The (billionaires') case against billionaires

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/11/a-dent-in-the-universe/#eminently-guillotineable

4 1 4 years ago

Cory Doctorow is always interesting to read.

"Capitalist apologetics" makes an argument that billionaires provide social utility, first, by motivating others through appeals to their greed: "If you strive and strive, you might someday become a billionaire and wield power, too."

How many people want to be a millionaire? It's easy to do. Walk around your downtown city, find 2 quarters(50 cents) and you can become a Venezuelan millionaire. Eventually inflation will make everyone billionaires but it won't mean anything. Yet most people cant become a millionaire in a western currency. They REALLY want to but dont.

The people who become millionaires have done something that benefited society to the point they were well rewarded. Perhaps they are a radiologist earning $400,000/year helping people. Perhaps they had a great idea and entrepreneured. Most people never have that idea or effort for education and execution to get that reward.

By extension, a billionaire right now is someone who had a REALLY GOOD idea and became a entrepreneur. They risked everything. Then worked with a ton of other people and made them all millionaires along the way.

So if you're arguing to end the possibility of being a billionaire. So perhaps you start going after wealth and not profit... or you bring in a progressive tax that caps you are earning 1 million a year maximum, 100% tax beyond that. Which is proposed by many politicians who havent seen how destructive this is.

You will end up with a diverging incentive system. You will in fact end up with a situation where nobody takes risks. Nobody tries to make their idea work. Everyone will just be a wage slave producing nothing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-small-business/wp/201...

Afterall eventually the currency inflates to the point that even a mcjob is a billionaire and then you can't earn enough money. But it's not there where it's a problem, the problem happens much much sooner. If you look at the washington post, it's been on the decline for ages. There has been nothing to change this. It means projections have this collapse at about now. The progressive tax already has this damaging factor.

The (billionaires') case against billionaires

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