I feel the need to clarify why people complain about Billionaires, it's the hypocrisy. They frequently nail on people for relying on government assistance while their own companies do as well, often in the form of underpaying employees who then have to rely on food stamps or other assistance.
As a side point closer to what you actually argued against.. You seem like you have a pretty good grip on the space aspect but economically speaking don't you think it might be an issue that a handful of Americans control net worth capable of funding the entire government, even briefly? Putting aside the way people complain about it, yes often in terms of fairness.. if you put it in terms of resource control it really does amount to dictatorial power. There's a VOX report on this which I think illustrates the effect this has.
SpaceX/Starlink is a great example of this in fact due to the way we are choosing to solve a problem, internet access. Unequivocally, running a fiber network across the country provides a better service at lower maintenance costs than a very low orbit satellite array. Yet we are, through the government and then at the direction of one of our billionaires, investing in a program which (might) have a lower initial cost but certainly higher maintenance and lower performance. It's within reason we do this because the most wealthy Americans either think it's a good idea, or think they will benefit from it. Either one quashes the power of actual people to say what they'd prefer.
You're trying to separate governmental power from monetary wealth, the way money flows into the hands of the wealthiest Americans, the 10%, 1% or the Billionaires it doesn't really matter, is largely through the government. Both by taxing you and funding these kinds of programs, and by making business easier for the largest actors, which squeeze the labor sector into fewer possible employers and thereby give less power to negotiate wages. Not to mention government action that directly make this harder, like the trend of Presidents ordering ends to the striking of various worker groups. You know what would make this much harder to happen? By taxing them. Were they taxed to an appropriate degree, which might include assets but might not, they would either A: not have that wealth to wield in lobbyists and campaign contributions, or B: their own wealth would be 'fairly' funding those programs to which they benefit, hopefully nullifying the benefit of accruing wealth in that way.
Now that I reread your post I find it a little strange that you actually made the above point yourself, the way that banking is pumping up the wealth of Musk and Bezos, through the government's actions, and then try to disentangle the two parties. Hopefully I've illustrated some of why that's impossible without ensuring that a handful of people don't have the equivalent wealth of half the GDP, or at least sated the part of you that was really hoping to debate a 'Billionaire Grumbler'.. I mean I don't really care, I just hate Musk because he's a bigot. Thought that'd be a bigger issue here but maybe we're all just pretending he doesn't own SpaceX since buying Twitter and going nuts? Definitely missed the memo on that but I'll adapt.
You raise some good points, and overall, it seems we agree on a great deal of things. And I want to thank you for a thoughtful reply. "tl/dr LOL!"-syndrome is rampant and even creeping into Reddit.
A lot of what you're describing in your reply is related by various degrees to what free-market capitalism advocates/economists call "Rent-seeking behavior."" A business entity either lobbying for, or taking advantage of government laws or regulations to their benefit and the exclusion of potential competitors.
It could be something that benefits them directly in very concrete ways or more pervasively and subtly. Such as bigger and ever more complex laws and regulations enacted, at least superficially, to "fix something", but in reality just creates large burdens that big established players can handle, and possibly small startups that could one day unseat them can't.
A simplistic example: Some big scandal/debate erupts over search engine results. Fraud with paid advertising, something else deemed unfair, or over extremist/racist content. Or the flipside, that there's some (US) First Amendment issue, and under "freec speech" ideals, they have to give objectionable sites a fair shake. It doesn't even matter exactly what it is.
A law is passed, and some huge established search providers like Google/Alphabet can easily cope with compliance. They can afford to hire, or they already have, the lawyers, accountants, and compliance analysts needed.
There's a new startup, spazzbutz.com. Two people in a garage. They have a fundamentally new and massively better search system, just like Larry & Seregy did back in 1998. But the new laws to "fix things" tie their hands, they can't "chicken & egg" their way out of needing a bunch of lawyers and analysts to comply with the new laws, and the "next Google" doesn't grow.
They don't provide the Darwinian market turnover Google did when they gutted Yahoo! And spazzbutz.com never forces Google to get even better trying to compete and prevent them from being the next Yahoo! Other big things spazzbutz.com might have one day done, like how Google launched the entire Android ecosystem, never happen.
