1. Welcome! Please take a few seconds to create your free account to post threads, make some friends, remove a few ads while surfing and much more. ClutchFans has been bringing fans together to talk Houston Sports since 1996. Join us!

Should Billionaires Exist?

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by rocketsjudoka, Feb 21, 2020.

?

Should Billionaires Exist?

  1. Yes

    43 vote(s)
    69.4%
  2. No

    16 vote(s)
    25.8%
  3. Undecided

    3 vote(s)
    4.8%
  1. rocketsjudoka

    rocketsjudoka Contributing Member
    Supporting Member

    Joined:
    Jul 24, 2007
    Messages:
    53,658
    Likes Received:
    41,542
    This has been a centerpiece of Sanders' campaign and Chuck Todd asked Bloomberg this question directly "Should you exist?" This has also been touched on in several of the Sanders' threads but I'm going to ask it directly including a poll to see what Clutchfans think.

    I've also been discussing this issue in a Philosophy salon group i'm in. I've brought up Adam Smith and the dreaded name of Ayn Rand. I do think there is something to the philosophy of Egoism that those who are able to create more should reap even outsized benefits from their creations. That society is advanced by the creator and if those people should just expect the admiration of society and a decent livelihood but not material wealth in the long run society will not benefit as much. Following Adam Smith such people will not seek to maximize the benefit of society through their efforts if they can't expect as much reward. I won't go as far as Rand though and say that it is a crime to expect someone to work without being able to maximize their financial benefits.

    For example if someone where to figure out a way to solve climate change without creating a lot of economic dislocation I think such a person deserves to make a billion dollars or more and wouldn't expect them to solve climate change just from their own concern for the state of Humanity. My own view is that to solve climate change we need to figure out how to monetize it more and encourage a profit motive to solve it.

    At the same time though I agree that the wealth gap is a problem and there are structural problems with a prolonged and exaggerated wealth gap. My own view is that we need to figure out a way to address it that doesn't just focus on taxing billionaires to the point that there aren't billionaires. I feel that is simplistic and is an argument based more on class resentment than actually solving the wealth gap.

    I've said this election is a tipping point and one of these is the philosophical argument regarding Socialism and Objectivism. Obviously this argument hasn't been brought up in philosophical terms as voters have very little interest in philosophical discussions but it is there in this campaign. It was summed up when Bloomberg talked about how he worked hard for his wealth and Sanders countered that he didn't and it was his workers who did. Right there Sanders is taking the Marxist view that wealth is created by the laborers while Bloomberg is essentially quoting Rand that he has the founder of the company and it's leader created that wealth. While his employees carried out his vision without him there wouldn't be a company to work for.

    And I'll head off the quote, "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
     
    jiggyfly and FranchiseBlade like this.
  2. Aleron

    Aleron Contributing Member

    Joined:
    Jun 24, 2010
    Messages:
    11,685
    Likes Received:
    1,113
    Price's law is fairly consistent across all economies (plus other things), so you want to be a country with billionaires, because the ones without them (excluding crooked government officials who steal it) are poor as ****.
     
    rocketsjudoka likes this.
  3. JuanValdez

    JuanValdez Contributing Member

    Joined:
    Feb 14, 1999
    Messages:
    34,060
    Likes Received:
    13,408
    Returns reward risk. The reason why people take jobs as employees is to shield themselves from financial risks, which means they avoid some downside risks and some upside risks. The owner, Bloomberg, here is accepting the risks -- that no one will buy his product, that his workers will be bad, that his input expenses will be too high, that his competitors will be better than him, that he might go bankrupt and lose everything he sunk into the effort. And he also accepts the upside risk, that he might become a billionaire if everything goes well. That's the arrangement we make. If you don't like the risk profile of being an employee, be an entrepreneur. Or vice versa.

