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Should Billionaires Exist?

Should Billionaires Exist?

  • Total voters
    77
Questerr said:
What innovation and foresight did MacKenzie Davis do to become a billionaire?
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She was half of a marriage which saw the potential for online commerce before almost anyone else, which saw that America's supply chains were ripe for innovation, and which saw the potential for cloud computing before almost anyone else.

Frankly, it's a little weird that you keep using her as an example of an undeserving billionaire layabout, when there actually ARE some of those you could have picked for your example. She isn't one of them.
 
1. I am not against billionaires.
2. I don't have wealth envy.
3. I only pointed out your argument is flawed. Billionaires don't create most jobs.
 
Questerr said:
What innovation and foresight did MacKenzie Davis do to become a billionaire?
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I don't know who MacKenzie is and I don't really care. But yeah some people who are billionaires did inherited their wealth, so what? They should have donated it all to the government who would blow it all on the homeless?...
Bill Gates along with Paul Allen started their internet service in his garage came from a family of wealth and like his father made on his own.
 
Gatsby said:
She was half of a marriage which saw the potential for online commerce before almost anyone else, which saw that America's supply chains were ripe for innovation, and which saw the potential for cloud computing before almost anyone else.
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Amazon stubbled into cloud computing. They built more datacenter capacity than they needed, and then tried to find a way to monetize it.
 
Gatsby said:
She was half of a marriage which saw the potential for online commerce before almost anyone else, which saw that America's supply chains were ripe for innovation, and which saw the potential for cloud computing before almost anyone else.
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Speaking of a half a marriage didn't Al Gore marry in wealth after he dumped his wife and married into a family with a ton of money?
 
Voted other, largely because these threads end up off the rails and largely absurd.

It is not as simple as saying "billionaires should *not* exist," as you have to deal with a massive legislative effort to define then limit how one holds wealth. If you asked how we define "uber wealthy" today and odds are you'll land on $100 million or more in net worth. The rub is most people of those means have "estimated" net worth because very little of the time is this wealth directly held. It is held in assets, held in complex holding corps and trusts, held in multiple locations, and not all of it sitting in a single nation.

We may not *need* billionaires but at the same time the only entity in the mix that could do anything about it is a strong central government and absent international cooperation all you encourage is more clever use of holding entities outside the nation making the most noise about this.

I will completely agree that on a long enough timeline wealth pooling tends to become economically and socially inhibitive. Takes time to play out and it manifests itself in various economic faults. But, you still need a strong and powerful government to become a wealth collection inhibitor. Historically speaking, that does not really happen. All you do is swap a wealth based aristocracy for a government based aristocracy, or in more modern contexts some terrible combination of the two.

What you need is encouragement in progressive taxation, not excessive but progressive, in combination with encouragement in investment over pooling assets to artificial levels of valuation. But that will not happen so long as political will gets their ideology from science fiction based class warfare over historical reality of what happens when government steps into resource and financial wealth.

Since so few are interested in flipping the economic barometer to stronger flavors of planned economics (socialism) then all you really have is soup throwing until we decide to be serious.

Mixed model economics is not perfect, going with government power to restrict wealth is bound to end in bad things. Historically proven.
 

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Which was originally Life Liberty and the pursuit of Property.
 
Lutherf said:
Their though process is limited to "He has it aFund I don't!". Their ONLY ambition is to destroy society to the point where nobody has anything.
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Ironically, the resentful are also the greedy ones. What have they done lately to improve the job market? Improved somebody else's life? Complaining about job creators and those who pay most of the country's taxes doesn't count.
 

Questerr said:
Absolutely not.

They are human dragons sitting on massive piles of gold.
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I'm amused by how some leftists think. They really do think they're heroes in some grand narrative clash between good and evil. That's one of the reasons I call it a religion - it scratches the same itch (ultimate purpose) that conventional religion does for normal people.
 
Lutherf said:
Nobody has absolute power. You're living in a fantasy world.
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Lutherf said:
Their though process is limited to "He has it and I don't!". Their ONLY ambition is to destroy society to the point where nobody has anything.




IRONY Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com​

Irony, sarcasm, satire indicate mockery of something or someone. The essential feature of irony is the indirect presentation of a contradiction between an action or expression
 
ALiberalModerate said:
1. I am not against billionaires.
2. I don't have wealth envy.
3. I only pointed out your argument is flawed. Billionaires don't create most jobs.
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If billionaires didn't create any jobs you'd have an ironclad point. You're throwing something at the wall that doesn't stick because nobody wrote that only billionaires create jobs.

