Do you believe that wealth has to be distributed equally or do you believe that some people earn more of the pie because of their own skills, efforts, and risk taking?
> The fact is, over 60% of the 400 richest Americans were born wealthy.
Your propaganda piece does not state that. It quotes forbes stating that 70% of therichest 400 in the US made their entire fortunes from scratch, but then tries to put an ideological spin on the article by asserting that they were born "priviledged", without providing any definition.
I think talking about earning is inherently talking about the creation of value, right? Wealth is arguably the proceeds of past value, work income, or income from a new enterprise the proceeds of current value.
There are definitely benefits to rewarding creating new value, I'll grant that. The invisible hand of economics helps distribute value fairly between equals.
But often the rewards of value are monetary, and are captured by those who already have money and power because of past value creation, rather then distributed according to the contributions of all individuals who participated in work.
Power and money further distort the abilities of less fortunate individuals to gain just compensation for their efforts.
I see that as exploitative and problematic. I think it also arguably undermines new enterprises and new value that might have been created had the work that people were doing been rewarded in an equitable manner.
And it's not like this system of exploitation is new, so the wealth that has been accrued by families is itself suspect.
I do believe that -- in fact, I have no problem with a relatively modest income and wealth inequality. However, the wealth and income inequality that exists in the United States is far beyond that. In the United States, the top 1% controls 35% of the wealth in this country, while the bottom 40% controls less than 1%. This isn't just a difference in skills, effort, and risk-taking. This is flagrant exploitation and domination by the rich and powerful.
Furthermore, I don't believe that Jeff Bezos or any CEO has a claim to their billions. I agree that "billionaires are a policy failure" -- no one person has any right to that much wealth. Amazon's success is not solely attributable to Jeff Bezos, it was the work of thousands of employees and built upon publicly-funded technology research. That wealth should be distributed to society at large, not controlled by one man.
If you find yourself defending billionaires, I wonder, why? Do you think you will someday be a billionaire? If not, then billionaires are not your friend. Their money is money that is taken from your pocket, and the collective pockets of our society. The traditional argument for wealth inequality is "a rising tide lifts all boats", but that has been empirically false since the 70s -- despite a massive increase in wealth, most of it has gone to a very tiny portion of our population. And if you're not part of that population, what on earth do you have to gain from defending them?
One small point: 'their money is money that is taken from your pocket'. I wonder how you work that out. We buy from Amazon (if we do) because after consideration we reckon on getting more value, in its broader sense, from that supplier than from elsewhere. We have a choice. Amazon would go bust in short order if that value was not perceived to exist. And of course the same (with exceptions mostly due to government interference) happens with all other businesses. Wealth creation is not a zero sum game.
You're talking about one aspect of businesses -- their relationship with their consumers, which generally is not exploitative (although there are obvious exceptions).
However, Jeff Bezos's relationship with his employees is exploitative (especially warehouse employees). Consider also his relationship with publicly-funded research. We as taxpayers pay for public research, we helped pay to build the internet, and yet we don't see any dividends for that money.
Also, the mere fact that one person controls that much wealth is problematic politically. Jeff Bezos owns one of the largest newspapers in the world, which concerns me greatly. He has tremendous political influence in Seattle, and has been able to bully other cities into giving into his demands for HQ2. Massive amounts of wealth comes with it massive amounts of power, and power is a zero sum game.
Indeed, the only contribution we see is a tiny bit of corporate taxes for the billions of dollars of public research Amazon and especially others use.
This is, depending on point of view, either a failure of the patent system (government cannot directly patent nor license) or of taxation, or both.
Oh the low level, additional failure of laws promoting economic growth such that employees are evaluated by the company and paid any low offer with no recourse. This could be either fixed by unions (though these like dramatic not everyday negotiations and tend to produce fiefdoms) or again government, not necessarily directly central, setting and overseeing wage standards based on their globally agreed policies.
In short, introducing an intermediary who can negotiate with clout and is not easy to buy.
(As seen in the past, union leaders and politicians are easy to buy.)
After Amazon drives others out of the market and changes the barriers to entry it is in a monopolistic position and that has a natural premium to to it.
The value consumers perceive is there in part because there are very few healthy other sites. For a lot of products probably zero. (Size matters after all.)
> That wealth should be distributed to society at large
Ok, let's say we do that--a 100% wealth tax on any personal wealth over $999,999,999. So Bezos forks over everything he has over that, and we distribute it.
