Please don’t talk to strangers in the same tone you use on your children.
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Well, how else will he signal how much more logical and mature he is than the rest of us rabble? How will we be put into our proper place if the big man doesn’t school us? He’s providing a valuable service! /s
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You don’t sound like a good investor. How did you make your first million?
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Meh, don’t waste your time on someone who thinks that inheriting a bunch of money from great-great-grandad who abused, cheated and swindled for it is harder work than 20 hr days in the field and a hot kitchen.
After all, they had to sign all those papers at the lawyers’ so someone else can make sure those investments are handled properly. And Mint Juleps are heavy doncha know?
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I can understand how rich people can delude themselves into believing personal wealth is strongly correlated to intelligence/hard work/productivity/etc. but when I hear non-rich people parrot those talking points I have to wonder if there’s some element of self-loathing involved.
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Literally describing credit unions.
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But who was the last credit union billionaire you met? How are credit unions supposed to lobby the Commerce and Treasury departments for bailouts if they give their earnings back to their members? Hmm?/s
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That was excellent! Thank you
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Akala is always worth listening to:
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From:
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I am. Regurgitated or not there is a place for business owners in our economy as they provide jobs. They take on risks that many of us do not and should receive some extra compensation for that higher risk. However, while I recognize that some billionaires do give back and in some cases, in big ways, I believe there are several that continue to look after numero uno. I am not certain a wealth tax is the solution, but am open to hearing the pros and cons of it.
Bill Gates was born into wealth and privilege. He never exposed himself to “risk” in the way most people understand the concept; even if he’d lost everything he had when he dropped out of college in 1975 to co-found Microsoft the worst fate he could have faced was being forced to move back in with his rich parents for a few months while he decided what to do next.
The people who invest in new businesses are, almost by definition, people who have excess assets to invest. Few if any billionaires alive today ever faced any serious risk of going hungry or going without a roof over their head.
Bill Gates is not a lazy person and he was an important part of Microsoft. But there is no way ANY individual is important enough to earn the amount of personal wealth Gates has amassed.
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I don’t disagree with you on you points of his wealth or that he had wealthy parents. I speak of risk from an economical standpoint. Higher risk meaning that they stand a chance sustaining higher loss.
As a clarification, I refer to all business owners. Those of small companies and large.
While I don’t disagree with you about no person being worth 100 billion dollars, I don’t agree either. That is something I’m going to have to mull over for a while. There are points from my economics classes and my experience in my jobs that would suggest that he couldn’t attain that wealth without providing some value; I do believe he has provided a lot of value.
But what I have learned is that in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, theory and practice are not the same.
So I guess what I’m saying is that I recognize the possibility of what you are saying to be true. There is a possibility that some of his wealth or a lot could have been generated by manipulating the rules of the game. If that makes sense.
He didn’t have to manipulate the rules of the game because the game’s rules were never written to be fair in the first place.
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No. They do not take any real meaningful risks at all. No one who starts a business or invests takes real risk because of it. In fact they are protected even from many bad business decisions so long as they can secure credit. To make some money into more money you take modest risks with the capital that may leave you with less capital but probably will leave you with more. That is nothing compared to the risk you are born with if you are poor. If the worst risk you take with your wealth is having less wealth then literally every single human with less wealth is at greater risk every day. I am sick and tired of hearing about the “risks” of starting a business or investing. Every penny I have invested is a privilege not a risk. Starting a business in the contemporary US is also a very very privileged thing to do. If you get lucky (and yes it’s luck… just dumb blind luck, almost anything else is survivorship bias) and make a lot off of your venture, then you did nothing special other than have enough wealth to do it and decide to try. You should pay some goddamned taxes in that case.
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Including time, which isn’t cheap (especially if you still need to concern yourself with the lower tiers of Maslow’s pyramid). Also social capital.
And education. Unsophisticated people who see money as a score-keeping mechanism or as an indicator of character or divine favour would like to boil these situations down to “more risk = more reward” and “a business owner adds value just in being a job creator” and “bootstraps and the Protestant work ethic are all it takes”. However, any self-aware and educated person (wealthy or not) who’s actually started and run a business knows it’s a lot more complex than that and that blind luck plays a huge role.
Right now in the U.S. and U.K., it’s difficult to advance and accumulate wealth if you don’t start from a certain baseline of family wealth (Richard Reeves puts it as being born into the top ventile). If things keep going the way they are, that situation will only get worse, effectively creating a new form of hereditary aristocracy.
Interestingly, Gates himself sees the value of laziness.
I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
I don’t think he’s the only supposed avatar of the Protestant Work Ethic who thinks this way.
And there’s no way that a multi-billionaire signals that an economy is healthy and sustainable. When I see a multi-billionaire, 90% of the time the next thing I see is a monopoly or semi-monopoly in an industry.
One thing that honest and smart wealthy people convey to the young people in their family is that, as things stand, the game is rigged. Those same people do their best to make sure those young people learn the life skills to play it as if it’s fair despite the fact that it’s not.
Gates himself is like this, as I noted in an earlier topic:
Now we all can laugh about the “hardship” and “normalcy” of flying first class, but this indicates how distorting and isolating that amount of money can be, and how it can thwart even the best intentions (which I believe that Gates genuinely has, whether its in bringing up his kids or in his philanthropy).
tl;dr: if you know anything about money, you know that the presence of multi-billionaires are not a healthy sign for an economy.
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Emphasis mine.
This term needs to be abandoned. Taxation by a flat-rate percentage is a more transparent way to describe how it should be, and exposes the inequality across the scale.
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Wow… people who work 40 hour weeks are lazy and “expecting a handout”? That’s next level.
I hope you’re enjoying your retirement on social security. So much better than having to beg for handouts like a working stiff, is it not? It sounds like it’s really mellowed you out.
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