I am of the opinion that if we everyday feel resentment towards those who have more, that we are in itself creating a lesser condition for ourself. Whether that be mental illness, hate, or worse.
Your thoughts?
Not necessarily. There are plenty of people who think that the growth of Microsoft and Amazon came from doing sketchy things that should not be repeated.
Because those are very different situations.
Also, I'm not sure that there was a meaningful equivalent to venture capitalists in that era, but I'm not at all confident enough in my history to state that with any weight.
The automobile used to be a toy for millionaires, now even (American) minimum-wage workers can travel daily in comfortable, individual, climate-controlled vehicles capable of incredible speeds.
I would pay $100k for a ten-year-old Civic but I don't have to because the car companies work hard and compete with each other and have driven down costs and prices to the bare minimum.
Same for many of todays billionaires / huge corporations. They're generally not stealing from us, but creating enormous wealth for all of us in the form of consumer surplus with their desirable goods and services.
I definitely don’t agree that either of these companies predatory tactics, and especially Amazon’s treatment of workers, is something that should be lauded or encouraged.
Absolutely not.
It’s a completely reasonably argument to assert that both men made the bulk of their outsized wealth via anti-competitive monopolistic behavior that was harmful to the markets they operated in.
Gates was in fact accused of this by the US Justice Department so it’s not exactly a fringe theory.
We read that the wealthy are taxed at a lower tax bracket because most of their income doesn't come from a paycheck, but from investments which are taxed at a lower rate. I can never compete, because I do not have investments that would generate a return similar to my current salary. Unfair rules in my opinion.
>The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent).
https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...
1: https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
The reality is (as of 2016) the top 1% pay 37% of the total income tax bill. The top 5% (income>198K) pay 58%. The top 10% 69.5%.
On the other hand, the bottom 90% pay 30% of the tax bill, the bottom 50% only 3%.
What I meant was: One way for rich people to get more at other peoples expense, that does not require what would legally considered stealing from you, is to have to pay less taxes than they previously had (by using legal ways to do it, or by being the beneficiary of changing laws).
The point is, there is a lot of way's for the rich to benefit at your expense, and hacking your bank account might just be the least practical.
try this thought experiment:
your neighbor has $10 and you have $1. the cost to keep a person sheltered, fed, and clothed is $3. your neighbor pays you $1 to do some task each month while making $10 from your labor. you can't afford the basics with the salary being offered. your neighbor, on the other hand, can afford the basics for themselves and also for you using the revenues generated from your labor -- and more! yet, they still only pay you $1, because if they paid you $3, they'd only be able to pay for their own consumption two times instead of three times. is this situation acceptable on the basis of the factors outlined in the experiment alone?
because that level of exploitation is a mere shadow of the scale of exploitation that the current crop of billionaires perform. and we haven't even started to talk abou tax dodging yet.
They are not so much stealing money from your account, but the amount they put in looks like it could be a lot bigger?
I don’t know, but something is off, the way I see it.
Many companies make huge profits because the enviromental impact of their work is an externiality, and they do not carry that cost.
Probably the biggest part, as we will come to see.
You seem pretty clearly to be speaking of his networth which rises and falls with the price of AMZN shares. When friends/relatives ask 'how much do you make?' do you include unrealized gains on any investments you own?
However, when you want something done, when you believe in a cause, you're going to have a harder time than previous generations to exert pressure on the powers that be to make that happen. They will care less about your purchasing power or your vote than was the case for your parents or grandparents. Depending on what injustices you see in the world, you will probably have a harder time finding an organization with any real influence that you can join to make a difference.
This is the biggest problem with inequality; people are fixated on what they have, not on what's possible. The world will change, and everyone has a stake in what it changes into. It's a problem when it changes on the terms of just one group, a problem that of course will always be the case, but can be bigger or smaller. Right not, it's getting bigger.