First, how do we distribute it? Let's say we just divide it up equally among all 325 million Americans. That's about $370 per person. Wow.
But second, what happens once we finish distributing? What are most people going to do with that $370? Spend it on something. How many people are going to make that $370 grow? Not many. Which means, in practice, all that wealth will just concentrate again. If most of the people spend the $370 buying something on Amazon, a lot of that wealth will just end up back in Bezos' pocket.
In other words, redistributing wealth can temporarily make things more equal, but they won't stay that way.
First off, Jeff Bezos is not the only billionaire, so your $370 number is off. Second off, there's more that the government can do other than cash payments to individuals, they can invest in infrastructure (like education, housing, public transit, etc.) which pays long-term dividends to society. The wealth from this tax could be used to fund a public bank, which re-invests it and pays dividends back to the community. I'm not advocating for a specific policy proposal -- there exist many -- I'm defending the general principle that concentration of wealth is unethical and ought to be redistributed. Once you agree with that principle, you can work out exactly how best to do it, but that principle is necessarily an ideological one -- one that says that money and capital should serve the needs of the people, not the wealthiest corporations.
True. You might get it up to a few thousand per American if you counted all billionaires.
> there's more that the government can do other than cash payments to individuals, they can invest in infrastructure (like education, housing, public transit, etc.) which pays long-term dividends to society
Sure, spend the $1T or so you would get from all the US billionaires on infrastructure. That's a decent fraction of US federal spending--for one year. Then it's gone. Now what do you do?
What all of this leaves out is that wealth is not a zero sum game. Wealth gets created. If you want to reduce wealth inequality, you need to help more people create wealth, not try to take it away from people who have already created it.
> I'm defending the general principle that concentration of wealth is unethical and ought to be redistributed
I don't agree with this principle. But I might if you added a qualifier; see below.
> money and capital should serve the needs of the people, not the wealthiest corporations
Jeff Bezos made his billions by serving the needs of the people; that's what Amazon does. Lots of people shop there because it gets them the stuff they need, when they need it, for an affordable price.
Another way of putting what I've just said is that Bezos, in creating and growing Amazon as a corporation, created lots of wealth. A huge, efficient distribution system for lots of goods people want now exists that didn't exist before; that's a huge creation of wealth.
But lots of billionaires didn't get their billions that way. Lots of them did so by not creating any wealth at all, just transferring wealth from other people to themselves. For example, investment banks transfer wealth to themselves by taking advantage of asymmetric information to get other parties to accept the wrong end of zero sum trades. (For that matter, the entire US banking and financial system transfer wealth to itself by getting the Federal Reserve to print money that they use for loans.)
So if you were to modify your principle to say that concentration of wealth that does not involve wealth creation is unethical, I would agree with you. But that wouldn't be fixed by redistributing Jeff Bezos' wealth. It wouldn't even be fixed by redistributing the wealth of all the investment banker billionaires. You would have to shut down the Federal Reserve and re-engineer the entire US monetary, financial, and banking systems.
>Sure, spend the $1T or so you would get from all the US billionaires on infrastructure. That's a decent fraction of US federal spending--for one year. Then it's gone. Now what do you do?
Again, you're interpreting my moral claim (billionaires are a policy failure) as specific advocacy of a one-time wealth tax on billionaires and no other shift of U.S. policy. I believe in a massive shift in U.S. economic policy to the left, which would entail a number of different reforms aimed at reducing wealth inequality over the long-term.
>What all of this leaves out is that wealth is not a zero sum game. Wealth gets created. If you want to reduce wealth inequality, you need to help more people create wealth, not try to take it away from people who have already created it.
You need to do both. I never advocated for merely expropriating billionaires' wealth and making no other policy changes.
>Jeff Bezos made his billions by serving the needs of the people; that's what Amazon does. Lots of people shop there because it gets them the stuff they need, when they need it, for an affordable price.
Jeff Bezos made his billions by exploiting his workers. Despite the fact that they built the company and do almost all of the work that makes Amazon possible, he reaps all the profits. Workers built Amazon, not merely Bezos alone, and you're totally erasing everyone else's contribution.
>Another way of putting what I've just said is that Bezos, in creating and growing Amazon as a corporation, created lots of wealth. A huge, efficient distribution system for lots of goods people want now exists that didn't exist before; that's a huge creation of wealth.
