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Criticism of billionairism

G

grainbelt

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I hypothesize that supporting, subsidizing, or protecting the creation or sustenance of billionaires is antithetical to supporting a strong middle class and in turn a strong consumer capitalist economy.

If you get the idea that removing a middle man from a supply chain could lower cost and enrich the whole thing, you should also get that removing the billionaire at the top could do something similar. By not having to appease the billionaires big ROI, income instead is dispersed at lower levels amongst more people and spent much more efficiently in the economy. To this end, progressive taxation, enforcement of tax and other white collar laws, anti trust laws, all need to be strengthened and enforced. Competition needs to be restored as a necessary pillar of our form of capitalism. Worker and consumer rights need to be elevated. Small businesses should be incentivized further. And the various governments need to stop pandering to mega conglomerates. This kills competition!

Theres no leeway for more corporatist judicial decisions or laws. They are middle class killers that suck the wealth and opportunity out and away from the working class.

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OTOH, they are all CORPORATE. Corporatism. I didn't vote for that.
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Is that what godless universities are teaching in America now? To stop entrepreneurship so the little guy can make more money? That is stupid. At least Trump understands that people need to take risks in starting businesses which hire people and to get those entrepreneurs to take those risks there will of necessity be the promise of wealth to obtained if successful. Only an idiot would take the risk to start a business if he knew there would be no money in it.
 
DaveFagan said:
OTOH, they are all CORPORATE. Corporatism. I didn't vote for that.
/
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I assume corporate means it has a large billionaire backing through the stock market ownership distribution. Yes, Im anti corporate conglomerate, anti billionaire. I dont want their money for myself. It's not envy or greed. It's an understanding that the concentrated wealth and power is not something to be desired or supported in our system. Hard workers need to win, for sure, but the economy cant support both a strong middle class and a strong corporate/billionaire class.

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Just so I do not misunderstand you, grainbelt: You would want the government to enforce a cap on the accumulation wealth?
 
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Entrprenuership is not synonymous with billionaires. Im all for a healthy environment for entrepreneurship. I even suggested in the post that small businesses should be further incentivized. That includes investment in said businesses. I'll expand that by saying starting and growing small businesses should be easier, cost less, should be prioritized over anything favoring the largest conglomerates and billionaires. For so many valid reasons, supporting wealth and power concentration is bad bad bad. And I did learn that in college. A strong competitive environment wouldnt allow so many mergers, so many windfall winners, such large tech firms like google Amazon facebook.

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Felis Leo said:
So just so I do not misunderstand you, grainbelt: You would want the government to enforce a cap on the accumulation wealth?
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No not at all. No where was a cap mentioned. I listed some things like progressive tax, enforcing and strengthening white collar financial and tax laws, enforcing anti trust, strengthening or enforcing consumer and worker rights, further incentivizing small business creation and growth, state and fed govt not pandering to the amazons, upholding competitive principles. I think especially for large corporations, they need to pay closer to true cost of business and not divert it as negative externalities onto public health and the environment.

The idea is that concentration of wealth and power into billionaires and mega conglomerates is not the best option for our citizens, democracy, economy. So why help it happen and further make ourselves dependant on their investments?

Progressive tax is wholly justified if you consider that someone earning the highest bracket is consuming the economic output the most. By which I mean, the total output is captured by them and working for them, they can be assumed on average to be consuming the largest segments of economic mechanisms like labor, physical and economic capital, lending, infrastructure, international activity, other public services including education, HHS, regulatory oversight. Directly or indirectly.

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The US government does have laws restricting the formation of monopolies and those are good. There is a problem, however, when big corporations give big money to candidates who vote for oppressive regulations which benefit themselves over others. Politics is bad when politicians favor policies which hurt Americans but help political donors. We need to do more to run crooked politicians out of office and refusing to investigate them is not helping.
 
