That’s like saying “the problem with cancer isn’t the unrestrained tumor growth, it’s the depletion of resources for the rest of the body”—the two go hand in hand.
Even if it didn’t enable them to accumulate more wealth, depriving many so one can live in excess is still immoral.
This hardly qualifies as a showerthought. Better moderation, please.
It’s both, pal. Both are bad, 'cause the former enables the later.
It’s both. The mere fact that there are people with billions of dollars to throw around means a large amount of the world’s productive capacity is spent catering to the whims of billionaires when it could instead be spent on useful things for ordinary people. And because money is inseparable from politics, billionaires can more or less directly bend government policies to their will, greatly hindering anyone else from having a real say in government policy.
If the needs and desires of the many were satiated and society was arranged to prioritize each individuals well being/contentedness it wouldn’t matter if one individual had more.
That’s a really big “if”, especially when you consider how billionaires actively use their influence to maintain an underclass by fighting against government policies that would help lower-class people become middle-class.
use their influence to maintain an underclass by fighting against government policies that would help lower-class people become middle-class.
See deprive people of their health and livelihood
Sorry but simply having our needs met is not enough. You are letting one class determine how everyone else works. People want self-determination and that should be extended to all people, not just billionaires.
in my head these are the same things but im glad you were able to arrive at this conclusion nevertheless
That’s really deep /s
We are not a post-scarcity society, so wealth is still a zero-sum game. For someone to have more, someone else has to have less.
The accumulating wealth is the problem, until we (if ever) achieve post-scarcity.
Depends on what we are talking about. Wealth in the form of oil? Maybe. Wealth in the form of housing, no.
The things people need to have a fulfilling life are in abundance. Sure, we all can’t drive humers and fly private jets.
Since you’re thinking about these things, you might also want to think about why individuals should be able to dictate what happens in the economy at all? Billionaires can’t exist without owning large swaths of the economy, and by owning large swaths of the economy they directly and dictatorially control a major part of the lives of thousands of people. More than Lords of old.
Why shouldn’t the economy be democratized? Why shouldn’t workers decide what to work on, and how to organize their work? Why shouldn’t the economy be cooperative instead of competitive, do we need winners and losers? Why can’t we just share our techniques and resources? Wouldn’t we all be better off?
I think the answer is we still use some dated heuristics. Some time in the 1800s when industrialization started to manifest people decided on the right and wrong ways to do things. People then added on and kept adding on. Unfortunately for us this process is only additive and we never take away or reconsider large over arching norms that don’t fit with all the advancement we’ve achieved.
Billionaires are billionaires because there are few who are billionaires. If everyone was a billionaire then nobody would see billionaires in awe but would see billion billionaires in awe. This is just a consequence of our social behaviour as being different always has a different response.
What I am saying is, billionaires are billionaires because not everyone is a billionaire and everyone is low compared to them.
!Note: I am not talking about “depriving people” topic. That’s different. !<
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