- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
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Yes there is Luigi showed us the way.
Or just fucking stop consuming like idiots and assholes. You really think shooting CEOs in the street is going to change anything for the better without changing the bad behaviour that those CEOs are still salivating and precumming at the thought of exploiting??
In America, people may have to pay over $1000 a month for health insurance, which may or may not even cover all their medical needs. People still need Bank accounts; cities are built without public transportation so vehicles are required just for the ability to feed and clothe yourself. This isn’t a “consumer” issue, this is a systemic structures of our civilization issue, where the needs of the many are less of a concern to politicians than the loudest voices of the few.
Nevermind lobbyists writing laws wholesale; supply chain management systems owned end to end by single companies; and Wall Street / vulture capitalists destroying companies (and lately hospitals!?!) to extract their wealth.
We need to structure civilization so that Money isn’t the only, single end goal of all endeavors; and we need to ensure that Greed is kept in check.
Poverty exists not because we can’t feed the poor, but because we can’t satisfy the rich.
Brian Thompson was just a poor millionaire though. Perhaps one of the reasons why he was so easy to get.
Yup. Show me a billionaire who has paid their workers fairly from day one, followed every single law and regulation by the book, never spent a single dollar on lobbying Congress or contributing to political campaigns for quid pro quos, and never used underpaid contractors or foreign slave labor. You can’t, because there’s no such thing as a good billionaire.
What about Warren Buffet? Out of genuine interest.
While he certainly comes across as one of the more virtuous billionaires, his company Berkshire Hathaway, has massive investments in some of the worst and most damaging industries in the world, in terms of labor exploitation and ongoing contributions to the climate disaster. For example, his company owns 6.6% of Chevron and 27.2% of Occidental Petroleum, two massive exploiters of fossil fuels. That’s no good in my book.
He disowned his granddaughter for having the temerity to appear in a Johnson&Johnson kid’s documentary about how the rich talk and act behind closed doors.
Taylor Swift?
Nope. That amount of wealth is only generated via exploitation. Exploiting workers or exploiting customers, or cutting corners and skirting regulations, failing to internalize externalities. Mostly all of the above
I assume you have examples?
Unless her financials are public, it’ll be hard to do but the general principle is that everyone’s labour is worth the same.
She’s able to get more money through manipulation, whether intending to or not, through her fans buying multiples of her merchandise, to playing her songs on Spotify non stop to boost her profits etc.
Applying this principle, she’s gaining profit from the work of her fans who aren’t getting any compensation for their labour, resulting in millions of dollars.
So the defining factor is her work, not her staff. Her staff doing the same work at another place wouldn’t generate the same profit. And if you think listening to songs on Spotify is work…
Some people think all profit is “stolen” labor value, and thus all wage labor is exploitation. I don’t think that’s true, but it is true that all for-profit firms have an incentive to pay their workers as little as possible, while getting as much productivity from them as possible, because that will maximize profits.
For-profit companies also have an incentive to cut other costs as much as possible, to maximize profits. This is why we see things like shrinkflation, planned obsolescence, or products just getting gradually crappier over time.
For-profit companies also have an incentive to externalize certain costs, like pollution, environmental destruction, or resource depletion, to, once again, maximize profits.
Where do you think that wealth comes from? They don’t produce it. The workers create the value, which is stolen from them for the owners and shareholders.
To be fair to Taylor she is producing a show, but the wealth should be fairly distributed with the crew that make those performances possible
Where do you think that wealth comes from? They don’t produce it. The workers create the value
This is such a deeply unserious argument when used in this case. “I can’t wait to see the front of house guy!” say all the wine moms and 14-year-old girls waiting in line outside the stadium. “And the road manager too!”
Fuck it you’re right. She can lug her own shit around and set the stage and work the sound system. That’s why she earns billions!
I love how swifties always say, “WhAt AbOuT tAyLoR?!”
And I say this as someone who loves her music.
She’s still a bad billionaire.
EVEN IF she paid everyone who works for her or her label above market rate, even if she charged her concert tickets below market value, even if she “goes green” with every CD, every piece of merchandise, the fact that she has more money than most people makes her a bad billionaire.
She could easily give half of her wealth away and still be okay.
She’s a bad billionaire.
And even then, if they managed to amass that kind of wealth, it had to come from somewhere, i.e. consumers paying enough for their product that it made them a billionaire, meaning all these people found have paid less and that billionaire could be a millionaire or just middle class and more people would be richer.
That is kind of true. But on the assumption that the corporation (in this case Costco) is doing more good than bad, like generating fair jobs, it would benefit most to see that business grow. If you dont generate profit because you distribute everything to your employees or customers, you will never be able to grow. So Costco will stay with 10 employees forever and only those businesses that exploit workers and customers can grow.