You're awful at this.
 
Questerr said:
“If you don’t want the King to rule with absolute divine right, you want everyone to be serfs!”
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If Trump had absolute power do you think he would be dealing with hapless and leaderless Democrats or trying to work within the boundaries of the Constitution?
 
The Brad Dad said:
Because you need a host of government assistant to exponentially grow wealth like that. Subsidies, mainly. And then theres lobbying to protect scale, I.e. please Mr Government, don’t break me up just because I’m a monopoly.
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I'm guessing Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Warren Buffett and others qould disagree.
 
Dans La Lune said:
I always thought Tolkien-style dragons were a deliberate critique of greed and capitalism.
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They are a critique of greed, but not of capitalism.

If it were a critique of capitalism, everyone in Laketown would be working for Smaug, and he would be looking to invest his hoard into expanding operations rather than just sitting on a bunch of gold that isn’t earning him any kind of return or dividends.
 
If you don't want billionaires to exist, then you, and everyone else who feels that way, should simply cease using the products and services that all Americans use daily for individuals to have that level of wealth. Stop using your smart phone and windows PC. Shop only in brick and mortar stores, but not Wal-Mart. Don't buy high priced, pre-prepared coffee or athletic shoes. Stop posting nonsense on Facebook and telling yourself you're raising awareness.

Nothing was taken from you so that another person could become rich, and the awful, awful truth of the matter is your life is likely better because these people exist.
 
I feel that the reality is that such people will always exist because they always have. Even if there are no billionaires, there will be millionaires who use their wealth similarly and it the greed and corruption will exist, no matter at what level (or even type) of wealth you allow.

So, it isn't so much about how much a person makes but allowing that wealth access to policy and government.
 
Guys who simp for billionaires shouldn’t exist.
 

So Jeff Bezos cooperatively developed Amazon with MacKenzie?

I keep bringing it up because people keep claiming billionaires get where they are because of merit.
 
jaypatriot said:
If Trump had absolute power do you think he would be dealing with hapless and leaderless Democrats or trying to work within the boundaries of the Constitution?
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Another conservative lacking basic literacy and understanding of my point.
 
trixare4kids said:
If billionaires didn't create any jobs you'd have an ironclad point. You're throwing something at the wall that doesn't stick because nobody wrote that only billionaires create jobs.

You're awful at this.
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You wrote the following in your post:
You made a statement about billionaires using a cleft sentence (it's the billionaires who create innovation and jobs). In fact, you even used a definite article by stating "the billionaires". Thus implying that it is primarily or only billionaires that create jobs. Perhaps English isn't your primary language since you don't actually want to own what you wrote. Either that, or you aren't a reader and thus don't understand English grammar and how emphasis works in the English language. In either case, what you wrote is wrong. Billionaires are not responsible for all jobs and innovation, nor are they responsible for most jobs and innovation. In fact, they are only responsible for a small percentage of jobs and innovation. If you knew that Billionaires were only responsible for a small percentage of jobs and innovation, you wouldn't have used a cleft sentence to describe the role of billionaires in the creation of innovation and jobs.
 
Gaius46 said:
I'm guessing Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Warren Buffett and others qould disagree.
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I don't know about these individuals, but the shear size of the federal government and the amount of money it spends can't result in anything other than wealthy individuals and corporations looking for a piece. Seems like the logical thing to do is shrink government
Questerr said:
So Jeff Bezos cooperatively developed Amazon with MacKenzie?

I keep bringing it up because people keep claiming billionaires get where they are because of merit.
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A woman clearly couldn't have contributed to Amazon in its early days, especially one who graduated from Princeton. Is that where we are?

Because Jeff has said multiple times, even after their divorce, that she helped him create the business plans and worked with him in the company's infancy.
 
It's not for anyone to say how much money anybody else should have....

... that being said, I'd say the existence of billionaires isn't exactly the sign of a healthy economy. We've been pretty much stuck on "full supply-side" since the Reagan Administration. That might have been well and good for the first 20-30 years, but I think it's long past due to change direction back to "demand side" economics. Just like New Deal demand-side economics ran out of steam by the early 70's, I think Reaganomics ran out of steam by the time Obama took office.
 
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