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This essay uses a weak straw-man: the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people I think the "principle of charity" or "steel-man" criticism of b

by drewrv 6y ago

This essay uses a weak straw-man: the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people I think the "principle of charity" or "steel-man" criticism of billionaires isn't that every single billionaire is directly exploiting people. It would be closer to something like this: The problem is that our society has feedback loops that make it hard to escape poverty, and feedback loops that let the wealthy amass more wealth and power. It doesn't have to be this way, it's a product of our laws and can be changed. Warren Buffet doesn't directly exploit anyone. However he does pay less taxes than his secretary. To the extent that Uber drivers and Amazon warehouse workers are exploited, it's because our society has millions of desperate people struggling to get by. What's the point of being the wealthiest nation ever on paper, if there's terrible schools, high infant mortality, and lead in the drinking pipes?

WalterBright 6y ago
> However he does pay less taxes than his secretary. His secretary can buy Berkshire Hathaway stock at any time and pay a lower tax rate than Buffet, while growing wealth at the same rate as Buffet.
TAForObvReasons 6y ago
> Warren Buffet doesn't directly exploit anyone FWIW He has a significant stake in a company (Berkshire Hathaway) that does own a series of companies that engage in questionable practices. And he is uniquely in a position to stop that practice and chooses not to. https://publicintegrity.org/business/warren-buffetts-mobile-home-empire-preys-on-the-poor/ https://publicintegrity.org/business/warren-buffetts-mobile-...
throwaway09223 6y ago
This isn't a straw man, it is an extremely common belief and it deserves to be addressed and debunked. My social media is stuffed to the brim with people posting exactly this sentiment. It is true that there are other, more reasonable beliefs.
- dang 6y ago
  I don't disagree, but can you please not create accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=community%20identity%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
  - throwaway09223 6y ago
    Yes, sorry. I started browsing HN on a new device a few weeks ago and I made a new account because I didn't have access to my other system at the time.
    - dang 6y ago
      Appreciated!
  - pgayed 6y ago
    Implement the email spam solution that never was: set a nontrivial fee to create a (posting) account on hn. 10 bucks oughtta do the trick.
    - dang 6y ago
      It's important to HN that anyone be able to participate. We pay a heavy price for that in spammers and trolls, but the benefit still exceeds the cost.
  - anoncow 6y ago
    How did you know? From the username?
    - 6y ago
SMAAART 6y ago
Your entire comment, minus your opening statement, contradicts your opening statement; and supports the theory that people mistakenly claim that the only way to become billionaire (or millionaires for that matter) is by exploring people.
- newen 6y ago
  Lol yes. He says billionaires don't exploit people. Then explains how billionaires exploit people. And then struggles to morally justify billionaires exploiting people.
dnautics 6y ago
it's not a weak straw man. There are people who say this: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/aoc-accuses-billionaires-exploiting-workers-paying-slave-wages-2020-1-1028842799?op=1 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/aoc-accuses-...
- cactus2093 6y ago
  And worth pointing out, there are not just random people saying it but members of the US Congress with many millions of supporters.
- lumost 6y ago
  It's a real argument, depending on where you stand. To become a billionaire, one must be able to amass 10 thousand times more wealth than the median household in the US. To reach the lofty heights of Bill Gates et al. one must amass ~ 1 million times more wealth than the median US household. The reason why some believe that to be a billionaire is exploitative is that they believe this 4-6 order of magnitude disparity in wealth is inherently exploitative. You could always imagine a society where the warehouse workers were paid double ( or even quadruple ) for the effort they perform and a 100 billionaire would simply be a 100 millionaire. Regardless of where you draw the line for the discrepancy to be considered exploitative. The line exists somewhere for everyone. Tsar Nicholas had the equivalent of ~1.3 trillion in today's dollars in wealth prior to the revolution, and I can't imagine the US supporting anyone with amassing more than 10-20 trillion dollars in wealth. Carnegie et. al. each managed to earn up to ~300 billion in today's dollars prior to the anti-trust act.
  - dnautics 6y ago
    I think this depends on what you mean by "exploitative". It's such a loaded word used for rhetorical purposes that it's not necessarily clear where one draws the line between any given pair of arguments.
  - refurb 6y ago
    How would your comment read if you replaced the word “amass wealth” versus “create value”?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
generalizations 6y ago
> It doesn't have to be this way, it's a product of our laws and can be changed I don't think any of your three statements are true, based on my (limited) knowledge of history. Far as I know, the only way to break the feedback loop is to restart it - a revolution or the like - and build something in its place that maximizes the time until the loop has to be broken again. If anything, I'd guess that it's human nature to try and amass power/money/influence/cows, and the more you have the easier it is to get more. That's not a fault with our laws, it's what people do - on average, in aggregate.
- naikrovek 6y ago
  Society and laws are constructs, and we constructed them to be this way. We do not need to restart from zero to fix things. People do those things because the pressure to avoid doing those things is far too weak, and the pressure to be a good person is one of the things that society should provide.
  - generalizations 6y ago
    Ok, but that pressure is brought to bear from somewhere. If there's people who are given the power to apply that pressure, then that power is now something people can amass. I don't know how you're imagining that society can provide that pressure without also giving ambitous people a way to collect power.
- joe463369 6y ago
  Capitalism unchecked tends towards monopolies and subsistence wage for those lucky enough to have a job. I agree this is a product of our human instincts, but the only thing stopping it - short of a revolution - are thoughtful laws designed to balance the entrepreneurial spirit with the need to treat everybody equitably.
bch 6y ago
> Warren Buffet doesn't directly exploit anyone. There might be something to discuss there: https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/warren-buffetts-mobile-home-empire-preys-on-the-poor/ https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/w...
Privacy846 6y ago
I don’t know who Graham is talking about—“politicians”?—but this is a very famous claim, or corollary, from Marx: capitalists exploit workers. Why? Because of the labor theory of value. (1) All value is created from labor. (2) Capitalists employ workers in order to extract surplus value from them (what’s the point of employing them if you don’t get more out of your “investment” than you pay it?). (3) Ergo capitalists exploit workers. Of course millionaires and billionaires can still _work_ themselves in the sense given above, i.e. in a way that creates value. And one could argue that one can be a self-made (no exploitation of others) millionaire. But it becomes farcical to claim that a person can become a billionaire without exploiting people. Any person on Earth would need much more than one lifetime to create a Billion USD worth of value _through their own labor alone_.