You could argue that there is really no need for businesses to grow as big ss many are today and I would completely agree, but that has to be regulated by law.
Non profits are a thing and they are able to grow, hell, you would expect them to grow more because less money goes to the pockets of a CEO and more goes to growing the company.
It can also make profit without billions going to the pockets of a single person, if that money was just redistributes to all employees the business would probably grow even faster because more qualified people would want to work there and would be happier working there.
Three scenarios:
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The company makes 100B in revenue, pays its employees a fair wage, distributes 5B to the C-suites and makes 50B in total profit
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The company makes 100B in revenues, pays its employees a fair wage, distributes 10M to the C-suites, distributes 9.99B in bonus to all employees and makes 50B in total profit
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The company reduces its prices, makes 95.01B in revenues, pays its employees a fair wage, gives 10M to the c-suites, makes 50B in total profit
What’s the difference?
Hint: there’s no difference except the number of people being treated better
NPOs have CEOs as well and many earn salaries in the millions. NPOs are the exact right example, though, but not for the reason you are talking about. Non-profit does not inherently mean lower-ranking employees get a bigger share.
The big difference is that NPOs dont have shareholders or owners, which is how billionaires become billionaires, by owning companies worth billions.
But you should know that most NPOs rely almost entirely on government grants and donations. They couldnt even survive a single year on their own revenues.
If you want to establish the NPO concept in the free market, you would need to ban private ownership of ocmpanies. It could work but there is no way it will ever be implemented.
I think you are ignoring his main question though. Are those not legitimately three different options companies have? Do they not have wildly different outcomes on the workers?
No, companies do not actually have the option to simply cut the upper managements salary by 99.8%. And even if they could, it would simply end in all management leaving the company the next day, the company going bankrupt and all of the empolyees losing their jobs.
Im not trying to defend management salaries in the millions. It is damn unnecessary and should be taxed appropriately. But simply denying that thats how the world works right now is bs.
And even if they could, it would simply end in all management leaving the company the next day, the company going bankrupt and all of the empolyees losing their jobs.
The management would all leave? I wonder how often that actually happens? I’d totally believe never. If you offered the management a lot less money, they could walk, but more likely, only some would walk. And in any case, then you could also promote employees from within the company. I bet there’s a department manager that wouldn’t mind the huge pay increase that comes with a c-level promotion, even if it does come with a million dollar bonus rather than a billion.
If you adjusted salaries slowly, say over the course of 5 years, managers could leave (if they really wanted to) gradually, you’d have time to replace people for a much smoother transition.
Funny how you ignored everything but the non profit bit. The reason they rely on donations and grants is because they’re mostly charities, there’s no reason a private company couldn’t reinvest 100% of its profits and try to adjust its prices to be closer to breaking even. Hell, life insurance for road users works exactly this way around here, prices are adjusted based on how much they need to pay for claims and we’re the place that pays the least for that type of insurance in North America, everything is paid for by car owners and it will covers anyone involved in an accident with a car, may they be in the car or riding a bike or walking on the sidewalk, it’s still cheaper than anywhere else for those who pay for it.
Tell me, from the companies’ perspective what the difference is between the three example I gave? You’re the one who said it’s not realistic to lower prices.
I think you are not familiar with how economy works. No offense, really, Im not an expert either but I dont really have the patience to go over everything in detail. Reinvesting profits is what ALL companies do. What youre suggesting was the opposite, you said profits should be distributed to employees or customers.
The difference between your examples is that 1 is a different company than 2 and 3. They are not different scenarios for the same company.
There are reasons why CEOs earn a lot and you cant change that by telling companies “but why not just give the money to your other employees, it would be better for them”. Thats not how economy works. Im not saying the way things are is good at all, but youre not offering an alternative. What youre suggesting would require that owners and shareholders would give a shit about the wellbeing of their employees and customers.
What a nice non answer that also ignores dividends and wealth accumulation and the fact that profits = revenues - spendings including wages :)
“ThEy’Re NoT tHe SaMe CoMpAnY!”
It’s what we call a thought experiment, the end result is the same, the difference is who gets to keep more money.
I’m done with people like you defending billionaires and being unable to think about alternatives, have a good life.
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I don’t have a problem with open lobbying per se. If it’s on behalf of all of the workers and customers as well and not just their own interests.
But can anyone identify such a billionaire?
And by definition that rules out any that step on their workers like bugs…
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The guy who founded Costco and was its CEO up until a few years ago is this, if not very close. A business lauded for both how it treated its workforce, and its customers. Basically no turnover unless someone retires.
