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The question if billionaires are bad for society is pretty much the same question as asking if the aristocracy was bad for previous societies. The existence of

The question if billionaires are bad for society is pretty much the same question as asking if the aristocracy was bad for previous societies. The existence of billionaires clearly undermines the core principles of democracy which is that all people have essentially the same political power. The existence of many laws which clearly aim to benefit billionaires only is enough evidence that this power balance does not exist when there are billionaires. Essentially strong wealth imbalance leads to unstable societies. I find it ironic that the US which was largely founded by people who left their home because of entrenched economics and limited opportunities and who used to have some of the highest taxes for the top brackets and strong eversion to the development of a new aristocracy have after Reagan developed into a nation of defenders log the superrich.

eanzenberg 6y ago
More precisely, attacking billionaires is attacking jobs. So you should ask, are jobs bad for society? Curbing billionaires will only curb job growth, wage growth and realized economic growth. It wont raise much revenue
- projektfu 6y ago
  How is it more precise to say something the commenter didn't say and, probably, wouldn't say?
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    don't feed
    - komali2 6y ago
      Is that a troll? I assumed they were just a fervent capitalist apologist.
      - VRay 6y ago
        They're both trolls, man. This is looking like a Reddit thread "BILLIONAIRES BAD" "JOB CREATORS" "BILLIONAIRES BAD!!!!" "__JOB__ GO BYE BYE"
      - kuzimoto 6y ago
        Capitalism has done more to lift people out of poverty than any other system in human history, so it's got that going for it.
        vidarh 6y ago
        Marx wrote something almost to that effect in the Communist Manifesto. About half the first chapter is intense praise for the advances brought by capitalism.
        kwhitefoot 6y ago
        Billionaires are not necessary for capitalism.
        kuzimoto 6y ago
        I never said they were. I believe they are merely a symptom of it.
        eanzenberg 6y ago
        I wouldn’t be surprised if billionaires are a one of the many reasons people want to immigrate to America.
        pinkfoot 6y ago
        Actually that title belongs to the CCP.
        kuzimoto 6y ago
        "China's Economic Success Proves the Power of Capitalism"[0] My point still stands. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzitelmann/2019/07/08/chinas-economic-success-proves-the-power-of-capitalism/#bb18a713b9d7 https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzitelmann/2019/07/08/chin...
  - eanzenberg 6y ago
    Do billionaires exist in a vacuum, creating their wealth away from society? What does it mean to be a billionaire? Physically, it means they’ve affected a large amount of the population. For the better, or worse? Take away the companies the billionaires created and imagine life.
    - istjohn 6y ago
      You seem to assume that billionaires would throw a hissy fit and go off grid to Galt's Gulch if they faced a wealth tax. But maybe they are motivated by more than the concrete purchasing power of their wealth. If they are motivated by the desire to build, they would still build. If they are motivated by the desire to beat their peers in a game of "Who Has The Most Money," they would still compete. The winning number would just have fewer digits. If they are motivated by the power money buys, well, maybe the rest of us are better off not playing that game.
      - eanzenberg 6y ago
        They would leave, though. There’s evidence of capital flight in high tax regions of Europe.
        weaksauce 6y ago
        there's evidence of capital flight and offshore tax havens now. they need to tax the movement of money.
      - vinay_ys 6y ago
        To curtail and equalize the political power of the rich with the rest of world, their wealth have to be reduced to such an extent that they also don't have the leisure to engage in deep politics. Let's say, if 75% of the voting population has < $x and if even 1% has 3x of that, then they basically have 2x leisure buffer over everyone else to be more politically engaged and influence the small number representative politicians, to manipulate the narrative for the rest of the 75% etc.
- komali2 6y ago
  We don't need billionaires for jobs to exist. 44% of the US gdp is small business - clearly billionaires aren't necessary for jobs to exist, so it's inaccurate to claim that attacking billionaires is attacking the very concept of employment. Furthermore, Jeff bezos being liquidated doesn't automatically mean amazon vanishes. You can have trillion dollar companies without a billionaire running it. The billionaire that founded it probably doesn't think that's fair but I don't really care about the feelings of dragons on top of gold hoards. Finally, even if the liquidation (or really just wealth tax so a slight depression of bezos's steady increase in net worth) of bezos somehow instantly dissolved amazon, that doesn't necessarily imply ethical negative just because people are unemployed, for plenty of reasons. Capitalist ones including other jobs existing, space for new companies to fill, etc. Purely ethical reasons as well such as, are we willing to bow down to dragons on gold hoards for the "right" to justify our existence through 40 hours of menial labor per week for 50 years? I'm not.
  - eanzenberg 6y ago
    Interesting, so billionaires directly affect the majority of jobs, and the rest of the jobs may be indirectly affected by billionaires and their job prowess as well. GDP growth is roughly 2% a year. Everyone here ok with GDP contraction for our future? How do we fund all the social experiments that many people want?
    - spencerflem 6y ago
      GDP growth doesn't matter to normal people if all of the growth goes to billionaires. Wages have been static for decades.
      - eanzenberg 6y ago
        Over the past 3 years much of that growth has gone to “normal” people.
        pwinnski 6y ago
        That doesn't seem line up with anything I've read about. Can you elaborate?
- lefrenchy 6y ago
  I’m sorry, what? Wage growth has stagnated for most Americans in the lat few decades. The idea that billionaires are a necessity for the existence of jobs is absurd. Ask yourself this: if they are paying their employees so well, where are they getting all that money?
  - gadders 6y ago
    One possible cause for wage growth stagnation is the increase in the supply of labour from EG immigration and H1B visas and the like.
    - airstrike 6y ago
      Yeah, no. The cause for wage growth stagnation isn't immigration. Immigration is a net positive for society. Emigration is the real harm. That much is settled in Economics. The cause for wage growth is, perhaps, the offshoring of labor to cheaper economies. Better for Nike to pay minimum wage in China than in the US. Meanwhile, capital gains remain domestic as business owners don't relocate
      - gadders 6y ago
