Should Billionaires Exist?
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Nomad1
Tupac KONY and GOAT
Who’s against people getting rich? I’m not.Why would anyone create anything and go through the hell you have to go through to create a company if there’s no potential to get rich?You think people working 85 hours a week and sleeping five hours a night for the greater good
How about we just raise taxes a bit and spend those tax dollars more efficiently and shup the fukk up about everything else.
@MMS, I'm more than a little tired of you ignoring the things I propose in order to just repeat mantras. You need to make logical defenses of WHY the systems you love are the best possible systems, not just keep repeating "it is so thus it must be".
And are you really going to claim that forests, fisheries, clean air, clean water, public health, an educated populace, basic human rights, healthy families, personal time, etc. have no value until you have a customer to pay for them? You have no justification for that other than a priori adherence to a radical capitalist worldview.
All that aside, I'm confused as to why you keep repeating your erroneous mantra anyway, as the semantics don't actually help you reject any of the arguments I made. Unfortunately, you simply keep ignoring the actual arguments I made.
That's not true, that is just the dogma of the radical capitalist position. Obviously even if you only equate money with value then there is money traded at every step of the process as well as by government, not just by end-use customers buying finished products.
And are you really going to claim that forests, fisheries, clean air, clean water, public health, an educated populace, basic human rights, healthy families, personal time, etc. have no value until you have a customer to pay for them? You have no justification for that other than a priori adherence to a radical capitalist worldview.
More like 500-800 years. There are multiple ways in which an economic system can be designed and the radical capitalist agenda is certainly not the only one nor is is inevitable. However, if maintained it will certainly inevitably destroy the world.
You can keep repeating that but none of your arguments for it come close to disputing the clear economic consensus that yes, money is a store of value. The easiest way to counter your claim - if money is simply a measure of value, and someone produces a product whose value is mismeasured and thus they inadvertently are given too much money but then the product they sold is later determined to have been worth much less, does their money lose its value or not? If money was only a measure then it would adjust as the value of the goods it was exchanged for adjusts, but in fact money retains its value even when it was gained fraudulently or by mistake. In fact, even in cases of theft the government has to seize the money itself in order to remove it's worth, because the value is literally being held in possession of the money.
All that aside, I'm confused as to why you keep repeating your erroneous mantra anyway, as the semantics don't actually help you reject any of the arguments I made. Unfortunately, you simply keep ignoring the actual arguments I made.
You misunderstand what I meant by "teachers". I was not referring to professors, I was referring to Ayn Rand and the others who wrote the propaganda you eat up.
This is more evidence that you're not even trying to read my arguments, I've never proposed backing the currency with gold nor do I believe that the current method of dispensing fiat currency via loans at positive interest is sustainable, I have however explicitly suggested backing currency with concrete public goods.
Really suggest you read some Silvio Gesell or Bernard Lietaer. In fact, I'll inject some into the conversation for you.
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"The Eleventh Round", a parable by Bernard Lietaer with additions by Charles Eisenstein. It gives a simple explanation of the problems surrounding our current financial system where all money is disbursed via loans at interest, such that there is always more money owed than ever created and massive constant pressure across the system to overproduce for the sake of paying back loans that literally don't have enough money available to pay back.
The Eleventh Round
Once upon a time, in a small village in the Outback, people used barter for all their transactions. On every market day, people walked around with chickens, eggs, hams, and breads, and engaged in prolonged negotiations among themselves to exchange what they needed. At key periods of the year, like harvests or whenever someone’s barn needed big repairs after a storm, people recalled the tradition of helping each other out that they had brought from the old country. They knew that if they had a problem someday, others would aid them in return.