- varjag 6y ago
  > But it becomes farcical to claim that a person can become a billionaire without exploiting people. It is farcical to a Marxist maybe, with infinite patience for labor theory of value despite century worth of contradictory evidence.
  - Privacy846 6y ago
    Here’s a recent quote from the Marxist rag The Economist: > One reason for the measure’s current strength is that the balance of power seems to have moved in favour of capital, and against labour, in recent decades. The decline of trade unions, and the addition of China to the global market, have weakened workers’ bargaining power; in the past 15 years, corporate profits have been regularly equivalent to more than 10% of American GDP, and at a much higher level than they were between 1960 and 2000. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/12/04/expensive-stocks-do-not-necessarily-mean-a-crash-is-close https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/12/04/expensiv... But I’m still Graham’s Billionaires Build la-la land is still a reality, though.
    - varjag 6y ago
      This has nothing to do with labor theory of value.
mcguire 6y ago
Almost. The straw-man is that future billionaires start out to exploit people. The exploitation is a side effect.
Spooky23 6y ago
That’s the equivalent of a solider claiming they were just following orders. The Doordash people don’t want to steal tips, but the law doesn’t punish them for doing so, and the people getting exploited are drinking lead water anyway.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Door dash didn't steal tips, they supplemented tips until they were pressured to stop.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    Commissioned salesmen sometimes work on a draw. A guy delivering Five Guys? Please. For a W2 worker it’s wage theft. Since these folks are 1099s it’s not protected by law. Either way is gross and unethical.
imgabe 6y ago
It's not a strawman insofar as there are people who literally say exactly that, and those are the people he's addressing. I agree there are more reasonable discussions to be had about how to distribute wealth for the greatest benefit to society but there are people who believe that if we just tax Jeff Bezos more then the Water Authority in Flint, MI will somehow become more competent.
- danans 6y ago
  > It's not a strawman insofar as there are people who literally say exactly that People oppose billionaires paying low taxes, and the related lack of public investment in bedrock services and infrastructure they need. When a rural area has no hospital, or a city has crumbling roads and transit, yes, people resent enormously wealthy people for whom those are not concerns. People do not, however, oppose their success at building companies that make money. PG is picking a fight with the least sophisticated form of the anti-billionaire argument (i.e. "billionaires suck"), which is beneath him. I get that it's easier to do that than than argue over how the structural issues that allow massive wealth accumulation also undermine the foundations that markets and societies are built on, but it's really beneath PG to choose such a trite argument to oppose. > if we just tax Jeff Bezos more then the Water Authority in Flint, MI will somehow become more competent. That, however, is a strawman. Nobody suggests that at all. People who support more progressive taxation point to things like the New Deal and the strong progressive taxation coupled with public investment in infrastructure and education that propelled the United States forward.
  - imgabe 6y ago
    > That, however, is a strawman. Nobody suggests that at all. People who support more progressive taxation point to things like the New Deal and the strong progressive taxation coupled with public investment in infrastructure and education that propelled the United States forward. You're making that exact argument in fancier words. "strong progressive taxation coupled with public investment in infrastructure" implies that the problem is not enough money. So take more money from people who have lots of money and let the government spend it. The US spends more per-pupil on education than almost every other country [1], with worse outcomes in most cases. The corrosion inhibitors that would have prevented the Flint water crisis cost $140 per day. That's not a misplaced decimal point. That's One Hundred and Forty dollars. Do we need to revamp the entire US tax system to come up with a 140 bucks? No. The money is there, what's needed is some competence in how it's applied. [1] https://www.manhattan-institute.org/issues-2020-us-public-school-spending-teachers-pay https://www.manhattan-institute.org/issues-2020-us-public-sc...
bedhead 6y ago
You are right about the feedback loops that make it hard to escape poverty. The most uncomfortable one to talk about is basic social network effects. Two people meet at some prestigious college and get married - are we shocked they have children who are predisposed for success? Besides from having god-given IQ, they are likely some combination of ambitious, punctual, respectful of authority, long-term oriented, hard-working, etc. But would one of those parents have ever been interested in marrying and having kids with some high school dropout, someone from a vastly different social place and lacking those values? It's pretty rare. Society organizes itself around this stuff and it's extremely powerful. The two high school dropouts end up hooking up and having kids and it's often times (though obviously not always) the opposite cycle. And yeah there are plenty of societal biases that are real, but I really don't think anything will ever be as powerful as this self-organizing dynamic of how people marry and have kids. It's cold and depressing and uncomfortable but it's reality.
- cactus2093 6y ago
  In your explanation I see the feedback loop that makes it easier for you and your children to stay out of poverty if you're already successful. I don't see a feedback loop that makes it hard to escape poverty. Why did the high school dropouts drop out in the first place, and why does that make their kid more likely to drop out? Ideally their kid should still have access to public school education, with all the tools needed to go on to become successful themselves. To be clear I'm not saying there is no poverty feedback loop, just that even taking what you've said about fundamental human preferences at face value it is not inevitable that it stay this way. We can improve our systems to make it easier for people to escape poverty. But this doesn't really have anything to do with billionaires. Many of the issues in these systems are not even for lack of funding, but inefficiently spent funding or other poorly designed incentives or bureaucratic rules that make things more difficult for poor people.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Ideally their kid should still have access to public school education, with all the tools needed to go on to become successful themselves. Ideally, but in reality public education is not an equalizer like that. Wealthy parents give their students advantages that school can't provide in our society: e.g. upper class culture and habits, resources for extra education, connections, etc. Even the institutional bits aren't equal: local property tax based funding mechanisms mean richer people live in better-resourced school districts than poorer people, with better educational opportunities.
mightybyte 6y ago