This comes down to how we massage the economy. Where does priority go? I believe we do not want to incentivize the very top or the very bottom of economic actors. The very bottom is essentially a leech on the rest and not playing their role in the economy as an able worker, consumer, and tax payer. The very top has levels of wealth that they have trouble stashing. They buy the mega yacht, mansions, they send it offshore to evade taxes, they have a lot of luxury good spending. Luxury goods are not economically efficient use of funds. They spend it manipulating our society and others. They do invest. That's mostly good, although the decision is all with one person. That's too much leverage. They gain unhealthy levels of monopoly and monopsony power. Competition greatly deteriorates in that atmosphere.

The job creator focus includes these but shouldnt. Bending over backwards for these types that dont actually need the help to stay in business begets a worsened dependence on them.

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I agree that's a big problem. Theres too much concentrated wealth and power. They look at what they can do for their investments and the easiest or cheapest thing is get a politician in their pocket to help build barriers to entrance and other protections for themselves. Or help them not pay the true cost of business. That's what we have now. Imagine what it will look like when bezos hits 1 trillion net worth. The guy will snap his fingers and get what he wants. I guess let's hope what he wants is good for all of us. 1 trillion on it's own is not remarkable. Its 1 trillion compared to average values I think that matters. Even the democratic and economic votes of the rest of us wont be able to stop him. Is it effectively different from an oligarchy or monarchy when someone has that much power over our society? Seems to me that's unamerican and something we wouldnt want.

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do we need super billionaires? in many cases, i doubt it. do i really care about the ragefaces who would bitch online if we actually used that money for infrastructure, health care, and other good things instead while the super billionaires are still rich but just not as rich? not really. they'll bitch even if we don't do that.
 

This is an unhinged post. I only reda the first couple sentences and could not even go on.
"If you get the idea that removing a middle man from a supply chain could lower cost and enrich the whole thing"

What on earth doe sthis even mean?

Then you use this as an analogy?

Honest, I have so had it with dumb.
 
grainbelt said:
I assume corporate means it has a large billionaire backing through the stock market ownership distribution.
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He has no clue what he is talking about.
 
Surely 1,000 millionaires is better for the economy than 1 billionaire. Accumulated wealth should only be taxed in the year it is accumulated, but at a higher rate.
 

Guess what?

Endless acquisitiveness is actually an addiction to the chemicals they get for gaining access to resources.

Basic biology. The member of any species with the best access to resources is the most likely to reproduce.

Therefore, behaviors associated with gaining that access are rewarded with pleasurable chemicals. That pleasure is addictive. So individuals continue to do it.

In our social species, that manifests as various behaviors associated with "status". I suspect you believe mankind was created a few thousand years ago, but I will continue with the evolutionary aspects anyway.

When we were evolving there was no "wealth" as we conceive of it today. You were limited to what you could carry. And interpersonal relationships and the fact that everybody else is an apex predator too kept greed in check. Nobody gave up a third of what they hunted or gathered to lay their heads at night. Or a percentage of the fruit in a valley because your grandfather saw it first.

When we settled down, established rigind heirarchies and the concept of wage labor, those mechanisms that worked for us for millennia broke down.

Long story short, the "entrepreneurs" will take everything they can get. Limiting what they can get will not stop them from getting that. They will continue to strive. They will not stop. And they can't do it alone.

What you are repeating is a propaganda line, developed to keep maximum satisfaction of their addiction.

You are being played.
 
It's hard to articulate what I'm trying to say becuase it's not just a slogan, catchphrase, or archaic economic parable. I'm not a scolarly economist but I have a vision that I'm trying to better articulate that concentrated wealth and power is not good and also not necessary so it shouldn't be supported, subsidized, prioritized, protected.

Let's say you have a "middle man" in a supply chain performing some task to get a product closer to consumption, operating under their cost structure, paying tax, shouldering losses from risk and inefficiency, and extracting their profit from the chain. Whatever function they are providing to the chain could be absorbed or made obsolete either up or down the chain by their supplier or consumer or both. Doing so erases the extra costs and profit extraction from the total cost of taking the product from nothing to end users $$. Poof gone. Now the supplier upstream or the consumer downstream has taken over performing that role and is doing so at an overall cost savings. Or the product could have changed to not require the functional step. Its circumstantial.

