If you pay any of your employees a non-living wage you’re not “earning” your billions. You hire someone you’re expecting them to show up, but also be well rested, hydrated, clothed, physically healthy, mentally fit, and motivated. They can’t be all of those things if you’re not compensating them well enough and providing them the flexibility life demands. If your employees depend on government services just so they can show up to work then it’s the taxpayers that are padding your pocket, not your own “hard work”.
Not arguing against you, just using your comment as a jumping off point:
If you are part of the owning class, you aren’t “earning” your wage. You are skimming the surplus value created by your employees and calling it “profit”
Capitalism not only encourages exploitation, but requires it. The whole purpose of capitalism is amassing capital, maximization of profit, and the way to do this is through taking the surplus value created by employees.
For example, when a car is created, raw materials go in and are assembled (at least in part) by people. The value created by turning those raw materials into a car is created by the employees that turned it into a car. The difference between the fair market value of that car and the raw materials put in is the value added by the worker.
If we were to actually pay these workers what they are worth, by the value they added to that car, there would be no profit. But because capitalism incentivises maximization of profit, the owning class pays you a wage that is always less than that value added, and they have incentive to make that wage as small as you are willing to take, after all, you can’t build the car yourself because you do not own the means of production
And therein lies the fundamental problem of capitalism. He who owns the means of production has the power.
Editing to add: If the workers owned the means of production, then there would be no reason for the owning (billionaire) class to exist – because they don’t actually do anything, they just own things.
Poverty wages are not evidence of a broken system, they are evidence that the system is working exactly as intended. We need an economic system that does not incentivize profit, period.
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How about Taylor Swift? By all accounts she pays her employees very well. I realize as with any rule there will be exceptions, and I’d say there are a few. Very few.
She’s not Mother Teresa, but not an absolute monster either, and just barely a billionaire. Most of that billion is intangible assets, she doesn’t literally have $1 billion in her bank account.
It’s hard to hate or speak against someone like that when they’re so insulated and it’s not clear how much class consciousness they even have. At the same time, someone like that could obviously do more.
Most of Taylor Swift’s wealth comes from the record label, not her employees’ labor. UMG certainly is a mega corporation that monopolizes the industry and is valued at tens of billions of dollars currently.
This is exactly why I don’t like this hard “billionaire” line. Because it detaches the argument from how they amassed their wealth and instead focuses on “they’re wealthy so it’s bad”. I don’t know enough about Swift to know if she in the socialist sense “earned” her wealth, but let’s say that she did. Let’s say her labor is that valuable and within the framework of of what she can reasonably influence she hasn’t deliberately exploited anyone for her benefit. If she put in the labor and walked away with a billion, what is wrong with that? Are we supposed to virtue signal and claim that she should’ve gone above and beyond to make sure every penny was ethically obtained? Are we supposed to perpetuate the capitalist misinformation that socialism is when you’re not allowed the fruits of your labor is it makes you too rich?
And are we also supposed to turn a blind eye to all the investor leeches who do no actual labor but take a profit margin from the labor of others? You know, as long as their wealth stays below a billion. Are you some kind of an ethical capitalist if you give away every penny that would make you a billionaire?
Yes, the vast majority (if not all) billionaires haven’t earned their billions but I think we should be emphasizing how they made their billions instead of the fact that they have a billion. It’s far more important to get rid of the leeches than it is to get rid of billionaires. Even if there aren’t any ethical billionaires getting rid of them isn’t going to get rid of all the multi-millionaires who are doing the same horrid shit.
If your scenario were true then we need to change the system, or how we teach our children what is right or wrong.
If I was Taylor Swift in your example, I would split all of the money with everyone who helped put my shows on, since its literally impossible for me to do it alone.
Part of the problem is that people see Taylor Swift as a one person act, when its hundreds. This puts her up on a pedestal, and everyone else is forgotten.
Taylor Swift isn’t THE problem, but she is absolutely a symbol of the problem.
Even if you could, you shouldn’t want to.
This is the problem that needs to be fixed. As long as we embrace greed we will be ruled by it.
Power. The more you have, the others have less. You are more special with each billion extra.
I just don’t get the point. Felon and bozos have more money than they’ll EVER be able to spend. What is the point of hoarding even more? It makes no sense. I just don’t get it
The hoarding becomes the point. It’s a form of psychosis.