        You supply a lot of assertions in your reply. I'm not sure why you think having more people to fill a role wouldn't drive the price down. Supply and demand applies to jobs and workers as much as any other part of economics.
        airstrike 6y ago
        > I'm not sure why you think having more people to fill a role wouldn't drive the price down. Immigration indeed lowers wages for competing workers, but it also increases wages for complementary workers and generates surplus to owners of capital – which in the long-term constitute a net gain to all of society, but at a minimum does constitute a net loss to workers at large. Research suggests negative wage effects are concentrated among low-skilled workers. Immigration can indeed have disruptive effects, but it can be managed, and its net gains for the whole of society are fairly well established.
dalbasal 6y ago
> is pretty much the same question as asking if the aristocracy was bad for previous societies. Well... that's stacking the deck somewhat. We were talking about how to add nuance. Nuance would be "what do we expect the economic result to be" or "this is a matter of right and wrong, not money." >I find it ironic that the US which was largely founded by people who left their home because of entrenched economics This gets abstract, but... The individuals most influential in the Revolution itself were mostly high ranking colonial officials from British nouveau aristocracy families of the empire. Granting voting rights only to property owners was the default position. "Universal" suffrage limited to european males was the radical position. Not a criticism of them. Just... we can't solve these things with history. If you think billionaires are harmful, why? Equality? Economics?
- istjohn 6y ago
  > If you think billionaires are harmful, why? Equality? Economics? They already answered that: > The existence of billionaires clearly undermines the core principles of democracy which is that all people have essentially the same political power. The existence of many laws which clearly aim to benefit billionaires only is enough evidence that this power balance does not exist when there are billionaires.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    OK, fair enough.
  - amscanne 6y ago
    I don't understand this. Clearly not all people have the same political power, regardless of the existence of billionaires. AOC, as a party firebrand, has more political power than Jeff Bezos, although it manifests differently. You can argue that the power was "earned" (in the sense that AOC won a primary), but how is the power that Bezos has any less earned? The same argument applies not just to politicians, but literally any influential public figure (artists, authors, journalists, actors, etc.).
    - 6y ago
maerF0x0 6y ago
> question if billionaires are bad for society Inflation changes this detail daily. A billion is just a number of units of an arbitrary currency. The real issue goes beyond the number and is more about generative assets vs liability / depreciating ones. IMO the real problem is money in politics. Fix that and many of these issues with billionaires will sort themselves out as the system corrects itself. EDIT: By "money in politics" I mean big money that overwhelms small distributed money. (ie money that does not look democratic) . Obviously it's always going to _take_ money to run campaigns
- pc86 6y ago
  This is hard to do in a legal environment where "money === speech" and you cannot, under most circumstances, abridge political speech.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    Technically... you can in all but one circumstance: modern US constitutional law. I don't think any country has the same laisezz-faire approach to buying politicians... certainly not in the name of free speech. I don't think the argument has even been made. That said, even in the US there isn't a real constitutional barrier to doing something about money in politics. You could make candidates wear sponsorships on their jerseys, like racecar drivers. No free impediment. That's a joke example, but you see my point. That particular ruling is not an actual barrier, the barrier is a legislative majority.
    - pc86 6y ago
      The US is what I was talking about re: "money === speech," e.g. Citizens United. I'll less interested in sound byte-like fixes like "wear sponsorships on their jerseys" and more with what you can realistically change without overturning Supreme Court precedent or ignoring the Constitution entirely.
      - airstrike 6y ago
        > what you can realistically change without overturning Supreme Court precedent or ignoring the Constitution entirely. Not addressing the actual question that's being discussed here, but you can always amend the law
andrewtbham 6y ago
Billionaires are good for society. elon musk and jeff bezos are leading the way into space and that is huge for humanity. If you tax them you will literally stop humanity from becoming multi-planetary. The comparison to aristocracy is absurd. The US was founded abolishing the class system because the wanted equal opportunity, not equal outcome.
- zentiggr 6y ago
  And in the ensuing time, those with money and influence built up the class distinctions in the legal and tax codes. The comparison isn't an exact match, but the class distinction IS. Bezos may be contributing to the privatization of space, but he's doing it by exploiting the ones who keep the merchandise flowing through the cash cow. 19th century robber barons honed some of that machinery, Amazon has capitalized on and honed to a fine sharpness that blade.
- big_youth 6y ago
  >Billionaires are good for society. elon musk and jeff bezos are leading the way into space and that is huge for humanity. Enough with the blanket statements, Sure bill gates is ok but just yesterday the front page had a story of the Sackler family and how they amassed billions by pumping the united states with opiates. They literally killed thousands and ruined the lives of millions, while destroying American society. Billionaries are people, some evil some good. Also, the point of a government is to provide for it's citizens (with taxes) not to hope that in a 100years we can settle on other planets. And btw, in that scenario we would not be the ones who end up on Elysium. As much as SV programmers like to think they can be part the billionaire class you are not and will never be an oligarch.
  - mgkimsal 6y ago
    going further, if sackler family started funding space exploration.... are they now good?
    - chasd00 6y ago
      For the people who worship at the feet of Bill Gates the answer is definitely yes.
roenxi 6y ago
