best answer this is going in the saved section
He also got me to stop using Reddit after hanging out with their CEO too. What a great guy 👍
Good acts do not make a good person. Plenty of billionaires have done good things, but they don't even come close to outweighing the bad.
A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.
True, and they generally get ample praise for the good. The bad has, unfortunately, rewarded them with their billions.
IDK if it works in this case.
The people with power over you will inevitably use that logic to demand constant praise.
The issue is that any philantropy a billionaire does comes from money "earned" through exploitation and is never enough to un-make them a billionaire. Even if they did, it's still a single person taking the resources of millions of people and controlling it themselves to put into their pet projects, in a completely undemocratic manner - so Gates gets to benefit from the looting of Africa and then turn arounf and tell Africans how he will be allocating that stolen loot. Oh, and that man controlling so much policy in various African nations thinks Africa is overpopulated, an extremely racist eugenicist myth.
The good and bad are not separste things you can judge in isolation, any "good" a billionaire does is only possible by causing disproportionate harm. It is not as though these billionaires are personally doing much of anything, they are simply seizing resources from the public to inefficiently address problems that the public could have managed themselves if they were permitted to control their own lives, if they aren't just doing what Gates does of using donations as money laundering.
Yeah, the wording of OP's question is dumb for this reason. What person on this planet has done literally only evil things? A better question would be more like "What billionaire is genuinely a good person and why?" Personally the size of my list of "overall good" billionaires is a rounding error but at least the thread would be more interesting.
Elon Musk:
Destroyed Twitter
Currently engaged in a protracted war to kill all Tesla owners
Destroyed the myth of meritocracy
Grifting the Pentagon for all the money he can and then just not doing what he's paid to
That one Koch brother died. The submarine guy too, he was a Standard Oil heir who took at least one other billionaire with him.
...That one guy's stupid submarine provided like a week of entertainment
This is probably a slightly misguided idea to go after them as bad people because as soon as they do do something "good" you leave the door open for people to think that perhaps on balance they're not so bad after all.
The problem of billionaires being billionaires is itself the chief complaint people should have. It doesn't matter if they're Mr Rogers and Santa Claus combined, because they can choose to be so entirely at will and can be selfish assholes too entirely at will. They can also be other things entirely, given they are actually human beings after all they can try to act on best intentions, but like all humans, with great ignorance or with flawed thinking. When you or I do that the consequences can be terrible, but mostly, we'd be unable to come close to the scale of impact these demi gods can leave in their wake, not to mention the "original sins" that allowed them to become billionaires in the first place leaving a legacy of nasty indirect consequences for society at large.
There's actually a lot of examples of billionaires philanthropy and as you likely expected to point out when people mentioned that, some of those acts hide less pure intention, but undoubtedly they probably really did do some good and that itself is enough to completely undermine your whole point that they never do anything good. The issue is that, with the sheer vast quantity of concentrated wealth and power they can wield, the society that supports them is bereft of a real voice in how it's resources are used. So much of the fruits of our labour end up closed off in private coffers and it undermines public institutions like democratic governments because while we may theoretically have a say in what they do, we legally have no say at all in how a billionaire spends his bucks (and I say his intentionally). They might say we oughtn't since it's their money and no one typically has a say in what the rest of us do with our money but as with most things, there's a point of extreme where this logic becomes perverse.
Can we as a society organize and innovate without billionaires? Even China changed their economy to make them possible.
Right now, writers are on strike. Hollywood workers could invest their time, make movies, and get paid afterwards. But instead, it takes people with money to do the funding.
How should big sums of money be managed? Bureaucrats work to a certain extend but hardly innovate. Which structure could ask a million people to invest a thousand dollars each and offer ethical profits?
Although it had some kinks to roll out, some planned socialist economy can easily fix two of these problems, while just allocating requested resources to the writers union to fund their works fixes the other. The soviet film industry has produced many beautiful films, so it can work well.
China needed them because they wanted money from the west. If they hadn't we would have done a cold war to them long ago and they might not have been strong enough to handle it. Because they had some billionairs we took it easy on them for a while and now they are strong enough to resist our coup attempts. So it wasn't that the oligarchs class is good for anything. They just needed to be part of our system for self defence.
Billionaires don't innovate, it's the engineers/scientists/workers in their payroll.
It boils down to abolishing private ownership of the means of production. The fruits of labour of society must belong to society, not just a handful of people that have been inheriting wealth generation after generation.
who could take over the role of billionaires without abusing their position of power?
The billionaires abuse their power. The problem of an abusive manager being totally solved is an irrational height to set the bar at.
Billionaires already represent societal detriments by the very nature of the absurd concentration of wealth into the hands of an individual.
Also billionaires tend not to personally manage things, which may be to save time for doing more abuse (see Elon)
What you are looking for is a "manager", which doesn't need to be a billionaire and, in fact, usually is not.
I hate stumbling upon libertarians.
Taxes. Next question.
The trick is that billionaires cannot consume their entire wealth. Thus the economy has free money that looks for opportunities.
