “transactional” in the way the Trump is. The difference, it seems to me, is that Bloomberg gives credit to others and recognizes the need for their contributions more than Trump.
isn’t microsoft a billion dollar idea? It’s a bigger pie.
I don’t have a cite for this, but let’s use Microsoft as an example. Founded by two people essentially. Gates net worth is around $110 billion. His idea (Microsoft) earned him that. Along the way many more billions were paid to workers, general infrastructure, and the courts. He didn’t get those billions by stealing from the workers or the people.
Yeah yeah, I know. I’m just using this as an example.
That sounds right to me. Certainly, all other things being equal, I’d prefer a candidate with more experience in “community organizing” (e.g., Obama) rather than running a company.
LOL you’re joking right? “Microsoft” is not a billion dollar idea, it’s a company name. No one was ever willing to pay a billion dollars for ‘Microsoft’ the name, or for something Gates did himself. His idea was to steal and buy code from people on the cheap, market it, then later leverage market dominance to make money. And yes, when Gates is taking billions for himself, he’s stealing from his workers. He didn’t work himself or come up with ideas, he had other people do the work but took the profit from their labor for himself. If Bill Gates developed his software alone, that could maybe qualify as a ‘billion dollar idea’. But he simply didn’t, even his first big offering (MS-DOS) was created by conning someone into selling him the rights to software, then later buying out the company that properly held the rights to forestall a lawsuit.