I don't agree with a lot of the recent demonizing of billionaires. Let's take Jeff Bezos as an example. I think Jeff is a good dude. He created the most valuable company in the world and gets my protein powder to my doorstep in a day. He employs thousands of people, all of whom pay their taxes, even if Amazon isn't paying much income tax themselves (11%ish). Isn't Amazon's money better spent expanding and hiring more workers rather than paying the feds so they can waste more money on the military?
Even if he wanted to sell all his Amazon shares and end world hunger, with an estimated cost of $250bn/year his fortune of approx. $100bn wouldn't make a dent.
What's the point if his shares would just be owned by others after he sold them? Then the onus of liquidating and solving world hunger would be on them? It's taking money from one pocket to the other. So why not let Jeff keep his shares? He earned them. The only entity that can create money out of thin air, and truly affect societal change, is the Federal Reserve/govt.
By this logic, we are all as guilty of not solving world hunger as Jeff Bezos, since collectively we could donate more money to the cause than he could. Why blame one person when the rest of us (not to mention the Fed) could make a bigger difference?
Agreed. Bezos is vilified for accumulating wealth legally and being a positive to society, the only people that dislike him are Bernie supporters who love saying eat the rich, engage in false socialist ideals that are impossible to implement in reality and can't understand basic economics. When a person looks up to Bezos and views him as a role model, he or she is vilified and called a bootlicker despite being inspired to accumulate wealth legally and improve society.
America's ability to discourage inspiration and encourage mediocrity is alarming. This extends ends into other areas as well, the disapproval of fitness and acceptance of fat men and women and short term validation in doing stupid shit for external validation is what will cause long term issues. As a country, we need to do better.
Agreed, but you pay taxes on profits not sales. So there is no good justification to avoid taxes other than inflating shareholder value. It’s not momey that will go towards workers.
profits can be used to expand the business/hire employees no?
Yes but amazon has 50+Bn in cash on balance sheet, hard to argue that they are using that to hire new employees especially given that their business model towards employees is more hiring on a need basis (ie following customer demand) rather than hire to drive growth.
Epstein
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You picked the wrong forum, almost everyone agrees here.. Maybe you should try Reddit or a humanities class at Harvard.
It’s not about billionaires being evil, but amazon in particular uses their scale and ability run losses to put others out of business.
Step 1. Market spirits have chosen their champions of amazon and Tesla. Investors have bought into the narrative and will allow them to raise infinite capital with no need to show profitability for decades. Essentially they are market sponsored future monopolizes
Step 2. Try to maximize efficiency and ramp up scale, selling below the costs of your competitors and small businesses to run them out of business
Step 3. Use profitable division like web services to subsidize loss making divisions.
Step4. Keep branching out into new markets and running losses in order to keep your tax rates low. Market will reward you for the revenue beat and share prices will go up as long as rates remain low
Step5. Use regulatory and taxation arbitrage , such as paying employees with stock based comp, to pay lower taxes and minimize costs vs competitors
Step 6. Profit
They can essentially crush any industry or market they want at this point. Everyone on this forum better pray that bezos doesn’t wake up one morning and decide to conquer investment banking,
I’d rather live in a society where you have 10,000 people running small businesses making 100k a year than 1guy making 1b and hiring people for $12/h, even if it’s slightly less efficient and gdp is .01% less
100% agree. Amazon is venturing into all types of businesses now because dominating one sector is just not enough. Grocery delivery, media, audiobooks, shipping, advertising, and probably more that I can't think of at the moment.
Now they have so much data on their shoppers too. Amazon also collects data on their best selling items by online vendors then directly makes those to compete with them. There was a story (on the WSJ I believe) about this recently. A former employee spoke out about it. Then obviously an Amazon spokesperson said this was entirely false. Kind of like how Facebook doesn't collect data on us. Right.
And for all the people who love democracy and hate socialism...you’re much more likely to have stable democracy in the first society. If one guy owns everything and keeps everyone else on subsistence wages, it’s only a matter of time before people get fed up and decide to switch to communism (if you’re already eating ramen noodles every day to pay rent, how much worse could it be?). You need a stable middle class for democratic capitalism to work.