One market day, a stranger with shiny black shoes and an elegant white hat came by and observed the whole process with a sardonic smile. When he saw one farmer running around to corral the six chickens he wanted to exchange for a big ham, he could not refrain from laughing. “Poor people,” he said, “so primitive.” The farmer’s wife overheard him and challenged the stranger, “Do you think you can do a better job handling chickens?” “Chickens, no,” responded the stranger, “But there is a much better way to eliminate all that hassle.” “Oh yes, how so?” asked the woman. “See that tree there?” the stranger replied. “Well, I will go wait there for one of you to bring me one large cowhide. Then have every family visit me. I’ll explain the better way.”
And so it happened. He took the cowhide, and cut perfect leather rounds in it, and put an elaborate and graceful little stamp on each round. Then he gave to each family 10 rounds, and explained that each represented the value of one chicken. “Now you can trade and bargain with the rounds instead of the unwieldy chickens,” he explained.
It made sense. Everybody was impressed with the man with the shiny shoes and inspiring hat.
“Oh, by the way,” he added after every family had received their 10 rounds, “in a year’s time, I will come back and sit under that same tree. I want you to each bring me back 11 rounds. That 11th round is a token of appreciation for the technological improvement I just made possible in your lives.” “But where will the 11th round come from?” asked the farmer with the six chickens. “You’ll see,” said the man with a reassuring smile.
Assuming that the population and its annual production remain exactly the same during that next year, what do you think had to happen? Remember, that 11th round was never created. Therefore, bottom line, one of each 11 families will have to lose all its rounds, even if everybody managed their affairs well, in order to provide the 11th round to 10 others.
So when a storm threatened the crop of one of the families, people became less generous with their time to help bring it in before disaster struck. While it was much more convenient to exchange the rounds instead of the chickens on market days, the new game also had the unintended side effect of actively discouraging the spontaneous cooperation that was traditional in the village. Instead, the new money game was generating a systemic undertow of competition among all the participants.
This parable begins to show how competition, insecurity, and greed are woven into our economy because of interest. They can never be eliminated as long as the necessities of life are denominated in interest-money. But let us continue the story now to show how interest also creates an endless pressure for perpetual economic growth.
There are three primary ways Lietaer’s story could end: default, growth in the money supply, or redistribution of wealth. One of each eleven families could go bankrupt and surrender their farms to the man in the hat (the banker), or he could procure another cowhide and make more currency, or the villagers could tar-and-feather the banker and refuse to repay the rounds. The same choices face any economy based on usury.
So imagine now that the villagers gather round the man in the hat and say, “Sir, could you please give us some additional rounds so that none of us need go bankrupt?”
The man says, “I will, but only to those who can assure me they will pay me back. Since each round is worth one chicken, I’ll lend new rounds to people who have more chickens than the number of rounds they already owe me. That way, if they don’t pay back the rounds, I can seize their chickens instead. Oh, and because I’m such a nice guy, I’ll even create new rounds for people who don’t have additional chickens right now, if they can persuade me that they will breed more chickens in the future. So show me your business plan! Show me that you are trustworthy (one villager can create ‘credit reports’ to help you do that). I’ll lend at 10 percent-if you are a clever breeder, you can increase your flock by 20 percent per year, pay me back, and get rich yourself, too.”
The villagers ask, “That sounds OK, but since you are creating the new rounds at 10 percent interest also, there still won’t be enough to pay you back in the end.”
“That won’t be a problem,” says the man. “You see, when that time arrives, I will have created even more rounds, and when those come due, I’ll create yet more. I will always be willing to lend new rounds into existence. Of course, you’ll have to produce more chickens, but as long as you keep increasing chicken production, there will never be a problem.”
A child comes up to him and says, “Excuse me, sir, my family is sick, and we don’t have enough rounds to buy food. Can you issue some new rounds to me?”
“I’m sorry,” says the man, “but I cannot do that. You see, I only create rounds for those who are going to pay me back. Now, if your family has some chickens to pledge as collateral, or if you can prove you are able to work a little harder to breed more chickens, then I will be happy to give you the rounds.”