    Within entrepreneurialism, and investing in general, there's normal profits and abnormal profits. Normal profits are returns that are reasonable for the risk that you take. So the stock market returns about 8.5% over the long term -- a reasonable profit for putting your capital at risk. Your typical shopkeeper is making something like normal profits.

    But when you find and exploit an inefficiency in the markets, you have a new invention or discover a flaw, you can reap enormous profits, abnormal profits. Apple did that with the iPhone, making a new product where there was no mature competition and they could grab large market shares with fat profits. George Soros made abnormal profits when he saw a flaw in the artificial European exchange rates and shorted the British pound and made $1B in one day. Both of these things were good for the world, but we paid very high prices to get it.

    The problem is the risk is assymetrical. On the downside, the risk of entrepreneurialism is that you lose everything you had. You declare bankruptcy and suffer some financial hardship. On the upside, you make a decent living while creating value for society. That's great. And then there's a tiny few who were smart and capable and got lucky one day to hit an enormous jackpot and they get all the money, all the women, all the power, and they can pass that on to their children and grandchildren. They were smart and capable, so they'd probably have made solid normal profits anyway, and at worst if they were unlucky they'd go bankrupt and have hardship, but they wouldn't go to debtors' prison and they wouldn't die.

    But they were lucky and made abnormal profits. And we want them to, to some extent. We want the iPhone and the rational Fx rates. But how much should we really reward them for it? Does the risk they took really justify billions and all the attendant benefits? And is all that really necessary to create the incentive? Would Apple not bother with the iPhone if they thought they could only be a $500B company instead of a $1T company? Would Soros not have shorted the pound if he figured he'd have to give up half of it in taxes anyway? No, they still would. Simply: society is overpaying for these benefits.

    I don't have a problem with people getting rich and maybe being billionaires. I have a problem with excessive rents in abnormal profits. Bloomberg is such a one -- he created a great company and we overpaid him for the benefit. And I don't have a problem saying, okay the system is imperfect and we should maybe true-up a bit when you take excessive profits by taxing those people more. Bloomberg can exist and he can be a billionaire, but let's true-up.
     
  4. rocketsjudoka

    rocketsjudoka Contributing Member
    Supporting Member

    Joined:
    Jul 24, 2007
    Messages:
    53,658
    Likes Received:
    41,542
    Good post JuanValdez. I’m curious what do you mean by “true up” is that a level of wealth that you think people like Bloomberg should be rewarded that would more a accurately reflect the benefit they generated to society?
     
  5. JuanValdez

    JuanValdez Contributing Member

    Joined:
    Feb 14, 1999
    Messages:
    34,060
    Likes Received:
    13,408
    That's code for extermination camps. :p

    Seriously, I left it open-ended because I don't really have a prescription for how to address it. Progressive taxation on income is probably the most obvious tool. Wealth tax might be helpful. But I think tax policy is limited because it puts the money in government coffers to decide what to do with instead of assigning it more broadly to all the people. UBI is interesting because it uses a tax policy to send money right back to people's pockets instead of to government programs.

    I wrote so much I decided not to talk about how the risk assymetry is reversed for wage-earners -- there's some persistent downside risk, but you've forsaken most of your upside risk. And that has to do with the relative bargaining power between workers and the companies. Policies that reduce that power disparity should result in more sharing of the wealth creation and perhaps upside risk with employees, which would share abnormal profits more broadly.
     
    jiggyfly likes this.
  6. ThatBoyNick

    ThatBoyNick Member

    Joined:
    Dec 8, 2011
    Messages:
    28,280
    Likes Received:
    43,344
    Theoretically no, 1 billion dollars is an absurd amount of wealth for one person to hold, and if you don't think so, well how about 5 billion? 500 billion? 5 trillion? 500 trillion? No limit?

    At what point amongst those 5 numbers do you think society should say "Congrats you won!" and the progression of the game that is wealth collection ends? If you say 500+ trillion, or it is your belief society should "not limit" the wealth one can obtain through legal means, hard work, generations of dedication, etc, then you are fine with a single person collecting more wealth then exist in the world.

