So we should focus on the problem but not one of the things that causes the problem?
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Extreme wealth hoarding causes a lot of these problems. Sure the system that allows them do that is the main issue but they choose to participate in this system and take wealth hoarding to extreme levels.
Not just “participate in this system”. They are actively involved in creating the rules for it.
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If you want to be really nitty, the highest number I have seen is 2% of wealth annually with is very likely less than this annualized expected rate of return, and therefore his wealth should continue to increase on an annualized basis, therefore they are talking about taking 0% of his wealth. How you like those apples?
This is something like ‘leveling up’, right? For example: Wealthy private schools have access to amazing resources that improve outcomes for the few rich enough to attend. It’s better to, as far as possible, make comparable resources available to all schools, rather than simply taking them away from the private one. That’s fine - I’m entirely on board with this approach.
But consider: The threshold for “the 1%” in the US is an annual income of $421,926. If you earned $421,926 every year since the birth of Christ, you still would not have earned a billion dollars. So it’s more like the wealthy private school has like eight thousand swimming pools (or whatever other enviable resources). You can’t level up in that way and there’d be no point - no school needs eight thousand swimming pools. No person needs a billion dollars.
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Let’s be really clear here… Clovis was defending basically just Bill Gates from the charge of being a stone sociopath. That’s as far as he went. He didn’t defend Gates saying he’d have a hard time voting for Warren over Trump… he didn’t defend the system that made Gates absurdly richer than any human has any need to be. He didn’t do any of that.
This whole thread is one absurdly long straw man argument where a bunch of you rage against the extremes of modern capitalism. Which I don’t think anybody sane is even disagreeing with you on.
And a bunch of you are starting to become caricatures of yourselves in your rage. And a bunch of you are trying to hold the billionaires themselves personally responsible for the situation… which I find super suspect because I don’t even really fully believe in free will. Billionaires are a government policy failure. Either you believe that or you don’t. Personally I believe it, and I simultaneously believe that Bill Gates is the best case scenario for a billionaire so he’s hardly the right guy to take shots at. There are lots of better candidates.
As to him giving away all his money and getting richer it’s his fault now that the stock market has been on a 10 year bull run and he has more money than he can figure out how to give away to start with? I’m sorry but you guys are taking shots at a guy who has funded a bunch of stuff that is probably going to actually make a real difference. In the case of nuclear power probably a much bigger difference than the value of his total fortune wrt addressing climate change.
I don’t want to end up in the same hole as Clovis with you guys… Bill Gates is no angel and he doesn’t need me to defend him, and the system that made him rich is utterly corrupt. I agree that he was incredibly ruthless in business and I agree that his entire business was the result of a largely government granted monopoly. I also agree that him saying he’d even consider voting for Trump over Warren is indefensible. Particularly since Trump single handedly torpedoed him testing his new nuclear tech in China which probably set back safe clean carbon neutral power by 5+ years.
But I’m also saying that of all the economic tumors we call billionaires he’s the best case scenario. Full stop. Pick a different target, there are literally 1000+ to choose from and most of them are basically cartoon villains lol. A few of them are the villains from Captain Planet ffs.
It makes him exactly the guy to take shots at.
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This. Tons of shots are taken at Mercer and Koch et al, but if your point is that there shouldn’t be billionaires then Gates is a prime target. It’s too obvious that Koch sucks.
I’d defend Buffett maybe because his money is essentially just circulating. It’s good that he doesn’t use it for power (to the same degree) and he doesn’t use up a crazy share of the resources of the planet.
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If you want to argue in favor of weakening patent protections that inflate drug and software profit margins, that is legitimate. Bill Gates made a lot of money as a result of government protectionism.
But people who use words like greed or hoarding need to read an introductory economics text. The argument is immediately lost when someone uses those words. Bill Gates delivers a product people willingly buy. Trade is win-win. Bill Gates made a lot of money serving people on a massive scale. And he used the money he made to continuously innovate and serve more people.
There is no coherent argument for taxing billionaires like Gates out of a existence. He is a model of what is right in America. People who grow businesses through innovation and reinvestment are what propel humanity forward.
