He doesn't owe us anything. He's free to spend his time on what he thinks is important. That's what you and I do as well. The difference is he actually works on things that make the world better. I don't know about you, but I don't. Not yet anyway.
He can start by not avoiding his taxes. That would be a good help.
> He doesn't owe us anything.
Naive. He owes at least the taxes he avoided. Any business that avoids taxes ends up costing the society more simply because they make use of infrastructure which needs maintenance, it likely pollutes the environment either directly or by proxy, and it ends up exploiting people for their bottom line, people who then need to be financed by the society. He also owes back for the brains he amassed that end up not giving back to the society, brains that were likely educated on the tax payer's pocket.
> He's free to spend his time on what he thinks is important
He is free, but he can also not be pretentious, or put his money where his mouth is.
The argument for helping other people instead of creating new ventures to pat your back is quite simple, but goes over most people's heads; the more scientists we have that actually tackle problems, the easier it becomes to deal with issues like cancer that plague everyone, the rich included. By accepting that the probability that many people smarter than us are impoverished, or born in awful circumstances is large, we see that the expectation that comes from dealing with poverty/lack of education has greater impact on our life expectancy and overall QOL over starting new projects and trying to sample people from a limited pool of candidates.
I'm sorry, do you pay more taxes than you owe? Why would anyone do that.
I see a lot of armchair criticism of billionaires in general. It's usually not well thought out and comes across to me as plain old jealously and sour grapes.
Put forward a real criticism if you want, and you'd better remove the log from your own eye first.
There's a difference between tax avoidance and paying more than you owe, but IIRC you could donate to the US, though I don't know why anyone would do that.
I did put forward real criticism, I said, straight out, that if they actually wanted to help, besides patting their backs and paying lip service, they would actually bring more brains out of poverty and there are many ways one can do that. They are certainly not as profitable as money laundering charities, but what does a proletariat know of the world of billionaires? Perhaps I am too stupid to see how amassing billions while underpaying workers, and making money off children in sweat shops makes the world a better place.
There is indeed some bitterness, I wasn't born lucky, heart defects, mental illnesses, poverty, all the good stuff.
No, that's the same. Using your brain to legally reduce your tax bill is quite reasonable and we all do it. If you have a problem with how much taxes presumably Amazon, not Jeff, pays, take it up with your lawmakers.
> Perhaps I am too stupid to see how amassing billions while underpaying workers, and making money off children in sweat shops makes the world a better place.
That's a pretty uncharitable characterization of Amazon. I can make an economics argument that to have a company of 1.6 trillion dollars in value means it probably brought more than that much in value to people around the world. But it doesn't really matter, he didn't do it to make the world a better place.
Some of the things he's focusing on now, including blue origin, he is doing, I think chiefly, to make the world a better place given his past statements about why he started that company.
Bending and modifying the law because you can exactly because you amassed money in order to amass more money isn't smart, it is literally the equivalent of the rich kid buying power in a pay to win game.
> That's a pretty uncharitable characterization of Amazon. I can make an economics argument that to have a company of 1.6 trillion dollars in value means it probably brought more than that much in value to people around the world. But it doesn't really matter, he didn't do it to make the world a better place.
I wasn't thinking just of amazon at the time, but also apple.
I could make a political science argument as to why Apple/Amazon/big corp not enforcing standards on sweatshops only enables further exploitation of people.
Obviously, being able to get just about anything delivered in a day is nice. But at what cost to the environment?
Is it a net good?
To answer your question from my view, yes Amazon is freaking awesome and has made the world better for me. It has saved me literally thousands of hours of doing things I don't enjoy, which are driving and shopping in stores. In exchange I even get a better experience and lower prices! It has also funded TV shows I like, made books and audiobooks easier to access than ever before, made it easier for me to eat healthy foods by allowing me to order fresh food online without owning a car. Also, it has made it easier than ever to start an online business because it pioneered the cloud. I could go on.
Just because someone is not doing the exact thing you want them to do doesn't make them bad. There's endless problems to solve, and Amazon decided to solve a subset of them that they deemed important and profitable. It's not like all the problems in the world would be gone without Amazon. Walmart wasn't a shining beacon of hope when Amazon didn't exist, and neither was any other large retailer.
Climate change is a big problem, but you can't force people to work on only the things you think are important. I'd rather live in a world where everything goes to shit but we still get to choose what we do with our lives than one where you decide for me what problems I need to dedicate my life to. The government should be providing much higher incentives/disincentives for dealing with climate change, and businesses will solve problems when the incentives line up. Don't expect businesses to shoot themselves in the foot for no reason.