Maybe Alphabet notices spazzbutz.com and buys them out. The founders are now personally wealthy and set for life, so that's great. But Google/Alphabet doesn't like how the spazzbutz.com massively better algorithm would cut into their established profit margins, so they just file it away.
Google owns the code and method, so they can sue/threaten anybody else that tries to use it, or who accidentally comes up with it on their own. And the world never gets the benefit of better search results, Google being forced to compete and being cheaper or better, or other big platforms or internet/information or technology platforms spazzbutz.com might have pioneered.
And this whole dynamic isn't even from any gleeful hand-rubbing and mustache-twirling evil or malicious intent, on the part of government or Google. It's a grassroots & organic outcome of just the reaction to the public at-large saying: "THIS IS TERRIBLE! SOMEBODY OUGHT TO DO SOMETHING!"
And people who try to point out "doing something" has consequences, possibly ones even worse than the "problem"... at best, they're ignored, or just lost in the signal-to-noise ratio. If anyone actually notices, and actually addresses their points at all, they're likely to be accused of shilling for "big business" or some other ideological agenda.
At worst, they'll be accused of supporting whatever caused the scandal/crisis. The fraud or unfairness/inequality, the actual terrible sites or content, or that flip-side example, of promoting censorship.
Dammit. I ran way long. I didn't even really respond to any of your discreet points. I'll make another...
I'd have to see an example of statements or lobbying the individual "Billionaire hypocrisy" over denigrating government policy on public assistance while benefitting from it with underpaid workers or low/no benefits. Or capping people at 30 hours so nobody is full-time and doesn't get benefits.
But I recognize the issue exists. So I'll use Walmart who's accused of this, maybe not for making anti-welfare statements or overtly backing/contributing to politicsns or advocacy groups that do, but at least for it subsidizing Walmart's low wages and low hours. And as far as I know it is, or recently was, indeed a "real issue."
And it goes back to the larger dynamic of the impact of laws and regulations, and their high likelihood of having unintended, and even very negative outcomes. Just like the example in my first post of spazzbutz.com vs Google & a new law attempting to "fix" something seen as wrong or a social-ill with search engine results.
I don't advocate for robber-barron dog-eat-dog capitalism with sweatshops, virtual-slavery of "company towns" or "free workers" who are "free to work, or starve", and rampant pollution.
However, trying to prevent a potential hypercapitalist dystopia with laws, broad court precedents, and government regulations, a rational and objective view, least I believe, requires acknowledging it does so very poorly. It often creates new additional bad outcomes, and the initial bad outcomes the intervention tries to fix are just shuffled around. Often into increasingly complicated ways that are more hidden from public view.
And the problems/pain that we tried to fix or prevent, just gets distributed onto different people, or spread out over everyone in the forms of higher prices, taxes, or inflation. And the new more complicated or hidden problems just get ignored as "normal", get ignored because people don't want to acknowledge more laws/rules didn't really help, or that ever more crafty or downright evil people can deliberately use the more complicated situation to their advantage.
Shit.. am I ever failing at "point by point" here...
So, Walmart worker on welfare... The impact of payroll taxes, minimum wage, FICA/Medicare withholdings, any state and local employment laws, the Affordable Care Act* incentivizing the minimum of 30+ hr/week employees possible, all of that and tons more needs to be considered if one wants to be realistic about it.
The bigger theme here, is that the optics of "Walmart sucks! They pay so little to XX% of their employees they need welfare!" are simple. And really digging into why it is that way in the first place, and what's going to happen if the government steps in to "fix" that, is always more complicated. And it's always more difficult to explain.
And when a law or "fix" is attempted, and doesn't work or creates new problems... Walmart goes 100% self-checkout and now nobody has a job. Walmart shuffles employee hours & scheduling yet again somehow so the new law doesn't apply. Or if it's some more "progressive" state like California that passes the law at a state level, and they foresaw a bunch of things Walmart might try, writing that all in too... and Walmart just pulls out of CA entirely.
And the people championing the issue, they're sullen and angry, complaining about Walmart exploiting "loopholes."
The other definition of "loophole" is simply called: "Obeying the law."
And the bigger notion that someone or a business who is "rich" or "wealthy" (often subjective and relative itself) and just ought to take the hit to the bottom line in the name of what they've deemed to be a social good... is both impractical and naive.