So does Bezos own "everything"? No he doesn't. Amazon is a highly diversified conglomerate. It doesn't control the cloud computing space. It doesn't control e-commerce. It competes a lot in variety of different fields because it's very well positioned to do so.
It pays its warehouse workers slightly above minimum wage, gives them medical benefits, overtime pay, 50% 401K match. There also is great upward mobility. It's a bit of a cut-throat culture but it rewards people who work hard and smart.
Hardly a "robber baron" of the early capitalistic society...
Generalizations are bad when we talk about any group of people. Everyone's different.
“don’t say bad things about rapists guys everybody is different”
Agree. They get hate, especially those and other successful people in finance, for no reason. I think most people just do not understand what they do, and resort to hatred
It’s very simple - people are jealous and want free shit.
Of course Billionaires are not inherently "evil."
This is a 4th grade level of unprompted social analysis though. Good lord.
Agree with your post but quick note, military makes up roughly 15% of the federal budget. Social security/Medicare make up 70%.
Social security is a blunder. Who designed that BS?
discretionary vs in-discretionary spending to be fair
the difference is billionaires are not created from labor. they are created from ownership and equity growing, investments growing, etc. there are very few if any billionaires from purely labor. especially because labor tax rates are high AF. this is where confusion from ‘regular people’ comes from who think labor is more valuable than ownership to an economy and be equally rewarded. these people don’t have an understanding of risk/reward and make characterizations about what ‘should’ happen and how much people ‘should’ be rewarded. every country has these people who want free money, get pandered to by people for election purposes, etc. thankfully we have 300M guns and a constitution in this country that people follow and guaranteed property rights.
the reality is further that JBezos and other billionaires aren’t ‘really’ billionaires as much as they are perceived to be. they can’t sell their stock or the stock price will tank, from a numerical perspective of supply and demand but also because investors will take it as a sign of being overvalued or company won’t be great etc etc.
reality is that the money is in ownership, is improperly valued, and not much can be done with it. JBezos liquidated about 1B a year in Amazon stock for space stuff and that’s probably about the most he can sell, about 1-2B a year without impact. So yeah he’s a billionaire but those who have stock ownership really aren’t. Lots of other types of investors and owners of different kinds of capital are definitely billionaires but
1) many have signed the giving pledge and have solved problems no government ever will eradicating disease 2) they continue to invest and create transformative innovations or fund them more intelligently than the government can 3) the fuck is a one time payment of 5,000-10,000 to people really going to do that is worth ruining every single Americans ability to the right to their own property. A horrible precedent that would be met with rage.
however it’s important to understand the sentiment behind confusion between the value of labor and entrepreneurship. I think both sides don’t care about eachother as much as eachother wants but the owners of capital have most of the power. I would be pro-labor organization because it balances the bargaining power and is fair, but to have 0 clue about the stress and risk in business and ambiguity over LITERALLY every decision? This is an information misalignment and thankfully, these uneducated people are seen as such (except the great AOC and Bernie Sanders). don’t think we need to go around teaching anyone about it either society don’t owe em shit! let alone the money in corporations or Bezos’ bank account.
Agree with this line of thinking for sure, although in a perfect world maybe the bottom 50% of the population would own 5% of the market so they could benefit too
Agree but there shouldn't be government intervention or anything on that part in redistributing wealth. I think unionizing would be the best bet and fighting for vested ownership would be great. But IDK about unionizing hourly employees at McDonalds who are "supposed" to be high school kids and temporary jobs pretty much- factory/warehousing/etc. would make more sense to unionize because they're difficult and a bit more skilled.
Maybe managers / middle management would make sense. But at the end of the day, if we could plop someone down from the 3rd world and they could do a similar or even better job than most disgruntled fast food workers it is really hard to justify giving those who are inherently transient a lasting ownership stake. All for collective bargaining but people need to face the risk too- a first taste of entrepreneurship and negotiation is to risk their jobs and livelihoods to get a bit bigger piece of the pie.
its a structural problem. so many other issues to fix.
such as? just curious so I can think about them too. part of the issue is that even people like me who would have easily been in these people's situations forget about it once getting to the other side. Let me know what kinds of structural problems exist
stfu charlie kirk
I really don't like him either, but he gives a voice to a lot of negative sentiment felt by lots of people. Similar to Bernie, AOC, etc. or Ben Shapiro/Crowder who gain fame off of vilifying a small proportion of people (billionaires / SJW's / etc.) However, for entertainment purposes and to voice emotions that many people aren't comfortable doing all these people do a great job. They exist and are popular for a reason, and it's immature to judge one if not the other. They're all basically the same people, except people like BS/SC/CK all have logical arguments to back up many arguments and by all appearances are willing to have their ideas challenged.