> the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people Here's a slightly different take on this idea: The only way to become a billionaire is to use leverage. I think this is a much more defensible argument. You can't become a billionaire by yourself. You have to have some mechanism of leverage to magnify your impact. Hiring employees is a form of leverage. Using a computer is a form of leverage. Putting your software on a large number of cloud computers is yet an additional form of leverage. The question of whether one is exploiting their employees is a worthwhile question to ask, but it is a completely separate (and much more polarizing) question. I think that leverage is the core kernel of truth lurking within this question.
- threatofrain 6y ago
  IMO, for this context, leverage is within the realm of individual incentive vs. pressure, not that you "leveraged" your DB's guarantees for worry-free scaling.
- pradn 6y ago
  You are turning a moral judgement ("exploiting") to a more mechanical expression ("using leverage"). For critics of billionaires, the moral judgement is the whole point. Whether the "billionaire problem" belongs in the moral realm or in the dispassionate realm of math or economics is an ideological choice.
  - mightybyte 6y ago
    I'm intentionally trying to separate the moral and the mechanical for the purpose of understanding--both understanding the structure of the way the world works and how we can make it better as well as understanding the arguments of those for whom it's ideological. (See also the sibling comment to your by pdonis.)
    - pradn 6y ago
      I see what you mean here, but I think the shift in mode of analysis from moral to scientific blunts the force of the critique.
rufus_foreman 6y ago
>> However he does pay less taxes than his secretary No, he does not. He claims he paid $1,850,000 in federal taxes in 2015, do you think his secretary earned that much, let alone paid that much in taxes? In addition: “In 2019, Berkshire sent $3.6 billion to the U.S. Treasury to pay its current income tax,” Buffett said in his annual letter to shareholders. “The U.S. government collected $243 billion from corporate income tax payments during the same period. From these statistics, you can take pride that your company delivered 1.5% of the federal income taxes paid by all of corporate America.” >> What's the point of being the wealthiest nation ever on paper, if there's terrible schools, high infant mortality, and lead in the drinking pipes? A higher percentage of people graduate from college today than graduated from high school a hundred years ago, infant mortality is 6 per 1000 today vs. 100 per 1000 a hundred years ago, and blood lead levels in children have been reduced so much that it is claimed to be largely responsible for the drop in crime rates since the 1980s. The point of getting wealthy is that it gives you resources to deal with your problems.
- criddell 6y ago
  > No, he does not. A quick googling suggest that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    Which is a very different claim.
    - z3ncyberpunk 6y ago
      equally corrupt and even sadder you shill so hard for the scum
    - criddell 6y ago
      It still feels equally outrageous to me.
      - rufus_foreman 6y ago
friedman23 6y ago
>This essay uses a weak straw-man: the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people It's not a strawman, people repeat this as fact in any far left leaning forum. To socialists all work in a capitalist system is exploitation.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
What's the point of being the wealthiest nation ever on paper, if there's terrible schools, high infant mortality, and lead in the drinking pipes? I think it's a little more complicated than that. I think "virtual goods" make it hard to figure out exactly where we stand these days in terms of economic health, a la this past comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732
centimeter 6y ago
There is not strong evidence that these feedback loops actually exist. Wealth is actually strongly mean-reverting along genetically heritable lines.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  Do you live in Scandinavia? We're not talking about Scandinavia. USA ranks #27 here: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-of-82-countries/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-...
  - centimeter 6y ago
    That report is obvious bullshit and you should be able to discern that immediately. It ranks countries on “ healthcare, education, technology access, working conditions, and social protection” and then calls that “social mobility”. Zero actual analysis of intra- or inter-generational wealth variance.
    - sien 6y ago
      Interesting. The OECD have a better report : https://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/medios/44582910.pdf https://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/medios/44582910.pdf From page 5 Australia ranks #2 and Canada #5 and the US is #10. That's on intergenerational income quintile mobility.
droptablemain 6y ago
Buffet may not directly exploit anyone, but wage-labor in itself is exploitation. If he's investing in companies that hire employees with the intent of extracting surplus value from said employees, then he's indirectly participating in capitalist exploitation.
8note 6y ago
Which billionaires have become billionaires without exploiting their labour? Who's becoming a billionaire outside of the ownership class?
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I suspect most of the workers for Ray Dalio, James Simons, and David E. Shaw would strongly disagree with the characterization that they are being exploited. Disclaimer/source: I worked for D. E. Shaw & Co and have close friends who work at RenTech. My personal experiences were amazingly positive and friends at RenTech say similar things.
slifin 6y ago
It annoys me that these conversations are always focused on people from the Forbes list Which explicitly excludes dictators and royal families It's super easy to defend the actions of "industrious" businessmen if you're even a little bit to the right Is it so easy to defend dictators who are even richer?
lukejduncan 6y ago
Having a lower tax rate is different than paying less tax. Not saying there isn’t something wrong with a lower tax rate, but it’s disingenuous to frame it this way.
nazgulnarsil 6y ago
PSA that the bottom 50% of taxpayers pay 3% of the taxes. Net negative once you consider all the frictional costs.
mattigames 6y ago
> and feedback loops that let the wealthy amass more wealth and power. It doesn't have to be this way, it's a product of our laws and can be changed. Those feedback loops are directly created by wealthy people for wealthy people, because politicians like money like just everyone else its easy to manipulate them into creating feedback loops that help those wealthy folks amaze even more wealth. The more corruptible the politicians are the more the wealth gap increases, from there is easy to conclude why millions are struggling to get by even in the wealthiest nation on paper.
namelosw 6y ago
> the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people I don't if it is the only way to become a billionaire. But the bigger problem is every billionaire is exploiting people. Imagine you are one of the wealthiest guys in the world. You can either: - Hire the best financial guys to take care of your equities (although they are the best they look cheap to you). - Hold a share of the equity of every business you can find in the world. Either way, if the world is growing, you earn money by lying on the bed all day long. And then you can use the money exchange a large amount of people's labor for your own pleasure, instead of building costly infrastructures for your country for very small returns. Even if the world is going through a recession, other people would more desperate than you - you would lose part of your money, but people's life would crash, small companies would go broke, most of the entities have to do sub-optimal choices, and you don't have to. Then you can do the purchase and hold even more equities of the world. In a word, holding extreme large number of equities is exploiting people because they can barely do nothing and enjoy people's labor without any risks.
