You don’t believe that if someone makes billions they should be able to pass it on to their children?
How long before we just have a permanent ruling class, and how does that move humanity forward?
It means the rich capture a growing portion of productivity, and in modern days it is on the strength of the financialization of productivity, not necessarily people actually doing work.
How is this an optimal system? How is it even a functioning system? What we are doing as a species, today, right now, is not working and our ability to live on this planet is increasingly in danger.
What I firmly oppose is someone who has a birth lottery of being born to such wealth creators - they don't deserve to inherit a vast fortune and all the power and privilege that come with it.
Irrespective, the wealth is the property of an individual who earned that wealth through voluntary exchange. If they want to give it all to their kids, to a charitable cause, or just destroy it, that should be their right as owners of that property, it is not just for the state to steal that property because some people don't like it when the parent decides to give that wealth to the child. Focus taxation on things that harm an unwilling third party, not things that involve only two consenting parties where nobody is made worse off.
Hard disagree. We won't see eye to eye on this point, and it really invalidates the rest of w hat you are saying.
I find it hard to believe that anyone could disagree with the above, which means you must disagree that the fruits of this exchange should be my property. Well let me ask you this: the customer made $20 in utility by engaging in this transaction with me. Why should they be able to keep the $20 utility but I must give up part of the $60? And what right do you have to reach into my pocket? If my customers instead traded groceries for my hour of training, should I not be able to keep these groceries?Is it only money that makes the difference for you?
As far as pushing back against crony capitalism and corporatism goes, we are in total agreement.
Consider point 13.6 of Scott Alexander's (Slate Star Codex) Non-Libertarian FAQ:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta...
If you assume that "individual property earned through voluntary exchange" is the ultimate value to be upheld, you may end up having to defend a hellscape world. You need at least to temper it with something along the lines of the Lockean proviso.
But I do consider it an important value since a lot of the motivation behind redistribution is self interest and jealousy (this is a finding in social science research), benelovant compassion only explains a small proportion of the variation.
1. Who do you think decides what rights an individual has in a society, and on what grounds do they hold that right? 2. Why grant property rights
On what grounds do they hold that right? I'm not religious so I can't appeal to an ultimate moral authority. See (2).
2. If you grant and enforce property rights you stake the individual, and the overall outcome is a more prosperous world. Removing property rights is a good way to collective starvation, it's been tried before. So it's moral in the sense that enforcing property rights minimises human suffering through the above mechanism.
If so, what kind of distribution do you think makes sense?
It's not like alternatives to billionaires owning the planet doesn't exist. Just America seems to be fairly resistant to the idea of public good.
And the other consideration is how the money of billionaires is actively used to make everyone else's lives worse, either through manipulating markets and commodities, raising our rent, or literally polluting and destroying the planet.
Or buying media and brain washing the population with their crazy ideologies. These are all highly negative events that come from a small group of people having control of too many resources.
No one yet has responded to me why it's such a great idea for billionaires to exist. I wonder if an argument could even be made that didn't even a personal fantasy/wish fulfillment scenario.
K, here's one, whether or not you accept it. I don't think the world would have SpaceX or Tesla were it not for the existence of billionaires.
Elon Musk already had a billion before founding/buying these companies. If he had "maxed out" and couldn't make any more money, I think there is a good chance he wouldn't have taken risks on these companies. I think we are better off with the existence of companies like these.
Even if you don't like Tesla or SpaceX, these are just examples. There are a lot of other companies that would not exist as well, especially if you consider the potential scarcity of funding in this scenario. And without their existence we would all be worse off.
There are downsides to having billionaires too, but it's pretty disingenuous to pretend there aren't upsides as well.
Someone else would have taken Musk's place. There is no inherent quality to billionaires that make them valuable outside of their wealth.
> especially if you consider the potential scarcity of funding in this scenario.
how is this an argument? I assume banks still exist in this world without billionaires?
As mentioned, there are other vehicles to obtain financing. Secondly, when billionaires disappear, their wealth doesn't disappear with them. Not sure what you are asking.
And even if you could gather the funding, you now have to keep a few dozen investors happy versus just pursuing your idea however you want.
And sure the money doesn't disappear, but would you really expect an Amazon warehouse worker who now makes $70k instead of $35k to be investing in highly risky ventures? I mean, they wouldn't even qualify to invest.
That seems unlikely, considering the USSR produced the space launches, and electric cars existed before Tesla. Without billionaires, you'd also lose the Koch's making it hard to move away from fossil fuels, which I think would make electric cars significantly easier, rather than harder
If you just mean that we won't have those brand names, should I care? It's just a name
Even if you assume that power correlates perfectly with wealth, there's not really evidence that billionaires control anywhere near enough money to become a "permanent ruling class".
[1]https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/06/25/six-facts... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth
By far the biggest source of wealth inequality is the division between the top and bottom 50th percentile, who have essentially zero wealth. The uber-wealthy may be rich on an individual basis, but in aggregate they still hold constitute significantly less than run-in-the-mill retirees, dentists, and actuaries.
[1]https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
It's much easier for a billionaire to hire lobbyists to protect his latest exploitative venture than it is for some dentist to do so. That's why the 1% held 30% of the total thirty years ago and they hold 40% now. That is a dark trend.
Your focus is too narrow. Broaden the timeline -- the meritocratic spoils cascade across the generations, as they ever have. It's part of the motivation to achieve.
History teaches us that extreme inequality and class resentment leads to societal collapse. First there is civil unrest, then revolution. We have seen the beginning of some serious civil unrest this year.
From a purely self-interested point of view, if you value living in a peaceful and stable society, you ought to be concerned about wealth inequality. Generational wealth is one of the major factors here.
Literally nobody is suggesting that the children of the wealthy should be penniless.
Just looking at history of presidents...George Bush Jr and George Bush Sr. Do you think George Bush Jr would have been president if his father wasn't? I'm not saying that GWB isn't competent or anything like that...but is your assertion that if he didn't have the name (and inherited wealth and connections), he would have been a viable candidate?
Same could be said about the Clinton's, so I don't think this is partisan.
In the United States, the titular head of state is chosen through a weird gameshow, and any given head of state can play that game twice. On two occasions, the son of a successful game show contestant has leveraged name recognition to also win a round in the hot seat.
Edit: because i can't reply right now:
I'm curious if a direct application of your question to something you need to survive would get a different answer.
We think of money as something we can accumulate without limit but if you replace it with other things in a similar context it seems different. Why is it okay for billionaires to exist, but not for someone to stockpile too much food?
I'm curious if anyone has an answer to both.
This way, a billionaire giving his fortune away won't be taxed. If that fortune goes to charity, still not taxed. If that fortune goes to his kids or to their trust fund, it should be heavily taxed.
I believe no individual has ever _earned_ a billion USD. If it were up to me, people like Jeff Bezos would have everything to their name seized by the state. It should be used for the benefit of the many -- and not a selected few. He'll be compensated with a trophy, though: "Congratulations, you won capitalism. Continue for New Game+."
...everything? Also what does "people like Jeff Bezos" mean? Bald ones?