> The existence of billionaires clearly undermines the core principles of democracy which is that all people have essentially the same political power. I'm very pro-democracy; but that isn't a principle that has ever shown to have massive success at scale. There are a lot of fools out there. Notably, some of the most successful experiments in democracy (British, American & Indian traditions) all have pretty clear principles of not having people with equal political power. Eg, a judge simply has more political power than an ordinary person. Britain and India have appointed members of their upper houses and the US has several safeguards to stop power defaulting to a majority. Democracy hasn't achieved success due to some rosy concept of equality, it achieves success because the insufferable can't hold power and it provides an excellent method for different interest groups to negotiate and play mock-battle to work out who is stronger. There is plenty of evidence that dictatorship would be a better model if there were some magic method of keeping the dictator focused on good results - and indeed the US political system has tendencies in that direction. The creation of billionaires as replaceable aristocracy is a potential strength. Plus most of the top US billionaires are self-created. It isn't really comparable to aristocracy either.
- oblio 6y ago
  > Plus most of the top US billionaires are self-created. It isn't really comparable to aristocracy either. That's just a function of accretion. The pearl has just begun to be produced. Do you think that the kids of the current top billionaires will not be at least middling billionaires? The US has lower social mobility than most European countries. Considering the fact that Europe is part of the "Old World", that's a worrying fact in my opinion.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    > The pearl has just begun to be produced. Do you think that the kids of the current top billionaires will not be at least middling billionaires? ... The US has lower social mobility than most European countries. Considering the fact that Europe is part of the "Old World", that's a worrying fact in my opinion. I'm not sure that this is actually true, wrt. "old" wealth. Mostly, because Europe's high income taxes and broadly business-hostile environment makes it very hard for new wealth to compete with old wealth, and especially unattractive for "old" wealth to get involved in riskier, more innovative ventures of their own as opposed to just kicking the can down the generational road.
kuzimoto 6y ago
> The question if billionaires are bad for society is pretty much the same question as asking if the aristocracy was bad for previous societies. Are you comparing billionaires of today, with dictatorships and monarchies of yesterday? Where people can be killed, jailed, sent to work camps, etc. at will? Are people today working for "the man" essentially indentured servants? > The existence of billionaires clearly undermines the core principles of democracy which is that all people have essentially the same political power. I don't think this is a core principal. Every person should have the same voting power, and the laws should apply to everyone equally. But the president and representatives clearly have much more political power than any average citizen. > Essentially strong wealth imbalance leads to unstable societies. This is a big claim, and would have to show some sort of evidence to support it.
centimeter 6y ago
Billionaires are a necessary consequence of having a scale-free market structure in a wealthy society, which is itself necessary for efficient resource allocation in the absence of (hypothetical well-implemented) dictatorial central planning.
- gowld 6y ago
  There's no reason that scale-free at the bottom (small business) entails scale-free at the top (deca-billionaires)
- acituan 6y ago
  > necessary for efficient resource allocation in the absence of (hypothetical well-implemented) dictatorial central planning Replacing a singular dictator with multiple agents that concentrate power is not necessarily more efficient. The biggest inefficiency with disproportionate wealth/resource accumulation is that the incentives/competence of the wealthy doesn’t match up with the money they sit on. Note that I am not talking about only billionaires, rich corporations that employ the smartest of humanity is equally culpable. Although venture capital tries to cure this problem, it is only a small percentage of the outbound money of the wealthy. Think it this way, Apple sits on billions and only innovation we get year after year is slightly thinner devices. Google has tons of billions and machine learning PhDs that work on classifying your cat’s pictures. Elon Musk’s puer aeternus dreams fixate on getting out of the planet instead of fixing it. For all the power they hold, the innovation and improvements in society we get is abysmal. This is not that different that dictatorial central planning, in which a narcissistic entity thinks they can have the wisdom and competence to manage our collective resources and potential as humanity. (Yes, that is exactly what money is, it is being owed other people’s goods and service should you choose to transact it) Why do we have to be capped by the best these people can think of? Accumulating wealth and using it wisely turns out to be very different skills, just like getting elected and governing wisely has been. So billionaires are a source of inefficiency and a part of the market, not a consequence of it because they don’t get out of the market once they are rich. If anything, the more rich they get the larger their participation gets, with all its downsides.
  - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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prepend 6y ago
> The question if billionaires are bad for society is pretty much the same question as asking if the aristocracy was bad for previous societies I think the main difference is that aristocracy was zero sum and rent seeking where billionaires aren’t necessarily (and with recent tech ones not) zero sum. Bezos having a billion dollars doesn’t limit anyone else from having a billion dollars. Only the king was allowed to hunt in the king’s forest. Aristocracy owning 50% of land (or whatever) means no else could own it and more land wasn’t (usually) created. If someone is king, then that means no one else can be. There’s some similarities with aristocracy, especially with generation after generation. But theoretically we have estate taxes and laws against perpetuity that help some and could be prevented. Perhaps half of billionaires are “self made” [0]. I don’t like that term, but I wish we had “how many billionaires weren’t born to millionaires?” But Bill Gates being born to a middle class lawyer and making billions is very different from Bill Gates being born to the Earl of Orkney and selling all the potatoes in Ireland to make billions. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/10/wealthx-billionaire-census-majority-of-worlds-billionaires-self-made.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/10/wealthx-billionaire-census-m...
- spatley 6y ago
  Bill Gates was not born middle class. His Father Bill Sr. was a partner in a very prestigious law firm and his Mother Mary was on the board of Regents at the University of Washington.
  - zimmern 6y ago
    It doesn't matter if he was the son of Warren Buffet. He flipping made Microsoft let him keep his billions he earned them. I guarantee, if 99% of the population were born under the same circumstances, they could not produce a Microsoft.
    - xutopia 6y ago