I think at a certain point it becomes about power and money is just a way they measure it
Money, money, money. The artificial middle-man of questionable value that we kill each other over. This is getting embarrassing already. Universal basic income. No-one should lack food, warmth and shelter nowadays, at the very least. Watch progress take off when everyone has a full belly and hope.
I’d hate to be the soulless fool who downvoted you
Thank you. Idk if this will be beneficial to my emotional wellbeing or not so I will likely forget about it
Probably just a McMansion guy with dreams of a superyacht. /s
The problem here is not her message, it is how the headlines present it.
She is not saying that having a billion dollars is wrong per se in a vacuum. she is saying how you go about getting a billion dollars in the real world is what makes it wrong.
That distinction is far too subtle for the average voter. She is talking about the rules of chess while ~50% of the country barely knows how to play checkers.
The better thing to focus on for people is probably the methods by which billionaires go about making their money more so than the specific amounts of money they end up with because of it.
Even leaving out the context, wealth-hoarding has severe negative side effects.
Well, nothing is wrong in a vacuum because there’s nothing there to be right or wrong, but having a billion dollars is wrong per se, because no one person, no matter how brilliant or diligent, can actually do something that is worth one billion dollars.
Also, I don’t think individuals should have the amount of power that comes with that much wealth.
Whatever AOC! It’s super easy, barely an inconvenience, to do. Over the span of a 40 year career you simply need to earn $25,000,000 on average each year without exploiting labor, committing fraud, violating antitrust, cheating investors, market manipulation, stealing, or any of the other ways billionaires became billionaires.
The real story is that having a billion dollars and not aggressively using your wealth to fix the problems in the world/society makes you a monster. Full stop.
This woman for president, enough is enough!
100%, although I think I might rather see her take down Schumer for his senate seat and then become majority leader…
The irritating thing is that the voting population is, on average, stupid, easily led, and anti woman. She would not fair well no matter how good she’d be in charge because brown woman bad or something equally idiotic. We’re nothing if not committed to shooting our own feet and wondering how it happened
Bruh, at this point, what the fuck are we gonna do? Just put up our own, inferior slightly less racist white old aristocratic man we ordered off TEMU? Even if we win, we lose.
I think radical is the way to go. We cannot let what happened to Bernie happen again. I’m just saying, I’m not sure she’s ready for the office of POTUS yet, maybe she needs more experience, but while we keep vetting and purity testing, the right just go “HERE’S ADOLF HITLER, EXCEPT HE IS ALSO GERIATRIC AND SUFFERS FROM ADVANCED DEMENTIA” and the people are like “FINALLY!”
I’m not saying she shouldn’t run. She’d be my most likely vote assuming some unicorn progressive candidate doesn’t show out of nowhere. It’s just irritating as fuck that she’s fighting from behind purely because she’s not a rich white dude
Don’t forget the “id vote for her but she’d never win” crowd
If people say they’d vote for her and don’t during the primary, they’re fuckasses and can be called out as such. Also the people who vote for her specifically because she’s a woman of color. Her skin color and gender are not important. Furthering progressive ideals of “kids and poor people not dying”, “healthcare should be between the person and their medical team, not including insurance and landlords”, “not having to choose between eating, seeing a doctor, and housing/utilities”, and so forth.
Is she perfect? No but the enemy of good is perfect so we need to push for progress, not perfection. We also need to be aware of how any chosen progressive candidate will be maligned and be able to combat it. The red scare is still a factor in today’s time as are racism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity. People automatically shut down upon certain words or ideas without listening to the actual content being said. There is no trying to understand, only soundbites and tweets and headlines.
Anyway, back to point. She’s a hard sell to the average idiot. Doesn’t mean we can’t try though. The opportunity is there to push for more progressive movement
|Her skin color and gender are not important.
Means she got experience being a minority. Know what I’m saying? If she says “I care about your tired, your poor, your huddled masses”, I’m more inclined to believe her than when an obese 86 year old billionaire in a brown shirt says it, you know. Except, the obese 86 year old billionaire in a brown shirt would never even say that, so…
I mean they are not important in and of themselves and should not be used directly as a reason to either support or dismiss her. I’d’ve thought that was obvious by context of literally everything else I said.
Don’t support a person because of their skin color, sexually, or genitalia situation. Support a person for their actions, beliefs, and intentional associations. Yes, their skin color, upbringing, etc affect these things but that is not the same thing.