The technology that enabled this massive creation of wealth wasn't created by Bezos though, it was created through publicly-funded research. Why is Jeff Bezos a billionaire but not Tim Barners-Lee, when by any measure he did far more to enable the creation of wealth? And again, like I said earlier, it is a huge creation of wealth, but that wealth goes into Jeff Bezos' pockets, not ours, nor his workers'.
>Lots of them did so by not creating any wealth at all, just transferring wealth from other people to themselves.
All billionaires get their wealth this way, by exploiting their workers. Furthermore, all the big tech companies participate in anti-competitive behavior (vendor lock-in, etc) which benefits them individually but hurts the wealth of society as a whole.
There's no reason, for example, a publicly-owned or worker-owned company could not have accomplished what Amazon did. All they would have needed is sufficient access to capital -- the basic technology already existed & wasn't created by Amazon, they just built the institutional structure.
These are two sides of the same coin. Our economy is structured so that wealth is concentrated at the top. This isn't just something that happens, it's a result of specific policy decisions. It went hand in hand with the dismantling of unions and the social safety net in this country in the 80s and onwards.
Regardless, if you're not a billionaire capitalist, why are you on their side? The rich are cognizant that capitalism is class struggle and openly state so, so why do you ally with them when they fight against you and your interests?
No, they really are not. One is driven by envy and petty jealousy, and the other is motivated by a legitimate concern that someone might be living in poverty.
> Complaining about some people having more money than you just screams envy and childishness.
Where did he do that?
> No, they really are not. One is driven by envy and petty jealousy, and the other is motivated by a legitimate concern that someone might be living in poverty.
Screw off with the ad hominem. It doesn't suffice in lieu of a point.
> Complaining about some people having more money than you just screams envy and childishness.
So by your logic if you are poor and mention billionaires and income inequality then you are envious and full of petty jealousy. Therefore, only people who are well-off are able to even bring the subject up without being labeled as such. People who are well off have a vested interest in not bringing the subject up, as they maintain a comparative advantage with a cheap, underpaid supply of labor in their economy.
Every now and then, however, a well-to-do and handsomely paid software engineer with a conscious will bring up the subject. In which case, you can simply move the goalpost and label him as having petty jealously since they are probably not a billionaire.
In your framework, an economy with fatal inequalities will not be fixed. That's how you get revolutions.
Everywhere. It's the central thesis. All statements were rooted on complaining about how some people are rich. If you remove them you're left with no assertion at all.
> Screw off with the ad hominem.
Excuse me? You're actually making that statement in defense of a personal attack based accusations of how someone is "on their side"?
> So by your logic if you are poor and mention billionaires and income inequality then you are envious and full of petty jealousy.
That's correct.
You can also pick other scapegoats such as the queen of england or Bill Gates, but they are not the reason why there is still actual poverty and malnutrition in the western world. You don't attack poverty by mounting petty propaganda attacks on the mega-rich.
>they are not the reason why there is still actual poverty and malnutrition in the western world.
Why is there poverty and malnutrition in the western world if not because of capitalism? Neoliberal capitalism has been the dominant economic system in the west since the 80s.
You're asking the wrong question. The right question is, why is there nothing else but poverty and malnutrition everywhere but in the western world? The answer: because in non-western societies, nobody has any incentive to create a lot of wealth, so they don't.
In other words, the problem is not that there are some people in the western world who are poor and malnourished. The problem is that the western world is the only part of the world that has a significant number of people who are not poor and malnourished. If the rest of the world would stop chasing after leftist chimeras and adopt neoliberal capitalism, they could create a lot of wealth too. The western world is way, way ahead in bringing people out of poverty and malnutrition.
This is ahistorical nonsense. The west industrialized hundreds of years ahead of the rest of the world and spent a century and a half plundering the global south. Regardless, China has managed to almost eliminate extreme poverty and hunger despite following a model very different than neoliberial Capitalism. As was the Soviet Union. Not defending these regimes, just stating a fact.
The majority of the world does follow neoliberial Capitalism and has for decades. And it has totally failed to reduce poverty. Almost all global poverty reduction since the 70s has taken place in China.