      You forget how instrumental his lawyer father was in creating the first software license agreements and how his family financed the mainframe computing time he was given before any teenager had ever had access to these machines. His biography is quite clear on how lucky he was and how much his parents contributed to his success. Denying it is perpetuating a myth of a self made billionaire that simply isn't true.
Shivetya 6y ago
Billionaires are not bad for society. However they are a magnate for those who seek to mold society in a particular direction and as such they have to either be exploited or expunged from consideration. Billionaires are in effect about the only means to challenge the political machine that runs each country. They only occur in countries that protected property rights to the point people could amass sufficient wealth so as not be subject to all the pettiness of the political class. Their power is their mobility but only if they have staged their wealth in such a way it cannot merely be confiscated with a single action. Billionaires who come into effect outside of those created by the armed forces of countries being used to enrich their leadership are signs of wildly successful economies that others want to be part of. Yes there is disparity between them and the bottom rungs of the society they are part of but those bottom rungs are usually as far apart from those in nations with no respect for property rights. America isn't suffering from a lack of tax on the wealthy, their wealth or income. America is suffering from misuse of the money taken from all sources used to prop up two political parties so that they are immune to their own actions. When we talk wealth we need to understand how the political class is fleecing America. All this talk of fair wages, $15 an hour, while they lavish pensions on their public employee buddies to the tune of a 100k or more per year, while they gain seats on various commissions and committees paying them 200k a year for part time work all on our dime. The real money issue is the theft by the political class. However they have the best marketing and are adept at playing people against each other.
- notJim 6y ago
  I find this attitude odd. Billionaires are accountable to no one at all, yet have enormous power over all of us. To you this is a good thing? Our political system is obviously a total disaster, but at least we have the power to change it if we want to. In fact, there are popular movements on both the right and the left that are working to make this change happen. Many of the problems with democratic government are in fact caused by the power of the billionaire class to shape society to their whims. I remember reading a paper that compared people's policy preferences to actual implemented policy. They found no correlation. Instead what they found is that the policy preferences of the wealthy were quite well represented. > America is suffering from misuse of the money taken from all sources used to prop up two political parties so that they are immune to their own actions. This makes no sense. Both political parties are in fact propped up by their wealthy and corporate donors. If you look at the establishment of both parties, you will find that they are indeed quite cozy with your beloved billionaire class. Paul Graham has given hundreds of thousands for example: https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=paul+graham https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=paul+g..., and he is a fairly mild example. > All this talk of fair wages, $15 an hour, while they lavish pensions on their public employee buddies to the tune of a 100k or more per year, while they gain seats on various commissions and committees paying them 200k a year for part time work all on our dime. Why shouldn't ordinary workers have retirement benefits? It used to be part of the deal: you devote your life to the company, and get to have a decent, comfortable retirement. In the private sector, unions are so weak/nonexistent that these benefits are gone, but why is that a good thing to you? Similarly, if you refuse to pay politicians a good salary, then only the wealthy will become politicians. I guess to you, that would be a good thing, but most of us would prefer having more ordinary people in power, not fewer.
andrewtbham 6y ago
billionaires definitely can be good for society. they do things that are in the public interest but governments can't attempt because they are inherently risk adverse because politicians want to get re-elected. Bill Gates does high risk speculative, investments for causes such as eradicating diseases. Elon Musk is attempting to colonize Mars. Because Presidential administrations are a maximum of 8 years and it takes longer to achieve a big goal in space, such as moon or mars colonization, Nasa has had a hard time sticking to a long term goal for space.
kolbe 6y ago
> The existence of billionaires clearly undermines the core principles of democracy which is that all people have essentially the same political power. Why is this axiomatically good, though? We should not be maximizing adherence to some theoretical democracy, but to a more abstract idea of how to best organize a successful society.
WalterBright 6y ago
> The question if billionaires are bad for society is pretty much the same question as asking if the aristocracy was bad for previous societies. Not at all. The aristocracy was a legally special class of people based on your ancestors. The end of aristocracy, especially in America, meant for a long list of rags-to-riches stories, and lots of politicians who came from very poor beginnings. The end of aristocracy also meant the end of officers being drawn solely from the aristocracy, which made for a far more effective military, as talent was not related to your parents.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  Economic mobility is more or less the lowest in the US of all OECD countries. This means that it is extremely likely that whatever quartile/quintile/percentile you are born into in the US, you will also die in the same economic bracket. Yes, you can cite whatever exceptions you like - the statistics are clear. Most billionaires are born to other billionaires (or at least extraordinarily wealthy people compared to median wealth). As such, they represent an ancestral inheritance just nearly as much as the aristocracy. There is almost no evidence of de novo great wealth being correlated to great talent. It may (or may not) be a necessary component, but it certainly is not necessary, even if it was possible to quantify precisely what is meant by "great talent". In a capitalist-ish society, there are always going to be great winners in the competitive economy. Pointing them out as if they are special is absurd: the system is designed to generate such cases.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    Back in the 90's, the Seattle Times reported that there were over 10,000 millionaires (excluding home equity) in Seattle as a result of working at Microsoft and getting stock options. I expect its far more than that with Amazon.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      Millionaires? Not even in the ballpark of the group of people we're talking about here. Also, US$1M is not what it used to be (even though it's more than most people will earn in 20 years).

