Billionaires should (not) exist?

[Utisz]

In the US, 616 billionaires now hold twice the amount of wealth held by the bottom 50 percent of households (160 million people) combined.

Should society allow billionaires like Bezos, Musk and Gates to exist?

Would society be better off if individuals could not amass such massive personal wealth?

Should laws be implemented to prevent such massive accumulation of wealth?

[Utisz]

My thoughts ...

Should society allow billionaires like Bezos, Musk and Gates to exist?

No.

Would society be better off if individuals could not amass such massive personal wealth?

Yes, duh.

Should laws be implemented to prevent such massive accumulation of wealth?

Yes. Marginal tax rates approaching 99.9% for some multiple (1000×?) of the median national salary.


Billionaires are nothing more than competent opportunists who are in the right place at the right time. The idea that they should be worth so much as individuals is a glaring bug in the capitalist system that requires legislation to correct.

[Spartan26]

In the immortal words of Stuart Scott, "Don't hate the playah, hate the game!" Actually, for the most part, I don't really care how much money someone has. If you build a better mousetrap and get abundantly wealthy in the process, so be it. Ala George Lucas, Oprah, Stephen Spielberg, Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe you strike it rich, like literally. I'm thinking of people who work in oil or precious medals or natural resources. You could be CEO or majority owner of a company that makes widgets, you might be a millionaire. You're in natural gas? OK add another three zeros on the end. But it does give me pause when I see Beyonce is supposedly "only" worth $400 million, Madonna $590M but somehow two of the Kardashians had somehow rung the $B bell??

Then there are traits, generally synonymous with being sociopathic, that fuel and enable people to achieve extreme levels of wealth. Is it fair to punish a hedge fund mgr who's a total ahole while leaving alone the inventor of a hair scrungie who just happened to tap into the zeitgeist of the tween aged market, even though their fortunes are the same? I honestly don't know. I do think it's more than a little odious that the Walton family are multi billionaires yet a sizeable portion of their labor pool requires public assistance because they're unable to work a fulltime schedule.

I'll have to come back and talk about large corps circumventing legislation and intended guidelines. I'll just I'm not opposed to it, but it'll be hard to do.

[djm]

Should society allow billionaires like Bezos, Musk and Gates to exist?

Yes. All of those people have hugely improved the lot of the average Joe far and above any personal wealth they have amassed.

Would society be better off if individuals could not amass such massive personal wealth?

No, the more capitalist a society becomes the less poverty there is.

Should laws be implemented to prevent such massive accumulation of wealth?

No.

[Ferrus]

I think we're set for round 2 of the epic djm vs Utisz fightdebate.

[ashi]

Billionaires are nothing more than competent opportunists who are in the right place at the right time. The idea that they should be worth so much as individuals is a glaring bug in the capitalist system that requires legislation to correct.

You speak far too kindly of them. Such extreme wealth is the fruit of rapidly growing inequality, the hideous expanding gut of these ravenous leeches pushing more and more people into the gutter as they valiantly reach for the stars on our behalf and in our name while contributing nothing to society beyond adding their own visage to the vast gallery of smug cunts to whom we might pray to be similarly blessed with the sociopathy needed to gleefully benefit from the misery of those around us.

So I guess put me down as a No/Yes/Yes.

[djm]

Billionaires are nothing more than competent opportunists who are in the right place at the right time. The idea that they should be worth so much as individuals is a glaring bug in the capitalist system that requires legislation to correct.

You speak far too kindly of them. Such extreme wealth is the fruit of rapidly growing inequality, the hideous expanding gut of these ravenous leeches pushing more and more people into the gutter as they valiantly reach for the stars on our behalf and in our name while contributing nothing to society beyond adding their own visage to the vast gallery of smug cunts to whom we might pray to be similarly blessed with the sociopathy needed to gleefully benefit from the misery of those around us.

So I guess put me down as a No/Yes/Yes.

Ravenous leeches like Bill Gates, a man who has given more and put more effort into improving the lot of the poor than any leftist politician ever has or ever will! The anti billionaire rhetoric towards people that started with little, contributed enormously to the world through ideas and commerce then turned philanthropic is nauseating. People should be grateful for the Bill Gates of the world, they have made the world a better place than morons like Biden ever will.

[djm]

and as for the nonsense about widening inequality, I will let the late great Margaret Thatcher speak

[/bbvideo]

imagine a world without Windows, Microsoft Office, MS DOS, Tesla (yeah OK the trucks shit), Amazon. Imagine that wealth, those jobs removed. These people invariably create more wwelth for others, for employees and society than they do for themselves. So what if they end up well off, many of them give it all away anyway.

It is pretty difficult to amass billions, the government does its best to steal most of it.

[Spartan26]

Should society allow billionaires like Bezos, Musk and Gates to exist?

Yes. All of those people have hugely improved the lot of the average Joe far and above any personal wealth they have amassed.

How has Elon Musk improved the lives of the average Joe? Also, how are you defining average Joe? I swear to you, I am not trying to be difficult. I'm legit asking.

No, the more capitalist a society becomes the less poverty there is.

How do you figure? What do you mean by more capitalist? I thought the number of people without access to clean water, education, and healthcare was rising. One third of the world's population is living in poverty, why is this number so high?

Billionaires are nothing more than competent opportunists who are in the right place at the right time. The idea that they should be worth so much as individuals is a glaring bug in the capitalist system that requires legislation to correct.