About the only billionaires that I might excuse are artists, who take a blank page, or a black canvas, and write song, or a book, or create some work of art out of their thin air, using only the ideas in their head. If they can create something out of their head, and get enough people pay them for it, then they deserve the money.
The problem is, in order to transfer than money from the fan to the artist, especially in massive amounts, it usually takes some gargantuan corporation that does all the exploiting on the part of the artist.
So while the artist wasn’t exploitive in the creation of his art, his distribution company that collected the money for him, certainly was.
Most actors and singers aren’t successful just because they have talent, it’s because they have the right connections in Hollywood.
This. And nearly no artist makes big money on art unless a.) they die first or b.) it’s some BS “modern art” paint splattered on a page made for the explicit purpose of being purchased by a bazillion are and “donated” to a museum so they can make a huge tax write off. (Read: used to dodge taxes)
Well JK Rowling made over a billion dollars from book sales alone, so it’s possible to make a billion dollars.
Suppose I should have been more specific, I meant “visual” artists like painters lol. Plenty of artists have made billions off book, movie, and song deals.
Wow, you really don’t have a clue about art.
Can you name a living visual artist (ya know painters or whatever) that are alive?
I can name a LOT of them: Damien Hurst, Banksy, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, and many, many more. Plenty more that have died recently, but were hugely famous during their lifetimes, like Chuck Close or Roy Lichtenstein, who are displayed in nearly every museum in the world, including the Met and MOMA. Many artists like Picasso, Rembrandt, Michaelangelo, Monet, and many more, were extraordinarily famous in their lifetimes.
The idea that famous artists and composers didn’t get famous until long after they were dead, is an exaggeration to the point of being mostly false.
I have a degree in music history, and I can name 10 famous composers who were relatively famous in their own lifetimes, for every one that became famous posthumously. Many famous artists and composers were very famous in their lifetimes, which is why they became even more famous in death. There are the notable exceptions like JS Bach and Van Gogh, but there are a lot more like Beethoven or DaVinci, who were enormously famous during their lifetimes. Even those that are known for becoming famous after death, like JS Bach or Schubert, were still well known among local and regional musicians, which is why their music was preserved after death.
And that’s where I concede that there may have been great composers who NEVER became famous because nobody ever heard their music, and nobody ever preserved it. But that’s not the same as becoming FAMOUS after death. That’s a bit of a cliche, with few actual examples.
I can name a LOT of them: Damien Hurst, Banksy, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, and many, many more. Plenty more that have died recently, but were hugely famous during their lifetimes, like Chuck Close or Roy Lichtenstein, who are displayed in nearly every museum in the world, including the Met and MOMA. Many artists like Picasso, Rembrandt, Michaelangelo, Monet, and many more, were extraordinarily famous in their lifetimes.
I think you’re being very naive. One of the people you mentioned did something exactly for the purpose op was saying. 20 artists in the last century in museums isn’t a lot of people either. All of that is decided by the tastemakers, the people who have connections and/or lots and lots of money to run the museum. Bill Gates mom ran the Seattle Art Museum for years.
I wasn’t offering a comprehensive list of “famous” or “great” living artists, just a few examples. I’m not naive, I know about Damien Hurst, and his consortiums, but he’s the exception. I chuckled typing his name as an example, he’s a K-Pop band, on a stage with Springsteen and Dylan, but technically he IS an artist, just like technically the K-Pop band are musicians. He’s just figured out a way to monetize his art, but he’s an exception. Koons is another one. So was Thomas Kinkade. These guys are bomb throwers, not serious artists.
Most artists don’t have that kind of notoriety, nor do they want it. Most artists I know, would be happy just making their living from their art, so they can only do art. Some don’t even want to make money from their art. Generally, success is based on how well they personally feel they rendered the emotion they were trying to explore.
And the wealthy have ALWAYS been the best benefactors for the arts, especially music and painting, that’s nothing new, and should be strongly encouraged. Most of Haydn’s greatest compositions were written while he spent decades employed by Prince Esterhazy. Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and just about every composer took commissions from wealthy patrons.
And why shouldn’t an artist take it? The wealthy generally have more money than brains (most inherited), so if they are going to throw away their excess excess excess money on obviously metaphoric rockets, throw some dough to the artists instead. It’s one way to get that promised trickle down money, although you got to squeeze that tree really hard to get the juice out of it.
There are a lot of different kinds of artists, not just actors and singers, and while Nepo-Babies are common in Hollywood, they are less common in most other art forms.
