Our country has a system where the President of the United States is ostensibly worth $3.1 billion dollars and yet there are dozens of homeless veterans sleeping on the streets two blocks from where he lives. If that's not the definition of a broken, immoral system, then I don't know what is.
However, to me that's not necessarily an argument for a Huey Long-esque maximum legal wealth and/or the overthrow of capitalism itself, it's an argument for much higher taxation of the rich, including making our income tax system a wealth tax, at least for the rich, and raising the capital gains tax, then using the new revenue to fund social programs to help the poor and working classes.
Are some billionaires immoral of course but being one in and itself is not and that is what she is saying . If you did the type of redestribution of wealth she calls for it would destroy our economy and create much more poverty .
Also many of her buddies on the TYT think that’s what should happen and her views and all
Of the justice Democrats are basically just a copy of many of the hosts on TYT.
And just because AOC believes things other people who you don't like believe doesn't make AOC's views dumb. TYT is stupid, but AOC isn't.
The reason Jeff Bezos net worth is what it is is because of how much the stocks of Amazon are worth . If he sold his share of the company he maybe would only get 10-15% of what his stocks are worth right now so that number is misleading .
For the millionth time, that is not how it works - please stop peddling your poorly understood concept of how net wealth works
Assets-Liabilities
Umm, no?
You see Cash is an asset like any other - it has the advantage of being the most liquid asset, but is a supremely stupid way to hold your wealth as it generates next to no interest (unlike bonds, say) or associated cash flow (like share dividends).
But not only that, although cash has the advantage of being liquid, this is
actually factored into the value of shares. The value of a share should equate to the value of future cash flows generated by ownership of the share* (ie by the company the shares are in), but discounted back to the present value of that cash
on the basis of the fact that cash held now is worth more than cash held in the future.
On that basis, Bezos's share-holding is worth the
same as the value of cash that will be generated in the future by holding those shares. It is genuine wealth.
If Bezos were to sell his entire shareholding, that would constitute a divestment on his part, meaning both that he would forego the future cash generated
and that Amazon would be expected to generate less future cash, meaning the shares were worth, less meaning he would be poorer. That is just how investment and asset values work- if you make bad investment decisions you lose money - it doesn't mean that the assets aren't worth what they supposedly are worth (the same is true with cash, as any Venzuelan would be able to tell you).
In any case, Bezos will be fairly unusual among billionaires in holding most of his portfolio in one company. Most of the super wealthy have diversified asset portolios which protects them from market fluctuations by limiting exposure in any one source.
*
if this isn't true in practice, it is because the market is absolutely not a rationale actor, which itself should call into question many of the key assumptions made by the rabid free-marketers
