Somehow people making these sort of hypotheticals about billionaires spending or dispersing their money always make a mistake like this.
"Jeff Bezos has 300 billion dollars. There are 300 million people in America, so he could give everybody a million dollars."
For fun, calculate how long the billionaires of America could fund America's social programs if they were taxed at 100%. If you ask people this, the off-the-cusp estimates are usually something like a thousand years, a century, some huge number like that...
Sure but those hypotheticals are just poorly thought out ways to visualize the imbalance. Another way to do it would be saying "Jeff Bezos has 300 billion dollars, that is 300 thousand millions. There are 300 million people in America, so $1000 has been taken out of every American's share of the national wealth and reserved exclusively for Jeff Bezos". Repeat that for every billionaire in the US and you should be able to demonstrate quite the imbalance.
Of course that assumes you think Earth's and society's (or at least the US's and Americans') resources should exist for all humans (or Americans) and the ideal balance would be based on as little as one needs and as much as one can contribute, i.e. literally how early human communities operated and how human communities still often operate outside economical contexts (e.g. after a natural disaster). You can say that model doesn't scale but I don't see a good argument for why that should be a reason to use a completely different model unless you're literally among the few people it disproportionately benefits (if you ignore how ruinous it usually is to them too at a human and interpersonal level because of how much it alienates them from almost anyone else around them).
Acrobatic_Road|1 year ago
lupusreal|1 year ago
"Jeff Bezos has 300 billion dollars. There are 300 million people in America, so he could give everybody a million dollars."
For fun, calculate how long the billionaires of America could fund America's social programs if they were taxed at 100%. If you ask people this, the off-the-cusp estimates are usually something like a thousand years, a century, some huge number like that...
kiba|1 year ago
JohnCClarke|1 year ago
Even in this populist age, math still counts.
hnbad|1 year ago
Of course that assumes you think Earth's and society's (or at least the US's and Americans') resources should exist for all humans (or Americans) and the ideal balance would be based on as little as one needs and as much as one can contribute, i.e. literally how early human communities operated and how human communities still often operate outside economical contexts (e.g. after a natural disaster). You can say that model doesn't scale but I don't see a good argument for why that should be a reason to use a completely different model unless you're literally among the few people it disproportionately benefits (if you ignore how ruinous it usually is to them too at a human and interpersonal level because of how much it alienates them from almost anyone else around them).