You speak far too kindly of them. Such extreme wealth is the fruit of rapidly growing inequality, the hideous expanding gut of these ravenous leeches pushing more and more people into the gutter as they valiantly reach for the stars on our behalf and in our name while contributing nothing to society beyond adding their own visage to the vast gallery of smug cunts to whom we might pray to be similarly blessed with the sociopathy needed to gleefully benefit from the misery of those around us.

So I guess put me down as a No/Yes/Yes.

Ravenous leeches like Bill Gates, a man who has given more and put more effort into improving the lot of the poor than any leftist politician ever has or ever will! The anti billionaire rhetoric towards people that started with little, contributed enormously to the world through ideas and commerce then turned philanthropic is nauseating. People should be grateful for the Bill Gates of the world, they have made the world a better place than morons like Biden ever will.

Bill Gates did not start out as Bill Gates the philanthropist. Microsoft practices violated a number of antitrust laws and their practices often infringed on copyrights of smaller companies or individuals who didn't have the bankroll to fight them in court. I'm glad the Gates have dedicated so much of their lives to developing regions but his empire was not singularly built on benevolent tendencies.

There may be a lot of nauseating anti billionaire rhetoric, but it seems like there's also a lot of nauseating billionaire worship. Bill Gates didn't come up with the majority of the features in Windows. Neither Dr Jonas Salk, who came up with the polio vaccination, nor Dr Charles Drew, who's innovative work in blood transfusions led to the formation of blood banks worldwide, were billionaires. Most doctors aren't, most teachers aren't. It doesn't seem like a person's ability to amass a billionaire dollars is a prerequisite doing work that positively effects the masses. Too often billionaires are given sole credit to an army of laborers beneath them. The billionaires you find in the field of pharmaceuticals aren't the ones developing the drugs.

While I'd be the first to admit that the work politicians do may be hard quantify, there could have been a number of lost opportunities had there not be the reduction of lead-based paint in children's toys and environment. The number of known carcinogenic elements in food has been greatly reduced and asbestos and other hazardous materials have been stricken leading to a rising life expectancy and better expected quality of life for senior citizens. Voting rights laws, anti discrimination laws. laws against sexual harassment, ensure a more just society which goes well beyond the donation of a generous family.

[Utisz]

I think we're set for round 2 of the epic djm vs Utisz fightdebate.

Dialetics.

You speak far too kindly of them. Such extreme wealth is the fruit of rapidly growing inequality, the hideous expanding gut of these ravenous leeches pushing more and more people into the gutter as they valiantly reach for the stars on our behalf and in our name while contributing nothing to society beyond adding their own visage to the vast gallery of smug cunts to whom we might pray to be similarly blessed with the sociopathy needed to gleefully benefit from the misery of those around us.

I see the recipe wisely called for a teaspoon of Oscar Wilde.

Ravenous leeches like Bill Gates, a man who has given more and put more effort into improving the lot of the poor than any leftist politician ever has or ever will! The anti billionaire rhetoric towards people that started with little, contributed enormously to the world through ideas and commerce then turned philanthropic is nauseating. People should be grateful for the Bill Gates of the world, they have made the world a better place than morons like Biden ever will.

Bill Gates has dedicated a large part of the wealth he will never use to philanthropic efforts, which at least means he is spending some of his wealth on something of worth. But the power he yields in the process is unchecked and unvetted and utterly disproportionate.

We can talk about his intent, but this guy is making decisions that affects hundreds of millions of people, even outside of the influence of his philanthropy. For example, he successfully convinced Oxford (who received massive amount of public funding) to not openly license their vaccine, but rather to license it to industry (they chose AstraZeneca). Was he in the right? What were the reasons? Did he pull some strings? Which ones?

Nobody knows. Zero transparency.

But at least, unlike most billionaires, he has dedicated most of his wealth to philanthropy. We got lucky there.

Which is to say that Gates is bad but Bezos is much worse.

imagine a world without Windows, Microsoft Office, MS DOS, Tesla (yeah OK the trucks shit), Amazon. Imagine that wealth, those jobs removed. These people invariably create more wwelth for others, for employees and society than they do for themselves. So what if they end up well off, many of them give it all away anyway.

Indeed. Imagine a world without Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos.

For real though, imagine it.

Instead of booting up Microsoft Windows™ we would boot up Macrohard Doors™.

Instead of making payments online using PayPal™, we would have to use BuyBud™.

Instead of buying novelty Nicolas Cage pillows on Amazon™, we would have to buy them on Nile™.

Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos are not innovative geniuses. They were lucky, mediocre opportunists, in the right place, at the right time, with the right idea, and the right shoulders to stand on, and the right people to exploit, like thousands of other people. If it were not them, it would be some other Fred Fucks or Sam Shits with the same idea a few months down the road.

As far as I can tell, there has not been a single person with a truly innovative idea more than a year ahead of its time since maybe Einstein (even Einstein is debatable). So how does progress happen? A slow collective war of attrition. That's not so sexy a story to get your funding with though. So we give Nobel prizes and patents and turn people into billionaires with houses we would like to occupy.

They run the last two meters of the relay and claim their hundreds of billions of dollars.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web we are all using now. He was not an innovative genius either (though he has a far better claim than Gate and Bezos and Musk to that title) and chose not to patent the Web, but to make it open for society. Billions of people benefit from his selflessness every day. All of the jobs that Bezos and Musk have generated and all of the money they made can be traced back to him. And yet his net worth is a paltry $10 million. Any society that celebrates or rewards Gates or Bezos or Musk more than Berners-Lee is gravely misguided.