eanzenberg 6y ago

More precisely, attacking billionaires is attacking jobs. So you should ask, are jobs bad for society? Curbing billionaires will only curb job growth, wage growth and realized economic growth. It wont raise much revenue

projektfu 6y ago
How is it more precise to say something the commenter didn't say and, probably, wouldn't say?
- dalbasal 6y ago
  don't feed
  - komali2 6y ago
    Is that a troll? I assumed they were just a fervent capitalist apologist.
    - VRay 6y ago
      They're both trolls, man. This is looking like a Reddit thread "BILLIONAIRES BAD" "JOB CREATORS" "BILLIONAIRES BAD!!!!" "__JOB__ GO BYE BYE"
    - kuzimoto 6y ago
      Capitalism has done more to lift people out of poverty than any other system in human history, so it's got that going for it.
      - vidarh 6y ago
        Marx wrote something almost to that effect in the Communist Manifesto. About half the first chapter is intense praise for the advances brought by capitalism.
      - kwhitefoot 6y ago
        Billionaires are not necessary for capitalism.
        kuzimoto 6y ago
        I never said they were. I believe they are merely a symptom of it.
        eanzenberg 6y ago
        I wouldn’t be surprised if billionaires are a one of the many reasons people want to immigrate to America.
      - pinkfoot 6y ago
        Actually that title belongs to the CCP.
        kuzimoto 6y ago
        "China's Economic Success Proves the Power of Capitalism"[0] My point still stands. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzitelmann/2019/07/08/chinas-economic-success-proves-the-power-of-capitalism/#bb18a713b9d7 https://www.forbes.com/sites/rainerzitelmann/2019/07/08/chin...
- eanzenberg 6y ago
  Do billionaires exist in a vacuum, creating their wealth away from society? What does it mean to be a billionaire? Physically, it means they’ve affected a large amount of the population. For the better, or worse? Take away the companies the billionaires created and imagine life.
  - istjohn 6y ago
    You seem to assume that billionaires would throw a hissy fit and go off grid to Galt's Gulch if they faced a wealth tax. But maybe they are motivated by more than the concrete purchasing power of their wealth. If they are motivated by the desire to build, they would still build. If they are motivated by the desire to beat their peers in a game of "Who Has The Most Money," they would still compete. The winning number would just have fewer digits. If they are motivated by the power money buys, well, maybe the rest of us are better off not playing that game.
    - eanzenberg 6y ago
      They would leave, though. There’s evidence of capital flight in high tax regions of Europe.
      - weaksauce 6y ago
        there's evidence of capital flight and offshore tax havens now. they need to tax the movement of money.
    - vinay_ys 6y ago
      To curtail and equalize the political power of the rich with the rest of world, their wealth have to be reduced to such an extent that they also don't have the leisure to engage in deep politics. Let's say, if 75% of the voting population has < $x and if even 1% has 3x of that, then they basically have 2x leisure buffer over everyone else to be more politically engaged and influence the small number representative politicians, to manipulate the narrative for the rest of the 75% etc.
komali2 6y ago
We don't need billionaires for jobs to exist. 44% of the US gdp is small business - clearly billionaires aren't necessary for jobs to exist, so it's inaccurate to claim that attacking billionaires is attacking the very concept of employment. Furthermore, Jeff bezos being liquidated doesn't automatically mean amazon vanishes. You can have trillion dollar companies without a billionaire running it. The billionaire that founded it probably doesn't think that's fair but I don't really care about the feelings of dragons on top of gold hoards. Finally, even if the liquidation (or really just wealth tax so a slight depression of bezos's steady increase in net worth) of bezos somehow instantly dissolved amazon, that doesn't necessarily imply ethical negative just because people are unemployed, for plenty of reasons. Capitalist ones including other jobs existing, space for new companies to fill, etc. Purely ethical reasons as well such as, are we willing to bow down to dragons on gold hoards for the "right" to justify our existence through 40 hours of menial labor per week for 50 years? I'm not.
- eanzenberg 6y ago
  Interesting, so billionaires directly affect the majority of jobs, and the rest of the jobs may be indirectly affected by billionaires and their job prowess as well. GDP growth is roughly 2% a year. Everyone here ok with GDP contraction for our future? How do we fund all the social experiments that many people want?
  - spencerflem 6y ago
    GDP growth doesn't matter to normal people if all of the growth goes to billionaires. Wages have been static for decades.
    - eanzenberg 6y ago
      Over the past 3 years much of that growth has gone to “normal” people.
      - pwinnski 6y ago
        That doesn't seem line up with anything I've read about. Can you elaborate?
lefrenchy 6y ago
I’m sorry, what? Wage growth has stagnated for most Americans in the lat few decades. The idea that billionaires are a necessity for the existence of jobs is absurd. Ask yourself this: if they are paying their employees so well, where are they getting all that money?
- gadders 6y ago
  One possible cause for wage growth stagnation is the increase in the supply of labour from EG immigration and H1B visas and the like.
  - airstrike 6y ago
    Yeah, no. The cause for wage growth stagnation isn't immigration. Immigration is a net positive for society. Emigration is the real harm. That much is settled in Economics. The cause for wage growth is, perhaps, the offshoring of labor to cheaper economies. Better for Nike to pay minimum wage in China than in the US. Meanwhile, capital gains remain domestic as business owners don't relocate
    - gadders 6y ago
      You supply a lot of assertions in your reply. I'm not sure why you think having more people to fill a role wouldn't drive the price down. Supply and demand applies to jobs and workers as much as any other part of economics.
      - airstrike 6y ago
        > I'm not sure why you think having more people to fill a role wouldn't drive the price down. Immigration indeed lowers wages for competing workers, but it also increases wages for complementary workers and generates surplus to owners of capital – which in the long-term constitute a net gain to all of society, but at a minimum does constitute a net loss to workers at large. Research suggests negative wage effects are concentrated among low-skilled workers. Immigration can indeed have disruptive effects, but it can be managed, and its net gains for the whole of society are fairly well established.