    At some point, if power and resources (wealth) are being hoarded at an absurd level by a few people, society will crumble into a dystopian nightmare, where everybody has zero resources and is at the will of one power.

    Capitalism needs common-sense regulations, or else it becomes a game of collecting money that will ultimately be won an extremely small group of people, and we are already seeing this. There needs to be a conversation about what level of wealth distribution amongst our society would be ideal, and once that conversation is had, how we can best set up the game to incentivize that envisioned ideal in the fairest manner possible.

    I wouldn't be for a hard cap at 1 billion, but I'd be for a progressive wealth tax that gets as absurdly high as the wealth being held.
     
    #6 ThatBoyNick, Feb 21, 2020
    Last edited: Feb 21, 2020
    R0ckets03, jiggyfly, da_juice and 3 others like this.
  7. FranchiseBlade

    FranchiseBlade Contributing Member
    Supporting Member

    Joined:
    Jan 14, 2002
    Messages:
    48,669
    Likes Received:
    17,295
    I expressed this in another thread.

    No they should not exist.

    Nobody needs that much or deserves that much. Using the example from the OP if a person could solve climate change without great economic hardships they deserve a substantial reward. They can still live in luxury, invest, donate, provide, do research, any of that if they end up with 900 million. If they have something they want to do that would go beyond that cost, they could turn their successes into an effort to bring aboard others with money to invest as well. Working together isn't a bad thing.

    Once you get to the billion mark (it's arbitrary number but in this day and age it works. That might change at a future date.) amounts that won't hurt you at all will help others greatly.

    Same example I posted before. If there was a person with 2 billion and they were required to give away 500 million technically they would still be a billionaire. Their lifestyle would have to take zero damage. They would inconvenienced very little to not at all. With that 500 million every single person in the nation could get 1 million dollars (actually a little more). At least for a little bit hunger would be eliminated. Homelessness would be next to nothing. People could afford medicine, education, transportation, etc. Those are huge major improvements while the person who lost the 500 million wouldn't have to really make any changes. That would be from just one billionaire. There are more than that so the numbers are insane.

    I'm not advocating that's what should be done with it, but it is possible to see with those kinds of figures what we could do for healthcare funding, education reform and enhancement, infrastructure investment, etc.

    That deals with people who already have that much money. If we at look at people who invent something or come up with an idea that starts getting them close to one billion but they know they can't reach that. That is where we see a huge and longer lasting positive change. They can restructure their wage model and setup for the business model to pay higher wages, provide greater benefits, invest rather than save, and that is where we will see a decrease in wealth cap, a stronger middle class, better working conditions etc. That all means that demand side will be strong which will trigger opportunities for growth and expansion, greater employment at better wages with better benefits which causes the cycle to continue. This is good for businesses, economy, which leads to more tax revenue for the govt. which reduces deficit spending and possibly even the debt.

    Again the investors and bosses will still be super rich and have motivation to make it. Motivation doesn't go away because you will have $999,999,999 rather than one billion. Luxury doesn't disappear. You would still have plenty to invest, donate, etc. But the people at the bottom have more money to throw back into the economy and help keep it moving while getting a better education, better healthcare, etc. Hopefully it would decrease stress which has huge benefits as well.

    We would get all of that without really causing anyone undue hardship. Incentive wouldn't be removed.

    That being said, those with that money and power want to keep it, so this would never happen, but theoretically it could, and there isn't a reason not to.
     
  8. rocketsjudoka

    rocketsjudoka Contributing Member
    Supporting Member

    Joined:
    Jul 24, 2007
    Messages:
    53,658
    Likes Received:
    41,542
    Thanks for your post ThatBoyNick. I don't think anyone is saying that one person should have all the wealth in the World as that wouldn't be a functioning economy but a one person absolute dictatorship. This also isn't about someone just amassing wealth without actually earning but that the person has done something that people have wanted and created a benefit to society. Consider my example. If someone developed a way to solve Climate Change without major economic dislocation do you think that person should be allowed to make a billion?