WalterBright 6y ago
> exploiting people Old soviet joke: Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's the other way around!
known 6y ago
"Behind every great fortune there is crime" --Balzac (b. 1799) e.g. https://www.quora.com/Which-caste-is-looting-India/answers/220938900 https://www.quora.com/Which-caste-is-looting-India/answers/2... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility != https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility
CalChris 6y ago
To be more accurate, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. https://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secretary-taxes/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secret...
CyberRabbi 6y ago
It’s not hard to escape poverty at all, especially in America. Just requires that you’re willing to pursue a skilled career.
- bccdee 6y ago
  You also need to already have the capital to get a skilled education and to support yourself while you do. Or you could assume large amounts of student debt before having a job, gambling on being able to complete your education and get a job before the payments start coming in. There's a student debt crisis for a reason. And you better not get too ambitious and pursue a degree that's too difficult, or you won't be able to complete your degree and you'll have all the debt but none of the credentials.
  - CyberRabbi 6y ago
    The student debt crisis is suffered mainly by people who majored in non-technical fields from liberal arts colleges. There is a lack of jobs for people who have training in the humanities. That is unfortunate but that is not what I am suggesting. If you take out a loan for professional training for a skill that is in high demand you will have little trouble paying it back. Software engineering is an example, but really any type of hard engineering training will relatively easily result in a relatively high paying job. There is such a high demand for those jobs in the US that we currently import many of those workers from China and India via H1B.
    - bccdee 6y ago
      Not everyone is well-suited to those fields. Starting a degree that you can't finish is the worst choice possible. But even if everyone retrained as software engineers, that would just result in a surplus & everyone would need to retrain again.
- doctor_eval 6y ago
  What do you recommend? And how do you recommend pursuing this skilled career when you don’t even have enough money for food, clothes and shelter? I mean that’s pretty much a working definition of poverty and I’m really curious how easy you think it is to do when you’re hungry, dirty and tired.
nathanvanfleet 6y ago
I think he actually owns real estate companies that do in fact exploit people. It's also interesting to find out that wage theft, the underpayment or nonpayment of wages is actually a huge problem and is pretty much the definition of exploitation (not being paid for work done). Many regular public companies engage in it regularly.
Aeolun 6y ago
> What's the point of being the wealthiest nation ever on paper, if there's terrible schools, high infant mortality, and lead in the drinking pipes? How does this affect me as a wealthy person?
quantified 6y ago
Nothing incompatible about exploiting and building in one person or coterie. It would be great if Y Combinator filters well to emphasize non-exploiting billionaires, but that’s certainly less that all billionaires.
kortilla 6y ago
> However he does pay less taxes than his secretary. No, he absolutely does not. He pays a lower effective tax rate but vastly more in actual money than his secretary. His effective rate is 17 something percent because the capital gains tax rate is 15%, not because he’s rich. https://www.fool.com/taxes/2020/09/25/why-does-billionaire-warren-buffett-pay-a-lower-ta/ https://www.fool.com/taxes/2020/09/25/why-does-billionaire-w... We could certainly increase cap gains rate to regular income, but that would fuck a huge portion of the middle class depending on gains in 401ks for retirement.
simonh 6y ago
Let’s phrase that feedback loop a bit more clearly. When a person finds a way to deploy resources more efficiently, to meet other people’s needs better and with improved efficiency, society has feedback looks that divert more resources to that persons control so they can do so at increased scale. Isn’t that what we want? Just a week ago or so on Reddit someone posted imagining how much good Elon could do with his Billions. I replied that yes, maybe he could devote those resources to push forward electrification of transport to mitigate global warming, invest heavily is solar power technology and devote resources to trying to create a future for humanity in space. Well, of course, that’s exactly what he’s doing. All those billions aren’t stacked in a mountain of dollar notes in his basement, it’s embodied in the jobs, infrastructure, technology and products of his companies. This basic, fundamental ignorance of even the simplest economic concepts is incredibly common. I see it all the time, here as well.
- petra 6y ago
  Musk is the exception, not the rule. It's usually much easier to make money in unnecessary bullshit, and via rent-like activities, than in socially valuable activities. So that's what most rich people choose to do.
  - tompccs 6y ago
    Musk is on his way to becoming the richest man on earth, I hardly think in a conversation about billionaires you can discount the example of someone who represents a couple of hundred of them.
  - simonh 6y ago
    He really isn't, as Paul Graham sys he's got unparalelled experience of working with many people doing exactly this - creating value and accumulating the resources to leverage that value to benefit society. Yes of course there are inefficiencies in the system, rent seeking behaviour does happen and it's an important aspect of policy to try and minimise and disincentivise it. Nevertheless, our economic system does work. All those companies employing people, paying taxes and generating goods and services are the economy. That's where the wealth is being generated. The vast majority of wealthy people are incredibly hard working, dedicated people running companies, employing people and creating wealth. If they weren't the system just wouldn't work.
MichaelBurge 6y ago
In 2015, Buffett released his tax returns and paid $1.8 million on $11.6 million in income. If his secretary paid more than $1.8 million in taxes, they have extremely high income and they shouldn't be used in a comparison of "desperate people struggling to get by" like Uber drivers.
ehejsbbejsk 6y ago
I’ve come to realize that you can’t be a billionaire without either being an ahole or extremely lucky (which means your success had little to do with your actual contribution). In order to accrue that amount of wealth in one lifetime from scratch you have to screw over a lot of people. Yet, our society rewards these behaviors and in fact idolizes them. We do not reward creativity, resourcefulness, goodwill, etc. In fact these behaviors are penalized.
tonfreed 6y ago
And the ones making all that money are the ones telling you to vote democrat and bring in huge numbers of workers they can pay peanuts instead of having to pay a good wage to an American.