dalbasal 6y ago

> is pretty much the same question as asking if the aristocracy was bad for previous societies. Well... that's stacking the deck somewhat. We were talking about how to add nuance. Nuance would be "what do we expect the economic result to be" or "this is a matter of right and wrong, not money." >I find it ironic that the US which was largely founded by people who left their home because of entrenched economics This gets abstract, but... The individuals most influential in the Revolution itself were mostly high ranking colonial officials from British nouveau aristocracy families of the empire. Granting voting rights only to property owners was the default position. "Universal" suffrage limited to european males was the radical position. Not a criticism of them. Just... we can't solve these things with history. If you think billionaires are harmful, why? Equality? Economics?

istjohn 6y ago
> If you think billionaires are harmful, why? Equality? Economics? They already answered that: > The existence of billionaires clearly undermines the core principles of democracy which is that all people have essentially the same political power. The existence of many laws which clearly aim to benefit billionaires only is enough evidence that this power balance does not exist when there are billionaires.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  OK, fair enough.
- amscanne 6y ago
  I don't understand this. Clearly not all people have the same political power, regardless of the existence of billionaires. AOC, as a party firebrand, has more political power than Jeff Bezos, although it manifests differently. You can argue that the power was "earned" (in the sense that AOC won a primary), but how is the power that Bezos has any less earned? The same argument applies not just to politicians, but literally any influential public figure (artists, authors, journalists, actors, etc.).
  - 6y ago

maerF0x0 6y ago

> question if billionaires are bad for society Inflation changes this detail daily. A billion is just a number of units of an arbitrary currency. The real issue goes beyond the number and is more about generative assets vs liability / depreciating ones. IMO the real problem is money in politics. Fix that and many of these issues with billionaires will sort themselves out as the system corrects itself. EDIT: By "money in politics" I mean big money that overwhelms small distributed money. (ie money that does not look democratic) . Obviously it's always going to _take_ money to run campaigns

pc86 6y ago
This is hard to do in a legal environment where "money === speech" and you cannot, under most circumstances, abridge political speech.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  Technically... you can in all but one circumstance: modern US constitutional law. I don't think any country has the same laisezz-faire approach to buying politicians... certainly not in the name of free speech. I don't think the argument has even been made. That said, even in the US there isn't a real constitutional barrier to doing something about money in politics. You could make candidates wear sponsorships on their jerseys, like racecar drivers. No free impediment. That's a joke example, but you see my point. That particular ruling is not an actual barrier, the barrier is a legislative majority.
  - pc86 6y ago
    The US is what I was talking about re: "money === speech," e.g. Citizens United. I'll less interested in sound byte-like fixes like "wear sponsorships on their jerseys" and more with what you can realistically change without overturning Supreme Court precedent or ignoring the Constitution entirely.
    - airstrike 6y ago
      > what you can realistically change without overturning Supreme Court precedent or ignoring the Constitution entirely. Not addressing the actual question that's being discussed here, but you can always amend the law

andrewtbham 6y ago

Billionaires are good for society. elon musk and jeff bezos are leading the way into space and that is huge for humanity. If you tax them you will literally stop humanity from becoming multi-planetary. The comparison to aristocracy is absurd. The US was founded abolishing the class system because the wanted equal opportunity, not equal outcome.

zentiggr 6y ago
And in the ensuing time, those with money and influence built up the class distinctions in the legal and tax codes. The comparison isn't an exact match, but the class distinction IS. Bezos may be contributing to the privatization of space, but he's doing it by exploiting the ones who keep the merchandise flowing through the cash cow. 19th century robber barons honed some of that machinery, Amazon has capitalized on and honed to a fine sharpness that blade.
big_youth 6y ago
>Billionaires are good for society. elon musk and jeff bezos are leading the way into space and that is huge for humanity. Enough with the blanket statements, Sure bill gates is ok but just yesterday the front page had a story of the Sackler family and how they amassed billions by pumping the united states with opiates. They literally killed thousands and ruined the lives of millions, while destroying American society. Billionaries are people, some evil some good. Also, the point of a government is to provide for it's citizens (with taxes) not to hope that in a 100years we can settle on other planets. And btw, in that scenario we would not be the ones who end up on Elysium. As much as SV programmers like to think they can be part the billionaire class you are not and will never be an oligarch.
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  going further, if sackler family started funding space exploration.... are they now good?
  - chasd00 6y ago
    For the people who worship at the feet of Bill Gates the answer is definitely yes.