Investment is part of the supply chain sort of but it doesnt need to be from highly concentrated sources. It would be better if it were not.

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noonereal said:
He has no clue what he is talking about.
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The top 1% by wealth owns something like 40% of stocks. Only a little over half are invested at all. The top .001% which is closer to the number of billionaires must own then 10 to 30% of stocks? I have no idea what proportion of direct investment they have. If i look at hypothetical publicly traded corporations, can I assume for discussion that the billionaires are skimming ~15% off everything? But is it more likely that their investment would be closer to a controlling share in an actual case? What would be your estimate?

With this in mind, corporatism is basically billionairism. For my arguments sake, a large corporation worth billions and a billionaire either working through it or on it's own are not that different in their ability to influence our economy and republic.

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This is incorrect. Brands that market direct incur the costs of the middle man and must extract the profits of that end of the business to make the added work worth it. (return on investment)

At lease now I know what you mean but you clearly don't understand business. I don't mean this as a knock just a statement of fact.

It is common for people to think that brands that sell direct give them a better deal, it's just not the case. Take a typical internet direct company.You think they are eliminating the middle man but in fact they are hiring the folks who function as the advertising agency, the sales force, the customer service, the shipping department the extra warehousing....plus it's a whole new business to them, they are likely to not do it as well or as efficiently.

Business is structured as it is for a reason and the reason is not to drive up prices. Driving up prices lowers demand and business knows this so they don't do so more than they have to.
 

I agree with this 100%... and I can pinpoint exactly when it started - with the passage of Reagan's Tax Reform Act of 1986. Prior to that time, the tax code operated using Eisenhower's 1954 system.... it was focused on bolstering the middle class. What Reagan did was make the Tax Curve much flatter and encourage wealth accumulation for high-income taxpayers. It changed us from being focused on stimulating demand to stimulating supply. This had it's good points... it lead to the massive investment and technology boom of the 1990's... but it also has it's bad points in that Middle Class demand hasn't been keeping up.

Picture the economy like an internal combustion engine... it requires a mixture of fuel and air to run. Fuel is supply and Air is demand. The Tax Code is the carburetor that sets the right mix between the two. During the 1970's, we were running lean and stagflation was the result. I think Reagan got roughly the right mix with his first term tax cuts.... but his second-term tax reform made us run way too rich... and that's where we've been ever since.
 

skimming?

imho you have come up with your ideas on how to correct the template that allows the rich to get richer without understand how things work.

in other words your remedies are for a situation that is not birthed as you believe.

listen, i am with you, the rich have way too much

but your ideas are based on fantasy so they are not even worth discussion

worry about taxing the bastards with zero loop holes. that will do the trick as it did to end the reign of the robber barons
 

No we want the wealth transfer to the rich to stop. Enough already. It's time to put back income tax structure that controls the massing of wealth to the 1%. It worked before and it will work today. $20 million incomes are obscene and need to be taxed out of existence. Then maybe their will be money left over for raises for workers from all those record profits.
Otherwise we are headed down the same road as we were in the 1920's. No one wants that again, do you?
 
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Communists destroyed Russia with their crappy Bolshevick Rob the rich fiscal ideas.
 

Some industries need to be big because they benefit a lot from economies of scale. Per instance, cars would a lot more expensive and affordable for far fewer people if they were produced by small businesses.

Some billionaires do great things with their money that would not otherwise get funded. Look at the work of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Elon Musk.

I agree there is a problem, but simply getting rid of billionaires throws the baby out with the bath water. Generally speaking, I think it matters how they make their money and what they spend it on.
 

/end thread
 
marke said:
Communists destroyed Russia with their crappy Bolshevick Rob the rich fiscal ideas.
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And we did the exact opposite by correcting the corporatist structure of the 20's, something the republicans are flipping back around now.
 
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