Is a billion dollars proof of extraordinary value created — or proof that something went wrong on the way there? Can anyone actually 'earn' that much, or is every billionaire a policy failure?
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Add your commentNobody works a billion times harder than a nurse. You don't earn a billion, you capture it — from underpaid workers, from tax loopholes, from a system you then lobby to keep exactly as it is.
imagine defending a guy with 200 billion to people who cant afford insulin. some of you would thank the boot on your neck for the free foot massage
nobody's mad at YOUR comfortable. the debate is about BILLIONS, with a B. theres a difference between a successful person and someone who has more money than they could spend in 500 lifetimes while people starve
The 'bigger pie' line always skips the part where the people who baked it got minimum wage and no healthcare while one guy kept the bakery, the recipe, and your data. Be serious about who baked it.
the wildest part is theyve convinced half of the working class to defend them by selling the fantasy that 'one day that could be me.' it almost never will be, but the dream keeps the system safe
ok but they borrow against those 'just shares' to live like kings tax-free while you pay income tax on every paycheck. the 'its not real money' defense falls apart the second they want a yacht
the fact that we cant draw a perfect line doesnt mean theres no problem. i cant tell you the exact temperature where warm becomes hot but i can still tell youre standing in a fire
Every empire in history thought its concentration of wealth was permanent and justified right up until it wasn't. We're not having a new debate. We're having the oldest one there is.
if someone invents something a billion people happily pay for, and gets a dollar each, theyre a billionaire and nobody was robbed. value isnt a fixed pie you slice, sometimes you bake a bigger one
The question isn't whether they're good or bad people. It's whether ANY system that allows one individual to accumulate that much power over markets, media and politics is healthy for a democracy. It isn't.
Philanthropy gets mentioned every time. But choosing to give some back on your own terms, with your name on the building, for the tax break, is not the same as paying what you owe. Charity isn't justice.
The R&D you're crediting them for was very often publicly funded first. The internet, GPS, touchscreens, the core science — taxpayers took the risk, they took the billions. Privatized profit, socialized risk.
Buy borrow die. Look it up. The whole 'their wealth is illiquid' argument is a magic trick and that comment just pulled back the curtain.
every billionaire is a failure of policy, not a personal sin. dont hate the player, change the rules. tax structure, not pitchforks
And some of you would burn down every business in the country to feel righteous for an afternoon, then wonder why there are no jobs. Both extremes are exhausting. The answer is boring policy, not a revolution.
Most billionaire wealth isn't a Scrooge McDuck vault of cash. It's shares in a company they built. Forcing them to sell would just hand control to other rich people or the state. Then what?
I grew up dirt poor and clawed my way to wealthy (not billions, but comfortable). The contempt for ambition in these threads is wild. Some of us actually built something. Stop assuming every rich person stole it.
Real answer: no hard cap, just a wealth tax above a huge threshold so fortunes stop snowballing into dynasties, plus closing the borrow-against-stock loophole. You don't ban the score, you fix the game.
Other side of that: telling people their effort is pointless and the game is rigged is also a way to keep them down. 'You'll never make it' is just a different cage. Hope isn't always a scam.
Define the line then. Is it a billion? 900 million? Where exactly does 'inspiring success' become 'should be illegal'? Nobody who says 'no billionaires' can ever draw the line cleanly and that's telling.
Their wealth funds the research, the factories, the jobs. You think a government committee would've built half of what these obsessive maniacs built? Sometimes a flawed genius beats a fair bureaucracy.
honest q for the 'abolish billionaires' crowd: in your ideal world whats the cap and what happens to the extra? genuinely asking because i flip-flop on this and want a real answer not a slogan
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