    Regarding fairness how do you determine what is fair? How do we determine that someone actually has wealth beyond what is fair? Are we going to use a billion as an arbitrary number?

    Also keep in mind that capital isn't a fixed resource and we're constantly creating new capital so it isn't a matter of taking wealth from others but creating new capital.
     
    Nook and foh like this.
  9. Jayzers_100

    Jayzers_100 Member

    Joined:
    Jul 9, 2013
    Messages:
    3,234
    Likes Received:
    2,877
    I hate to nitpick because I agree with everything you’re saying, but the math was a little off. There roughly 300 million people in the US. If you divided up $500 million they would each get less then two dollars apiece, not a million
     
    foh likes this.
  10. FranchiseBlade

    FranchiseBlade Contributing Member
    Supporting Member

    Joined:
    Jan 14, 2002
    Messages:
    48,669
    Likes Received:
    17,295
    Yes you are absolutely right. I'm a moron. I made the same erroneous statement before in another thread. I need more sleep and perhaps some shock therapy.
     
    Hakeemtheking and Os Trigonum like this.
  11. Jayzers_100

    Jayzers_100 Member

    Joined:
    Jul 9, 2013
    Messages:
    3,234
    Likes Received:
    2,877
    Lol it’s okay, I was really optimistic for a second before I realized the mistake
     
    R0ckets03 and FranchiseBlade like this.
  12. FranchiseBlade

    FranchiseBlade Contributing Member
    Supporting Member

    Joined:
    Jan 14, 2002
    Messages:
    48,669
    Likes Received:
    17,295
    Yes it was fun to believe my own fantasy error for a brief moment.
     
  13. Roxfreak724

    Roxfreak724 Member

    Joined:
    Jan 26, 2012
    Messages:
    1,076
    Likes Received:
    1,464
    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/21/opinion/sunday/billionaires-inequality-2020-election.html

    The Billionaire Election

    "Bernie Sanders wants to get rid of them. Amy Klobuchar is fine with them, but wants them to pay somewhat higher taxes. Joe Biden promises them that under him, “nothing would fundamentally change.” Tom Steyer is one of them and wouldn’t be in the race if he wasn’t but seems slightly embarrassed about it. Elizabeth Warren wants to break up the companies that made many of them in the first place. Michael Bloomberg is trying to become president largely on the basis of being one. It would take Pete Buttigieg thousands of years to become one at his past rate of adult wealth creation, and yet he seems to be their top choice.

    And waiting across the aisle, Donald Trump claims he’s one of them, which, because he’s Trump, means he probably isn’t.

    I’m talking about billionaires, of course.

    The Democratic debate on Wednesday made it clearer than ever that November’s election has become the billionaire referendum, in which it will be impossible to vote without taking a stand on extreme wealth in a democracy. The word “billionaire” came up more often than “China,” America’s leading geopolitical competitor; “immigration,” among its most contentious issues; and “climate,” its gravest existential threat.


    As the veteran Washington watchers Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, of Axios, have observed, billionaires are less a major topic of this race than the total atmosphere of it. It’s not just the politicians. From Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg to Jeff Bezos and Rupert Murdoch, billionaires are the captains of an economy whose cruelties have given this year its populist verve, the boogeypeople for some candidates, the bankrollers of others, and the owners of the platforms of persuasion.

    So what should we do about them? Voters are being treated to a vast range of answers to that question — from “Let’s tax them down to mere millionaire status” to “Let’s put them in charge of everything A.S.A.P.”

    The debate is testing abiding American assumptions. A country more ardently capitalist than most is asking itself, as seriously as at any time in the modern era, whether the ultrarich, just because they are ultrarich, endanger democracy. And a country just as committed, contrarily, to its founding ideal of equality is asking whether to resign itself to a gilded revolving door in which you unseat billionaire leaders you hate by electing billionaires you don’t mind.