Yes, even that one
Any individual that wants to horde so much money and wealth that could satisfy the lives of millions of people is not a good person.
It’s like having a million sandwiches and thousands of hungry people around you … but you’d rather keep all your sandwiches and screw everyone else, even though you will never be able to physically eat all the sandwiches you have in a lifetime.
Being a billionaire is not a sign of intelligence, it’s a mental disorder and a person who lacks human empathy.
You do know that billionaires don’t actually have billions of dollars in a vault in a Scrooge McDuck fashion, right?
Hoarding is hoarding
If a little old lady hoards 20 cats we call her crazy … a man hoards $400 billion dollars and we call them a genius
A billion dollars distributed to 1,000,000 people is $1000.
All the wealth billionaires in the US hold is not enough to pay for the government to run for one year.
Let’s not pretend giving away all their wealth would fix all of our problems.
What makes more sense in a society? One person who controls a billion dollars or a thousand people with million dollars?
The billionaire locks up all that wealth and it doesn’t do anything for anyone … sure it might make someone even more money but it essentially locks away that potential wealth from a larger group of people.
If you had 1,000 millionaires, then they would all go out to perform all kinds of other activities and businesses that would be smaller but at least benefit even more people.
Driving wealth to smaller and smaller groups of people only drives more and more wealth to fewer people while everyone else suffers.
Redistributing millions or billions of dollars might not change much … but at the very least it would be a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
The billionaires have their wealth in businesses, it’s not locked up. People don’t just put a billion in a savings account
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Your argument lacks credibility. If people didn’t like extremes then we’d have similar outrage from those centrists when Elon Musk throws a Nazi salute or when people hurt cops and storm the Capitol building. Instead we get apologists and excuses. Meanwhile protestors of injustice are treated as if they’ve committed genocide caused they hurt a Walmart and people actually committing genocide get excused.
People don’t worry about extremes. They worry about change of the status quo.
Also, the systemic issues within our country and the ability to ignore the system as a whole by the privileged is what gives you the power to say something like “reeorting to violence as a first resort” as if we haven’t had ample evidence of attempts to bring accountability and change to the system that just gets ignored. Not only is it not a first resort but to the people who are suffering daily… Why should they care what level of resort it is? We excuse businesses for doing whatever it takes because “shareholder value” but when it comes to the poor and suffering they just follow the exact letter of the law and then some.
It’s not about extremes and never has been.
Yes but we are letting the companies get this big. But competition whatever. So we could split them back up. And Elon WHY is Tesla stock do high. There isn’t a reason.
I have no problem with splitting up Microsoft or Google, but the founders would still get shares in both companies. Ideally those companies wouldn’t lose value after being split
Youre not talking about running the government, which isnt really expensive, youre talking about the whole country. “10 people cant pay for a whole country of 340,000,000 including all of its infrastructure and industry, they dont have that much money”.
Can you reflect on how fucking ridiculous this statement is?
Whats next? “Elon Musk cant even buy a planet, hes not that rich”
There are about 800 billionaires
“800 people cant pay for a whole country of 340,000,000 including all of its infrastructure and industry, they dont have that much money”, better?
Let’s not pretend giving away all their wealth would fix all of our problems.
Let’s not pretend that assets work like cash.
Not to be that person, but most people forget that the net worth oft these people is not liquid. They can not just wave a magic wand and give people money.
It’s usually in shares of their very highly valued company which they can’t give up because they wouldl give up control. Billionaires are not about money, they are about power.
What keeps you in power does not align with doing good. Thus the giving pledge exists, it allows giving away the money while you don’t lose control in your lifetime.
Most billionaires do some kind of philanthropy. Gotta control where the money they would pay in taxes ends up. Even this is about power.
Their survival bias makes them believe that they know best what’s good for the world. Taxing them would just increase their philanthropy, which is a good thing even though not perfect. Let’s start somewhere.
That is the fallacious paper millionaire argument. They have more than enough liquidity, can take loans against their “non-liquid” wealth, and are anyway working with multi-year plans to sell assets and have enough liquidity. I believe this is also explained in https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ and there they also explain that the US market cap is bigger than their stocks and so. So they could sell a lot in one go, of course losing “efficiency”, but the market would be able to cope without any issue.
I think we are on the same side here judging from the rest of your comment, but I find it important to refute this typical argument, because it does not help that there is some sort of billionaire apologism by saying that they “don’t actually have this money in their bank account to spend”.
If a company is set up right from the start, you could have voting shares that aren’t stock based, and that can be a way to maintain control of your company without hoarding the wealth via stock, but if it’s not like that from the start, it would be very hard to make that change after the fact.
