- taking away healthcare from the poor, killing people
- destroying/privatizing what was once free and part of the shared commonwealth
- privatizing what never should've been profit-motivated in the first place: hospitals, prisons, schools and so on.
- "deregulating" removing pollution and safety protections that were written in blood
- spending money to corrupt the political process in order to buy passage of laws
- underpaying workers so they have to live in their cars and cheating them out of the profits they helped create
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair
(One could also call it the "Upton Sinclair-effect".)
How about we pick a skin color correlating with petty crimes and then draw conclusions on that? Not so cool, huh...
Most have made their money using the many advantages of their countries. Roads, infrastructure, eductaion, stability, government, etc.
That's great. Nothing wrong with that. But when we allow such concentration of wealth we have given away the decision power to this handfull of people about how all that wealth gets used. The very top wealthy may in some cases believe their motivations and decisions are altruistic. That they may be. But that doesn't give them the authority to think "I know better than every one else in my country/world how this wealth should be spent."
So while the fault for how we get in these situations of terrible wealth inequality may be shared by the peoples and governments that allow it, the wealthy themselves cannot escape their share either.
And in terms of who has more individual power to help restore balance by influencing the system, it sure isn't the single parent working a minimum wage job. Or a family barely getting by after an economic downturn destroys their jobs. Or the student struggling to pay their loans because they chose to get a degree in social work or eductaion instead of compsci or finance quant.
So it would be nice to see a lot more effort by more these lucky billionaires to actually correct wealth inequality and the systemtic issues that leads to this type of inequality.
Owning the wealth gives them authority on how it's spent.
A Warren-style wealth tax comes up surprisingly short in terms of funds collected for the government relative to the risks it faces ($2.75 trillion over 10 years, https://www.factcheck.org/2019/06/facts-on-warrens-wealth-ta...) The risks it drives include capital flight, worsened corporate governance, and decreased economic dynamism. These are all long term risks that are difficult to quantify. Most countries that have ever instituted a wealth tax have later repealed it. In every economic sense, taxing income is a better idea than taxing wealth.
Much of our understanding of wealth distribution is biased toward our home country. There's a pretty good chance that if you are an HN reader you are in the top 1% of income or wealth in the world (http://www.globalrichlist.com/). When I consider how little of the government's efforts try to solve global humanitarian problems compared to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, I tend to think that the Gates' charitable contributions do more to address income inequality than a wealth tax on Gates would have.
In many ways the charitable contributions by billionaires solve problems that the government is poorly equipped to solve due to collective action problems. Forcing any large-scale charitable effort to be redirected through the government risks stultification, political misappropriation of funds, endless bickering about policy goals, projects cancelled due to changes at each election cycle. Having a two-pronged approach of private and public charity is more robust.
I know it's popular to rain crap on rich people (just see Hollywood's long list of well moneyed villains) but in the Real World I have many billionaires I respect and admire (from Gates to Musk and Bezos) and ZERO politicians.
I can’t speak for other countries but US government seems to systematically undervalue making and executing decisions efficiently. To me, the biggest failure of US-style democracy - often touted as a strength in the form of checks and balances (admittedly, thankfully because Trump has been slowed down quite a bit) - is its inefficiency - so many social problems root from that alone.
(I’m of the camp that issues like immigration are less of a “dumb racist conservatives” problem as the American left puts it, and more of a “convenient scapegoats for hopelessly low opportunity” problem, I say as someone who leans liberal but feels repelled by the way the party acts)
I got tired of SF government being so thoroughly useless at improving day to day life for its citizens, that I moved out to Tokyo now. They’re not perfect by any means, but the feeling that systems actually seem to work well, is revolutionary for me in a time of intense political disillusionment.
Most of the world's problems are caused by millionaires trying to become billionaires - Beyond a certain point, it's all zero-sum games that destroy society.
Then they go around preaching the doctrine of capitalistic self-interest.
The law of capitalistic self-interest according to Milton Friedman basically says: Take the money from wherever you can get it, however you can get it. Billionaires have a lot of money, so why don't we all collaborate and take it? Why the double standard?
Why is everyone collaborating against the lower and middle classes? If you're reading this, you're the middle class! Unless these billionaires are paying you to down-vote, the law of capitalistic self-interest says screw them.
Are you going to try to get 100% correct?
- narcissism, greed & hubris
- political, regulatory & media captures
become the dominating gradient vectors which tends to aggregate capital in the hands of those with the most power and extract it from those with the least. (Not a conspiracy theory, but a diffuse set of circumstances, patterns, attitudes and behaviors that snatch externalities and collapse from the jaws of success.)
Gates has, to my knowledge, been vastly more successful than any government program at reducing malaria and getting people vaccinated.
Which is an exact antithesis of the subheading of the article.
Bill Gates singlehandedly did more to eradicate Polio & several other deadly diseases than multiple Governments, WHO, and several development orgs over several decades!
This demonization of the billionaires is uncalled for, many of them do plenty of good for society on balance.
