Not sure if this falls under politics or not but it seems, like everything else, that there is no middle ground on this issue. Which probably falls in line with there being no middle class.
You’ve got one group shouting “no one needs that much money, why can’t they cure world hunger” and another shouting “that’s part of capitalism they earned it, if you work hard enough you can be a billionaire too!”
They should only exist if the workers that got them to that point are paid living wages, with benefits and humane working conditions. When warehouse workers have to pee in jars on the warehoise floor because they have no breaks and are living paycheck to paycheck then it is an abuse of capitalism.
shareAgreed
shareI disagree, kind of. I don't think an employee should make more than their job is worth just because the CEO is wealthy. Amazon for example has raised their minimum wage to $15, which is a damn good starting pay. Stick with the company and you will grow with it.
shareAbolish money.
as long as those billions are accumulated with a lot of redistribution along the way, i have no problem. the more the merrier.
sharewe've never had so many billionaires and millionaires as we do right now.
at the same time, world poverty has completely collapsed. the last thirty years has seen 100s of millions, over a billion people escape true complete poverty. and the places where people have escaped from poverty are the ones where the countries have adopted free market and trade reforms.
the places where people are the worst off are those that have deviated from that the most.
the world is not zero sum. larry page & jeff bezos didn't take money from the world and impoverish other people. the world has benefited from their innovations, and when people buy through amazon, they are a free, willing participant to a transaction where they feel like they're receiving a value at least equal to the dollars they give that company.
if we didn't have a system that allowed people to pursue whatever their interests are as they see fit, would we have all the efficiencies of resource allocations and incredible wealth that we all enjoy? almost certainly not - we can see that we probably wouldn't because we can see the disastrous results from economic systems that prevent people from pursuing those interests.
Excellent post. Capitalism is responsible for human existence being better than it's ever been. No serious person can argue with that. I would say more, but you have summed it up perfectly.
shareI don't think that's true. Sounds like a convenient way to credit capitalism for what should be progress in every civilized society.
Yes, capitalism has it's benefits but it's always being abused and so many want to turn a blind eye to it, and for the life of me I don't understand why. Unregulated Capitalism is not the "only" way.
Corporate capitalism is pure evil. We need a true free-market economy, one in which anyone who puts in a day of good honest work can be successful.
sharehttps://humanprogress.org/article.php?p=2188
sharean excellent site - very useful. i reference it & our world in data all the time.
shareOf course you don't think it's true. You're a dyed in the wool communist.
sharethe world is not zero sum. larry page & jeff bezos didn't take money from the world and impoverish other people
I'm not sure that's true. The more business Amazon hoovers up the less business is available to go around for others.
the world has benefited from their innovations
Really ? Amazon bought up IMDb and then promptly shut down its message boards which was an act of cultural vandalism in my book. Also the method they used to compress their MP3 music should be a scandal. They should pay people to download that crap not the other way around. And I don't think their workers are all that impressed by Amazon's "innovations". As for Google don't get me started on their skewed search results as they chase the mega advertising dollars.
if we didn't have a system that allowed people to pursue whatever their interests are as they see fit, would we have all the efficiencies of resource allocations and incredible wealth that we all enjoy?
Excuse me, are we living on the same planet ? Do you mean pursuing the interest of buying a huge range of disposable cheap crap from China, is that what you mean ?
In my opinion unregulated capitalism no longer represents value for money, not by a long chalk. They have gamed the system to the point where it's rotten to its foundations.
The real enemy is not capitalist billionaires....
Kleptocratic governments and their leaders that steal billions from their countrymen,wield power to rig the game and have somehow accumulated billions are the real enemy.
The world has many, many more of these type....they hide in the shadows. They don't have Twitter accounts, most people don't know their names. That is the way they like it.
I'm not sure that's true. The more business Amazon hoovers up the less business is available to go around for others.
but that doesn't mean that amazon's input is zero sum. it's certainly true that they've displaced businesses & industries, but that's simply a case of consumer dollars following a new model that they think is an improvement over the prior ones. cars displaced horses. that doesn't mean cars were zero sum. just the opposite, they improved people's lives in all sorts of ways - creative destruction.
and it's a fact that the world is not zero sum. if it was zero sum, we'd all be as poor as we were a thousand years ago collectively, but instead we're much, much richer.
Really ? Amazon bought up IMDb and then promptly shut down its message boards which was an act of cultural vandalism in my book. Also the method they used to compress their MP3 music should be a scandal. They should pay people to download that crap not the other way around. And I don't think their workers are all that impressed by Amazon's "innovations". As for Google don't get me started on their skewed search results as they chase the mega advertising dollars.
some fair points, but my response would be: the real world is messy, and innovation isn't always clear in its gains, and there can be losses. i bet mp3s are worse in sound quality, there's likely little question on that. but apparently that doesn't matter to people, because they seem to be happy to trade the better sound quality for the convenience of beaming electrons instead of having 100s of pieces of plastic cluttering up their houses.
in fact, this leads to one of the greatest stories that everyone should be talking about, but almost no one seems to know: the decoupling of economic growth from material consumption. we are actually using less stuff even as we grow more wealthy, and the ability to consume things by having them beamed to your phone or roku or laptop is a huge part of that.
