Metaur wrote:I understand that people grudge billionaires, as they understand that they don't need so much money. Frankly, a lot of billionaires made their fortunes with dirty, from the law point, methods. But you need to fight not with billionaires, but with law gaps that allow them to make such fortunes. If a billionaire made money with own skills, then this is excellent.
It may be important for us to consider how we argue and think about billionaires. This is because lack of rigor may leave us not only far from being billionaires, but also far from creating just societies.
We need to recall that the issue of 'billionaires' isn't so much about the quantity but the exclusiveness and huge wealth disparities.
As such my proposition is that we shouldn't have such exclusive institutions especially where they tend to overpower government and subvert economic systems to their ends.
If billionaires can subvert both government and economies then a population gets worse off with their presence. Billionaires determine directions of investments and entrepreneurship - eg. Space X is funded under a billionaire view that may be nihilistic.
Billions can never be made by labor/economic skill alone. In fact economies can never be made by skill alone. Other factors like philosophy and aspiration may even come before skill.
Therefore, billionaires are at best, an unnecessary good/evil - whichever you may choose. And that the law changes you're talking about necessarily entail challenging the billionaire class. What we need to do is as the BBI recommends: reconsider the validity of our ethical systems.