I don't think there was any suggestion to confiscate their wealth. It's more of a moral question. If it was just envy, why not go after millionaires too? I don't think that's the issue.
Many of these billionaires don't just have 1, but tens and some of them even hundreds. How many of them operate independently with no influence on the government or subsidies from them? I think you would be hard pressed to find a billionaire who hasn't engaged in underhanded and perhaps even egregious tactics in order to achieve that level of wealth.
I think this is a larger reflection of society that has become obsessed with materialism and profit at the expense of others. That is the underlying issue.
How hard do people have to fight for a pay rise in corporate environments? All while many corporations increase their profits YOY, but are primarily trying to serve the interests of their shareholders rather than employees and customers.
Maybe it's just me, but when my business makes more profit, we proactively raise how much we are paying anyone we hire (freelancers and contractors) because they are fundamental to our growth and it shows appreciation. It's something I fought with my business partner over for years, and he finally came round to seeing things from this perspective.
I agree with some of this — when I was in business, I always advocating for preemptively raising our best people, but it wasn’t because I’m a great guy or anything, just because I knew that taking care of them was sound business, since they were doing such good work.
But where I disagree is the notion that materialism in society (which I also think is misplaced) is due to that fact that some people have more resources than others. IMO it’s coming from the focus on who has what rather than creating and building.
If Steve Jobs gets rich off the iPhone, and I’m focused on the money he’s making I am the materialist in that scenario. No one is forcing me to buy one. Why am I worried about his money?
Now obviously, many billionaires game the system, and reforming the system to minimize that and prosecuting people whose gaming violates the law is good and necessary. But focusing on the amount rather than the process is the essence of materialism IMO.
I wouldn't say the materialism is due to others having more resources. It's a mindset. If society wasn't overly materialistic, they wouldn't unnecessarily be upgrading their iPhones every 12 months, and in turn, Apple wouldn't be working on annual release cycles, which are incremental at best and solely profit driven. There is nothing a new iPhone can do that a 5 year old iPhone can't, other than perhaps artificial software limitations imposed by apple to sell more hardware. Same goes for new cars and other status symbols. It's not just apple, most businesses have adopted this cycle, rarely building products that last to encourage more spending for small iterations.
The system feeds itself, elevating people to gain enormous wealth which will never make its way back into hands of the average person without the goal of trying to extract even more from those investments. And that wealth is then protected and hoarded to appease shareholders and such, with regulation seemingly always benefitting those with all the wealth.
I wouldn't advocate for taking that wealth back, although a monetary reset via something like Bitcoin would essentially do that. We continue to see a consistent shift of wealth from the average person to the uber wealthy as long as people keep giving them money for things they don't need. Billionaires are more of a symptom of material ideology. It's celebrated and idolised because people tend to measure success based on financial status.
society has high time prefence, per nostr:npub1gdu7w6l6w65qhrdeaf6eyywepwe7v7ezqtugsrxy7hl7ypjsvxksd76nak due to inflation, which drives the endless unnecessary consumption, but that’s a separate issue IMO from billionaires existing. And I’m not sure how wealth is “hoarded” because if you store your wealth in bitcoin for later use to build the next Notre Dame, surely that massive amount of purchasing power was put to good use when the vision for the project occurred to you and without which the next Notre Dame would not be possible.
Billionaires are just people who get to decide how to allocate resources at greater scale. A regular person gets to decide where to eat lunch, what kind of phone to buy, but a billionaire can allocate to build a rocket if he chooses. I don’t think “hoarding” comes into it, so long as your gains are not ill-gotten.
I do think bitcoin will level the playing field clawback, so to speak, a lot of the Cantillionaire fiat that is ill-gotten by devaluing it. In a way, it’s reverse Cantillonism, wherein the closer you are to the money printer, the more of your relative wealth gets devalued.
I'm largely in agreement with what you're saying. To me there are few to no billionaires who are allocating their wealth towards building the next Notre dame, instead they are riding the coattails of innovations past. It looks to me like they are more interested in earnings than allocating capital to further true innovation, which is why many of these industries have stagnated now that the visionaries are gone.
I think you're also correctly alluding to these beings symptoms of the fiat system and fiat thinking. It's not so much the concentration of immense wealth, but what they are doing with it.
If I make a billion dollars by shorting a market, but I don't use that to innovate, even at the risk of spending it all, then it just seems wasteful. If I make a billion from creating products and services, it's not quite the same. It's not a problem exclusive to that class though, but they do have the means, which the average person does not.
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