i'd really recommend andrew mcafee's book 'more from less.' it's chock full of details on this incredible revolution. if you don't want to read his book, i really recommend his interview on the podcast 'econtalk.' it's bursting with fun, interesting insights on what's happened in the past few decades.
https://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/
so you may not like that lots of people are listening to relatively lo-fi music, but 1) you still, as a consumer in a free market, have the option of buying an lp or a cd in almost all cases because companies will try to satisfy even small niche consumers, and 2) what would the alternative be if we didn't have those electrons providing us with our music and tv and movies? if we didn't have that, then we'd all be buying lots more plastic and playing those.
consider the way so many products have collapsed into our phones and laptops - all kinds of gizmos, clocks and radios and stereos and cameras and compasses and barometers. and stuff we never had before - gps, for example. and not only the fact that we can carry around all those things on one device. consider the energy saved. lots of devices like your clock radio are weirdly energy hungry, and having that displaced by your phone is indeed a net good. it's bad for clock radio manufacturers. they lose. but their loss is a net gain, a gain for consumers who get more for less, a gain for the world that gets more information, more value with less material consumption.
Excuse me, are we living on the same planet ? Do you mean pursuing the interest of buying a huge range of disposable cheap crap from China, is that what you mean ?
and consider the consumer who buys that stuff. it may not mean much to some, but for lower class americans and canadians, the option to buy more things at a lower price is an incredible blessing. it saves them money. it allows them to buy things for their kids that they wouldn't have had otherwise. that is a gain for them, for their children. it allows them to save in ways they couldn't, take their kids on a vacation, save for their education. that is a net dollar value for them, for the world, and it as a moral good for us.
if capitalism doesn't do those things, then my challenge to anyone would be to point me to a place that has removed it and subsequently improved the conditions for their residents. i don't think there is such a place, and until we find an alternative way, there is no system shown to improve the lives of all people that can compare to the innovations and improvements that result from economic freedom, from billions of people individually pursuing their own interests.
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That is the correct answer.
" the efficiencies of resource allocations and incredible wealth that we all enjoy"
Wow, you must live in a very privileged bubble. We All Enjoy ?!?
not at all!
not that it should matter, and not that i really need to divulge such a thing here, but i work for a homeless shelter in one of the poorest urban areas of canada.
what i recognize, and what i think we should all recognize, is that we all have the greatest privilege the world's ever seen: the temporal privilege we all have in living at a time where everyone living in a free market country has access to limitless calories and clean drinking water and incredible technology.
our ancestors would weep with gratitude to have a tenth of what we have. all of us, not just billionaires. we are the luckiest people ever to live.
Well, that's your take, anyway.
Mine is we're giving away the gold mine and getting the shaft.
And there are legions of economically disadvantaged people who aren't weeping with gratitude because they have cell phones. Yippy skippy.
there are economically disadvantaged people everywhere.
that is essentially the default position of humanity, and of all living things. when you open up the package and take humans out of their box, they are poor. the continuous story of humans was misery, of scratching out a meager existence, of childhood deaths and disease and threat of starvation, until it wasn't.
and if you don't appreciate that even the poor in 'the west' have by historical measures lives of luxury, then i think that's a pretty thoughtless dismissal of something really remarkable, something truly special and incredibly rare in our history.
but i guess that's your take! personally, i don't think billions of people having lives of comfort, of never having to worry about adequate calories or clean drinking water is a trivial thing.
i would direct you to the really good humanprogress article that lily linked to above as a really good primer on this.
or simply look at the countries that are the most economically free. those are the places where the greatest number of people are the best off.
the places where people are the worst off are those where there is less freedom, where people are most restricted and unable to pursue their own interests.
the judgement of history on this matter really couldn't be any more clear. there are no people smart enough to design a system that can produce a result that matches the emergent order that comes from billions of people pursuing the things they want to achieve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_freedom
And who is qualified to make that determination?
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I don't like your framing of the issue, but that's not surprising.
SOME people might say the former, and SOME people might say the latter, but this doesn't define how everyone thinks.
The latter point is patently absurd. At least the former shows some compassion for the suffering.
The problem about billionaires is that most people hate them but at the same time want to be one.
shareI'm not sure that's true either. I'm struggling to find things worth spending my money on as it is and I'm a good way short of being a millionaire let alone being a billionaire. Just look at the mansions billionaires build themselves. Sure they are gigantic and expensive but they look like huge new car dealer showrooms. I wouldn't live in one if you paid me to. It's as if no-one knows how to make things that combine beauty and function any more. No true artisans or craftsmen.
Money isn't outer space, it's not unlimited potential. What I'm trying to say is that there is only so much you can do with it. That why rich house wives get bored easily. After you brought 2 manision for 20 million, a yacht and some cars now what?
When I see people buy a gold toilet or an inland to live by themselves, I'm like ok, now your just trying to find sh#t to buy. Or a picture that noone wants that cost 2 millions dollars just to say I got it, Ok......
These people have gotten to end of the rainbow which they really shouldn't be there. they point of life is the journey not actually getting to the end because then you go now what?
But at the end of the day it's not my concern what people do with their money and I don't believe anyone needs to be someone else's moral compass. As long as people don't earn their money illegally it isn't anybody's business how much money someone has.
shareIf it effect the nation you live in negatively then yes,you have to say something sooner or later.
shareyou are killing it in this thread, q.
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