This is hopelessly naive. Most of what they do with all that extra money is incestuous money laundering and regulatory capture. There's no reason to give unaccountable individuals such an absurd level of societal power when it's not like they "innovated" their wealth from thin air. Take it from the people they otherwise would take it from via, for example, a tax system and you can produce something accountable that can be changed freely by society and won't buy twitter to force us to read its tweets.
Society already pays many taxes and changing the spending doesn't happen freely by society.
Much of what those taxes are currently spent on is utter bullshit for oligarchs
billionaires are a complementary way to allocate resources.
[citation needed]
That society can be locked into Twitter shows that taxes shouldn't be the only source of capital. Every democracy could have created a Twitter clone many years ago as basic infrastructure.
China facilitated conditions for the creation of such clones quite well. America's cultural imperialism had already dominated Europe anyway and neocolonial infrastructure pushes many third world countries towards western services being synonymous with the internet itself. The market solution is for the dominant power to snowball, with all the problems that entails.
Politicians rely on society for sustainability whereas billionaires have to identify and improve sustainable forms of income.
This is a joke. Aside from the politicians being bought out by those self-same billionaires, the latter are infamous for making things worse long term (or just in totality) in order to maximize quarterly profits, again see Twitter. They burn money on bribing politicians and institutions and drain society of wealth with various forms of tax fraud while paying hardly a cent for all the infrastructure that they use in wild disproportion to a normal citizen.
If neither politicians nor billionaires should invest, what would be a good way to identify the people who should?
My point is that it should not be oriented around one person's executive decisions: Stop looking for a good king. It should be decided democratically or, at the most republican, by a representative who the laws are oriented around preventing the corruption of (no lobbying, PACs of any kind, "campaign donations" from anything but a private citizen, no "gifts" at all, no revolving door employment, no "speaking fees") who also is subject to a vote of no confidence or some equivalent procedure that allows the citizenry to terminate his term early (and put him on trial, if needed) if they find him to not be acting as he represented that he would. But all of this is to say it the representative should have as little personal agency as possible in day-to-day affairs, merely acting as a laborer performing tasks according to the lines the public wants him to without needing to have the entire citizenry be up-to-date on everything all the time (as they would need to be in a pure democracy).
Maybe, but they've used their power to set the system up that way, and heavily propagandized against socialized alternatives
the Titan that shipwrecked on the way to the Titanic shipwreck was pretty neat.
Still waiting for bezos to launch himself into the sun tho
Nah, his rockets aren't good enough to do that. He's going to get stuck in orbit and asphyxiate, and we can all watch his rocket burn up on re-entry and point and laugh.
Your source is pro-russia, pro-china, and other authoritarian regimes.
They spin those facts in their own bias, in which is authoritarian bullshit.
Burden of proof is on your for that one, bud
Tangentially, "lying is authritarian" doesn't give me much hope for the rest of your critique you may offer.
Wikipedia isn't a valid source. Didn't your teachers tell you that in 9th grade?
A combination of citations that are either useless for demonstrating anything (see reference 25) or hinge on the western pop-politics conspiracy that there is a genocide of the people of Xinjiang (21, 26, 30), looking in the intro.
I don't mean to tell you your job, but this seems awfully flippant for "combating authoritarianism" or whatever neoliberal bullshit you characterize yourself with.
I'm undeniably pro-gulag so thanks for letting me know this source is for me!
Warren Buffet invented the buffet (I think) and I met my girlfriend at a buffet. She is a paramedic, I lost consciousness because I drank 4 litres of the truffle bechamel (I did the maths and this would have cost the restaurant slightly more money than the admission fee, hence hurting Warren Buffet's bottom line)
Mark Cuban is a bit of a wall street asshole, but he’s created a drug company to slash the prices of generic drugs for Americans: https://www.npr.org/2022/01/24/1075344246/mark-cuban-pharmacy#:~:text=Billionaire%20investor%20and%20Dallas%20Mavericks,of%20its%20online%20pharmacy%20Wednesday.
OK I'm sorry maybe I'm letting the autism overflow my brain but seeing you just say "wrong" to technically correct statements that answer the question presented here is just so fucking annoying. Ooooo you got so many upbears from fellow Hexbears who dont want to think but just dunk. Getting very frusterated with this community right now.
Don't treat a fellow hexbear like the lemmy liberals please. We literally have rules about that.
Please refer to Hexbear's community standards on respecting disengagement.
I'm not from Hexbear and this thread isn't on Hexbear. I know the rules and you demonstrated that you don't.
"Please "remember the human" and be kind to your fellow leftists."
Please take your critique with dignity.
Please refer to the "respect disengagement" portion of your "remember to be human" guideline.
If I were less comfortable with myself I'd say both of you are harassing someone you keep calling a "comrade" over a harmless bit.
taking mark cuban's money and using it to help fund a the integration of our system into that of free medicare for all would be a much better use of resources
For sure! I wanted to make sure someone chimed in on this. I forwarded it to an elderly hospital roommate who was extremely appreciative.
It is easy to think that, but it was mostly his father who controlled the wealth. Osama himself had dozens of siblings:
Bin Laden was one of more than 50 children of Muhammad bin Laden, a self-made billionaire who, after immigrating to Saudi Arabia from Yemen as a labourer, rose to direct major construction projects for the Saudi royal family.
