this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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I mean you could even take the bottom number and leave them with the top number and they could still live in unimaginable luxury forever. Or just take the lot because fuck em lol.
I couldn't imagine spending $1 billion in my entire life, let alone 3-4.
A million seconds is about 12 days. A billion seconds is about 32 years.
The proportional difference is the same, i.e. the same number of orders of magnitude separate them, but in absolute terms, someone with $10B is closer in wealth to your or I than to Bezos (which, to be clear, does not mean we shouldn't take it, merely that the height Bezos is at is unfathomable)
Most of their billions is ownership in companies they grew into what they are today. It's not like they have billions to spend, it's that their ownership is worth billions according to the market.
True, but that ownership gives them access to very low interest loans that they then use as spending money and don't have to pay taxes on it
https://www.businessinsider.com/american-billionaires-tax-avoidance-income-wealth-borrow-money-propublica-2021-6
So what? We should take away that ownership because they can leverage it? Also the same people suggesting we tax wealth like this want to also close those "loopholes" of low interest loans on shares.
Yes.
Yes to taking away wealth or the way to leverage it?
Taking away (extreme) wealth. There's no reason one person should have that much. There's countless better ways to use that money/wealth than for one persons extravagant lifestyle. And even if they don't have an extravagant lifestyle, what are they gonna do with it? Doubt they will build infrastructure out of good will with it.
So take away ownership of a company just because it's too successful? That wealth is mostly in company ownership, so are you really suggesting we steal away legitimate ownership in successful companies?
Yes. Fuck Capitalism.
It's not stealing their legitimate ownership. They don't have legitimate ownership.
They could go to any bank and leverage that asset for a loan for more than everyone who posts on this platform will make in their lifetimes no problem. That is a nonsense talking point
What's your point? So because they can leverage their ownership of their own company we need to take away that ownership?
Yes, if you can control more wealth than a mid size city earns in ten lifetimes, you should not be allowed to do that
I don't think the stock market should be determining if we take away companies from their owners, no matter how much it's worth. Why does having more wealth than a certain size city matter? Especially if your company has more employees and customers than even a large city?
Why do those employees get the bare minimum? Why are the working majority excluded from ownership and decision-making in the companies they run?
Employees are allowed to buy company stock and vote using it just like anyone else. Many companies even have employee stock purchase programs. What's the problem ?
Why don't the underpaid employees simply buy enough stock to sway company policy
those shares don't give you voting rights
those shares amount to a tiny fraction of the total value of the company
without the employees there would be no company
you try to square those three facts
So all those times I've gotten mail about using my shares to vote, what was that about exactly?
Of course they do, I don't expect a given employee who isn't the owner or high level exec to have a larger fraction of ownership.
So what? What's your point?
Mostly it was about fooling you into thinking that, as a worker, you have even an iota of power within that company.
You: "The owners deserve all the value that results from owning the company and not the workers because the owners own the company, duh." Reread what you said and note the ridiculous circular logic.
The company would continue to function perfectly fine without the owner(s), yet would immediately cease to function or even exist without the workers. The only role the owner plays in the company (that the workers operate), is to siphon the value away from the workers who made it and unto themselves.
The workers get paid, they get value out of it, they aren't slaves.
The company wouldn't exist without owners, someone created it, someone started it, someone owns it. The owners are also the ones usually making the big decisions, they have a lot of skin in the game when it comes to the future of the company.
Look at a company like Blockbuster. With a better owner they could have changed their position to stay around as a company, but the owner made bad choices. If there was no owner what would have happened? It probably would have failed even quicker because there is nobody making decisions and most employees probably didn't see the wiring on the wall until it was too late.
A good owner would have seen the direction the market was going and changed the company to prepare. Netflix has been fighting this fight for a while now, switching from streaming other's content to making their own content. Without an owner they would have died a long time ago.
Americans are so pro-democracy, but they'll bust out the most self-defeating, thoughtless, begging-the-question-ass logic to argue against having democracy in the workplace. Sad.
I hope you can realize this is a false equivalency, but maybe you can't?
If you believe so little in democracy in the workplace, why do you bother with democracy at all? Should other institutions that govern our lives also function as oligarchies, dictatorships, autocracies?
If they are self-made millionaires/billionaires as they claim, take everything they have/own and tell them to start the quest again, no glitches, DLC, or saved progress.
You all realize they don't have that money laying around to pay the IRS right? They own companies, those companies are worth that much. To pay that you would have to liquidate those companies. So no more Amazon, Tesla, Space X, etc...
I highly recommend you to read the paper billionare argument. The market can stand the liquidation of most of those companies without making them go bankrupt, we don't want them to stop existing, just to make them smaller and not a threat to democracy.
For the whole scale of wealth I also recommend going through wealth shown to scale
Oh no! Anyway, so how can we make this happen, like, yesterday?
Don't be a bootlicker or bot or idiot.
When they sell their shares to buy twitter or pay the tax man, those companies still exist. It just means that other people get to buy those shares and that's a good thing, because that way those companies get owned by the public.
Tesla and SpaceX still exist even after Elon overpaid by some $30B for his Twitter adventure.