Why Can’t Billionaires Advance the Common Good?
fixcapitalism.com
fixcapitalism.com
When you become oversocialized, you start to be subservient to the global world - you begin to think in terms of "we" for all of humanity.
Some questions worth asking:
1. Did all alleged parties agreed to be involved?
2. What is the purpose in banding together? What does everyone get out of it?
3. If you somehow solve world hunger, for example, for the 7 billion people on Earth, what do you do when that number reaches 10 billion, or 20, etc? What are your requirements for someone to be receiving these alms? Does the criminal receive the same?
4. What do you do when the mothers and fathers of these new children have absolutely no regard for their offspring? Is it a problem of the state? Again, refer back to question one. Is it within the interest of all of the parties to continue to support people who are too indifferent to prepare a future for their next of kin?
5. Beyond vague appeals to "world good" and all, I mean, sincerely, do you not see that these issues will persist no matter what you do?
If we're going to throw around "shoulds" and "should nots," then how about, "Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal."
I guess the most vexing thing for me: What does it even mean to fix something as vague as capitalism? Why should I expect anyone to help me, or for me to expect help from anyone else? Appealing to a common good just means you've been duped
- created a new business, - employed 1000s of people, giving them better opportunities, - created something valuable to improve the lives of consumers, and - did it for so many people at such scale that they became a billionaire,
and somehow you're complaining about the amount of their contribution?
That said, the origin of your wealth is also important. A politician that got it simply by stealing via the government didn't contribute anything.
If the business model is aligned with customers and has positive external impacts on society, generally even selfish moguls will act in a way beneficial to everyone.
If the business model is in any way significantly misaligned with any of its stakeholders, or incurs external costs, the richer it gets, the greater the incentive and growth dependency on doing more worse things, ignoring or hiding damage, be deceptive, etc.
I am looking at you Mark Z. :(
Those whose justification is "the common good" are often those who hate them and wish to see them destroyed. One can't blame them for not wanting to consort with such undesirables.
Inequality is? Really?
Given that I don't believe that inequality is on the same level of threat as war or climate collapse, they might do better to explain why they think so, rather than just to state that it is true. Because, frankly, I think they are quite mistaken, and just running on about it being so is really not very persuasive. Even calling it a "wicked problem" leaves me unmoved. Tell my why... and they don't.
Of course, war has also been around for thousands of years, and has also destroyed various societies, but only within living memory have we had the war-making capability to destroy >99% of human life. (Whether that is a likely outcome if a nuclear war occurred is a separate question). Similarly the climate has changed before, but only in living memory have humans pushed the climate outside of its normal range of parameters, risking civilization-harming changes that happen faster than we can adapt to.
In terms of inequality, what is perhaps new about the current age is the magnitude of difference between the poorest and the richest person. Some would say that the bottom 10% in the US are still richer in some sense than a king living 1000 years ago, and that may be true, but a modern billionaire is so much more wealthy than a modern poor person, that this level of inequality is arguably a difference of kind rather than degree.
The precautionary principle would advise us that this new type of problem could cause a civilization-level danger, given how inequality has been associated with collapses in the past, and how large power imbalances tend to lead to corruption and abuse of that power. The precise mechanism for inequality causing the destruction of civilization is less clear than the mechanisms for war and climate collapse, but there are plausible ways that inequality can lead to the latter two, at least to a limited extent.
This is pretty much the same argument as someone saying "Why is the government allowed to put people in prison, but when I lock someone up in my basement I'm apparently the bad guy?!"
It has also always been the purview of government to tax the population/businesses whatever it can get away with, just as it has been the purview of government to regulate commerce for the benefit of its citizens:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_competition_law#Rom...
You're free to disagree on the ethics, but hopefully you can accept the logic of it. If I may ironically steal a line from William Francis Sutton Jr., they tax the rich because "that's where the money is".
To be a little more nuanced, though, money has diminishing marginal utility, in the sense that $10 means less to a billionaire than to someone who is broke, and therefore if a tax system takes into account the perspectives of the people who hold the money, rather than the perspectives of the pieces of money themselves, it makes sense to tax not just as a fixed proportion of people's wealth, but to tax wealth above certain thresholds at higher rates.
Consider also that the median US household pays about $10k in taxes per year, and has a net worth of about $120k. That means that, just to tax billionaires proportionally (not progressively), there could be a wealth tax of 8% per year. Instead we tax income, which punishes people for working and rewards the idle rich.
Some of them do... assuming one agrees that the charity cases they take on constitutes the common good.
I and many more people have transitioned from loud, complicated, dirty chemical transporters earlier than we might have due to a saucy billionaire we all know and some love.