I think that, somewhere north of $1 ~ $5 million is life-changing on its own. There’s no need for someone to have tens of millions or hundreds of millions. Tens of millions is like, changing multiple lives in a family with how much that can stretch.
Whenever someone has billions to their name, it is boggling to think about. That it becomes just ‘fuck you’ money at that point because more often than not, not a lot of billionaires out there being charitable. When they know they’re set for a few lifetimes just by a single billion alone.
No single person should ever have that amount of gross wealth.
Let me put it this way.
It’s possible to become a millionaire through a combination of hardwork, brains, luck and timing.
It’s impossible to become a billionaire after that without exploiting others, whether that is workers, employees, investors…whoever.
In other words, it’s possible to be an honest millionaire, but not an honest billionaire.
So the amount of wealth a person is entitled to is the amount that they can earn with their own labour without exploiting others in order to do so.
So if you own a furniture store, and you pay your employees a living wage, give benefits, etc… and after that you’re successful enough to be a millionaire…great. You deserve it. If you’re an employer and you own a furniture store, and in order to become a millionaire you have to pay your workers minimum wage and rely on unfair labour practices to inflate your profits…you don’t deserve it.
I use the furniture store example because I worked for just such a guy. Family run business. Paid us all well enough. Gave us benefits. Made sure we were taken care of. Treated us like family. And he was financially very successful while managing to do so. Could he have made even MORE if he had taken it from wages and benefits…sure. But that wasn’t the type of person he was.
To me, THAT example is capitalism working as it should in it’s purest form. Corporatization is just a bastardization of the concept created by venture capitalists and shareholders.
People say this, but I don’t think it’s true.
If I simply ask for people to give me money if they like me, and I get 1 million people to give me a dollar each, then I become a millionaire. Nobody’s being taken advantage of, everyone is voluntarily doing this.
Getting to a billion is a lot harder but not impossible. If I ask and 10 million people give me $100 each over the course of 10 years, I might make a billion dollars that way.
So who can do this kind of “ask people for money” at these scales? Anyone who provides a service where the marginal cost of each additional recipient of that service doesn’t cost anything. A musician playing music in a subway station performs basically the same amount of work whether 10 people walk by or 1000 people walk by in the time that he performs. And if you’re a recording artist, you might release a song that literally over a billion people enjoy.
Yes, sports leagues and movie studios and record labels and Ticketmaster and book publishers and live venues and broadcasters and tech platforms are often exploitative in many ways, but authors, musicians, artists, filmmakers, comedians, and other creators can and do sometimes do things that make the world better by billions of dollars worth of happiness, while taking a cut worth hundreds of millions, or even billions.
Ultimately, we do things that produce value in some way or another. Sometimes we get to keep the fruits of our labor, and sometimes we get to profit from that value created. Often, as in the world of intellectual property, the value is very far removed from the actual cost to produce, including the cost in terms of human labor. When that happens, sometimes the excess value is worth billions. Even without a big team creating that value.
I see what you’re saying. But to me it’s very much a “You can’t swim in the sewer without getting covered in shit” morality-play.
The very act of providing a service that earns more than a billion dollars by necessity requires the cooperation of a number of different entities. As you described, Ticket Master, Publishers, Distributors, etc… So while they themselves might not be directly exploiting people, they have to interact and make use of partners that do if they want to play in that billionaire paddling pool.
To me, exploitation by association is still exploitation.
But that’s me. Everyone is welcome to their own opinion.
I totally agree. And id like to ask, what sort of system benefits this?
Regulation is what government does and kills small business while large corps either pay em off to get by or they submit to regulation and lose a few billion but doesn’t affect em.
Socialism is viewed here as government ownership of everything, no more individualism, and Americans fear government above all else (ironically blindly trusting corporations with all their money and data).
Cant we outlaw corporations and continue as we are? Sure would be nice.
I think the world would do better if all of us shrank a bit to be more mindful of a community economy.
If my neighbour down the street woodworks in his spare time and makes bespoke tables and chairs, I’ll do everything I can to go buy from him rather than a corporation (for example)
Growing up on an Acreage, it was more common for us to buy a half a side of beef or pork from the farmer next door than to go to the grocery store. Same for vegetables from farmer’s markets or similar community markets.
It’s less about criminalizing corporations and more about refusing to reward them for making their profits off the backs of poverty wages and government subsidies…
I agree.
People are SO against doing that though, almost vehemently so. 1000 people will go to scamazon to buy some junk before 1 person goes 2 blocks to get it from a local store. People are so lazy they dont want to get up to put in a dvd (yes im old, but this is something I heard a friend actually say not long ago)
Not to mention everything made local costs 4x more by default.
There’s really not much sense of community anymore in America.