Which isn't to say he's wrong either, but he comes off as immature and annoying. I wish every piece of media content or analysis by these guys wan't 100% on the new SJW that is christening their new baby as an all-gender transmorph.
No one thinks the billionaires themselves are evil, it’s a critique of a system that allows people to accumulate that much wealth on the backs of other’s efforts and communal infrastructure. To use your example of Amazon - Amazon is impossible without a strong capital markets and legal doctrine, educated workforce, extensive infrastructure to facilitate delivery of goods, and internet infrastructure that allows its customers to access Amazon in the first place. Billionaires by and large take home a disproportionate amount of the benefit of leveraging those resources that we all collectively support with our tax dollars. There’s many more layers to this all (another poster mentioned the opportunity cost of Amazon, et. al. killing entire markets with their scale) but this is a first bite for you to chew on.
Some billionaires are probably evil but some are probably inherently good people too, just like any randomly-selected class of people
In order to critique a system, one must understand said system.
The average bleeding lib Bernie Bro villainizing billionaires pretty much just does not want to be held accountable for his or her string of poor decisions, from studying pottery in college to moving to NYC for an $80k (I’m being generous) job to scrounging up every last dime to backpack through flea-infested hostels instead of, you know, saving to ultimately finding themselves underemployed past the age of 30.
So what better way to avoid self reflection and taking agency than to blame a crook like Warren Buffett, a monopolist like Bill Gates, a violator of human-rights like Mark Zuckerberg, a soulless miser like George Soros (eh maybe they’re onto something with that last one). Buffett, Gates and Zuck are all, let’s face it, pretty harmless nerds who just want to play bridge and go about their homegrown empires without these clowns nitpicking at their every move to gather evidence of their evildoing. And no one can say shit because wow that would prove that the “haves” lack any fucking empathy and will take any opportunity to oppress the already disadvantaged “have nots”
And so these wayward millennials will go on and on spending all of their energy ranting about rich people or penning manifestos in support of Bernie because they don’t want to pay for their student loans and also don’t understand how Congress works instead of picking up a book or working on themselves.
It’s the equivalent of an obese person screaming about how an athlete has somehow hampered their own ability to exercise despite the fact that free open spaces for running or the willpower to not eat 7 chalupas and 2 nachos bel grande are available to all. And when they have no more arguments to make about the athlete, they’ll start blaming a supposed thyroid disorder and weak ankles. While eating another plate of nachos
Lol what is up with the ad hominem attacks - try again but instead of attacking people, try arguing the issue at hand
[Carry on wayward son - Kansas](
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"Masquerading as a man with a reason.
My charade is the event of the season.
And if I claim to be a wise man, it surely means that I don't know"
All Bernie bros need to listen those 3 lines.
No one disagrees here lol
Given everyone here is a capitalist and is working to accure wealth, hating billionaires would basically be saying you hate yourself here
Now go on Reddit and it's the polar opposite, definitey a cesspool for the far left vs. WSO which I feel is maybe slightly right of center
oh god for sure. no one on reddit can seem to wrap their head around the fact that Bezos’ wealth is tied to his ownership in Amazon. I guess they assume this guy has $100 B in cash
I don't think it's a left or right issue. Plenty of people on all both political sides who are reasonable and intelligent. But more people who are dumb, uninformed, misinformed, or a mix of the three.
Facts, evidence, and basic logic don't matter to some folks. Stupidity doesn't discriminate left or right. It's a menace that the world is shifting towards bigotry vs. reason. We used to have reasonable people arguing with other reasonable people on best ways to achieve the same results.
No, money doesn't make people evil, using money to do evil does. Does giving away all your money you made to charity honestly make you a bad person, no, does taking your money to hurt and ruin other people's lives because you want to be richer and wealthier? Yes, it does. Money is the instrument of change, how would you use it?