by drewrv 6y ago

WalterBright 6y ago

> However he does pay less taxes than his secretary. His secretary can buy Berkshire Hathaway stock at any time and pay a lower tax rate than Buffet, while growing wealth at the same rate as Buffet.

TAForObvReasons 6y ago

> Warren Buffet doesn't directly exploit anyone FWIW He has a significant stake in a company (Berkshire Hathaway) that does own a series of companies that engage in questionable practices. And he is uniquely in a position to stop that practice and chooses not to. https://publicintegrity.org/business/warren-buffetts-mobile-home-empire-preys-on-the-poor/ https://publicintegrity.org/business/warren-buffetts-mobile-...

throwaway09223 6y ago

This isn't a straw man, it is an extremely common belief and it deserves to be addressed and debunked. My social media is stuffed to the brim with people posting exactly this sentiment. It is true that there are other, more reasonable beliefs.

dang 6y ago
I don't disagree, but can you please not create accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=community%20identity%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
- throwaway09223 6y ago
  Yes, sorry. I started browsing HN on a new device a few weeks ago and I made a new account because I didn't have access to my other system at the time.
  - dang 6y ago
    Appreciated!
- pgayed 6y ago
  Implement the email spam solution that never was: set a nontrivial fee to create a (posting) account on hn. 10 bucks oughtta do the trick.
  - dang 6y ago
    It's important to HN that anyone be able to participate. We pay a heavy price for that in spammers and trolls, but the benefit still exceeds the cost.
- anoncow 6y ago
  How did you know? From the username?
  - 6y ago

SMAAART 6y ago

Your entire comment, minus your opening statement, contradicts your opening statement; and supports the theory that people mistakenly claim that the only way to become billionaire (or millionaires for that matter) is by exploring people.

newen 6y ago
Lol yes. He says billionaires don't exploit people. Then explains how billionaires exploit people. And then struggles to morally justify billionaires exploiting people.

dnautics 6y ago

it's not a weak straw man. There are people who say this: https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/aoc-accuses-billionaires-exploiting-workers-paying-slave-wages-2020-1-1028842799?op=1 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/aoc-accuses-...

cactus2093 6y ago
And worth pointing out, there are not just random people saying it but members of the US Congress with many millions of supporters.
lumost 6y ago
It's a real argument, depending on where you stand. To become a billionaire, one must be able to amass 10 thousand times more wealth than the median household in the US. To reach the lofty heights of Bill Gates et al. one must amass ~ 1 million times more wealth than the median US household. The reason why some believe that to be a billionaire is exploitative is that they believe this 4-6 order of magnitude disparity in wealth is inherently exploitative. You could always imagine a society where the warehouse workers were paid double ( or even quadruple ) for the effort they perform and a 100 billionaire would simply be a 100 millionaire. Regardless of where you draw the line for the discrepancy to be considered exploitative. The line exists somewhere for everyone. Tsar Nicholas had the equivalent of ~1.3 trillion in today's dollars in wealth prior to the revolution, and I can't imagine the US supporting anyone with amassing more than 10-20 trillion dollars in wealth. Carnegie et. al. each managed to earn up to ~300 billion in today's dollars prior to the anti-trust act.
- dnautics 6y ago
  I think this depends on what you mean by "exploitative". It's such a loaded word used for rhetorical purposes that it's not necessarily clear where one draws the line between any given pair of arguments.
- refurb 6y ago
  How would your comment read if you replaced the word “amass wealth” versus “create value”?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

generalizations 6y ago

> It doesn't have to be this way, it's a product of our laws and can be changed I don't think any of your three statements are true, based on my (limited) knowledge of history. Far as I know, the only way to break the feedback loop is to restart it - a revolution or the like - and build something in its place that maximizes the time until the loop has to be broken again. If anything, I'd guess that it's human nature to try and amass power/money/influence/cows, and the more you have the easier it is to get more. That's not a fault with our laws, it's what people do - on average, in aggregate.

naikrovek 6y ago
Society and laws are constructs, and we constructed them to be this way. We do not need to restart from zero to fix things. People do those things because the pressure to avoid doing those things is far too weak, and the pressure to be a good person is one of the things that society should provide.
- generalizations 6y ago
  Ok, but that pressure is brought to bear from somewhere. If there's people who are given the power to apply that pressure, then that power is now something people can amass. I don't know how you're imagining that society can provide that pressure without also giving ambitous people a way to collect power.
joe463369 6y ago
Capitalism unchecked tends towards monopolies and subsistence wage for those lucky enough to have a job. I agree this is a product of our human instincts, but the only thing stopping it - short of a revolution - are thoughtful laws designed to balance the entrepreneurial spirit with the need to treat everybody equitably.

bch 6y ago

> Warren Buffet doesn't directly exploit anyone. There might be something to discuss there: https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/warren-buffetts-mobile-home-empire-preys-on-the-poor/ https://publicintegrity.org/inequality-poverty-opportunity/w...