roenxi 6y ago

> The existence of billionaires clearly undermines the core principles of democracy which is that all people have essentially the same political power. I'm very pro-democracy; but that isn't a principle that has ever shown to have massive success at scale. There are a lot of fools out there. Notably, some of the most successful experiments in democracy (British, American & Indian traditions) all have pretty clear principles of not having people with equal political power. Eg, a judge simply has more political power than an ordinary person. Britain and India have appointed members of their upper houses and the US has several safeguards to stop power defaulting to a majority. Democracy hasn't achieved success due to some rosy concept of equality, it achieves success because the insufferable can't hold power and it provides an excellent method for different interest groups to negotiate and play mock-battle to work out who is stronger. There is plenty of evidence that dictatorship would be a better model if there were some magic method of keeping the dictator focused on good results - and indeed the US political system has tendencies in that direction. The creation of billionaires as replaceable aristocracy is a potential strength. Plus most of the top US billionaires are self-created. It isn't really comparable to aristocracy either.

oblio 6y ago
> Plus most of the top US billionaires are self-created. It isn't really comparable to aristocracy either. That's just a function of accretion. The pearl has just begun to be produced. Do you think that the kids of the current top billionaires will not be at least middling billionaires? The US has lower social mobility than most European countries. Considering the fact that Europe is part of the "Old World", that's a worrying fact in my opinion.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > The pearl has just begun to be produced. Do you think that the kids of the current top billionaires will not be at least middling billionaires? ... The US has lower social mobility than most European countries. Considering the fact that Europe is part of the "Old World", that's a worrying fact in my opinion. I'm not sure that this is actually true, wrt. "old" wealth. Mostly, because Europe's high income taxes and broadly business-hostile environment makes it very hard for new wealth to compete with old wealth, and especially unattractive for "old" wealth to get involved in riskier, more innovative ventures of their own as opposed to just kicking the can down the generational road.

kuzimoto 6y ago

> The question if billionaires are bad for society is pretty much the same question as asking if the aristocracy was bad for previous societies. Are you comparing billionaires of today, with dictatorships and monarchies of yesterday? Where people can be killed, jailed, sent to work camps, etc. at will? Are people today working for "the man" essentially indentured servants? > The existence of billionaires clearly undermines the core principles of democracy which is that all people have essentially the same political power. I don't think this is a core principal. Every person should have the same voting power, and the laws should apply to everyone equally. But the president and representatives clearly have much more political power than any average citizen. > Essentially strong wealth imbalance leads to unstable societies. This is a big claim, and would have to show some sort of evidence to support it.

centimeter 6y ago

Billionaires are a necessary consequence of having a scale-free market structure in a wealthy society, which is itself necessary for efficient resource allocation in the absence of (hypothetical well-implemented) dictatorial central planning.

gowld 6y ago
There's no reason that scale-free at the bottom (small business) entails scale-free at the top (deca-billionaires)
acituan 6y ago
> necessary for efficient resource allocation in the absence of (hypothetical well-implemented) dictatorial central planning Replacing a singular dictator with multiple agents that concentrate power is not necessarily more efficient. The biggest inefficiency with disproportionate wealth/resource accumulation is that the incentives/competence of the wealthy doesn’t match up with the money they sit on. Note that I am not talking about only billionaires, rich corporations that employ the smartest of humanity is equally culpable. Although venture capital tries to cure this problem, it is only a small percentage of the outbound money of the wealthy. Think it this way, Apple sits on billions and only innovation we get year after year is slightly thinner devices. Google has tons of billions and machine learning PhDs that work on classifying your cat’s pictures. Elon Musk’s puer aeternus dreams fixate on getting out of the planet instead of fixing it. For all the power they hold, the innovation and improvements in society we get is abysmal. This is not that different that dictatorial central planning, in which a narcissistic entity thinks they can have the wisdom and competence to manage our collective resources and potential as humanity. (Yes, that is exactly what money is, it is being owed other people’s goods and service should you choose to transact it) Why do we have to be capped by the best these people can think of? Accumulating wealth and using it wisely turns out to be very different skills, just like getting elected and governing wisely has been. So billionaires are a source of inefficiency and a part of the market, not a consequence of it because they don’t get out of the market once they are rich. If anything, the more rich they get the larger their participation gets, with all its downsides.
- 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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prepend 6y ago

> The question if billionaires are bad for society is pretty much the same question as asking if the aristocracy was bad for previous societies I think the main difference is that aristocracy was zero sum and rent seeking where billionaires aren’t necessarily (and with recent tech ones not) zero sum. Bezos having a billion dollars doesn’t limit anyone else from having a billion dollars. Only the king was allowed to hunt in the king’s forest. Aristocracy owning 50% of land (or whatever) means no else could own it and more land wasn’t (usually) created. If someone is king, then that means no one else can be. There’s some similarities with aristocracy, especially with generation after generation. But theoretically we have estate taxes and laws against perpetuity that help some and could be prevented. Perhaps half of billionaires are “self made” [0]. I don’t like that term, but I wish we had “how many billionaires weren’t born to millionaires?” But Bill Gates being born to a middle class lawyer and making billions is very different from Bill Gates being born to the Earl of Orkney and selling all the potatoes in Ireland to make billions. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/10/wealthx-billionaire-census-majority-of-worlds-billionaires-self-made.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/10/wealthx-billionaire-census-m...

spatley 6y ago
Bill Gates was not born middle class. His Father Bill Sr. was a partner in a very prestigious law firm and his Mother Mary was on the board of Regents at the University of Washington.
- zimmern 6y ago
  It doesn't matter if he was the son of Warren Buffet. He flipping made Microsoft let him keep his billions he earned them. I guarantee, if 99% of the population were born under the same circumstances, they could not produce a Microsoft.
  - xutopia 6y ago
    You forget how instrumental his lawyer father was in creating the first software license agreements and how his family financed the mainframe computing time he was given before any teenager had ever had access to these machines. His biography is quite clear on how lucky he was and how much his parents contributed to his success. Denying it is perpetuating a myth of a self made billionaire that simply isn't true.