In a system of voluntary transactions where people vote with their dollars, people hurting and ruining other lives by wanting to be richer and wealthier is a good thing (yeah there are spots where people do morally questionable things like lie, misrepresent, cheat, but that's the exception not the norm).
Your assumptions here are poor, in the same way people who built railroads for transportation had their lives ruined by those who innovated and created automobiles. That sucks, sure, but people prefer the alternative way more. Would you not use your laptop or internet over people who bred owls for sending messages? Personal responsibility probably goes a long way for any of the "issues" you might raise- those who make poor decisions are left with more difficult decisions down the line.
Billionaires are neither evil nor good. Like most things in the world, they just are. Individuals are good or bad because of their personality, behavior, and belief systems. Wealth is not a factor.
3 reasons why I think people vilify the "rich".
1) It's incredibly easy to pick a small group of people and blame everything on them. They're scapegoats for focusing the anger of the society.
2) When there is social unrest because the socio-economic inequality is at an unhealthy level (remember, there is such thing as "healthy" amount of inequality), people get angry. They want to understand why they can't do things that successful people can. Billionaires are the epitome of success. So, naturally the resentment shifts towards the "rich".
3) Unfortunately, some "truly bad" people understand the above 2 points very very well. So they deliberately abuse them to gain power. This is essentially a form of populism. Shouting out verbal BS about "How billionaires are working you like dogs and paying you peanuts while they get richer and richer" is a highly effective rhetoric, but with horrifying consequences.
As far I'm concerned, those people, "ehem AOC" are the true evil. Borderline sociopaths who will brand themselves as "the champions of the downtrodden" will do just about anything to gain power. They don't care if they create chaos. They don't care if the country becomes a shit hole. As long as they can take power, often as politicians, they'll do just about anything. And what better ways are there to gain more power than to give the government more power and restrict people's freedom? Remember, most dictators started out as populists who everyone loved but turned out to be self-justifying egomaniacs. In a place like the US, with an intricate and functioning democracy, it's unlikely to happen so these "sociopaths" play the political game.
In a functioning society, governments and private enterprises practice self-discipline and cooperate to solve problems. Vilification of billionaires and call for ridiculous socialist agendas are clear signs of this country starting to malfunction.
No, they are signs that society is already malfunctioning. First of all, "socialists" are a tiny fringe; there are far more nationalist fascists in this country (the Tea Party) than there are socialists. White nationalism and the political movement that represents it had far greater representation in it's day, and today, than do self-professed socialists. We essentially have a fascist sitting in the White House, for god's sake!
People like AOC exist because the system does not work for most Americans. Billionaires are merely the easiest target for this malaise, for the left (as opposed to the right, which thinks it's people with different ethnic backgrounds ruining the country). Billionaires and corporate America wield massively out-sized influence within the political system. Government very much seems to exist by the rich and for the rich. It's hard to watch corporate entities be showered with tax breaks, or hoard cash overseas, all while posting record profits and not be angry. You have airlines getting massive COVID-19 related bailouts and then announcing they'll still lay off workers, and suffering no consequences.... all while half the political class tells us there isn't any money for health care, for a universal basic income, etc - hell, we can't even keep the national infrastructure in good repair! Why is it so hard to understand that frustration? Especially under Mr Trump, the country has been run to the tune of the stock ticker instead of for people.
Government is supposed to exist by the people and for the people. But whatever the reality of the situation is, American government gives the distinct impression of being owned and operated by faceless entities who exist to generate profits for a vanishingly small proportion of the population. Billions and trillions are available for any industrial or agricultural concern that posts a month of losses, but we can't pay to give housing and care for the homeless? Something is broken, and while outright socialism (which no one is advocating for, by the way) may not be the right answer, that's the nature of human response to injustice - to go too far in the other direction. Which is why intelligent "capitalists" should understand that higher taxes, more spending on social policies, etc are all intelligent short term investments. Sure, you'll pay 10% more in taxes, or your capital gains get taxed at a higher rate, or fuck it, your net worth over (xx millions of dollars) gets taxed - that shit is what keeps your head out of a guillotine. There is no human right to own property, it's only the forbearance of your fellow citizens that guarantees it. I know that won't be a popular opinion to hear, but it's the truth. We all have to coexist, and as I've said elsewhere before, it is to the benefit of the rentier class to make sure that labor has a stake in maintaining the current system, because the alternative is true socialism, and a violent form at that. If I have to work 3 jobs, 16 hours a day 7 days a week, just to survive, knowing I am one broken leg away from absolute penury, then why in the fucking world should I have any interest in maintaining the status quo? Active revolt against the system is the only rational option for that person, as we're seeing now. Black folks have recognized that the system won't change to accommodate them, that there is no way to gain equality through traditional means (voting, etc) which are being denied them anyway - so they take to the streets.
