I don’t quite agree. That billionaires exist in the first place is absolutely a problem, but the billionaires themselves aren’t. A capitalist system naturally concentrates wealth (because the whole point of capitalism is that capital, i.e. wealth-making-wealth exists), and so even if the whole of the billionaire class divest themselves of every single penny they own and then immolate themselves on Times Square, the systems we have running things will, in an amazingly short period of time, siphon off all that distributed wealth back into the pockets of the people with merely many millions of dollars who’d then become the billionaires. Money runs uphill. Simple as that.
The system needs changing and I can’t see that happening, especially not in America.
Because, as far as I can tell, all the alternatives are unthinkable, and you can’t have capitalism without the money going to the top. During the 1950s and 1960s there was a brief period where it seemed like you could square the circle and have plenty left for everyone, but that was a seasonal aberration. This rapacious planet-striding strain of capitalism we have now is, I contend, the normal state of affairs.
[citation needed]
Labor may become so abundant that it is worthless (dooming all of us who must sell ours to make a living), but we aren’t close to post-scarcity. The phosphorous shortage comes swiftly to mind.
Now, admittedly, you could extract everything you could ever want from seawater, and if we had effectively unlimited power, and better tech, we might even give it a shot, but we don’t have either.
Guillotines? People don’t have the money or engineering skills for guillotines. Instead lets use piano wire and a couple of handles. It’s much more … intimate.
I don’t think they’re going to have a choice in preserving it, to be honest. They’re all going to make a lot of rational short- or medium-term choices that will involve a lot of automation and job destruction, because that’s how they’re incentivized.
But at some point, the calculus of the situation will change: the middle class won’t exist enough to support whatever products or services they’re trying to sell us (already happening in many sectors, especially the luxury markets), and there will be a collapse in a number of non-essential market segments as a result.
Secondarily, this will lead to a feedback cycle of unemployment and collapse of additional markets, as well as a contraction in financial and real estate markets, with some artificial bubbles inflating and popping along the way as various schemes to “create” (actually transfer, with negative-sum consequences, see: cryptocurrency) wealth naturally happen along the way.
This will be perceived as a crisis, and different countries will respond differently to it. Some will try the austerity (AKA “don’t raise no taxes on no rich people!!!”) route, and some will try a more socialistic route, and those latter countries will probably survive with much less damage in the long run.
I personally am waiting to see which way America is going to go, but I also plan to GTFO to any country that looks to be going the socialist route when the collapse is coming if America sticks its head in the sand, because it’s going to be an unbelievable shakeup in terms of balance of world power, and I want to make sure my kids will grow up somewhere where they still have options.
The billionaires themselves are well positioned to see some changes to the system. Advocating for an estate tax rate of 99% for everything over $100,000,000 would be a good start.
(And would be in their interest too, since their advocating for 0 estate tax sure makes me realize that 99% of everything would be pretty fair.)
I get the impression that what he’s whinging about being unfair is that their plundering of the workers of the world is going to bite them in the ass, rather than inequality being unfair on its face.
As for billionaires in the US, they’d better start thinking about getting gun laws changed. When an AR-15 costs as little as $300, why invest in all the wood and steel necessary to build a guillotine at greater expense?
Good point. Goat are basically sheep with attitude, but otherwise?
I thought it was ‘tell the sheep from the sharks’.
(Sharks don’t look back. Because they don’t have necks.)
The recent Kurtzgesagt video on egoistic altruism touches on this. Their (recapitulated) economic argument it is in your own selfish economic interest that everyone does better, because the economy has been a positive sum game for a long long time time now.
You can’t have pure capitalism but then again we have never had that. This nation and indeed the global economy is a mixed bag of capitalism, community capitalism, socialism, etc etc.
But the idea that capitalism is necessary or even desirable is still up in the air for me.
Normally, the problem with capital pooling at the top has been dealt with by imposing very high tax rates on the wealthy. But since we chose to tax income rather than wealth, we have created all sorts of investor class problems.
It’s simple enough, tax wealthy at above 50% and watch re-investment and middle class wages go back up.
The only counter-argument here is that these days, a business re-investing in itself doesn’t mean more jobs, it means more automation. Which means fewer jobs - a few really good jobs (creating and maintaining the automated machinery), and a lot fewer jobs that are replaced. With more profits going to the top in the short run, but at the cost of diminished overall economic activity (because fewer overall dollars are going to wages/overhead, and therefore fewer dollars into the economy).
In the long run, that just marginally speeds up an inevitable process, of course. We’re going to hit that old brick wall sooner or later where we only have a small number of people employed and producing anything of tangible value, and everyone else is going to be competing to be, I dunno, potential YouTube stars or something.
re-investment can also mean creating new lines of business, expanding the ownership of other businesses, and all sorts of other things that are a net benefit to the company without paying stupidly high salaries to just a few. Also, we can’t loose sight of the fact that those taxes can be used to pay for a more realistic social safety net which could include state funded payments to all citizens to ensure no one is left penniless.
