image transcription:
big collage of people captioned, “the only people I wouldn’t have minded being billionaires”
names(and a bit of info, which is not included in the collage) of people in collage(from top left, row-wise):
- Alexandra Elbakyan, creator of Sci-Hub. perhaps the single-most important person in the scientific community regarding access to research papers.
- Linus Torvalds, creator of linux kernel and git, courtesy of which we have GNU/Linux.
- David Revoy, french artist famous for his pepper&carrot, a libre webcomic. inspiration for artists who are into free software movement
- Richard Stallman, arch-hacker who started it all. founded the GNU project, free software movement, Emacs, GCC, GPL, concept of copyleft, among many other things. champions for free software to this day(is undergoing treatment for cancer at the moment).
- Jean-Baptiste Kempf, president of VLC media player for 2 decades now
- Ian Murdock, founder of Debian GNU/Linux and Debian manifesto. died too soon.
- Alexis Kauffmann, creator of framasoft, a French nonprofit organisation that champions free software. known for providing alternatives to centralised services, notable one being framapad and peertube.
- Aaron Swartz, a brilliant programmer who created RSS, markdown, creative commons, and is known for his involvement in creation of reddit. he also died too soon.
- Bram Moolenaar, creator of vim, a charityware.
on the bottom right is the text reading, “plus the thousands of free software enthusiasts working tirelessly.”
Paul McCartney is a billionaire. What people did he exploit?
I think Taylor Swift is now worth a billion dollars, despite being the exploited
Simply by having a billion dollars means they have decided to hoard that wealth. They could give away 90% of it, leaving them with $100 million, it wouldn’t impact their quality of life in any way, and still leave them with more wealth than 99.9% of the planet. Imagine the good that $900 million could do if it was put to good use rather than sitting in a bank account as a status symbol - having the capability to do that good with no impact on yourself or your family and choosing not to makes you an immoral person.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist. At all.
How much money should a person be allowed to have?
I don’t know, but there probably should be a line somewhere. More wealth than 99.9% of the rest of the planet sounds like a good place to start
A lot less than a billion. The exact amount is negotiable.
I doubt any billionaires have that much money “sitting in a bank”.
Most wealth is non-liquid. For example, if you found a company that becomes massive, and you maintain a controlling share, then you could be a billionaire on paper while having no real money to spend – the only way to turn that into “real” money would be to sell shares in the company, and thus lose control of it. If the company is doing good work, it could be better to retain control and act through the company, by ensuring that it pays employees good wages to do good work for the benefit of society. This is not completely incompatible with profit in theory, though in practice…yeah. I’m not sure if there are any such billionaires in the world today.
The real problem is more fundamental to the economy, in that it fairly consistently rewards bad behavior.
Larry Page basically became a billionaire overnight when Google went public. I don’t recall Page or Google doing anything especially evil or exploitative before that, though their success was certainly built in an unsustainable economic bubble.
If Amazon didn’t treat its employees like shit and poison the entire economy, then Bezos could probably still be a billionaire and I wouldn’t necessarily hold that against him.
“Have” vs “control”
This is bullshit
While I agree with your sentiment, the truth is, none of those billionaires have their billions sitting on their bank account, like I have my couple hundred dollars.
McCartney and Swift ‘exploit’ tons of people as well. They might flagship their music artist operation themselves and kind of ‘be’ the product (or rather the brand), but there are lots and lots of people involved to make tours and shows possible, recording, production and especially distribution of music and merch involves labour as well.
In addition to that: I don’t think they store all that money on a nice little heap in their backyard. It usually gets invested into some sorts of corporations, be it through the stock market, where it will accrue revenue, that comes as the result of more exploitation.
That being said: the term ‘exploitation’ carries a much more negative connotation than would be beneficial for the conversation. It’s concept of marxist economics, and the term ‘Ausbeutung’ = exploitation was used by Marx himself to describe how capitalists benefit from the surplus that workers produce. I like the term ‘reaping the surplus’ better because it doesn’t carry as much of a negative connotation. The criticism of capitalism shouldn’t barely rely on the fact that surplus is being taken away from the workers, but from the consequences to society and the political system that inevitably follow when that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a minority.
Let’s reformulate. No single individual gets to a billion dollars of net worth without someone getting fucked over in the process. The very concept of any one individual having a net worth of hundreds of times the one of the next 99.9% is fucking absurd, regardless of what they did. Nobody “deserves” multiple lifetimes worth of wealth while half of the world’s population is living with dollars a day. It would take collectively for this world’s billlionaires, the equivalent of us foregoing buying a gaming PC (in relative terms) to get rid of world hunger, yet they choose not to. So, yes, they are actively fucking people over by having so much wealth in the first place.