I can’t tell if this is a serious post. An extra pair of shoes and an extra yacht are obviously not the same.
A lot of what this debate comes down to is how much worse a person thinks it is to kill someone vs. letting someone die. The “eat the rich” side, or at least my view of this side, see much less of a gap between these things than the “rich is fine” side of things.
Having 3 pairs of shoes that you use while other people go barefoot may not be saintly, but it’s not the same thing as having 3000 pairs of shoes, most of which you will never touch and couldn’t possibly need.
Now most of the “wealth” that billionaires have is just on paper and a lot of it would evaporate if you liquidated it, but the part that is the vacation house that you never set foot in and the like is a moral failing imo.
Of course they aren’t the same, it’s harder to live without shoes than it is to live without yachts. Anytime someone complains at people not giving away their extra stuff I start wondering how much extra stuff they the complainer isn’t giving away. Then hearing that Witchata can afford to go to Spain while I have to save up for a watch and I realize he’s just another hypocrite who doesn’t like people with more than him.
I don’t think I would be that good either, but I think I could cap myself at $10m or maybe $5m. I wouldn’t want to have billions though, to give away or not. That makes you famous. Being famous would suck.
I don’t understand the eat the rich angle at all. If someone wants to make a billion dollars, in a free market, should they not be allowed? Tax the fuck out of them if you must - the role of govt is to make things fair and equitable for everyone.
Or are you not suggesting we should disallow it or provide negative incentives for it? Like I don’t get what your “solution” is. Taxing the hell out of high income earners/hoarders we can all agree on. Whether they should even be allowed to accumulate that much wealth is something I think we might not. I don’t really see a good argument for not allowing a free market to favor certain individuals. What is a problem is when this market unfairly favors those individuals at the expense of the poor. Which currently happens.
What if I told you that the rich were massively and openly corrupting the system such that they have systematically overrode the will of the people for a more equitable system through my entire lifetime, and thus are directly responsible for our current predicament? Bezos, on the slightly less evil end of the spectrum, thought a nationwide jobs blackmail tour to further rig the law to his advantage was not only appropriate but laudable.
The rhetoric against these masters of the universe needs to be dialed up several notches.
We’re not in disagreement. The role of govt is to curtail this behavior. To tackle this problem the corruption needs to be dealt with at all levels of govt.
I guess I just really don’t see that much daylight between these two statements. Like if you think the rich (people making more than $1mm a year) should be paying 40% or greater in taxes on the money they make, but then you realize that they mostly have been paying 15% or less, what exactly is your solution and how is it different than we should be taking money from the rich?
On your way to work, you pass a small pond. On hot days, children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee-deep. The weather’s cool today, though, and the hour is early, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond. As you get closer, you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. You look for the parents or babysitter, but there is no one else around. The child is unable to keep his head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don’t wade in and pull him out, he seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy. By the time you hand the child over to someone responsible for him, and change your clothes, you’ll be late for work. What should you do?
It is possible to have a world where the rich are taxed at a very high rate and we still have a lot wealthy individuals. These arent like mutually exclusive things. It already exists in some places.