I'd say the real problem is radicalization of people's beliefs. Bigotry on all sides is spreading like wildfire. Nothing wrong with being a liberal or being a conservative, as long as you don't believe in bigotry, respect other people's beliefs, and can have constructive and thoughtful conversation with people who hold different views. America used to have this and managed to have George H.W. Bush vs. Bill Clinton, two pragmatists with good leadership.
People like Trump also exist for the same reason. I think we can agree that the radicalization of political beliefs in all directions is caused by the exact same reason. People just respond differently and billionaires and immigrants are just easy targets.I'd argue that this is because the government enables the corporations to do so. Governments hold all the key. If the government set very well-defined, simple, and fair rule in the first place, there wouldn't be room for private enterprises to gain influence through extensive lobbying. Also some part of this sounds very much like a "socialist" rhetoric, which is incredibly misleading.
As for tax issues, the US tax law is way too complicated with too many loopholes. Tax law needs to be simplified, straightforward, and ironclad. But I'm for low corporate tax. Let businesses do their job and tax the people who work in those businesses through progressive income tax. Heck, Obama wanted to reduce corporate tax.
Have you looked at their financial standings at all? I haven't so I don't really know. But until you carefully examine things, you just shouldn't make any criticisms. Who knows, maybe they would have gone insolvent without the bailouts. Bailouts are designed to prevent industries from falling apart so that the job losses are minimized. It's unfortunate, but perhaps that was the best we could do.Also, remember that the Great Depression could've been a run-of-the-mill recession if the authorities bailed out banks and companies. That was the rational behind all the bailouts during the financial crisis, to prevent the melt-down and minimize the damage.
Lots of politicians are dumbasses. But lots of concerns are legitimate. I think there should be a public health care option for people who can't afford private ones. I don't support UBI, but I support negative income tax (I disagree with Mankiw that UBI and negative income tax have the same impacts because negative income tax encourages employment).
The issue is that the government spends too much money on poorly designed systems like Social Security and there are just too many government organizations that exist to serve themselves, not the people. If I had the power to, I'd restructure most of the government organizations - get rid of a lot of them and reduce the sizes of others except those tied to national security and preventive medicine. Then, I'd shift the money to healthcare, education, and infrastructure. That'd probably cut total required spending significantly, so I'd cut income tax. Finally then, we can have fiscal surplus. Singapore's been doing that since its beginning...
I understand the frustration. But, I'm really just frustrated in the politicians of all sides, because lots of what they say just don't make sense and often not based on facts.
Something is broken, but it's not billionaires, it's not immigrants, it's our government. Decades of mismanaged federal policies are now taking their long-term impacts. Big federal government was good during various crises, but now we're facing the long-term damages. Weirdly, the people who caused those long-term damages have been dead for a while.
We should be shifting towards a self-disciplined government that understands its limits and mindful of long-term impacts.
"There is no human right to own property, it's only the forbearance of your fellow citizens that guarantees it." and "it is to the benefit of the rentier class to make sure that labor has a stake in maintaining the current system" are two points I always try to make and people dont get it. It's not that hard - as you gave the example of that person one broken leg away from breaking point - we would all do the same. How the rich are ignorant of this is beyond belief. It's pure greed and ignorance - plain and simple. Property rights are not a human right - we are all animal that coexist - why should swathes of society accept a miserable existence to drive the wasteful lives of the few? Everyone has a right to survival - we are ultimately animals and owe nothing to each other. I hate this idea that property rights are human rights - it's so clearly flawed
chances of becoming a billionaire: one in 578,500 chances of becoming homeless: one in 200
just a reality check to all the prospects that jerk off to dreams about being a billionaire and go to great lengths to defend them
chances of being in poverty 2/100 if you:
graduate high school or get a GED, get any job, don't get married until you have kids and don't before 21.
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