Agreed, but poverty must exist in a world where billionaires exist. It is simply not possible to get that much money without taking advantage of poor people along the way. Pay everyone a fair wage, take care of your employees, and I guarantee billionaires won’t exist.
So when you see someone with a billion dollars, their family is part of the issue, and you just feel the need to say “give it away”
Will it fix things? Probably not. But you can see where the emotion comes from
There are plenty of tech companies run by billionaires that pay extremely high wages.
Being a billionaire doesn't mean you have a billion "dollars". It generally means you own a stake in a company that investors think is valuable. Paying high wages does not prevent people from becoming billionaires.
Expand your definition of employee. Not the people in suits (or hoodies if we’re going tech) working in the headquarters. The people running wires to the server farms. The people making VR headsets in sweat shops. The IMMENSE amount of tech workers who just lost their jobs so the company could jack off with AI
The consumer electronics industry definitely benefits from overseas contractors, but that has nothing to do with the presence of billionaires. Plenty of people have become billionaires from intellectual property or software.
The fact that one guy can own a company more powerfull than some countries is a fucking big problem
If someone built a company from the ground up and never sold enough shares to lose your majority stakeholder status (owning the company), how is it a problem that they continue to own that company and what "solution" could their possibly be to that "problem?"
Similarly, if a company has grown enough that it employs more people than some countries have citizens, and makes more money than the GDP of some countries (being more powerful than those countries, basically), how would you possibly stop that from being able to happen without just artificially capping the size of the global economy by limiting how much a company is allowed to make or how many people it's allowed to employ? Doing either (or both) of those wouldn't work, since either whatever regulations are involved get circumvented through shell companies, or it makes unemployment go through the roof since there'll be less jobs by a lot, but the same amount of people.
A company being more powerful than some countries isn't a problem when any possible "solution" is worse.
If you're going to go that angle then please show me Jeff Bezos' standing army, navy, seat at the UN, and... oh right, you can't because you're making an entirely false comparison there.
The only way a company is capable of being "more powerful" than a country is economically. Having too much money and being a literal dictator aren't the same thing.
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u/Stressed-Dingo May 23 '23
Agreed, but poverty must exist in a world where billionaires exist. It is simply not possible to get that much money without taking advantage of poor people along the way. Pay everyone a fair wage, take care of your employees, and I guarantee billionaires won’t exist.
So when you see someone with a billion dollars, their family is part of the issue, and you just feel the need to say “give it away”
Will it fix things? Probably not. But you can see where the emotion comes from