Someone might as well set up a gaming site called How to Become A Billionaire. Simply paid the cheapest amount of money to set a a company somewhere, issues a billion shares and get someone to buy one share for a dollar.
While I do agree on the world in large has inequality problem. Focusing on the ultra rich doesn't fix it.
Your right. The wealth Jeff has vastly comes from his ownership of his business, of which he alone didn't make it what it is today. Many workers helped contribute and make it what it is today, but they're not anywhere as wealthy as they're weren't fairly given part ownership in the business they contributed in making...
You could argue the workers were paid a wage which they could of invested into a share of ownership in the business, but it's still unfair. There's a limited amount of stock to go around (unless the company issues more stock), existing owners stand to benefit more when this happens.
Stock behaves just like money in regards to it's store of value. Print alot of it, without making goods, and it becomes worthless and vice versa.
Therefore for fairness, ideally companies should print stock equal to the growth in their value and given to those who made the value. But lol at this pipe dream, as share prices wouldn't ever change much, so existing owners would be against it as they wouldn't benefit from it (unless they also worked in adding more value). Nevermind the difficulties in objectively attributing value...
Source? I think Linus Torvalds and Norman Borlaug both easily did this. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates certainly might be up there. $140 billion is not that much when you compare the productivity gains just these four people have given the world.
People find value in the companies they create and willingly give their money to the companies in exchange for their services. Nobody is forced to give money to these companies.
The huge amount of wealth that is created from this process comes in part from the globalization and scale of their operations.
The lobbying, tax loopholes, anticompetition behaviors are a separate issue. Many of these are patently unfair and true competition starts to break down.
The problem in my opinion is not that a single person gets so much wealth, but rather what they receive the wealth for. Amazon just made life easier for the masses to consume goods. IMO someone like Einstein deserves a lot more money and someone like Bezos less. The people inventing the actual science that then enables something like Amazon don't really get compensated -- and perhaps they should.
1. Usually these comparisons imply that the super rich have a major chunk of their wealth sitting as cold hard cash. That's hardly the case. Most of the wealth is in assets or illiquid forms. Take Bezos for ex, a good chunk of his wealth is in AMZN stock. If he sells all of it to fund a philanthropic scheme, that'd trigger a massive selloff in the stock market and impact a lot of people negatively. Not saying that they're helpless, but I think they may be doing some good with all the excess cash that we may not be aware of.
2. From a logistics point of view, it's hard to ensure that money intended to help someone reaches them. Unless you are personally delivering the money, there'll be middle men who take their cut. If a billionaire decides to spend a billion dollars on charity, I'd think a bunch of orgs would want that money, to do charity as well as run their non-profit operation. Which would make it appear that not enough is being done by the billionaire, when it is employing a few and benefiting some more.
I have a hard time feeling like large-scale preventable deaths of six figures of real human children is worth Jeff Bezos’ warm tummy fuzzies he gets when he thinks about being unfathomably rich. Instead of thinking about whether innovations like Amazon would have materialized in this brave new world where people can actually get their malaria treated and have access to clean drinking water, consider: how many people might have made something just as game-changing as Amazon, but died a preventable death, or lived on, but weren’t given the same resources to survive and thrive as someone like Bezos?
[1]: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2014/05/01/Piketty-C...
[2]: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/03/pikettys-new-...
(I agree with you about the property value stuff tho)
[0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/whats-your-net-worth-and-h... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
Brutal.
The theoretical appeal of capitalism is that it allocates resources efficiently, is it not? Can someone explain to me how letting all these children die of malaria is efficient, given the cost/benefit of eliminating it? Is our economic system really allocating those resources in the best way?
Edit: come on guys if you’re going to downvote me then try to think of a reason I’m wrong..
There is one way. If everyone were slaves, then the capitalist really would own every child they saved. You’d probably see rates of malnutrition and disease plummet. Of course, then we’d all be slaves. But that would be a purer, less dysfunctional capitalism. Maybe that’s the only direction capitalism can go- it might go that way through a maze of debts and complex contracts and property rights rather than legal ownership of persons, but that’s probably the direction capitalism is going to go, if you assume that capitalism is evolving to be the most economically efficient version of itself.
Every years budget for U.S is in trillions, so its pointless to go after wealth of private people.
Even if we were to take the wealth of the richest, do you expect the government to spend it, with all the bureaucracy ? Even if you hand wave all the cash ... malaria and hygiene are not going to fix themselves without feet on the ground.
[0] (see page 41): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312519...
All of it? But why would anyone convert all their wealth into cash?
> I think its 1% at best ... so bezos is worth 100 million.
What? Even if he dumped all his shares on the market, he'd net a lot more than $100 million. Sure dumping the stock would push down the share price and he wouldn't net less than $100 billion, but why would he do that? Even if he did, he'd easily net tens of billions as there is ample support from $2300 to whatever level the price eventually drops to.
How would you setup a malaria fund of 10 billion, otherwise ?
All this talk about inequality is for naught. You don't have to tell Bezos how big his slice of the pie is. He knows. And he will take more by any means necessary.