    These conditions make it at once utterly remarkable, and totally explicable, that Mr. Sanders, the junior senator from Vermont and a democratic socialist, has become the front-runner for the Democratic nomination — and that Ms. Warren’s debate performance this week resonated as much as it did. You wouldn’t know it from watching cable news, where pundits are often aghast at the tastes of regular people who think green rooms are just rooms that are green, but in recent years, anger at billionaires has risen to a boil. This is thanks to the financial crisis, to endless wars cheered on by corporate and media elites and to yawning inequality. There is a growing sense that billionaires are not people who just happen to have drifted up from our midst, that in fact they are up there because they are standing on our backs, pinning us down.

    Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren, the senior senator from Massachusetts, have some meaningful differences of policy and personality. But the thread that connects their campaigns is their insistence that the “left behind” in America are not actually being left behind so much as stood on. They each seek to take the passive voice out of the grammar of American hardship: Your health insurance hasn’t somehow, mysteriously been made too expensive; your brick-and-mortar store hasn’t somehow, mysteriously been undercut. Someone did those things to you, probably by rigging the system to secure an undeserved advantage. And that person was probably a billionaire.

    The degree of support for these ideas in 2020 is astonishing in a center-right country where, as John Steinbeck once wrote, explaining socialism’s limited growth in America: “We didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.” It is a reflection of how fed up many Americans are with the old narratives about how, with a little pluck and patience, they too will rise. And it is a sign of a generational changing of the guard. As the (millennial) journalist Charlotte Alter, author of the new book “The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For,” told me, “Socialism is a generational Rorschach test: Boomers think of Soviet gulags and bad shoes, millennials think of Swedish health care and free education.”

    In the mainstream of the Democratic Party, it has long been said that billionaires should pay more of their “fair share,” But, until recently, few would have questioned that you’d want more billionaires on the Forbes list, not fewer. Today a vocal chunk of the Democratic electorate is gravitating to a strikingly different conclusion: that America would actually be better off reducing its billionaire population through taxes and profit-trimming regulations.

    (In fact, if I could ask one debate question, it would be this: Raise your hand if you would want there to be more billionaires at the end of your presidency than the start; raise your hand if you’d want fewer billionaires. Then, same question, but applied to millionaires. I think it would be revealing.)

    Ballooning anti-billionaire sentiment is galvanizing billionaires. Some have been motivated to go on television to cast their critics as naïve and un-American. Others donate to centrist candidates like Mr. Biden, Mr. Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who serve a cocktail of down-home incrementalism shaken with wealth defense. But it took a special billionaire — Mr. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York — to find a more direct way to thwart ascendant progressives. He is seeking to buy the election.

    Just when the accountants thought they knew every tax-avoidance trick, here is the ultimate: become the leader of the free world. Of course, Mr. Bloomberg would say that he is running for an entirely different reason, which also happens to be very billionairey: He thinks he’s the only one with the wits and war chest to pull it off. “I alone can fix it,” as Mr. Trump once put it. It is something of a mantra for the billionaires.

    Bloomberg told an audience in Phoenix last November, “who isn’t going to take a penny from anyone, and will work for a dollar a year.” This was the best he could do: suggest that being a billionaire would make him more honest because billionaires are so rich they don’t have to listen to other billionaires.

    One problem with this approach is that it is eerily similar to that taken by Mr. Trump, whose White House Mr. Bloomberg has called “besotted by lies, chaos and corruption.” As Larry Kudlow, a Trump adviser, put it in 2016, “Why shouldn’t the president surround himself with successful people? Wealthy folks have no need to steal or engage in corruption.” And Mr. Trump also said, “As far as salary is concerned, I won’t take even one dollar.”