With a few unfortunate exceptions, the system worked fine for a while. The villagers grew their flocks fast enough to obtain the additional rounds they needed to pay back the man in the hat. Some, for whatever reason-ill fortune or ineptitude-did indeed go bankrupt, and their more fortunate, more efficient neighbors took over their farms and hired them as labor. Overall, though, the flocks grew at 10 percent a year along with the money supply. The village and its flocks had grown so large that the man in the hat was joined by many others like him, all busily cutting out new rounds and issuing them to anyone with a good plan to breed more chickens.
From time to time, problems arose. For one, it became apparent that no one really needed all those chickens. “We’re getting sick of eggs,” the children complained. “Every room in the house has a feather bed now,” complained the housewives. In order to keep consumption of chicken products growing, the villagers invented all kinds of devices. It became fashionable to buy a new feather mattress every month, and bigger houses to keep them in, and to have yards and yards full of chickens. Disputes arose with other villages that were settled with huge egg-throwing battles. “We must create demand for more chickens!” shouted the mayor, who was the brother-in-law of the man in the hat. “That way we will all continue to grow rich.”
One day, a village old-timer noticed another problem. Whereas the fields around the village had once been green and fertile, now they were brown and foul. All the vegetation had been stripped away to plant grain to feed the chickens. The ponds and streams, once full of fish, were now cesspools of stinking manure. She said, “This has to stop! If we keep expanding our flocks, we will soon drown in chicken shyt!”
The man in the hat pulled her aside and, in reassuring tones, told her, “Don’t worry, there is another village down the road with plenty of fertile fields. The men of our village are planning to farm out chicken production to them. And if they don’t agree … well, we outnumber them. Anyway, you can’t be serious about ending growth. Why, how would your neighbors pay off their debts? How would I be able to create new rounds? Even I would go bankrupt.”
And so, one by one, all the villages turned to stinking cesspools surrounding enormous flocks of chickens that no one really needed, and the villages fought each other for the few remaining green spaces that could support a few more years of growth. Yet despite their best efforts to maintain growth, its pace began to slow. As growth slowed, debt began to rise in proportion to income, until many people spent all their available rounds just paying off the man in the hat. Many went bankrupt and had to work at subsistence wages for employers who themselves could barely meet their obligations to the man in the hat. There were fewer and fewer people who could afford to buy chicken products, making it even harder to maintain demand and growth. Amid an environment-wrecking superabundance of chickens, more and more people had barely enough on which to live, leading to the paradox of scarcity amidst abundance.
And that is where things stand today.
The Eleventh Round
Once upon a time, in a small village in the Outback, people used barter for all their transactions. On every market day, people walked around with chickens, eggs, hams, and breads, and engaged in prolonged negotiations among themselves to exchange what they needed. At key periods of the year, like harvests or whenever someone’s barn needed big repairs after a storm, people recalled the tradition of helping each other out that they had brought from the old country. They knew that if they had a problem someday, others would aid them in return.
One market day, a stranger with shiny black shoes and an elegant white hat came by and observed the whole process with a sardonic smile. When he saw one farmer running around to corral the six chickens he wanted to exchange for a big ham, he could not refrain from laughing. “Poor people,” he said, “so primitive.” The farmer’s wife overheard him and challenged the stranger, “Do you think you can do a better job handling chickens?” “Chickens, no,” responded the stranger, “But there is a much better way to eliminate all that hassle.” “Oh yes, how so?” asked the woman. “See that tree there?” the stranger replied. “Well, I will go wait there for one of you to bring me one large cowhide. Then have every family visit me. I’ll explain the better way.”
And so it happened. He took the cowhide, and cut perfect leather rounds in it, and put an elaborate and graceful little stamp on each round. Then he gave to each family 10 rounds, and explained that each represented the value of one chicken. “Now you can trade and bargain with the rounds instead of the unwieldy chickens,” he explained.
It made sense. Everybody was impressed with the man with the shiny shoes and inspiring hat.
