If you want another bit of shock, think about this: Do you have any wealth? Is your net worth positive? Then you have more wealth than millions of Americans combined.
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[QUOTE]Once again Oxfam have come out with a report that demonises capitalism, conveniently skimming over the fact that free markets have helped over 100 million people rise out of poverty in the last year alone.[/QUOTE]
It’s really odd to me that the “rebuttal” here isn’t more coherent.
It’s an ad hominem combined with a topic shift.
As if to say, “Yes, your criticism is exactly correct, but here is something completely unrelated, you big jerk!”
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Our Minister of Finance helpfully pointed out that in a couple of year’s time it’s likely that neither of them will still be in the top two spots. Well, thanks Captain Obvious - you’re not helping! (ok, you’re helping them, but you aren’t helping address the widening wealth gap)
Over the last couple of hundred years we’ve sort of now gotten to a place where physical violence isn’t acceptable. It still happens, of course. A lot. But mere ‘might is right’ justification isn’t generally seen as sufficient anymore.
In the middle years of last century (very roughly, 1935-1970) it looked like economic violence was similarly being bought under control. But over the last 30-40 years we’ve been going backwards at an accelerating pace.
I wonder when the pendulum will start swinging the other way again.
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I’m normally the first person to advocate eating the rich, but most of these names I’m okay with.
For the most part these people are self-made, and grew up in poor or middle class households. People like that tend to be grateful for what they have and are pretty likely to be philanthropists and advocate for humanitarian causes.
It’s the second, third, hundredth generation wealthy I have a problem with- The ones who do nothing, grow their fortunes in absentia, and feel both superior and entitled because of it. The Waltons and Kochs and Bushes.
Were I to wave my magic wand and fix all the world’s problems, I’d simply place a cap on inheritance. As Buffett put it, ‘‘enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.’’ And it actually looks like both he and Gates are doing just that.
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Right, exactly. It’s not strictly about capitalization, I think, that’s just a by product. The stocks themselves make money, rather than on directly investing in a company in order to get a return and to provide a service for the public or one’s community.
Depends on the size of the project one wishes to pursue, yeah? Co-operatives of some kind, collective banking maybe. Or businesses that are owned by the workers themselves. On a small scale, microloans have proven invaluable for starting small businesses that tend to be far more beneficial to communities. There have been some rather great successes with online fund raising like Kickstarter and Gofund me, etc. There is no reason that couldn’t be scaled up as needed. Honestly, the whole notion that one needs tens of millions of dollars to start a business right out of the gate is skewing what it means to start a business. yes, you often need lots of $$, but probably not as much as the venture capitalist are pouring into endless start ups to find the “next big thing”… And companies that are on the stock market get there well after they are in their start up phase, anyhow.
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Which of them started out poor or lower middle class? Not Gates, he dropped out of an Ivy League School… Buffett’s dad was a congressman. Bezos is a legacy landowner in Texas. Zuckerberg’s family had enough to send him to Phillips Exeter in NH. Ellis was born to an unwed mother, but was given to a middle class aunt and uncle to raise him at the age of 8 (so closer to what you mean). Bloomberg, too, came from a more humble, but not poor, background. The only one of the list who was poor is Ortega and maybe Carlos Slim- I couldn’t find anything about his family. Quite a few came from not upper class, but certainly not a struggling background by any means, and many of them came up in an era when being white and male meant you had more economic opportunities, backed by the postwar expansion (or were 2 generations from that and still benefited from it, in the case of Zuckerberg).
The question is what are they doing with that wealth now, however they got it. Do you honestly think that there isn’t a problem, just because how they made their fortunes isn’t personally objectionable to you? It’s not the individuals that are the problem, but the way the global economic structures benefit some, very small number, of people.
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Again, the point isn’t that those individuals are evil people. The point is that wealth inequality has risen to the point where eight people control as many resources as 3.5 billion.
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Back when I worked in social work, most of our clients were people who lived on the edge of a subsistence income and had been knocked over that edge by a single event (e.g. car broke down, couldn’t afford to fix it, lost their job because they couldn’t get to work, got evicted because they couldn’t meet the rent, downward spiral).
Often, a small one-off payment would allow them to get back on their feet. Just a few hundred dollars, most of the time.
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So if you grow up poor, you deserve to keep your billions but if you inherit them, you don’t? I don’t care if they are philanthropists or not. There is no reason for society to allow people to make this obscene level of wealth.
And his father is a famous local (Seattle) lawyer with his name on a firm (“Preston Gates” as I recall).
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I don’t begrudge people getting wealthy, the issue is income inequality. Leaving it up to chance that magnates become philanthropists is not a successful model. BTW, Larry Ellison is anything but a philanthropist. Philanthropy actually is a really shitty model in much the same way that leaving environmentalism up to charities marketing to protect cute animals is. Some nice causes get more money and massive systemic gaps get left as massive systemic gaps.
If all these billionaires had ten billion instead of seventy billion they’d be doing just fine, still could contribute to whatever random flashy pet causes they chose, still could maintain their fleets of yachts, and more revenues could be contributed to the really boring but important allocations.
Inheritance taxes also could help, were they not so trivially avoidable that the very rich rarely pay them (see Zuckerberg’s recent foundation to ensure his daughter’s billions).
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More like Feudalism, really.
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Perhaps someday they’ll learn where that leads?
Nah.
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I dunno, half the world’s wealth buys a lot of well fed, semi-pampered private security.
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Just without all the social relations between peasants and landowners… if the worst happens, they are not obligated to let us into their compounds and protect us the way that a feudal lord would have been.
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As it always has. You’ll note from the list I posted that the majority of peasant revolts are unsuccessful…
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And not even the fig leaf of the noblesse oblige. More mega-yachts, less responsibility.
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It’s worth noting that the report is based on the Forbes list of top billionaires, which excludes royalty and other kleptocrats from contention
This probably skews the top of the listings, and gives a falsely bootstrappy impression of the list’s members. Which is probably just how Forbes likes it.
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Congratulations to them!
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It also conveniently skips over the question of exactly how those 100 million people found themselves living in poverty in the first place. Are we supposed to credit the free market for every person who rises out of poverty but not blame it for any of the people who sink into it?
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