    The billionaire’s intrinsic incorruptibility is a curious pitch when you seek to run against a maybe-billionaire impeached for corruption. But even if we take Mr. Bloomberg at his word, the notion that being beholden only to your own opinions, and not those of many donors, deserves more scrutiny. Personally, I am not a fan of billionaires pumping any money at all into politics. But I would trust someone who has to juggle the different needs, moods and taboos of multiple billionaire donors over a billionaire who is accountable only to himself.



    Continued on next post....
     
    FranchiseBlade likes this.
  14. Roxfreak724

    Roxfreak724 Member

    Joined:
    Jan 26, 2012
    Messages:
    1,076
    Likes Received:
    1,464

    Mr. Bloomberg’s incorruptibility argument functions as a smokescreen. It can cause you to ignore that his basic enterprise — spending his personal fortune to flood the airwaves with an unprecedented deluge of ads, thereby ginning up votes and arguably purchasing the presidency — is the picture of corruption.

    (When I texted my friend Alexander Theodoridis, a political scientist at the University of California, Merced, to ask if any scholarship could shed light on Mr. Bloomberg’s method of campaigning, he answered: “Most of the work on buying votes is about the developing world, which perhaps the U.S. is joining.”)

    Yet, simply by running, Mr. Bloomberg is performing a valuable public service: illustrating to the public how billionaire influence complicates any challenges to billionaire influence.

    As Alexander Burns and Nicholas Kulish have documented in these pages, Mr. Bloomberg is a dedicated philanthropist — and has leveraged his giving to develop “a national infrastructure of influence, image-making and unspoken suasion that has helped transform a former Republican mayor of New York City into a plausible contender for the Democratic nomination.” By giving away billions of dollars to nonprofit groups that fight for the most vulnerable, Mr. Bloomberg has made allies out of people who might otherwise be vocally against him.

    Just this week, Mr. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, announced his creation of a $10 billion fund to fight climate change. Once, such a gift might have been greeted with unmitigated gratitude. But now, rightly, people are asking about all the taxes Amazon doesn’t pay, about its own carbon footprint, and about whether any mortal should have that much power over a shared crisis."



    This, too, is on the ballot this autumn. There are candidates who would leave undisturbed the opportunity to create wealth on that scale and who encourage the private solution of public problems. (One less thing for the pols to do!) And there are candidates who want the Bezoses of the world to have way less money, and who want citizens to trust that the government having that money instead will mean better solutions.

    Never in our lifetimes has it been a prerequisite to have a take on billionaires in order to do your basic civic duty and vote. But it is now. Here are some questions no voter can avoid:

    Do you think we shouldn’t have billionaires or should have many more — maybe you?!

    Do you think being incredibly wealthy makes you immune to corruption, or prone to it?

    Do you think it’s possible to empower those Americans locked in the basement of opportunity while helping billionaires do even better — a win-win? Or do you believe we need to take away a great deal of billionaire wealth to give millions a better life?

    Do you trust a news media that sells advertisements to corporations owned by billionaires, and sometimes to billionaire candidates directly, to inform you properly about the level of power billionaires have and what to do about it?

    Do you believe only a billionaire is qualified to solve the problems billionaires helped create? Or are you skeptical of the deployment of arsonists as firefighters?

    Let’s face it. You’re unlikely to become one of the billionaires. But you can choose whether to resign yourself to living in their country — or to remind them that they live in yours."
     
    rocketsjudoka and FranchiseBlade like this.
  15. ghettocheeze

    ghettocheeze Member

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2006
    Messages:
    7,325
    Likes Received:
    9,134
    Billionaires should not exist.

    Too many people in this country have forgotten their own history. Our current winner-takes-all economic model was already proven unsustainable in the early 20th century. A progressive tax was instituted out of sheer necessity as a compromise by the wealthy to save capitalism. Have we already forgotten the 90% tax bracket?

    Yes, that is what it takes to keep this broken system afloat.