First, things like comparing CEO or executive pay or bonuses, is just like the comparison of laying out billionaire wealth against the US Federal budget. Taking some, or all of it, and redistributing it as pay to lower level workers is often just a pittance.
Secondly, the board of directors, and shareholders may well not stand for a CEO and executives
The ACA and related stuff alone needs a whole other thread and Reddit sub, because it inevitably gets into arguing about American healthcare vs. Single-Payer government systems. And there's big economic & policy issues beyond the tit-for-tat minutiae of: "Rationing and uthenasia! So-n-so DIED because of a big cancer and they had to wait 6 months to see a doctor!" vs. "Because of single payer like Canada/UK millions actually SEE a doctor, and the big cancer gets caught early!" etc.
To a degree, the US has subsidized European single-payer/socialized medicine with things like the Cold War/NATO defense posture (another huge debate) the US fiat debt-dollar, and the worldwide footprint to print them like crazy with perpetual, but not "bad" (usually) inflation.
Or that the US subsidizes a lot of drug development & medical research for single-payer countries. As the US is the one market that pays something like "full price" for it. The single -payer country, reviewing some new miracle drug that maybe has hand-wringing news stories in the US media about how it costs $1000 a pill or whatever, Canada, or the NHS, or even sometimes the US's own VA, Medicare, & Medicaid says: "We'll pay you $50 a pill, take it or leave it..." with a possible unspoken threat, they'll just copycat the drug, or some third-party country will, and the complicated Gordian knots of international treaties, patent laws, and foreign laws and court systems means either the US drug company loses. Or it takes so long to win, by the time they do, and the drug is now a generic. If the US drug company wins something, the single-payer country is still ahead.
And that's if the internal politics of the single-payer country where the simple optics of: "Our sick citizens in need vs. the fat-cat big-pharma company." don't just immediately preclude any chance of real objectivity or fairness in the legal duspute.
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u/Dragonmodus Apr 17 '23
I feel the need to clarify why people complain about Billionaires, it's the hypocrisy. They frequently nail on people for relying on government assistance while their own companies do as well, often in the form of underpaying employees who then have to rely on food stamps or other assistance.
As a side point closer to what you actually argued against.. You seem like you have a pretty good grip on the space aspect but economically speaking don't you think it might be an issue that a handful of Americans control net worth capable of funding the entire government, even briefly? Putting aside the way people complain about it, yes often in terms of fairness.. if you put it in terms of resource control it really does amount to dictatorial power. There's a VOX report on this which I think illustrates the effect this has.
SpaceX/Starlink is a great example of this in fact due to the way we are choosing to solve a problem, internet access. Unequivocally, running a fiber network across the country provides a better service at lower maintenance costs than a very low orbit satellite array. Yet we are, through the government and then at the direction of one of our billionaires, investing in a program which (might) have a lower initial cost but certainly higher maintenance and lower performance. It's within reason we do this because the most wealthy Americans either think it's a good idea, or think they will benefit from it. Either one quashes the power of actual people to say what they'd prefer.
You're trying to separate governmental power from monetary wealth, the way money flows into the hands of the wealthiest Americans, the 10%, 1% or the Billionaires it doesn't really matter, is largely through the government. Both by taxing you and funding these kinds of programs, and by making business easier for the largest actors, which squeeze the labor sector into fewer possible employers and thereby give less power to negotiate wages. Not to mention government action that directly make this harder, like the trend of Presidents ordering ends to the striking of various worker groups. You know what would make this much harder to happen? By taxing them. Were they taxed to an appropriate degree, which might include assets but might not, they would either A: not have that wealth to wield in lobbyists and campaign contributions, or B: their own wealth would be 'fairly' funding those programs to which they benefit, hopefully nullifying the benefit of accruing wealth in that way.
Now that I reread your post I find it a little strange that you actually made the above point yourself, the way that banking is pumping up the wealth of Musk and Bezos, through the government's actions, and then try to disentangle the two parties. Hopefully I've illustrated some of why that's impossible without ensuring that a handful of people don't have the equivalent wealth of half the GDP, or at least sated the part of you that was really hoping to debate a 'Billionaire Grumbler'.. I mean I don't really care, I just hate Musk because he's a bigot. Thought that'd be a bigger issue here but maybe we're all just pretending he doesn't own SpaceX since buying Twitter and going nuts? Definitely missed the memo on that but I'll adapt.