Privacy846 6y ago

I don’t know who Graham is talking about—“politicians”?—but this is a very famous claim, or corollary, from Marx: capitalists exploit workers. Why? Because of the labor theory of value. (1) All value is created from labor. (2) Capitalists employ workers in order to extract surplus value from them (what’s the point of employing them if you don’t get more out of your “investment” than you pay it?). (3) Ergo capitalists exploit workers. Of course millionaires and billionaires can still _work_ themselves in the sense given above, i.e. in a way that creates value. And one could argue that one can be a self-made (no exploitation of others) millionaire. But it becomes farcical to claim that a person can become a billionaire without exploiting people. Any person on Earth would need much more than one lifetime to create a Billion USD worth of value _through their own labor alone_.

varjag 6y ago
> But it becomes farcical to claim that a person can become a billionaire without exploiting people. It is farcical to a Marxist maybe, with infinite patience for labor theory of value despite century worth of contradictory evidence.
- Privacy846 6y ago
  Here’s a recent quote from the Marxist rag The Economist: > One reason for the measure’s current strength is that the balance of power seems to have moved in favour of capital, and against labour, in recent decades. The decline of trade unions, and the addition of China to the global market, have weakened workers’ bargaining power; in the past 15 years, corporate profits have been regularly equivalent to more than 10% of American GDP, and at a much higher level than they were between 1960 and 2000. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/12/04/expensive-stocks-do-not-necessarily-mean-a-crash-is-close https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/12/04/expensiv... But I’m still Graham’s Billionaires Build la-la land is still a reality, though.
  - varjag 6y ago
    This has nothing to do with labor theory of value.

mcguire 6y ago

Almost. The straw-man is that future billionaires start out to exploit people. The exploitation is a side effect.

Spooky23 6y ago

That’s the equivalent of a solider claiming they were just following orders. The Doordash people don’t want to steal tips, but the law doesn’t punish them for doing so, and the people getting exploited are drinking lead water anyway.

alisonkisk 6y ago
Door dash didn't steal tips, they supplemented tips until they were pressured to stop.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Commissioned salesmen sometimes work on a draw. A guy delivering Five Guys? Please. For a W2 worker it’s wage theft. Since these folks are 1099s it’s not protected by law. Either way is gross and unethical.

imgabe 6y ago

It's not a strawman insofar as there are people who literally say exactly that, and those are the people he's addressing. I agree there are more reasonable discussions to be had about how to distribute wealth for the greatest benefit to society but there are people who believe that if we just tax Jeff Bezos more then the Water Authority in Flint, MI will somehow become more competent.

danans 6y ago
> It's not a strawman insofar as there are people who literally say exactly that People oppose billionaires paying low taxes, and the related lack of public investment in bedrock services and infrastructure they need. When a rural area has no hospital, or a city has crumbling roads and transit, yes, people resent enormously wealthy people for whom those are not concerns. People do not, however, oppose their success at building companies that make money. PG is picking a fight with the least sophisticated form of the anti-billionaire argument (i.e. "billionaires suck"), which is beneath him. I get that it's easier to do that than than argue over how the structural issues that allow massive wealth accumulation also undermine the foundations that markets and societies are built on, but it's really beneath PG to choose such a trite argument to oppose. > if we just tax Jeff Bezos more then the Water Authority in Flint, MI will somehow become more competent. That, however, is a strawman. Nobody suggests that at all. People who support more progressive taxation point to things like the New Deal and the strong progressive taxation coupled with public investment in infrastructure and education that propelled the United States forward.
- imgabe 6y ago
  > That, however, is a strawman. Nobody suggests that at all. People who support more progressive taxation point to things like the New Deal and the strong progressive taxation coupled with public investment in infrastructure and education that propelled the United States forward. You're making that exact argument in fancier words. "strong progressive taxation coupled with public investment in infrastructure" implies that the problem is not enough money. So take more money from people who have lots of money and let the government spend it. The US spends more per-pupil on education than almost every other country [1], with worse outcomes in most cases. The corrosion inhibitors that would have prevented the Flint water crisis cost $140 per day. That's not a misplaced decimal point. That's One Hundred and Forty dollars. Do we need to revamp the entire US tax system to come up with a 140 bucks? No. The money is there, what's needed is some competence in how it's applied. [1] https://www.manhattan-institute.org/issues-2020-us-public-school-spending-teachers-pay https://www.manhattan-institute.org/issues-2020-us-public-sc...

bedhead 6y ago

You are right about the feedback loops that make it hard to escape poverty. The most uncomfortable one to talk about is basic social network effects. Two people meet at some prestigious college and get married - are we shocked they have children who are predisposed for success? Besides from having god-given IQ, they are likely some combination of ambitious, punctual, respectful of authority, long-term oriented, hard-working, etc. But would one of those parents have ever been interested in marrying and having kids with some high school dropout, someone from a vastly different social place and lacking those values? It's pretty rare. Society organizes itself around this stuff and it's extremely powerful. The two high school dropouts end up hooking up and having kids and it's often times (though obviously not always) the opposite cycle. And yeah there are plenty of societal biases that are real, but I really don't think anything will ever be as powerful as this self-organizing dynamic of how people marry and have kids. It's cold and depressing and uncomfortable but it's reality.

cactus2093 6y ago
In your explanation I see the feedback loop that makes it easier for you and your children to stay out of poverty if you're already successful. I don't see a feedback loop that makes it hard to escape poverty. Why did the high school dropouts drop out in the first place, and why does that make their kid more likely to drop out? Ideally their kid should still have access to public school education, with all the tools needed to go on to become successful themselves. To be clear I'm not saying there is no poverty feedback loop, just that even taking what you've said about fundamental human preferences at face value it is not inevitable that it stay this way. We can improve our systems to make it easier for people to escape poverty. But this doesn't really have anything to do with billionaires. Many of the issues in these systems are not even for lack of funding, but inefficiently spent funding or other poorly designed incentives or bureaucratic rules that make things more difficult for poor people.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > Ideally their kid should still have access to public school education, with all the tools needed to go on to become successful themselves. Ideally, but in reality public education is not an equalizer like that. Wealthy parents give their students advantages that school can't provide in our society: e.g. upper class culture and habits, resources for extra education, connections, etc. Even the institutional bits aren't equal: local property tax based funding mechanisms mean richer people live in better-resourced school districts than poorer people, with better educational opportunities.

mightybyte 6y ago

> the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people Here's a slightly different take on this idea: The only way to become a billionaire is to use leverage. I think this is a much more defensible argument. You can't become a billionaire by yourself. You have to have some mechanism of leverage to magnify your impact. Hiring employees is a form of leverage. Using a computer is a form of leverage. Putting your software on a large number of cloud computers is yet an additional form of leverage. The question of whether one is exploiting their employees is a worthwhile question to ask, but it is a completely separate (and much more polarizing) question. I think that leverage is the core kernel of truth lurking within this question.