    Now, some of you argue that entrepreneurs deserve maximum reward for risk taking and it all sounds reasonable in theory. However, that does not take into account all the other resources needed for a successful enterprise in a modern economy. The need for infrastructure, education, healthy workers, etc.

    No billionaire exists in a vacuum by himself.

    His success largely depends on the quality of these resources available to him. Now, our economic model does not provide a natural mechanism to pay to upgrade to these resources so we rely on public funding through government taxation.

    However over the past 50 years, the wealthy have used their combined political power to dismantle the progressive tax and have broken that compromise. Hence, here we are today with Americans living in grotesque wealth inequality, crumbling infrastructure, neglected education, unaffordable healthcare -- all the things Bernie Sanders is fighting for.

    Now tell me how many billionaires are going to quietly agree to go back to the 90% tax bracket?

    Because that's what it's going to take to truly make America great again -- a compromise.
     
    Roxfreak724 and FranchiseBlade like this.
  16. Roxfreak724

    Roxfreak724 Member

    Joined:
    Jan 26, 2012
    Messages:
    1,076
    Likes Received:
    1,464
    I'm not educated in philosophy I just kind of go by what I see.

    Billionaires (or "uber-wealthy" people, whatever you wanna call them) and multinational corporations are wreaking havoc on the world. Whether it's the Sackler's and the opioid epidemic, the fossil fuel industry and climate change, the Koch brothers and politics, it seems like society keeps getting burned again and again.

    This isn't to say all billionaires are bad (I look up to people like Gates, Musk, etc) but I definitely believe in the idea that too much money/power in too few hands is just not good.

    A lot of billionaires don't just simply make their money and leave the rest of the world alone. The "bad" billionaires especially have massive egos that tell them they should be leading and shaping the world. Whether it's behind the scenes (the way Soros, Bloomberg, the Kochs etc) or just outright influencing media/public opinion (Fox News, Bloomberg News, Washington Post), these guys feel like they should be influencing the world due to whatever conceit or narcissism they may develop during their ascendance.

    I just don't trust billionaires to have the empathy and understanding for simple, everyday people that is required to make the enormous decisions that they in many ways have unilateral control over. There is also an inherent conflict of interest when it comes to billionaires making any sort of significant, structural change that could threaten their profits or their position in society.

    So I don't think the question "Whether Billionaires exist should exist" is so much a question about how much wealth a person should or should not allowed to be had, that can be made into a very subjectve/arbiritrary discussion. It is much more about should we allow the currents status quo of this society to continue? A status quo that allows a certain group of very privileged and powerful people/corporations to not only play by a very different set of rules than the rest of society but also allows them to have an inordinate amount of power over our lives. I think the answer to that is clearly no.

    On a side note, laborers don't just magically appear out of thin air. Someone has to pay for their health, education, upbringing, etc.. Bloomberg, or any other entrepreneur, cannot do anything without a safe, well-functioning and orderly society that produces laborers with a certain pre-requisite skill-set to contribute to their companies. And the fact there are billionaires who find every which way to avoid putting money back into that generous society is both disgusting and an existential threat to the social mobility that the American Dream espouses.
     
    #16 Roxfreak724, Feb 21, 2020
    Last edited: Feb 21, 2020
  17. ThatBoyNick

    ThatBoyNick Member

    Joined:
    Dec 8, 2011
    Messages:
    28,280
    Likes Received:
    43,344
    My point was to invoke thought, if someone doesn't believe 1 billion is too much, then where is the cut-off? Because there needs to be one if we agree that we wouldn't allow one person to have dictation over the entire economy.

    Then we can ask further questions after we have come to the conclusion above, like should one person be allowed to accumulate half of the world's wealth? How about 100 people, should we allow 100 people to control half of the world's wealth? 1k? 10k? 100k? 1 million? How about 1% of our population, should 1% be able to control half of the world's wealth? Well, the richest 1% does control half of the world's wealth currently. Is this okay? If it is, then when would it not become okay? We need to know because number of people holding obscene amounts of wealth continues to shrink and concentrate rapidly.