Art tends to be very merit-based. Bad artists don’t tend to be very successful. Good artists don’t always find success, but bad artist almost never do, and never on a huge basis. Wealthy artists are generally very good at what they do.
IMO, I think that artists, like any other person, should have wealth and income limits imposed on them. No one should be rich enough to buy influence, and artists would be especially dangerous if they had mogul money and the ability to popularize ideas through their works. JK Rowling, Ronald Reagan, Kanye West, Alex Jones, and others come to mind.
The answer isn’t to make artists rich, but rather to eliminate poverty and provide a baseline of living that allows anybody to succeed at life.
Valid.
No one deserves to be a billionaire. Most artists are not wealthy in their lifetime. In fact, most art is never even sold. It is so strange that we are so addicted to money that saying an artist deserves billions makes sense to people.
I didn’t say that artists deserve to be billionaires. I said that if an artist writes a song, and enough people buy that song to make him a billionaire, at he hasn’t done it by exploiting thousands of workers, and keeping profits that should have been shared with those workers. He got rich because people were willing to buy his ideas.
However, I also acknowledged while his side of the process may be exploitation-free, the side that actually distributes that song in the marketplace is NOT exploitation-free.
I’m not excusing any billionaires, I’m just saying there’s a big difference between wealthy artists, and people whose business was conceived with exploitation baked into the business plan from the start.
Sorry, I was not trying to make it out like you said that. Just generally that people are so obsessed with money it has perverted their view of art. Art is not about making money even if a few people successfully do this. It is about expression.
Trying to make art about money is a perversion which can be seen on platforms like Spotify where artists now pay more than streamers to get their music heard. This is not art/expression, it is commercialization.
While I am not against artist trying to sell their works, I am against corporations stealing and taking the lions share of the profits. Think musicians who don’t own their works or graphic artists that regularly get ripped off by corporations.
Corporations are so addicted to greed they are even trying to cut out the small portion of profits given to artists with AI and all signs seem to indicate they are going to be wildly successful pushing slop without any human artists.
This, of course, is not the end of art by any means.
How many artists are actually billionaires? It’s a lot of difference from being a millionare
There are getting to be quite a few these days. Musicians like McCartney, Springsteen, Dylan, Sting, Beyonce, Jay-Z, and more, are reaching Billionaire status these days. Most of them have sold their publishing for $500 million, putting them halfway there, with a lifetime of royalties. Being a Rock Star used to be a great path to serious wealth, when records actually sold in the millions.
Visual artists are another story. I feel sorry for them. They create a beautiful painting, and then sell it for a bit of money. Then that buyer holds it for a few years, and sells it for double, but the artist doesn’t see any of that. All he gets are the proceeds from that initial sale. Being the artist that holds the record for the largest sale by a living artist has got to be rough. Some guy just got $50 mill for a painting that you sold 20 years ago for rent money.
I couldn’t access the site with protonvpn but removepaywalls fixed it.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
Sure you can. You just have to figure out a way to live for 10,000 years.
You can create wealth. The issue is distribution not wealth creation. The American workforce needs a raise.
Trying to understand this type of concept, as economics is not a super strong topic of mine, and I hear or see this type of phrasing sometimes; “creating wealth” “wealth creation”.
How do you define how someone creates wealth?
Provide a good or service and sell it in the market for a profit. Sell your labor. Sell your art. Anything. Sky is the limit.
Oh… Uh, what’s the wealth in those situations?
I had a coworker who was in Marketing but got a bug up his ass to change his life, and went into “coaching.” It was clearly some kind of Silicon Valley success coaching because he totally flipped personalities and became a CEO archetype. He got out of Marketing and managed to become a mid level executive at a company that sold itself to Oracle. For them, this was a big payday and a big success and he used it to go get some venture capital and start a company, which he headed.
I was talking to him at some point in all this and he described how he wanted to make a shift in his life.
“I want less doing and more causing.”
In other words, I want to call the shots for other people to do the work, because doing work is not glorious or enriching enough to offset my small dick energy.
Now don’t get me wrong. “Causing” is important too. We need people to come up with good business plans and break them down into prioritized tasks. We need people to secure funding so a team can then spend 6 months building a product. We need someone to make a major business deal so that product can get exposure and find customers. We need someone to decide what to work on / not work on from an informed position with some clear long-term vision. We need people to figure out if two groups should merge because they’ll both benefit.
