personally i absolutely support billionaires if you remove the actual issues like them being able to lobby and remove legal forms of tax evasion so that the country is benefitted more, especially when they are creative(ish) like elon and do stuff actually beneficial to humanity like space programs (may be wrong but i believe hearing news abt him making that and running it), and honestly it would be great if more billionaires focused on space exploration as well as the governments, its just the next step in mankind tbh
I just want to start off by saying that your opinion is valid and it’s not even necessarily wrong. So don’t listen to anybody trying to disparage you on this.
If we are to allow billionaires to exist, they should take considerably more responsibility for the power that they wield and they of course should be taxed fairly in accordance to their income.
Also, lobbying should just be downright illegal. Which it is borderline is anyway.
Without discussing validity of the argument, which is pointless anyway, billionaires are in many ways similar to autocrats: they have a ton of unchecked, unelected power, near zero incentives to put this power to benefit everyone except for goodness of heart (but even then they are tied by laws obligating them to give profits to public companies), and every incentive to benefit themselves.
Billionaires mean that workers are exploited and underpaid somewhere in the chain. Support for billionaires means support for exploitation and resource extraction from actual workers (and the government initiatives and representatives they pay for).
Their money doesn’t come from nowhere, it comes from us. It comes from income taxes spent on subsidies, it comes from stock dividends paid for by mass layoffs, it comes from not having to pay a commensurate fine when hundreds of thousands of gallons of pollutants leak into the water we drink and fish in.
“Absolutely supporting billionaires” is a decidedly uninformed position.
In a very real sense the money doesn’t even exist. It’s the worth of their holdings… Which for some reason they can often borrow against… that adds the extra 2 or 3 zeros.
Yeah, that’s why I specifically mentioned dividends. A lot of executives are also paid bonuses on their salaries based on stock performance, so they can “double dip” in these cases too. This is on top of lobbying for deregulation.
Must be great to not have to worry about money and be able to simply fire other people if it ever becomes a concern; it just further goes to show that these people don’t actually add value to even their own companies.
Scenario: you have 10 kids. Would you rather 1 kid thrive, 4 do alright, 4 struggling to find food, and one starving, or all 10 eat well?
The reason that kid is starving is directly tied to why the first one is thriving. It isn’t because there wasn’t enough food, it’s because the one thriving was taking the food from the rest, and throwing away a lot of it along the way, not caring at all about his siblings