threatofrain 6y ago
IMO, for this context, leverage is within the realm of individual incentive vs. pressure, not that you "leveraged" your DB's guarantees for worry-free scaling.
pradn 6y ago
You are turning a moral judgement ("exploiting") to a more mechanical expression ("using leverage"). For critics of billionaires, the moral judgement is the whole point. Whether the "billionaire problem" belongs in the moral realm or in the dispassionate realm of math or economics is an ideological choice.
- mightybyte 6y ago
  I'm intentionally trying to separate the moral and the mechanical for the purpose of understanding--both understanding the structure of the way the world works and how we can make it better as well as understanding the arguments of those for whom it's ideological. (See also the sibling comment to your by pdonis.)
  - pradn 6y ago
    I see what you mean here, but I think the shift in mode of analysis from moral to scientific blunts the force of the critique.

rufus_foreman 6y ago

>> However he does pay less taxes than his secretary No, he does not. He claims he paid $1,850,000 in federal taxes in 2015, do you think his secretary earned that much, let alone paid that much in taxes? In addition: “In 2019, Berkshire sent $3.6 billion to the U.S. Treasury to pay its current income tax,” Buffett said in his annual letter to shareholders. “The U.S. government collected $243 billion from corporate income tax payments during the same period. From these statistics, you can take pride that your company delivered 1.5% of the federal income taxes paid by all of corporate America.” >> What's the point of being the wealthiest nation ever on paper, if there's terrible schools, high infant mortality, and lead in the drinking pipes? A higher percentage of people graduate from college today than graduated from high school a hundred years ago, infant mortality is 6 per 1000 today vs. 100 per 1000 a hundred years ago, and blood lead levels in children have been reduced so much that it is claimed to be largely responsible for the drop in crime rates since the 1980s. The point of getting wealthy is that it gives you resources to deal with your problems.

criddell 6y ago
> No, he does not. A quick googling suggest that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  Which is a very different claim.
  - z3ncyberpunk 6y ago
    equally corrupt and even sadder you shill so hard for the scum
  - criddell 6y ago
    It still feels equally outrageous to me.
    - rufus_foreman 6y ago

friedman23 6y ago

>This essay uses a weak straw-man: the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people It's not a strawman, people repeat this as fact in any far left leaning forum. To socialists all work in a capitalist system is exploitation.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

What's the point of being the wealthiest nation ever on paper, if there's terrible schools, high infant mortality, and lead in the drinking pipes? I think it's a little more complicated than that. I think "virtual goods" make it hard to figure out exactly where we stand these days in terms of economic health, a la this past comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22028732

centimeter 6y ago

There is not strong evidence that these feedback loops actually exist. Wealth is actually strongly mean-reverting along genetically heritable lines.

jessaustin 6y ago
Do you live in Scandinavia? We're not talking about Scandinavia. USA ranks #27 here: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-of-82-countries/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-...
- centimeter 6y ago
  That report is obvious bullshit and you should be able to discern that immediately. It ranks countries on “ healthcare, education, technology access, working conditions, and social protection” and then calls that “social mobility”. Zero actual analysis of intra- or inter-generational wealth variance.
  - sien 6y ago
    Interesting. The OECD have a better report : https://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/medios/44582910.pdf https://www.oecd.org/centrodemexico/medios/44582910.pdf From page 5 Australia ranks #2 and Canada #5 and the US is #10. That's on intergenerational income quintile mobility.

droptablemain 6y ago

Buffet may not directly exploit anyone, but wage-labor in itself is exploitation. If he's investing in companies that hire employees with the intent of extracting surplus value from said employees, then he's indirectly participating in capitalist exploitation.

8note 6y ago

Which billionaires have become billionaires without exploiting their labour? Who's becoming a billionaire outside of the ownership class?

sokoloff 6y ago
I suspect most of the workers for Ray Dalio, James Simons, and David E. Shaw would strongly disagree with the characterization that they are being exploited. Disclaimer/source: I worked for D. E. Shaw & Co and have close friends who work at RenTech. My personal experiences were amazingly positive and friends at RenTech say similar things.

slifin 6y ago

It annoys me that these conversations are always focused on people from the Forbes list Which explicitly excludes dictators and royal families It's super easy to defend the actions of "industrious" businessmen if you're even a little bit to the right Is it so easy to defend dictators who are even richer?

lukejduncan 6y ago

Having a lower tax rate is different than paying less tax. Not saying there isn’t something wrong with a lower tax rate, but it’s disingenuous to frame it this way.

nazgulnarsil 6y ago

PSA that the bottom 50% of taxpayers pay 3% of the taxes. Net negative once you consider all the frictional costs.

mattigames 6y ago

> and feedback loops that let the wealthy amass more wealth and power. It doesn't have to be this way, it's a product of our laws and can be changed. Those feedback loops are directly created by wealthy people for wealthy people, because politicians like money like just everyone else its easy to manipulate them into creating feedback loops that help those wealthy folks amaze even more wealth. The more corruptible the politicians are the more the wealth gap increases, from there is easy to conclude why millions are struggling to get by even in the wealthiest nation on paper.

namelosw 6y ago

> the only way to become a billionaire is by exploiting people I don't if it is the only way to become a billionaire. But the bigger problem is every billionaire is exploiting people. Imagine you are one of the wealthiest guys in the world. You can either: - Hire the best financial guys to take care of your equities (although they are the best they look cheap to you). - Hold a share of the equity of every business you can find in the world. Either way, if the world is growing, you earn money by lying on the bed all day long. And then you can use the money exchange a large amount of people's labor for your own pleasure, instead of building costly infrastructures for your country for very small returns. Even if the world is going through a recession, other people would more desperate than you - you would lose part of your money, but people's life would crash, small companies would go broke, most of the entities have to do sub-optimal choices, and you don't have to. Then you can do the purchase and hold even more equities of the world. In a word, holding extreme large number of equities is exploiting people because they can barely do nothing and enjoy people's labor without any risks.