You also neglect the role of imperialism. The west has acquired much of its wealth through exploitation of the global south. So of course they are wealthier, because they have stolen wealth from everyone else, trapping countries in debt or dependence and overthrowing any regime that challenges neoliberial rule. Leftist regimes have done phenomenally well given the global economic context they live within -- Cuba has a similar life expectancy rate to the United States and phenomenally low malnutrition among developing Nations. China and Vietnam have experienced staggering economic growth for decades. Just compare India and China in this regard -- a country totally dominated by Western imperialism vs a left wing government that managed to forge its own development path
You ignored my point - that the concentration of wealth is an inhibitor of solving poverty, and you failed to explain why you feel the need to defend billionaires' interests when they couldn't care less about yours, unless you're a billionaire.
> you're interpreting my moral claim (billionaires are a policy failure) as specific advocacy of a one-time wealth tax on billionaires and no other shift of U.S. policy
No, I'm disagreeing with your moral claim and illustrating how any policy that does not allow for creation of wealth is doomed. And any policy that does allow for creation of wealth needs to consider the reasons why people are willing to do it. Historically, satisfying leftist social and political dogma has not been among those reasons.
> The technology that enabled this massive creation of wealth wasn't created by Bezos though
Yes, it's true that wealth creation is never done in a vacuum--it builds on previous wealth creation. The technology that enabled Amazon's massive creation of wealth was another massive creation of wealth. Some of the initial technology for the Internet was created through publicly funded research, but the actual buildout of the infrastructure, along with optimizing the technology for a global network--the actual creation of that massive amount of wealth that connects every computer in the world to every other--was done by companies wanting to make money by selling Internet services.
> All billionaires get their wealth this way, by exploiting their workers
This is your opinion, not fact.
> all the big tech companies participate in anti-competitive behavior (vendor lock-in, etc) which benefits them individually but hurts the wealth of society as a whole.
Then why not focus on the anti-competitive behavior, instead of trying to remake the entire society in your leftist image?
Socialism is a material struggle, it isn't an idealist Utopia where everything is perfect. It's a process. And most socialist regimes have been in the developing world, which had much less to work with and much weaker infrastructure. Regardless, China has lifted nearly a billion people out of extreme poverty over the last 40 years. I also think that Cuba's accomplishments have been admirable, despite decades of aggression and embargo from the United States. You may compare these regimes unfavourably to a developed country, but that's an unfair comparison, because they weren't developed countries before socialists took over. Compare them to other, capitalist countries in the global south and I think there is no question what model works better
>> Jeff Bezos made his billions by exploiting his workers.
You keep stating this like it an absolute fact. It is an opinion. And while it is true in some cases, it is definitely not true in the majority of them. If it is, please show your work that the majority of Amazon workers have been specifically exploited by the actual definition of the word, not "we paid them less for their labor than we got value out of it," which is called "running a business," not exploitation.
>> Why is Jeff Bezos a billionaire but not Tim Barners-Lee, when by any measure he did far more to enable the creation of wealth?
Building the best mousetrap does not entitle you to billions of dollars. This is a feature, not a bug.
>> Despite the fact that they built the company and do almost all of the work that makes Amazon possible, he reaps all the profits. Workers built Amazon, not merely Bezos alone, and you're totally erasing everyone else's contribution.
No, he does not. Have you heard of shares of stock that are publicly traded and also offered as a form of compensation to employees, which are literally exactly the opposite of what you are saying?
>> There's no reason, for example, a publicly-owned or worker-owned company could not have accomplished what Amazon did.
Then.... why hasn't any done a fraction of what Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Google, and others have done?
Your arguments are literally false. The facts are not in dispute here, especially on the claims that Amazon reaps all the profits - a lookup on AMZN and the various shareholders of said financial instrument is all you need to know about that particular part.
We could do this all day, but the fundamental difference here is you look at the normal functioning of capitalism and think it is just and good, while I look at it and see it as highly exploitative, unethical and inhumane. I think concentration of wealth and power in the hands of an unelected few is bad, and I think the world that these people have created is also bad. I think that we as a species can, and must do better.
>> That wealth should be distributed to society at large, not controlled by one man.
It is distributed to society via jobs, construction, technology, and so forth.
>> And if you're not part of that population, what on earth do you have to gain from defending them?
Some of us do not believe the leftist alternatives being proposed are better. This does not mean we actually like the status quo. You are knocking down a giant strawman here.
>Some of us do not believe the leftist alternatives being proposed are better. This does not mean we actually like the status quo. You are knocking down a giant strawman here.
I'm trying to be fair here, what alternatives are you defending? I want a world where billionaires have less wealth and power, do you disagree?