It’d probably be better if that was more common, but I still don’t think they’d give up their shares worth money on the market, and then I still think these types of shares would have off market value?
It’s usually in shares of their very highly valued company which they can’t give up because they wouldl give up control.
To be that guy, they still can access the wealth provided by those shares without liquidating them. That’s exactly what they do too. They use shares as leverage to obtain loans, and then they spend the loan money. It’s called the “buy borrow die” strategy and they also use it to avoid taxes because loans aren’t considered income.
Modern age dragons, sitting on their hoards while occasionally burning a peasant village to keep those dirty plebs in line.
You know… you don’t really need the qualifier “modern age”. There weren’t dragons in the middle ages or at any period in human history.
Sorry to be that guy, I guess I’m that guy… 🫤
Well, you know what to do with dragons
Sir/ma’am/other, you are on the internet. There are many responses to that.
There are many responses. Not all of them are right
No, they are right.
All the many responses.
Just not right -in this circumstance-
Donkey_from_shrek.gif
Will someone stop this man from yelling “dragon”?
My proof that ethical billionaires don’t exist is that there’s a line (I usually like to set it at 10 million due to living in a very high CoL area) beyond this line you will never need more money in your life. Money will no longer improve your standard of living and your savings are enough to ride out life in comfort.
When you reach or approach this line you have two options:
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Look at everyone you’re working with and help them reach that line - if you’ve accomplished that then start lowering the costs of your business to customers to help your customers reach that line.
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Squeeze harder so you get more money and everyone around you gets fucked.
If you chose #2 you are a fucking asshole. You cannot become a billionaire[1] except by choosing #2. You have actively chosen to push down those around you so you can watch number go up.
- The exception here is inheritance though someone with a sizable inheritance also has questions about using it to help those around them and, IMO, the estate tax should be near 100% and we should ensure that everyone has as equal a shot at life as we can. I loathe inheritance of wealth as a general concept though some things like having a family home are obviously pretty meaningful to a lot of people.
The premise that merely having more than you need is inherently unethical is completely arbitrary, doubly so when only applied to those who have the most.
I live a fairly simple and frugal lifestyle. The amount of money where I am living at the standard of living and want, and my “savings are enough to ride out life in comfort”, is likely a much lower number than most others in the US.
Does that make me more ethical than those others? I don’t believe so.
Well, inflation has made that more than 10 million, but yes I agree there is a number that says “I own a huge mansion, 10 cars, a yacht, and I eat caviar every meal.” That number is significantly less than a billion without having to work a day more.
You can’t own a yacht with 10 million
Oh, you ray of sunshine.
I’m gonna be that guy… but yes you can.
What many perceive as Yachts, the big boats that the ultra wealth have, are not the sole size of yachts.
This is a yacht for under 600k
Seriously… how much do people think yachts are. Not everyone is buying bill gates’ $500m yacht.
They are very expensive to maintain
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There is no need for billionaires. They have more money than they know what to do with and could solve a lot of world issues and still have enough money left over to not know what to do with it. There’s literally no reason in hoarding all that money if you’re not going to spend it. It’s a necessity for literally everyone else while they hold onto it to make themselves more powerful. If all the billionaires were hoarding all the food and we had to deal with the scrapes, people would be going absolutely crazy. Even though that’s pretty much exactly what they are doing when people can’t make enough money to buy food. Throw everything else like medical care and housing into the mix and what you end up with is a few people living a life of luxury while they are literally keeping your life away from you.
One single billion at any one time is more than any one person should have. There really should just be a cap. Like, 999,999,999 is the highest your bank account can get, anything after that just flows into public programs.
The game Zelda: A link to the past had a max capacity of 999 rupees (money). If you picked up more, nothing happened. That’s how life should be.
Maybe they could use 32-bit twos complement arithmetic so if you have $2147483647 and you add one more dollar, suddenly you have NEGATIVE $2147483648. When you call customer service, they tell you that’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Heh heh.
What happens when something already owned grows in value past the arbitrary maximum? Net worth is, after all, a function of how valuable everyone else thinks the stuff you own is. It’s a price tag.
If you buy a rookie baseball card for $5, and he has a great year and now your card is worth $100, did you deprive anyone of $95 by continuing to own it?
I’m not super concerned with “things” and their value. If a person makes $1b a year and wants to buy a $1b yacht every year then they have a bunch of yachts. The point is that money went back into the economy. Now, if they have 2 and want to sell 2 for $2b all at once… sorry, no. There is a wealth cap.
The issue with Billionaires now is that money isn’t in the economy. The more they hold, the harder it is to get enough.
Greed is a horrible thing.
