alt Hacker NewsPeople are billionaires because they “share with society”. They take a small fraction of the wealth and surplus they create. If you create $6 of value for every American and capture half of it you are a billionaire.
“Public investments” besides are heavily spent on. The majority of the US federal budget goes to welfare. If you want new infrastructure and so on, the primary blockers are the universal veto powers we hand normal people.
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If they want to "share with society", it's nice, but they can do it after taxes, just like everyone else.
Even if a rich person reinvests everything, the control over large amount of money is what makes it problematic.
Also the idea that welfare doesn't go to investments is wrong. When you buy groceries (or anything really), there is a decision made by the management of the company you buy these things from to reinvest part of it to maintain or build productive capacity.
There is no need for a "capitalist" (owner of the enterprise) to insert themself into the process, they are useless middlemen who get a cut, essentially. (They are not so useless when they do actual managerial work, but then they can be just an employee like everyone else.)
In an ideal capitalistic world billionaires are people that provide most value to society, yes. In the real world it’s questionable to say the least because they usually do not do fair win-win business, they do cutthroat “I’m gonna abuse my position to the absolute limit, what are you gonna do about it, you have no other choice” business. People that don’t do that don’t end up billionaires because they can’t compete with those that do.
> People are billionaires because they “share with society”. They take a small fraction of the wealth and surplus they create.
I truly cannot believe that anyone with an ounce of empathy or integrity could possibly believe a statement as absurd as this.
People are billionaires because they “share with society”.
I appreciate that this is a flippant remark, but there are crypto billionaires proving that there are exceptions to this assertion.
I think this is essentially correct. I'm sorry you're getting downvoted. I think there seems to be a prevailing attitude here (and in the world in general) that making money is 0 sum and you get it by taking taking it from others, rather than the reality (in free-ish, market-ish economies) that most people make money by adding value to other people's lives and being voluntarily paid for that value. Similarly there's a sentiment that policies are bad because billionaires lobby politicians, as opposed to that most people want terrible policies (though the lobbying can definitely be bad).
I guess one important nuace is that it's not all billionaires for whom this is the case. You have lots of Carlos Slim style 'get a government monopoly and collect the rents'. So it's a bit messy.
Pro-tip: more often than not people are billionaires because their parent was a billionaire or multi millionaire
Billionaires extract a vast amount from the economy and pay a tiny fraction of that back in. It’s not “creating value” to replace millions of middle class retail jobs across the country with tens or hundreds of thousands of largely poverty line jobs and parking the delta in shareholder investment accounts.
Without billionaires, money stays in the community where it circulates (workers and small business owners make money and they spend it). With billionaires it is extracted from the communities and hoarded in investment accounts a thousand miles away.
> People are billionaires because they “share with society”. They take a small fraction of the wealth and surplus they create.
That's certainly an opinion that some people have, but as the parent comment stated, companies don't run without employees, so the idea that the value created is solely attributed to the founders or other executives is not an empircal fact like you're claiming it is. There's no scientific formula for "how much of this result of a bunch of actions that multiple people took over the course of a few years is attributed to each of the people"; the only way to have any sort of objective delineation of that like you're describing is if you already bake in assumptions of how valuable each piece is before you've started, which just moves the opinions one later deeper.
I can't prove you wrong any more than you can prove the parent commenter wrong, because what you've said is based on so many premises that I fundamentally agree with that seem like universal laws to you.