“Oh, by the way,” he added after every family had received their 10 rounds, “in a year’s time, I will come back and sit under that same tree. I want you to each bring me back 11 rounds. That 11th round is a token of appreciation for the technological improvement I just made possible in your lives.” “But where will the 11th round come from?” asked the farmer with the six chickens. “You’ll see,” said the man with a reassuring smile.
Assuming that the population and its annual production remain exactly the same during that next year, what do you think had to happen? Remember, that 11th round was never created. Therefore, bottom line, one of each 11 families will have to lose all its rounds, even if everybody managed their affairs well, in order to provide the 11th round to 10 others.
So when a storm threatened the crop of one of the families, people became less generous with their time to help bring it in before disaster struck. While it was much more convenient to exchange the rounds instead of the chickens on market days, the new game also had the unintended side effect of actively discouraging the spontaneous cooperation that was traditional in the village. Instead, the new money game was generating a systemic undertow of competition among all the participants.
This parable begins to show how competition, insecurity, and greed are woven into our economy because of interest. They can never be eliminated as long as the necessities of life are denominated in interest-money. But let us continue the story now to show how interest also creates an endless pressure for perpetual economic growth.
There are three primary ways Lietaer’s story could end: default, growth in the money supply, or redistribution of wealth. One of each eleven families could go bankrupt and surrender their farms to the man in the hat (the banker), or he could procure another cowhide and make more currency, or the villagers could tar-and-feather the banker and refuse to repay the rounds. The same choices face any economy based on usury.
So imagine now that the villagers gather round the man in the hat and say, “Sir, could you please give us some additional rounds so that none of us need go bankrupt?”
The man says, “I will, but only to those who can assure me they will pay me back. Since each round is worth one chicken, I’ll lend new rounds to people who have more chickens than the number of rounds they already owe me. That way, if they don’t pay back the rounds, I can seize their chickens instead. Oh, and because I’m such a nice guy, I’ll even create new rounds for people who don’t have additional chickens right now, if they can persuade me that they will breed more chickens in the future. So show me your business plan! Show me that you are trustworthy (one villager can create ‘credit reports’ to help you do that). I’ll lend at 10 percent-if you are a clever breeder, you can increase your flock by 20 percent per year, pay me back, and get rich yourself, too.”
The villagers ask, “That sounds OK, but since you are creating the new rounds at 10 percent interest also, there still won’t be enough to pay you back in the end.”
“That won’t be a problem,” says the man. “You see, when that time arrives, I will have created even more rounds, and when those come due, I’ll create yet more. I will always be willing to lend new rounds into existence. Of course, you’ll have to produce more chickens, but as long as you keep increasing chicken production, there will never be a problem.”
A child comes up to him and says, “Excuse me, sir, my family is sick, and we don’t have enough rounds to buy food. Can you issue some new rounds to me?”
“I’m sorry,” says the man, “but I cannot do that. You see, I only create rounds for those who are going to pay me back. Now, if your family has some chickens to pledge as collateral, or if you can prove you are able to work a little harder to breed more chickens, then I will be happy to give you the rounds.”
With a few unfortunate exceptions, the system worked fine for a while. The villagers grew their flocks fast enough to obtain the additional rounds they needed to pay back the man in the hat. Some, for whatever reason-ill fortune or ineptitude-did indeed go bankrupt, and their more fortunate, more efficient neighbors took over their farms and hired them as labor. Overall, though, the flocks grew at 10 percent a year along with the money supply. The village and its flocks had grown so large that the man in the hat was joined by many others like him, all busily cutting out new rounds and issuing them to anyone with a good plan to breed more chickens.
From time to time, problems arose. For one, it became apparent that no one really needed all those chickens. “We’re getting sick of eggs,” the children complained. “Every room in the house has a feather bed now,” complained the housewives. In order to keep consumption of chicken products growing, the villagers invented all kinds of devices. It became fashionable to buy a new feather mattress every month, and bigger houses to keep them in, and to have yards and yards full of chickens. Disputes arose with other villages that were settled with huge egg-throwing battles. “We must create demand for more chickens!” shouted the mayor, who was the brother-in-law of the man in the hat. “That way we will all continue to grow rich.”