The issue with Billionaires now is that money isn’t in the economy.
Again, the baseball card growing in value by $95 took $95 away from no one. No one is deprived of cash in their wallet as a result of another person’s purchase appreciating in value.
Also, their net worth is not cash sitting in a vault, it’s investing into businesses that are running within the economy. It literally all is actively in the economy. You literally can’t become a billionaire without doing that. Saying/implying that billionaires “hoard” wealth is deeply ignorant.
They should still be shot
Grow up.
I think you have exactly the opposite impression of wealth than how it is in reality, then. Billionaires typically have only a tiny amount of their wealth in liquid funds (what you call “holding” money) - most of their wealth is in investments, and hence “in the economy”. So the thing you’re proposing already holds.
Kill them anyway
Billionaires don’t have 1 billion in their bank account
How would you even know? If I had 150bn, I’d have at least ONE in several overseas banks so it looks like I have nothing.
I have some money and I’m not stupid enough to have more than 10K in cash. I’m sure billionaires have financial advisors that tell them how to invest their money
could solve a lot of world issues and still have enough money left over to not know what to do with it.
There is no world issue that can be solved by just throwing money at it. Those issues have had MUCH more money thrown at them than all of the net worth of all billionaires on Earth combined, without being solved.
It’s just not that simple.
There is no world issue that can be solved by just throwing money at it. Those issues have had MUCH more money thrown at them than all of the net worth of all billionaires on Earth combined, without being solved.
That seems obviously false, unless you’re proposing that all the charities in the world are scams and don’t actually do anything. I guess you could argue that as you throw money into saving lives, the low-hanging fruits get picked and the cost rises, so you can never saturate all the charities - but this is a very weak argument, since saving 99.99% of all the people in the world from hunger or poverty would be about as good as 100%. Just because there’s diminishing returns doesn’t mean it’s a doomed cause.
That seems obviously false, unless you’re proposing that all the charities in the world are scams and don’t actually do anything.
Charities do more than throw money at problems. This doesn’t contradict my point at all, which is that money alone is not the answer–if it was, all of these problems would have been solved by now.
As a small example, you can’t truly solve world hunger until you achieve world peace, and you can’t buy peace.
General strike is the best and most effective means we have. If we wait for AI and robots to replace you, you loose your bargaining power.
Crash the fake economy. Your fucked either way might as well go down swinging and on your terms.
When you do it, I’ll do it. But I’m not wasting my life if it’s not a community effort.
Been on strike since the election. Come join me!
My industry doesn’t strike. It wouldn’t work. BUT I hope that all works out for you.
However, striking only works for so long. And, with Trump as president, I doubt there will be much striking allowed once he changes those laws or just replaces you with people from the concentration camp.
We should feed them to the orca
While, Brian Thompson may be the exception, after The-Man-Luigi-is-taking-a-fall-for was done with him of course.
Forbes sometimes publishes lists of good billionaires:
Billionaire is a pathology as far as I’m concerned.
Billionaires should not exist
But I do think there is at least one who did more good than harm and maybe a handful who have made mistakes but are doing better in the present.
Anyone who accrues enough money to be a billionaire should be contributing enough back to the society they’re strip mining that they shouldn’t be billionaires. Anyone who doesn’t should be turned into BBQ.
That definition is lenient enough to forgive anybody who signed the Bill Gates giving pledge, which the other commenters here clearly disagree with.
I do think it is important to not give away our empathy for normal human beings when the real solution is a system that taxes the rich.
Good Billionaire is Thousander.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
Soon to be trillionaires…
Bill Gates? Mark Cuban? (Although I can’t remember if he is a billionaire or not)
They are both pure evil.
I’d argue they’re “less worse” but the fact remains that no one becomes a billionaire without exploitation. Bill Gates owned a monopoly and I’m honestly not sure what Mark Cuban did. At some point and time you must exploit a system and it’s people to amass that much wealth.
I’ll say Bill Gates monopoly sucked, but didn’t represent anything like Amazon warehouse conditions or generally other terribly exploitative behaviors. He basically won the lottery of being in the right spot in a tech industry to be the benefeciary of a lot of money being freely thrown at him without him having to resort to typical billionaire measures. Sounds similar for Mark Cuban.
Monopolistic tactics.
No, he didn’t “win the lottery”. He was a monopolist who engaged in anti-competitive behavior for years. Went to court and everything, case closed.
He can’t donate more than the total he stole and destroyed by deadweight loss.
Cuban is what would have happened to Musk if he basically just took his money and walked away after Paypal. Cuban sold a website to Yahoo and the deal is arguably the worst deal (for Yahoo) of the dot-com bubble.
