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.
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”.
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.
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.
Here’s the relevant quote from the article:
“You can’t earn a billion dollars,” Ocasio‑Cortez said. “You just can’t earn that. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that.”
It’s big that she said this. It’s a big political risk.
It’s common knowledge here, but certainly not everywhere it needs to be.
Nah. They are few. We are many.
They own all of the media. I guarantee that the propaganda machine has started up against her already.
The propaganda machine includes this very article. It’s already been going since her first primary run, and it will continue churning the propaganda against her out.
You have more access than most people in the world to firearms. Glass bottles are cheap, and gasoline, while increasing in price, is relatively still inexpensive
You’re just one plane ticket away! Surely that won’t stop you from showing us how it’s done.
good luck
Oh, okay. You’re doing all you can, yeah? Not at all mistaking cowardice for helplessness? Nah. Couldn’t be. Weird how your whole country dined out for a couple centuries on the myth of being REALLY good at fighting tyranny against great odds. It’s almost like you made it your entire deal and used it as a cudgel against those who suggested you weren’t living up to your stated ideals. Huh.
You could at least get your own country to stop using the US dollar, stop trading with the USA, stop buying weapons from the US at least, and stop training with the US military. That would help a LOT.
But, instead you’d rather enable the USA. Disgusting.
It’s a plane ticket for either one of us, and since you’re the smart one with all of the solutions, you should of course lead the way. Like you said, glass bottles and gasoline are cheap, and so are plane tickets, so hop on the plane and SAVE THE WORLD.
Or… just sit on your ass and tell other people what to do, while your own country enables the USA. You’re doing all you can, right?
No, keep going.
Keep getting defensive and illustrating exactly why they’re steamrolling you. Don’t stop. It’s already clear enough to me, but I think it’s useful that other people see the mindset that’s keeping US liberals from stopping MAGA.
Your country probably bought into that lie.
And by the way it was and is Boomers who pushed that. 🤷♂️ We’re just along for the ride here.
The capital class wants to divide the working class.
Creating generational divide is one way.
You have way more in common with your grandparents than with a billionaire.
What shitty media do you read?
There’s dozens of amazing independent news outlets in the US.
I am of course referring to mainstream media that reaches the plebs. The ones who don’t exist terminally online and consume their information through all the small media outlets that are prolific here. People who watch NBC, CBS, and ABC and who regularly consume Fox News and CNN as their primary news source. Those are the people that are getting a 24/7 fire hose of misinformation about her.
I’m pretty sure those people are so old that they hardly count as existing
Big media calling her a communist is all it needs to destroy a candidate in Murica.
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
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
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.
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
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.
She’s not wrong.
Since billionaire don’t have a billion dollars she is literally right as well.
What do you mean?
I mean billionaires have stocks that are worth a billion. They don’t have a billion dollars. So you are essentially taxing money that doesn’t exist. So where does the money come from?
You tax the money they borrow against their stock holdings as income, and allow them to deduct money used to pay back those loans. You could also tax a percentage of their wealth, which they can pay by selling some stock.
So you want every billionaire to have to sell stocks every year, on evaluations they don’t control.
Guess you want everyone 401k to go belly up which stocks crash, and products become more expensive because companies will just pass the cost down to the consumer. The money cones from somewhere, and it would be the buyers of these stocks. Which is us.
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.
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
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.
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.
How many artists are actually billionaires? It’s a lot of difference from being a millionare
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.