Shivetya 6y ago

Billionaires are not bad for society. However they are a magnate for those who seek to mold society in a particular direction and as such they have to either be exploited or expunged from consideration. Billionaires are in effect about the only means to challenge the political machine that runs each country. They only occur in countries that protected property rights to the point people could amass sufficient wealth so as not be subject to all the pettiness of the political class. Their power is their mobility but only if they have staged their wealth in such a way it cannot merely be confiscated with a single action. Billionaires who come into effect outside of those created by the armed forces of countries being used to enrich their leadership are signs of wildly successful economies that others want to be part of. Yes there is disparity between them and the bottom rungs of the society they are part of but those bottom rungs are usually as far apart from those in nations with no respect for property rights. America isn't suffering from a lack of tax on the wealthy, their wealth or income. America is suffering from misuse of the money taken from all sources used to prop up two political parties so that they are immune to their own actions. When we talk wealth we need to understand how the political class is fleecing America. All this talk of fair wages, $15 an hour, while they lavish pensions on their public employee buddies to the tune of a 100k or more per year, while they gain seats on various commissions and committees paying them 200k a year for part time work all on our dime. The real money issue is the theft by the political class. However they have the best marketing and are adept at playing people against each other.

notJim 6y ago
I find this attitude odd. Billionaires are accountable to no one at all, yet have enormous power over all of us. To you this is a good thing? Our political system is obviously a total disaster, but at least we have the power to change it if we want to. In fact, there are popular movements on both the right and the left that are working to make this change happen. Many of the problems with democratic government are in fact caused by the power of the billionaire class to shape society to their whims. I remember reading a paper that compared people's policy preferences to actual implemented policy. They found no correlation. Instead what they found is that the policy preferences of the wealthy were quite well represented. > America is suffering from misuse of the money taken from all sources used to prop up two political parties so that they are immune to their own actions. This makes no sense. Both political parties are in fact propped up by their wealthy and corporate donors. If you look at the establishment of both parties, you will find that they are indeed quite cozy with your beloved billionaire class. Paul Graham has given hundreds of thousands for example: https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=paul+graham https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=paul+g..., and he is a fairly mild example. > All this talk of fair wages, $15 an hour, while they lavish pensions on their public employee buddies to the tune of a 100k or more per year, while they gain seats on various commissions and committees paying them 200k a year for part time work all on our dime. Why shouldn't ordinary workers have retirement benefits? It used to be part of the deal: you devote your life to the company, and get to have a decent, comfortable retirement. In the private sector, unions are so weak/nonexistent that these benefits are gone, but why is that a good thing to you? Similarly, if you refuse to pay politicians a good salary, then only the wealthy will become politicians. I guess to you, that would be a good thing, but most of us would prefer having more ordinary people in power, not fewer.

andrewtbham 6y ago

billionaires definitely can be good for society. they do things that are in the public interest but governments can't attempt because they are inherently risk adverse because politicians want to get re-elected. Bill Gates does high risk speculative, investments for causes such as eradicating diseases. Elon Musk is attempting to colonize Mars. Because Presidential administrations are a maximum of 8 years and it takes longer to achieve a big goal in space, such as moon or mars colonization, Nasa has had a hard time sticking to a long term goal for space.

kolbe 6y ago

> The existence of billionaires clearly undermines the core principles of democracy which is that all people have essentially the same political power. Why is this axiomatically good, though? We should not be maximizing adherence to some theoretical democracy, but to a more abstract idea of how to best organize a successful society.

WalterBright 6y ago

> The question if billionaires are bad for society is pretty much the same question as asking if the aristocracy was bad for previous societies. Not at all. The aristocracy was a legally special class of people based on your ancestors. The end of aristocracy, especially in America, meant for a long list of rags-to-riches stories, and lots of politicians who came from very poor beginnings. The end of aristocracy also meant the end of officers being drawn solely from the aristocracy, which made for a far more effective military, as talent was not related to your parents.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
Economic mobility is more or less the lowest in the US of all OECD countries. This means that it is extremely likely that whatever quartile/quintile/percentile you are born into in the US, you will also die in the same economic bracket. Yes, you can cite whatever exceptions you like - the statistics are clear. Most billionaires are born to other billionaires (or at least extraordinarily wealthy people compared to median wealth). As such, they represent an ancestral inheritance just nearly as much as the aristocracy. There is almost no evidence of de novo great wealth being correlated to great talent. It may (or may not) be a necessary component, but it certainly is not necessary, even if it was possible to quantify precisely what is meant by "great talent". In a capitalist-ish society, there are always going to be great winners in the competitive economy. Pointing them out as if they are special is absurd: the system is designed to generate such cases.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  Back in the 90's, the Seattle Times reported that there were over 10,000 millionaires (excluding home equity) in Seattle as a result of working at Microsoft and getting stock options. I expect its far more than that with Amazon.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    Millionaires? Not even in the ballpark of the group of people we're talking about here. Also, US$1M is not what it used to be (even though it's more than most people will earn in 20 years).