I don’t think anyone really has a problem with this and it would be pretty ludicris to try to devise a system where the poorest person’s opinion means as much as the richest. The problem is that 6-100 peoples’ opinions mean more than 325 million peoples’ opinions.
I must not be understanding you, because literally, that sounds like ‘democracy’. If I really squint, I can imagine you meaning that, some opinions being worth more than others, those with worthwhile opinions will generally accumulate more money. But that’s an odd way to have phrased it.
They have only 1 vote currently but more influence than the next 320 million, so clearly the number of votes one casts themselves is not the whole answer. Basically scroll upto the disaster that was citizens’ united, and I’ll just state the obvious, judicial activism by the conservative members of the court who are all far from strict constitutionalists.
Still not getting where it’s ludicrous not to weight opinions by bankroll.
My favorite part is how the Econ 101 certificate holders rush in to enlighten us about principles of microeconomics like marginal utility while simultaneously arguing that a fine outcome is a few people hoarding everything.
2 Likes
“I would have stolen code and released it as ransomware for $100B, but you socialists capped my incentives at $1B and for that reason, I’m out.”
3 Likes
I bet Bill Gates’ favorite position is missionary.
Are you saying its ok for 1 person to have 32million times their say in a democracy or not? I’m saying it’s not ok, FTR.
Sure, that’s fine, we agree. I just don’t know what idea you were trying to convey when you said “it would be pretty ludicris to try to devise a system where the poorest person’s opinion means as much as the richest.” It looked like you were saying it was either impossible or undesirable to devise such a system. I could even buy that it’s impossible, but in the context, it looked more like you were saying it was undesirable. Don’t worry about it.
A little bit of both? I’m ok with a homeless bum hypothetically having as much influence as Bezos… Ghandi was approximately worth $1k according to a google search. But like obviously the people who earn great wealth through ingenuity should have a little more say than the average person who fails high school pre-algebra.
They could literally just buy the presidency.
Sure - but not because of their wealth. Their wealth is (partially) a consequence of the actual quality - ingenuity - that makes their opinion more worthwhile than average.
The myth of success works so well because few people truly understand how much and what types of luck are involved. It’s basically always going to be an uphill battle in the court of public opinion. Imagine doing one of those panels with a Gates or Schwartz type and hammering the luck aspect. That “insult” is the pain of a thousand needles to narcissists of that caliber and their pain levels palpable as they writhe against the nappy boucle of that Jacobsen swan chair on stage. They have a really easy save with audiences that’s their version of “support the troops” which is smarmy platitudes about hard work and determination. And then bonus points for name-dropping Jesus.
2 Likes
I guess I’m wrong here. I had previously thought that the policy failure line was trying to say something more subtle—that the existence of billionaires was indicative of some upstream policy failure that let them amass such wealth. But I looked into it, and it’s like you say. The policy failure is that there wasn’t a policy that outlawed being a billionaire. Lol WAAF
My point is that it is literally impossible to have an exactly equal influence of elections for the poorest and the richest. All one can do is attempt to insulate the political environment as much as possible, ala campaign finance, anticorruption, in general good governance and oversight.
I change the name of the thread as per @clovis8 asking and others agreeing that it should be removed if asked by Clovis8.
We had our fun. As I let the title stay a little too long, sorry @clovis8
4 Likes
“Sure, I may have barged into the thread talking loudly about the weak tea everyone in it was bringing, and I may have asked a question I was confident had no meaningful answer, and it may have turned out to have had a two-word answer that should have been obvious BUT, nevertheless-”
3 Likes
It would be an expert troll if Clovis now started arguing ITT
7 Likes
Where is Bill “ @clovis ” Gates?
1 Like
I don’t consider billionaires to be inherently bad.
My position is that excessive inequality is bad. (Insufficient inequality is also bad. We need some social stratification.) Too many billionaires with too much political influence is just a symptom of excessive inequality.
I am not an econ wonk, so I can’t really describe which specific policies I want. I can, however, describe my goal, which is to decrease inequality. I could say that I want policies which drive the Gini coefficient in the US under 0.3, but I wouldn’t know exactly which policies drive us towards that because I am not an econ wonk. I would want to decrease inequality over maximizing the growth of the economy or increase the standard of living on an absolute scale. If we held the quality of life for the upper middle class constant and increased the quality of life for people below that at the expense of people above that, I would prefer that to increasing the quality of life for everyone in a way that widens the gap between the rich and the poor.
Underlying all that is that I do not have a libertarian view of property rights, so I am very open to policies that would make libertarians cry in pursuit of decreasing inequality.
I see villifying billionaires as propaganda to build political will for redistributionist policies. I see nothing inherently wrong with propaganda. I see nothing wrong with using an emotional, subjective argument to try and sway public opinion. Saying that “billionaires are a policy failure” doesn’t make people stupid. People are already stupid. “Billionaires are a policy failure” is giving people a heuristic for decision-making that gets them pointed in the right general direction most of the time. It’s more efficient cognitively than trying to get them to understand political and economic systems accurately.
5 Likes