    Should someone who does something great be allowed to make a billion? Personally speaking sure, like I said I wouldn't be for a hard cap, I would be for a very progressive wealth tax. If someone is out-earning that progressive wealth tax all the way to 1+ billion, then they will have a 1+ billion for as long as they can out-earn the progressive wealth tax.

    I'm not sure, fairness is something that should be calculated by everyone, not me. If 1 billion is arbitrary and unfair, what about 1 trillion? Like I said earlier, I think you agree with a wealth limit, you have to ask your self what limit you believe is fair. Personally I don't think many people can fathom how much wealth 1 billion actually is, to me it is absolutely an obscene amount of wealth for one person to hold.

    New capital created tends to go at an extremely disproportionate rate to those with capital, one of the perks of having obscure amounts of capital.
     
  18. Major

    Major Member

    Joined:
    Jun 28, 1999
    Messages:
    41,383
    Likes Received:
    15,808
    I disagree with this to a degree. Incrementally, it's a small deal. But overall, you have to consider the risk side of things. Would Apple still have invested billions and risked their whole business model on a new kind of phone if they thought their upside was much lower? Maybe. But for every iPhone, there's also Windows Phone and Palm Pre and Blackberry's touch phone. If you half the reward, maybe one or two of those don't give it a shot - and maybe one of them is Apple or Google and today we're all running around with crappy Palm Pre's. Shorting is a risky venture - would Soros take the same risks for half the potential reward? Almost certainly not if he has any kind of risk management system.

    I think the simple solution to wealth accumulation going to the few is to dramatically escalate the estate tax and eliminate loopholes. You can be rich while you're alive and reap all the rewards for your success, but once you die, that money mostly gets recycled back into society. You reward success fully, but address wealth collecting in those few families unless all the keeps keeping being uber-successful too. It also incentivizes billionaires to use their money for something or other while they are alive instead of simply accumulating it.

    I would argue in many ways, billionaires can address problems governments can't or don't. Governments are designed to be slow and inefficient and aren't good at dealing with global issues that go beyond their boundaries. The Bill Gates Foundation has tackled issues that governments have repeatedly failed at. Just this week, Bezos dedicated $10 billion to fighting climate change - no chance the US government would do that if they took that money from him. And by using the private sector, they can avoid the red tape that governments regularly face and they can tackle issues far more quickly and precisely.

    I think people also overestimate the impact of going after billionaires. The US economy produces $18 trillion annually. The US has a total of about 300 billionaires worth a combined $3 trillion. Assuming they spent about 30 years on average to generate that, they generate a tiny fraction of the overall US economy. They are freakish outliers in a giant world and making policy around them is going to have negligible impact on our federal budgets and the like.
     
  19. dachuda86

    dachuda86 Member

    Joined:
    May 3, 2008
    Messages:
    16,308
    Likes Received:
    3,580
    They ask.... should so many poor people exist?
     
    JuanValdez likes this.
  20. AleksandarN

    AleksandarN Member

    Joined:
    Aug 10, 2001
    Messages:
    4,444
    Likes Received:
    5,860
    I agree. But what really makes billionaires now a days? The Stock market. This is where the richest get all of their wealth from. The stock market needs to be more regulated opposed to actual limits on individual’s wealth.
     
    jiggyfly likes this.

Share This Page

  • About ClutchFans

    Since 1996, ClutchFans has been loud and proud covering the Houston Rockets, helping set an industry standard for team fan sites. The forums have been a home for Houston sports fans as well as basketball fanatics around the globe.

  • Support ClutchFans!

    If you find that ClutchFans is a valuable resource for you, please consider becoming a Supporting Member. Supporting Members can upload photos and attachments directly to their posts, customize their user title and more. Gold Supporters see zero ads!


    Upgrade Now