6 ms·

This only makes sense from a naively individualist perspective. If no one ever made a billion dollars, so to speak, there would be no money at all.

• samb1729 4y ago
  > If no one ever made a billion dollars, so to speak, there would be no money at all. Could you please elaborate?
  • afiori 4y ago
    The amount of money/value/richness in the world is not constant. Suppose we all lived on an island in a completely stable economy valued somehow at 1 trillion dollars. Then imagine that a dozen or so explorers went to another island and started a completely independent economy that (after some centuries) gets also valued at 1 trillion dollars. The latter billion dollar was created at the meager cost of a boat and the life work of some people. This is a horrible analogy for anything that ever happened, but it is something that could possibly happen.
• mnsc 4y ago
  It also makes sense from a marxist perspective. How billionaires/capitalists take the surplus value from manual labour and all that untrendy stuff.
  • nurettin 4y ago
    It is not trendy, because labour is not something that exists by itself in a vacuum.
    • mnsc 4y ago
      That is very true and something that capitalists often forget.
      • nurettin 4y ago
        Yes. After a short episode of amnesia, they continue to create jobs which create the labour.
        • mnsc 4y ago
          I'm not trying to be snarky now but you should read Marx, you won't become a crazy stalinist, pinky promise.
          • nurettin 4y ago
            Let's say Marx is not the only one I've read when I was young and leave it at that.
• hutzlibu 4y ago
  Money just gets arbitarily created by banks. It is easy to "make money". Maintaining a stable, accepted currency however, is quite hard and so is providing enough value for others, that they give you a billion dollars of a stable, accepted currency ...
• bccdee 4y ago
  You're assuming that the statement vacuously means "money is never made," which is not what it's getting at. The point is that nobody has ever become a billionaire without manipulating markets, exploiting employees, misleading investors, or otherwise abusing the fabric of society to squeeze wealth out of the rest of the world. The guy who invents the thing isn't the one who gets rich. It's his employer who profits off of it. It's not hard to make money, but it's impossible to make a billion dollars. You can only get that much by taking it.
• amelius 4y ago
  Not sure what is special about billion dollars in your statement. If no one ever made 10^100 dollars, there would be no money at all. So ... there is no money?