Why would you attack the strong point instead of the many many weak points? The right way to handle ‘but Bill Gates’ from ‘free market’ extremists is to laugh and point at the hundreds of other billionaires who are doing massive amounts of damage to humanity on a scale that absolutely dwarfs what Gates is doing… which is crazy because Gates is a pretty big force for good on balance.
The guy is absurdly well funded and is very good at picking the right problems and going after them. If every billionaire was like Gates we wouldn’t be so angry… because they would have actually solved some big macro problems and would be an obvious force for good. But they haven’t, because 99% of them are busy ruining everything for everyone else so that they can be more powerful.
The Koch’s, the Walton’s, Bezos, the Mars family, the fashion people, Zuckerburg… literally every other name from the top 100 sucks more except MAYBE Buffett because he earned his money in a somewhat less exploitative fashion…
None of this is meant to be a defense of Gates per se, more of an argument that there are tons of more deserving people if you want to hate someone. The whole system is pretty gross and well deserving of anger… but make no mistake it’s the system that’s causing the problems, and your preferred solution (government intervention) has a huge chunk of the responsibility for these people metastasizing.
Taxing him at like 99% would do a lot less to stop the next Bill Gates than removing the government protection that you’re ok with giving up.
Because it’s necessary to undermine the idea that billionaires are good and/or useful, and to promote the idea that every billionaire is a policy failure. There’s no point attacking the ones ~everyone agrees are bad. You have to attack the ones a lot of people think are good.
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There are like 2-3 defensible ones total. The rest are just complete scum. The way to handle those ‘but this guy is pretty good’ argument correctly is to ask them to name 2-3 more good ones. Then tell them how many actual billionaires there are. Make them really consider the implications of what they are saying.
It’s extremely rare to find a billionaire with any redeeming qualities at all, so making them name the 2-3 good ones and then asking if they’ve run out of names is a great strat.
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You mean that he has some significant narcissistic tendencies, is very competitive, and doesn’t have a huge amount of empathy for other humans?
Yeah obviously. You can’t get as rich as him without at the very least the almost compulsive desire to win. I say this as someone who is plenty competitive himself… I’ve already found the limits of what I’m willing to do to win, and there are plenty of people who will go farther. There’s a good chance Gates has never found that place.
He’s also extremely smart and wants to make the world a better place even if it’s for his own glory. These people have always been with humanity. There are pyramids in Egypt for a reason.
See gregorio’s posts. Also see the documentary Poverty, Inc.
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Hardly any Gates cheerleader knows the first thing about his foundation and its activities. They’ve read the headlines and believed the hype. That’s not some immutable brute fact of reality that simply must be negotiated. It’s a mistaken impression that can be corrected, and must be corrected if people generally are to accept that billionaires shouldn’t exist.
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What makes you so sure of this?
MSDOS was him buying the rights to QDOS which was a reverse engineering of CP/M. Windows sucked for the whole time Gates could have had anything to do with it. I think he wrote a version of BASIC.
He got rich because he was ruthless at business and lucky (mostly that IBM was dumb), not because he’s a super genius.
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The assumption that the great geniuses of tech are the billionaires is so absurd and wrong. Gates and Zuckerberg both got rich off of plagiarism. A guy like Ken Thompson who was a creator of UNIX, C, and Go (Golang) is virtually unknown.
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Charles Koch. Sam Walton was great. Jeff Bezos. Larry Page. Michael Bloomberg. Most billionaires made their money by doing good for the world.
What is the argument against Sam Walton? I do 100% of my grocery shopping there and buy household supplies there. They have much better prices than any comparable store. Wal-Mart is an amazing place. Wal-Mart is a couple thousand dollar yearly tax cut. I just bought Michael Bloomberg’s biography for the cost of shipping on Amazon. Twenty years ago that book would be twenty five dollars and it would be hard to find after a few years. And he was an innovative entrepreneur in disseminating financial news. Google provides an amazing product for free. I just used the Google Map thing on my phone yesterday to get someplace when I was lost. And Charles Koch has built a conglomerate by continuously creating efficiencies all the while employing 90,000 people at high paying jobs.