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No ethical billionaires. Nobody comes by that much money honestly.
While I don't think it's true, I could accept the idea that it were possible to make that much money ethically. However, having that much and not doing good with it? To me that's the bigger evil. Billionaires should be extincting themselves.
Entertainers could be an exception to the evil billionaire rule, but even Swift was doing things like renting out her jet, and her shows have a huge carbon footprint as well.
If she were paying for the pollution, the profit margins wouldn’t be so high.
Also we just need to tax most of the income over $1 million a year. Like we did before the 80s greed is good bullshit started.
Also there's the whole "stealing the surplus labor" of the many people she employs thing.
Like this, it should just be harder by the mechanics of the game to just keep amassing dollars. Sure, you can have massively successful concerts and live an amazing life. Just pay for them in what it actually costs to society.
Here's a quick and simple example of how much $1 million ($1,000,000,000,) is compared to $1 billion ($1,000,000,000,000.)
1 million seconds equals 11.57 days. 1 billion seconds equals 31.71 years. Days v.s. YEARS!
The different between one million and one billion is about a billion
Nobody earns a billion dollars. Imagine it's October 12, 1492. One of your ancestors is so excited about Columbus landing in America, that he starts putting aside the equivalent of 5000 dollars every single day. And through good fortune, every heir continues to do the same. 5000 dollars added to a pile every single day for over 530 years. 5000 dollars is more than most people make in a month and it accrues every. single. day. There is no interest on the money, but at the same time there are no taxes and nobody spends it on frivolous stuff like food or shelter or education or healthcare. And now, after more than 531 years you inherit it all and realize you're not a billionaire. I know it's an unrealistic thought experiment, but to me it shows that no billionaire ever earned their money.
You’re really close to $1B. I’m not actually sure what is thought provoking about this.
I also don’t know why it doesn’t show that a billionaire hasn’t earned their money. If Taylor Swift gets 10 million people to pay her $150 to go to her concerts in her life time, and her expenses are $50 per show, is she not a billionaire that earned $1B?
10 million tickets is only 400 shows if she’s filling 25k seat arenas.
None of this is actual math, but it’s not insane to me that someone could earn a billion dollars.
What is insane is that someone would sit on a billion dollars like a dragon on their pile of gold.
Yeah, I think if we had hyperinflation, you'd see the scaling back of the "there are no ethical billionaires" umbrella shorthand that sort of simultaneously gestures towards and obfuscates the rent-seeking behavior and owning of capital that's really being lambasted in that statement. Regardless of whether or not the speaker knows it, the speaker might just be spouting shit. We'd probably see "there are no ethical hundred-billionaires" or something instead, anyways. It's just a kind of oversimplification, common to like every stupid slogan in which we are condemned to do all political discourse, compounded by people taking everything hyper-literally and uncritically reading everything as though their own set of definitions is the absolute merriam webster set.
I dunno, I wonder if that's just the kind of horribly stupid strategy that social media has foisted upon everyone, with character limits and short-form content. And then character limits means that everyone can browse through a much broader pool of stupidity at once, absorbing all of it, understanding none of it, and then regurgitating it into whatever new form will reach as many people as possible by the same token.
I think ever having that money, unless it's just shit into your lap for some reason, precludes you from being the kind of person who can do that good. It takes a level of cutthroat and a degree of psychopathy to accumulate that much wealth in a single lifetime. So in essence, having and making that much are both fucked.
Are you actually that far gone?
No, but you seem to be.