People want to own things even if they are not billionaires, and they want to value things freely even if they are not billionaires. Those two things combined make billionaires unavoidable if you think about it.
I think what you really desire is that billionaires should not be able to corrupt society or exploit the environment to the detriment of others. Which I am fully behind and consider an attainable and worthy goal even though we're currently far from it.
>Those two things combined make billionaires unavoidable if you think about it.
What service, commodity, or neccessity one owns, one pays a billion for? Considering production is worker owned, there would be no necessity for billionaires. This is basically a statement on the concentration of wealth, and that theoretically no one should have 20 Billion more "moneys" then any other person, with the linked fact that this person has 20 billion more influence in politics and getting their voice heard than a person with only one dollar on them. Because the fact that money buys influence is also "unavoidable" if you think about it. If I can feed 10.000 people daily and make them rely on me, they are much more likely to do my bidding and listen to me.
>What service, commodity, or neccessity one owns, one pays a billion for?
Nobody has to actually pay a billion to make someone a billionaire.
If you and three of your friends create a website that someone wants to buy one percent of for 40 million dollars, you are all billionaires whether you want to sell or not.
It doesn't even matter if nobody else wants to buy the other 99% for the same price, in the eyes of the world you are a billionaire anyway.
Society doesn't create billionaires because they need to exist, they are a side-effect of other things that we desire to exist.
Any society that allows 1) ownership and 2) freedom will generate billionaires when it reaches a sufficient population.
It unfortunately sometimes also happens because 3) criminal activity, and we should of course do everything we can to prevent 3, but if we prevent 1 and 2 we've created a dystopia.
You know the difference between 40 million and a billion dollars?
A billion dollars.
We have a dystopia now with billionaires and their private space companies, buying newspapers, tracking our every move. We'd have LESS of a dystopia if we prevented them in the first place.
>We have a dystopia now with billionaires and their private space companies, buying newspapers, tracking our every move. We'd have LESS of a dystopia if we prevented them in the first place.
History teaches us the opposite. The worst dystopias are the ones where you have only one billionaire who also controls the military, and that is inevitably what happens when you try to limit the number of billionaires.
The best countries to live in tend to have a high number of billionaires per capita, which is natural since freedom and prosperity will generate billionaires. Tax havens twist this statistic of course but look at countries like Canada, Germany, Scandinavia, they are all up there and certainly no tax havens.
>History teaches us the opposite. The worst dystopias are the ones where you have only one billionaire who also controls the military
Explicitly not what I, or anyone else, is suggesting.
Or it could be that billionaires, being able to live anywhere, choose nice places to live - while not paying their fair share and contributing to the current situations we have now.
We don't want, or need, billionaires and we should stop that kind of ridiculous accumulation of wealth. Make stock buybacks illegal again, make the top marginal tax rate 70%, and make things work for workers (and not global capital).
>Explicitly not what I, or anyone else, is suggesting.
To be fair you hadn't suggested anything except "Billionaires shouldn't exist" yet, which is a sentiment that so far in history has only achieved dystopian results. How is your plan different?
Taxing and limiting the influence of billionaires and ensuring that workers are not exploited unfairly are fine suggestions. We can add prevention of monopolies and cartels to the list as well, but that's still a very different idea from "Billionaires should not exist".
I'm not carrying any water for anyone, you have just failed to make a persuasive argument for your position.
>Any society that allows 1) ownership and 2) freedom
No, this is highly dependend on the definition of "freedom". A huge market freedom, and freedom for money? Yes. The freedom from shakles, from one being a billion times better than another, from people living lives somehow on the same plane? No. Billionares are not a direct result of whatever you define as "freedom" which is a very murky concept, there can be freedom in societies without billionaires.
And yes, the whole system of buying stock and then valuing something at 1 billion is broken, but does not change the fact, in fact enforces it because cleary the system is broken.
>No, this is highly dependend on the definition of "freedom".
I'm talking about the freedom you, (as in you personally, not the billionaires) have today to buy things you want. Let's say it's a book. Should you be allowed to buy a book for say, 20 dollars?
If a 100 million other people enjoy that same freedom to buy the same book, you have a billionaire author. How do you prevent that from happening? Honest question, I don't see any way to prevent it.
"Billionaires shouldn't exist" is thought number 1 that people get when they see what some of them are up to, and I certainly sympathize, but the only chain of reasoning I've seen that goes beyond thought 2 is the writings of Karl Marx. And where his thoughts end, thoughts from Stalin, Mao and the like always always follow. They are billionaires too btw, just way worse than the ones we have.
I think the solution is strong laws and vigilant control to prevent corruption. If for example the punishment for corruption was confiscation of all your assets and it was actually enforced, I think we'd come a long way. It would almost certainly get rid of a lot of billionaires too, so maybe we have some common ground there after all. ;-)
People want to own things even if they are not billionaires, and they want to value things freely even if they are not billionaires. Those two things combined make billionaires unavoidable if you think about it.
I think what you really desire is that billionaires should not be able to corrupt society or exploit the environment to the detriment of others. Which I am fully behind and consider an attainable and worthy goal even though we're currently far from it.