WalterBright 6y ago

> exploiting people Old soviet joke: Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's the other way around!

known 6y ago

"Behind every great fortune there is crime" --Balzac (b. 1799) e.g. https://www.quora.com/Which-caste-is-looting-India/answers/220938900 https://www.quora.com/Which-caste-is-looting-India/answers/2... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility != https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility

CalChris 6y ago

To be more accurate, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. https://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secretary-taxes/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secret...

CyberRabbi 6y ago

It’s not hard to escape poverty at all, especially in America. Just requires that you’re willing to pursue a skilled career.

bccdee 6y ago
You also need to already have the capital to get a skilled education and to support yourself while you do. Or you could assume large amounts of student debt before having a job, gambling on being able to complete your education and get a job before the payments start coming in. There's a student debt crisis for a reason. And you better not get too ambitious and pursue a degree that's too difficult, or you won't be able to complete your degree and you'll have all the debt but none of the credentials.
- CyberRabbi 6y ago
  The student debt crisis is suffered mainly by people who majored in non-technical fields from liberal arts colleges. There is a lack of jobs for people who have training in the humanities. That is unfortunate but that is not what I am suggesting. If you take out a loan for professional training for a skill that is in high demand you will have little trouble paying it back. Software engineering is an example, but really any type of hard engineering training will relatively easily result in a relatively high paying job. There is such a high demand for those jobs in the US that we currently import many of those workers from China and India via H1B.
  - bccdee 6y ago
    Not everyone is well-suited to those fields. Starting a degree that you can't finish is the worst choice possible. But even if everyone retrained as software engineers, that would just result in a surplus & everyone would need to retrain again.
doctor_eval 6y ago
What do you recommend? And how do you recommend pursuing this skilled career when you don’t even have enough money for food, clothes and shelter? I mean that’s pretty much a working definition of poverty and I’m really curious how easy you think it is to do when you’re hungry, dirty and tired.

nathanvanfleet 6y ago

I think he actually owns real estate companies that do in fact exploit people. It's also interesting to find out that wage theft, the underpayment or nonpayment of wages is actually a huge problem and is pretty much the definition of exploitation (not being paid for work done). Many regular public companies engage in it regularly.

Aeolun 6y ago

> What's the point of being the wealthiest nation ever on paper, if there's terrible schools, high infant mortality, and lead in the drinking pipes? How does this affect me as a wealthy person?

quantified 6y ago

Nothing incompatible about exploiting and building in one person or coterie. It would be great if Y Combinator filters well to emphasize non-exploiting billionaires, but that’s certainly less that all billionaires.

kortilla 6y ago

> However he does pay less taxes than his secretary. No, he absolutely does not. He pays a lower effective tax rate but vastly more in actual money than his secretary. His effective rate is 17 something percent because the capital gains tax rate is 15%, not because he’s rich. https://www.fool.com/taxes/2020/09/25/why-does-billionaire-warren-buffett-pay-a-lower-ta/ https://www.fool.com/taxes/2020/09/25/why-does-billionaire-w... We could certainly increase cap gains rate to regular income, but that would fuck a huge portion of the middle class depending on gains in 401ks for retirement.

simonh 6y ago

Let’s phrase that feedback loop a bit more clearly. When a person finds a way to deploy resources more efficiently, to meet other people’s needs better and with improved efficiency, society has feedback looks that divert more resources to that persons control so they can do so at increased scale. Isn’t that what we want? Just a week ago or so on Reddit someone posted imagining how much good Elon could do with his Billions. I replied that yes, maybe he could devote those resources to push forward electrification of transport to mitigate global warming, invest heavily is solar power technology and devote resources to trying to create a future for humanity in space. Well, of course, that’s exactly what he’s doing. All those billions aren’t stacked in a mountain of dollar notes in his basement, it’s embodied in the jobs, infrastructure, technology and products of his companies. This basic, fundamental ignorance of even the simplest economic concepts is incredibly common. I see it all the time, here as well.

petra 6y ago
Musk is the exception, not the rule. It's usually much easier to make money in unnecessary bullshit, and via rent-like activities, than in socially valuable activities. So that's what most rich people choose to do.
- tompccs 6y ago
  Musk is on his way to becoming the richest man on earth, I hardly think in a conversation about billionaires you can discount the example of someone who represents a couple of hundred of them.
- simonh 6y ago
  He really isn't, as Paul Graham sys he's got unparalelled experience of working with many people doing exactly this - creating value and accumulating the resources to leverage that value to benefit society. Yes of course there are inefficiencies in the system, rent seeking behaviour does happen and it's an important aspect of policy to try and minimise and disincentivise it. Nevertheless, our economic system does work. All those companies employing people, paying taxes and generating goods and services are the economy. That's where the wealth is being generated. The vast majority of wealthy people are incredibly hard working, dedicated people running companies, employing people and creating wealth. If they weren't the system just wouldn't work.

MichaelBurge 6y ago

In 2015, Buffett released his tax returns and paid $1.8 million on $11.6 million in income. If his secretary paid more than $1.8 million in taxes, they have extremely high income and they shouldn't be used in a comparison of "desperate people struggling to get by" like Uber drivers.

ehejsbbejsk 6y ago

I’ve come to realize that you can’t be a billionaire without either being an ahole or extremely lucky (which means your success had little to do with your actual contribution). In order to accrue that amount of wealth in one lifetime from scratch you have to screw over a lot of people. Yet, our society rewards these behaviors and in fact idolizes them. We do not reward creativity, resourcefulness, goodwill, etc. In fact these behaviors are penalized.

tonfreed 6y ago

And the ones making all that money are the ones telling you to vote democrat and bring in huge numbers of workers they can pay peanuts instead of having to pay a good wage to an American.