One day, a village old-timer noticed another problem. Whereas the fields around the village had once been green and fertile, now they were brown and foul. All the vegetation had been stripped away to plant grain to feed the chickens. The ponds and streams, once full of fish, were now cesspools of stinking manure. She said, “This has to stop! If we keep expanding our flocks, we will soon drown in chicken shyt!”
The man in the hat pulled her aside and, in reassuring tones, told her, “Don’t worry, there is another village down the road with plenty of fertile fields. The men of our village are planning to farm out chicken production to them. And if they don’t agree … well, we outnumber them. Anyway, you can’t be serious about ending growth. Why, how would your neighbors pay off their debts? How would I be able to create new rounds? Even I would go bankrupt.”
And so, one by one, all the villages turned to stinking cesspools surrounding enormous flocks of chickens that no one really needed, and the villages fought each other for the few remaining green spaces that could support a few more years of growth. Yet despite their best efforts to maintain growth, its pace began to slow. As growth slowed, debt began to rise in proportion to income, until many people spent all their available rounds just paying off the man in the hat. Many went bankrupt and had to work at subsistence wages for employers who themselves could barely meet their obligations to the man in the hat. There were fewer and fewer people who could afford to buy chicken products, making it even harder to maintain demand and growth. Amid an environment-wrecking superabundance of chickens, more and more people had barely enough on which to live, leading to the paradox of scarcity amidst abundance.
And that is where things stand today.
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you still cant do simple math.who says I’m trying to be a billionaire? I’m just trying to be as successful as I can be without anyone trying to put a CAP on what my potential ceiling can be.
millionaires and billionaires create jobs and opportunities for other people.
It’s funny that Bernie and Liz wants to use the resources of those same billionaires to fund their social programs. Where would they get this money if billionaires didn’t exist in the first place?
Bernie and Liz are not winning shyt, don’t get mad, get used to it
if they pay taxes like they are supposed to and regulatory bodies in government were not working to help the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. you wouldt have people running around with 100s of billions of dollars in the first place.
Its like a company. you take some money out for profit right? you also put a lot of money back in for R&D. well taxes are our R&D. if you keep skemping on that R&D the country will eventually fall behind. why? because you will get to a point where workers will be too ill to work and produce efficiently. the broker we are, the sicker we are, the less we eat, the less we eat the right foods, the more we're on drugs or take up other bad vices, etc, etc, etc. the less enthusiastic we are about working the less work gets done and the more errors are made. it is only beneficial to the few billionaires out there. its not beneficial to most others. thats not a society for all. thats a society for a few. if you want to live like that, thats on you. go to some remote island and do that. we aint on that here sorry.
No.
You'll never be a billionaire or know a billionaire, bootlicking is worthless for you.fukk this nikka. Only someone who has not achieved any amount of self-made success would argue against a billionaire
Why would anyone create anything and go through the hell you have to go through to create a company if there’s no potential to get rich?
if the only reason you're doing something is to get rich. and i have allowed you in a society to get ultra rich which means you will then have ultra power. naw, we dont need that at all. we would be better off without your ideas/inventions.
another thing, yall do realize we have a lot of people in this country. and where there are lots of people, that are lots of smart people and lots of people with good to great ideas running around. this idea that if we do this we will all of a sudden make every single person with a great idea and every single smart person disappear to some other country is stupid.
there are some broke a.. black kids running around these hoods that are smarter than steve jobs ever was, smarter than or as smart as Warren B, donald trump, Bill Gates, and Bezos all put together. but they are so broke that odds are their great ideas will never see the light of day.
