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An excess of billionaires is destabilising politics – just as academics predicted
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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I'd argue against the word "earn" even. One cannot earn one billion dollars at all.
Nobody deserves $1 billion when it would take a teacher about 20,000 years to make the same amount. And it's not earned if it's not deserved.
But that's just semantic ranting, you're right.
Even the best teacher on Earth can only teach so many students a year. You can't become a billionaire without being able to 'scale up'.
But, for example, someone who invents something that makes a common manufacturing process just a few % more efficient, can affect millions if not billions of products that millions if not billions of people around the world buy. Even a small increase in profit margin can aggregate to a huge amount of increased wealth.
If you create that level of aggregate value, then you absolutely have earned that aggregate sum.
Also, it is literally not possible to become a billionaire by simply underpaying employees. That'd be the same kind of linear increase used in all of the dumb 'if you made $X every day for thousands of years (and interest didn't exist for some reason)' analogies, so I know the people who argue this do understand that linear growth doesn't get you there in a lifetime.
P.S. if employees were such an automatic profit source, why does downsizing exist? If labor is a profit source, firing people is throwing money away.
While I agree, billionaires don't just have a 10+ figure checking account. Most of their networth is in non-liquid assets.
Which is why we should tax unrealized gains over a certain amount, and loans against those unrealized gains.
Owning that much of a company that is valued that highly is still damaging to society, even if it isn't liquid cash. Even putting aside their ability to take out loans with the shares as collateral, if the company is really worth that much it should be owned by a larger number of people with each taking a reasonably sized share to ensure that decisions are not made selfishly.
Taxing unrealised gains also hurt working class people dabbling in the stock market to try and improve their circumstance. IMO once you reach a net worth of $1B you get a pat on the back that you won captalism, and a 200% tax rate on anything beyond that to force you to give it up. No one person should own and control so much of a company if it truely has so much value, divide it among those that created the value i.e. the employees.
No, I realized that after I wrote it and did the lazy thing and didn't edit.