Opinion of billionaires

[RaphaelDLG]

Even the amazing, admirable, philanthropic, heroic ones like Gates, Buffett, etc have myopia about how the rules are rigged in their favor and continue to promote deregulation etc

[RaphaelDLG]

There's nothing wrong with being successful and working hard and coming with great ideas - in fact, that is a great thing that makes you a great, helpful person, and those people SHOULD get to be rich!

However,

1) rich people should not be able to write investment/taxation/competition/monopoly/prosecutorial laws to hoard/consolidate wealth/evade punishment/make it impossible for other talented, hardworking, entrepreneurial/intelligent poor people to rise up.  We need a country of hard work, competition, innovation, and mobility - not a country where rich skull and bones types continually get richer without doing much but gaming the system/resting on their laurels.

2) people having more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes and using it to buy like 80 $20 million dollar yachts or plain hoarding it is SPIRITUALLY PROFANE.

So billionaires as people are not "satanic" - most of the people on this board would behave in similar ways placed in the same situation.  But I think it is fair to generalize that this group of people (even the saintly ones like I said on the first page) are having a net "bad" effect on society.

edit:  grammar

[RaphaelDLG]

Billionaires should give enough of their money that they stop being billionaires (or hell, they should limit themselves to 10 million as a maximum). Problem solved.

Why 10M?

Well, I guess ideally it would be less than that, but we're only human, and that's a good start.

10 million would mean you'd be worth a hundred average yearly incomes in an super-wealthy country like Luxembourg.  Should be enough for any sane person.

I personally don't actually believe in income caps on principle, though - just very steep progressive taxation.

[RaphaelDLG]

Billionaires should give enough of their money that they stop being billionaires (or hell, they should limit themselves to 10 million as a maximum). Problem solved.

Being a Billionaire means you have more then a Billion dollars worth of assets. Many of those assets are how they make more money. And you can't donate millions or billions(depending on how many billions one makes) of dollars to charity every year unless you make billions of dollars every year. Plus a certain amount(don't make this a debate about whether the current amount is so much that its harmful, because I really don't care to discuss that question now, and that isn't the point) of investments by rich people are helpful to the economy(as while as occasionally getting projects like asteroid defense systems that could become very important to have but no one wants to fund rn).

Of course, all of this pretends that the middle class isn't just as guilty of not giving enough back.

Uh, no.  By definition, the investments by rich people are in things that have a return on investment, largely without regard to their social utility.  Sometimes, those things are good, like new pills or something.  Sometimes they are socially deleterious, like putting your stock in mcdonalds or a tobacco company or budweiser or something.

But stuff like asteroid defense systems, massive research projects, dams, etc are by definition things that are too expensive/provide too little/too nebulous an ROI for even one billionaire to fund by themselves.  That's why all of those things (like computers, missiles, hoover dams, etc) start as government-funded research projects.

And it would be a better investment for the government to just take a huge chunk of the billionaire's income and pool it with other tax funds to do those impossibly large-scale, low ROI investment projects.  Or provide quality healthcare and education to jamal and jethro so that, instead of being chronically unhealthy and going to roach-infested sh**tty schools much different than the one you go to, they can have a chance to be the next big inventor/entrepreneur billionaire.

And most billion-dollar wealth is either inherited or made through compounded interest off of an initial windfall, not through creating a company/genius idea (the things that people DESERVE to be rich from).

Also, OF COURSE the middle class is as guilty or more of not giving enough back.  Everyone has to spend a fixed number of first few dollars on subsistence needs, then quality education, healthcare, etc before they have enough money to piss away on charity.  This fixed number of dollars is a smaller or even negative percentage of an lower-income individual's salary as compared to a mega-rich individual.  A mega-rich individual spends an infinitesimal % of his/her income on this first and second-level needs, so they have a much higher % of income freed for giving, most of which they hoard, as is human nature.

[RaphaelDLG]

Billionaires should give enough of their money that they stop being billionaires (or hell, they should limit themselves to 10 million as a maximum). Problem solved.

Being a Billionaire means you have more then a Billion dollars worth of assets. Many of those assets are how they make more money. And you can't donate millions or billions(depending on how many billions one makes) of dollars to charity every year unless you make billions of dollars every year. Plus a certain amount(don't make this a debate about whether the current amount is so much that its harmful, because I really don't care to discuss that question now, and that isn't the point) of investments by rich people are helpful to the economy(as while as occasionally getting projects like asteroid defense systems that could become very important to have but no one wants to fund rn).

Of course, all of this pretends that the middle class isn't just as guilty of not giving enough back.

And most billion-dollar wealth is either inherited or made through compounded interest off of an initial windfall, not through creating a company/genius idea (the things that people DESERVE to be rich from).

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/269593

According to this article, 20% of American billionaires made their money via inheritance and an additional 18% made their money via a combination of inheritance and making their own wealth. 62% of American billionaires are self made (although it's important to note that a majority of these self made billionaires still grew up in relatively privileged circumstances).

I'm familiar with that article, and it's flawed, because it doesn't take into account the percentage of the wealth that is from passive investment compounding interest vs from whatever said billionaire creates/does professionally.

So you can create a company that you sell for $200m at 25 and become a billionaire at age 45 simply by putting your money in an extremely passive, extremely low-risk vanguard index fund and sitting on your ass for 20 years.

[RaphaelDLG]

It's pretty clear that you start from a moral framework that leads you to this conclusion. This moral framework is obviously terrible, but not very surprising. I guess that's the direction the wind of history seems to be blowing towards, so what can I do?

This man on TV told me that God wants to you be rich, and if you pray hard enough, work hard, and are a righteous person, Jesus will bless you and make you a millionaire.  Conversely, if you are not a millionaire, that is a sign that you are a lazy, unrighteous person who needs to find Jesus.  He had very nice teeth and hair and a nice smile, so I am inclined to believe him.

[RaphaelDLG]

For the record, I think billionaires as a group are HPs not because I hate them or am interested in "dehumanizing" them but because pretty much every class status has its own set of moral and spiritual pitfalls and billionaires' position in society gives them more ability to inflict those flaws on the rest of us.

I would have empty quoted this comment in approval until I realized that you were one of the mega rich; now I'm looking for my torch and pitchfork.

[RaphaelDLG]

For the record, I think billionaires as a group are HPs not because I hate them or am interested in "dehumanizing" them but because pretty much every class status has its own set of moral and spiritual pitfalls and billionaires' position in society gives them more ability to inflict those flaws on the rest of us.

I would have empty quoted this comment in approval until I realized that you were one of the mega rich; now I'm looking for my torch and pitchfork.

I'd say something about not being that rich but the money literally comes from Standard Oil so that pretty much cancels out any defense I could make.

FYI that was sarcasm