852
An excess of billionaires is destabilising politics – just as academics predicted
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
852 points (99.5% liked)
News
23376 readers
2604 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
One billionaire is an excess.
One cannot earn that much money without exploiting workers.
I'd argue against the word "earn" even. One cannot earn one billion dollars at all.
Nobody deserves $1 billion when it would take a teacher about 20,000 years to make the same amount. And it's not earned if it's not deserved.
But that's just semantic ranting, you're right.
While I agree, billionaires don't just have a 10+ figure checking account. Most of their networth is in non-liquid assets.
Which is why we should tax unrealized gains over a certain amount, and loans against those unrealized gains.
Owning that much of a company that is valued that highly is still damaging to society, even if it isn't liquid cash. Even putting aside their ability to take out loans with the shares as collateral, if the company is really worth that much it should be owned by a larger number of people with each taking a reasonably sized share to ensure that decisions are not made selfishly.
Taxing unrealised gains also hurt working class people dabbling in the stock market to try and improve their circumstance. IMO once you reach a net worth of $1B you get a pat on the back that you won captalism, and a 200% tax rate on anything beyond that to force you to give it up. No one person should own and control so much of a company if it truely has so much value, divide it among those that created the value i.e. the employees.
No, I realized that after I wrote it and did the lazy thing and didn't edit.
Even the best teacher on Earth can only teach so many students a year. You can't become a billionaire without being able to 'scale up'.
But, for example, someone who invents something that makes a common manufacturing process just a few % more efficient, can affect millions if not billions of products that millions if not billions of people around the world buy. Even a small increase in profit margin can aggregate to a huge amount of increased wealth.
If you create that level of aggregate value, then you absolutely have earned that aggregate sum.
Also, it is literally not possible to become a billionaire by simply underpaying employees. That'd be the same kind of linear increase used in all of the dumb 'if you made $X every day for thousands of years (and interest didn't exist for some reason)' analogies, so I know the people who argue this do understand that linear growth doesn't get you there in a lifetime.
P.S. if employees were such an automatic profit source, why does downsizing exist? If labor is a profit source, firing people is throwing money away.