Sure people want to have businesses that thrive. and yes you will get rich one day. but you dont ever need to make a 1000 million dollars. never. you dont need it, and neither does anyone else. you wont even know what to do with that kind of money/power. which is the real problem. you get that kind of doe then you start trying to make big moves in public sector stuff like education(bill gates, mr facebook) and they both failed at it miserably. why? because just cause you're good at computers doesnt mean you're good at everything else. odds are you're just good at that one thing and you suck at other stuff. but that billi on your name has you and others thinking you're smarter than the rest of us. you aint. you're just really good at the one thing you're good at. which is fine.
and let me add, if these rich people would not only pay their fair share in taxes and stop ducking the tax man. in addition to paying their employees living wages and giving them appropriate raises and not having ceos making a 100 times more than the regular employees. There would be no need for half of the so called tax exempt charities we see today.
No need for a backpack drive when the kids parents can buy them backpacks on their own. there's no need for a big food drive when the people can afford their own food.
why would i make it so I keep having to give hand outs to people rather than pay them properly so they can fend for themselves? Unless, i like playing god?
No need for a backpack drive when the kids parents can buy them backpacks on their own. there's no need for a big food drive when the people can afford their own food.
why would i make it so I keep having to give hand outs to people rather than pay them properly so they can fend for themselves? Unless, i like playing god?
I don't think you know the first thing about corporate or business organization structure if you honestly believe this.
Abolish the Billionaire Class
For that much wealth to be accumulated someone has to suffer.
Were wealth distributed to each according to their need, there would be no millionaires or billionaires.
This is an inaccurate view of corporate billionaires.
They get their billions from other billionaires and millionaires; the vast majority of it is rooted in brute extraction.
How does Apple get is high valuations? From the betting on its worth by other large wealth holders, predicated on cheap production and the vast exploitation of specific minerals for production. If cobalt mines didn't use child labor, had environmental protections in place, and the countries' governments were not paid off in excess of billions of dollars a year to keep worker's protections non-existent, the price of your average Apple product would go up exponentially, and its value would rapidly go down in the eyes of investors, who would simply pool their capital elsewhere. Low taxes on these capital gains and easy bookkeeping to avoid tax penalties also makes it an attractive option, the downside of which is less tax revenue to go to social welfare programs.
Many companies are far more exploitative of their American workers as well as their foreign workers and use the government's limited welfare programs now to subsidize what should be a much higher salary with benefits (like Amazon and WalMart). This also keeps the speculation going and their share values high, enriching their boards and owners at the expense of the labor.
There's a reason Adam Smith found this kind of rent-seeking behavior repugnant: he saw right through the mass accumulation of profit without productivity as usury at its best, and sheer theft at its worst.
Tax them until they aren't billionaires anymoreSure.
Doesn’t bother me. I just ask that they pay more taxes.
There are a lot more of us than there are of them.
Far better taxation and redistribution than anything proposed by centrists. Global poverty is a fools measure; and the absolute vast majority of people who are holding a billion dollars or more, in anyway, have a chunk of their wealth generated by exploitation.
Bill Gates actually pushed for eugenics instead of better anti-corruption and local economic systems. He's helped destroy the US public education system and pushed for its privatization (which has been shown to bring *no* improvements), explicitly became wealthy through the exploitation of his own workers as well as massive profiteering through the exploitation of workers in the third world on everything from materials for his products to newfound areas to pump capital to avoid taxation.Bill Gates destroys many of the absolutes stated in this thread about billionaires... as does John Hopkins and many others.
He's an anti-competitive monopolist (which has been obvious since the 90s, I'm honestly assuming you're older than a teenager and likely remember that); same as well for John Hopkins: the man himself was born wealthy off of the exploitation of enslaved African peoples in the United States and the corporate practices of the university and hospital endowed by him are the stuff of legend in terms of worker exploitation and even the destruction of the neighborhoods around them in part due to the literal bankrupting of its own employees and the (largely AA) population in the area directly outside the hospital and university.