All of that is “causing” instead of working but it supports working and aims working at the right priorities. We love to shit on CEOs for doing nothing but most people want to show up to their job with clear instructions of what to do, and they want that to be part of a larger plan that’s well thought out and will lead to big success for all.
If we expect that from our managers and leaders, we should recognize that it is a job. I’m not saying they all do it well, just that it is a thing someone needs to do. We’ve all worked under jackasses that do it badly, but some of us have also worked under really good leaders who do it well, and we know it’s game changing.
So yeah… you can cause a billion dollars to be made, even if you can’t “make” a billion dollars with your own two hands.
The real question is how that billion dollars should be shared between the causers and the doers. Our system favors the investors above all (they own the company, they are the capitalists in capitalism). So they really are the ones that get the lion’s share. But the causers who work right under them are the next in line and they get fantastically wealthy too. Because what’s capital if you can’t get someone to turn it into more capital for you? The causer may be the only person the capitalists ever talk to.
The actual workers are just commodities that get bought for a given price. And this is where our system really fails society. I would like every worker and causer to be part owner and have a real stake in the success of their venture, and share in the risks and rewards. This might mean more risk for workers: maybe slightly lower guaranteed wages but more equity that could go big or could amount to nothing.
This system operates today and is not some wild fantasy. I am a worker, but I just got my annual equity grant, and its market value is more than my annual salary. I can live on the salary but I am only really getting ahead in life because of the equity. Of course the executives and board and shareholders are getting obscenely wealthy. But I’m genuinely happy with my share and I want them to get obscenely wealthy because that means I’ll do nicely myself.
Why more workplaces can’t be like this is a mystery to me. And I don’t think it’s necessary to prevent anyone from ever becoming a billionaire - we just need a system where every billionaire made means 500 millionaires got made too. Thats still wildly unequal but it’s possible for everyone to thrive even if they’re not all equal.
I really agree with your comment. It is a relationship and that relationship has been tipped in favor of one side that has taken things to extreme and fails society.
You mention making the doers part-owners. I’ve always found buying broad based index funds that buy the entire stock market the easiest way to do that.
I wish we required (yes I know how people feel about that word) everybody to invest 10% of their paycheck into something like that. If we had started this 40 years ago the workers would all be owners and benefit from the raising stock market.
You’d also have to teach people to buy and hold for their career (the long-term) but some would still sell for dumb reasons like a new iPhone or PS5.
So yeah…
I agree with you in a sense that this is something that could have helped us not reach this point. However I don’t think it’s something that can help us move forward from this point. Income inequality has people at a point where they are foregoing medical care and even food. Many lack housing. Investing is an impossibility for people living hand to mouth.
Any solution has to include some redistribution of wealth even if all of it goes to investing, along the lines you are describing. People are strapped for cash so the thing to do is pay them in Index fund shares that vest slowly, just the way employee stock shares work. It we could give every American a 10% raise, all in slowly vesting equity, we could see some change from that in time.
For sure. Society has moved beyond a few breaking points. I still think something what you described in your reply would help ease some of the growing wealth gap even if implemented today, but I know actually realizing such a program is a fantasy.
I followed an index fund investing method and am now removed from many pain points of capitalism. I try to share this anybody who bring up “I am worried about my future as I have no plans.” Many enjoy the conversation, but if even one in a hundred actually makes efforts to follow it means at least they will benefit.
Wait till she finds out most billionaire didn’t have a billion dollars
Is this supposed to be a gotcha or something? This has got to be a bot
It’s not, not the problem is trying to tax wealth, specifically unraised gains from stock value is a problem no one knows how to solve.
If you tax unraised gains, the cost ultimately goes to the customer. And it’s you force them to sell the stocks, it would crash the bubble economy and they will just find another alternative to stock assets. It would basically be perks retirements paying for the tax. The money comes from somewhere when you tax money that doesn’t exist.
I was responding as if your comment referenced the headline. I don’t really think it’s defensible to be a billionaire.
Maybe just nationalize their assets then?
But how does that help everyone? If we nationalized the stocks, the value is then like Tesla would go from pe 300 to pe 30. It would wipe out 800 million overnight just on that one company.
The word “billionaire” exists because “slave owner” had a negative connotation.
I like the way both of those words sound, right before the new industrial revolution begins churning out freshly sharpened guillotines.
In both cases, the people rejoice and get a free ball to kick around.
That sounds like a really good way to break a foot. Heads be heavy af, yo. Stay safe
Steel-toed boots are ideal for that purpose, and others too.
