Where Do Billionaires Come From?

[georgephillip]

I don't think that we "have" billionaires so much as we "make" billionaires.

Even then, we have "faith" in the worth of currency, when on its own it is merely paper and metal.

Is a billion dollars far more than anyone can reasonably claim to deserve based on their contribution to society?

If it's true at some level of extreme wealth money inevitably corrupts, society is better off without billionaires.

I don't buy into that logic, no.

I don't buy into that logic, no.

Abolishing billionaires seems like an idea worth debating:

Opinion | Abolish Billionaires

"But it is an illustration of the political precariousness of billionaires that the idea has since become something like mainline thought on the progressive left.

"Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are floating new taxes aimed at the superrich, including special rates for billionaires.

"Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who also favors higher taxes on the wealthy, has been making a moral case against the existence of billionaires.

"Dan Riffle, her policy adviser, recently changed his Twitter name to 'Every Billionaire Is A Policy Failure.'

"Last week, HuffPost asked, 'Should Billionaires Even Exist?'"

How are you going to do it, with a guillotine?

How are you going to do it, with a guillotine?

Adjusting the rights of intellectual property and enhancing anti-trust enforcement might be a good starting point:

Should We Have Billionaires?

"Apart from the fact that a different structure of intellectual property rules could substantially reduce their income, they are other issues with our tech billionaires.

"Some, like Bill Gates, would have much less money if anti-trust laws were still enforced.

"Mark Zuckerberg would have much less money if Facebook were subject to the same libel laws as print and broadcast media."

There are also worker-self-directed-enterprise options that would distribute the "owners" share of a business profits over a much broader proportion of its productive employees.

 

[georgephillip]

Does a (small but militant) faction of American society really believe that patents and copyrights are some sort of "government monopoly"? Here's a thought, force millionaire Hollywood actors to accept the same wage as electricians or gaffers (whatever that is) and let us know how you make out.

How would you describe our current version of patents and copyrights if not as government-enforced monopolies?

 

[Grumblenuts]

"Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who also favors higher taxes on the wealthy, has been making a moral case against the existence of billionaires.

Thank you for that. At the request of one of our daughters my wife and I took in a young half black woman for a number of years who closely resembles AOC in many ways. Not so much politically, and a magnet for bad luck in terms of cars, family issues, boyfriends and so forth, but tough as nails on the whole and finally enjoying some well earned breaks in her life. So I can't help thinking of her as another daughter and AOC by extension. I'm so proud of them both right now.. HAHA!

“The question of marginal tax rates is a policy question but it’s also a moral question,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “What kind of society do we want to live in? Are we comfortable with a society where someone can have a personal helipad while this city is experiencing the highest levels of poverty and homelessness since the Great Depression?”

Cutting right to the point, Coates asked if it’s possible to live in a moral society that includes billionaires.

“No, it’s not,” she responded. “I’m not saying that Bill Gates or Warren Buffet are immoral, but a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.”

She went on to list other moral travesties that can be traced to economic inequality.

“I think it’s wrong that the majority of the country doesn’t make a living wage, I think it’s wrong that you can work 100 hours and not feed your kids. I think it’s wrong that corporations like Walmart and Amazon can get paid by the government, experiencing a wealth transfer from the public, for paying people less than a minimum wage.”

“It not only doesn’t make economic sense, it doesn’t make moral sense,” she added.

This kind of rhetoric that plainly lays out the struggle of regular Americans in an age of massive wealth inequality is so foreign to most political discourse today that hearing it feels like a revelation. We are so used to politicians dodging and weaving, carefully avoiding offending their donors, while spitting out platitudes like “freedom” and “hope.” Ocasio-Cortez, instead, is pointing to exactly where the problem lies: with the wealthy, and the politicians who cater to them.

Instead of talking about inequality as an abstract issue to be solved by tax cuts or stimulus packages, AOC frames it in terms that everyone can understand. The status quo is wrong, and it can not stand

I would say clearly our first and main problem rather than simply "the problem". The one increasingly making tackling the myriad others artificially difficult.

 

[Grumblenuts]

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