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Hey now! They are also taking on a lot of risk! Like being poor if they somehow manage to miss the golden parachute after messing up on the job
They are also taking on a lot of risk! Like being
poormarginally less rich if they somehow manage to miss the golden parachute after messing up on the jobIf you don’t have wealth amassed outside the company and the company ends up not being able to pay debts your entire livelihood can be taken by a debt collector. Really depends on the company but if you want to get a loan banks want some safety to back it up
If you don’t have wealth amassed outside the company and the company ends up not being able to pay debts your entire livelihood can be taken by a debt collector.
Man, I wonder what it would be like to live like that. Just dependent on a company making money so you don’t have your livelihood taken from you…
If you work for a company and it goes bankrupt you don’t get your entire private shit seized. You can find a new company to work for. Starting a company based on debt is inherently risky. This comparison isn’t really as great as you think it is.
What are all the Christmas stories all about? It’s always someone being greedy and changing their ways. It is a value in America to be generous and to change your ways. We have just forgotten…
We just have to actually listen to our revered holiday stories. Shove them down their throats
Haven’t you heard? Those stories are all bigoted propaganda rooted in white supremacy.
There’s certainly no shortage of White Man’s Burden propaganda floating around. But that’s through philanthropy, not Dickensian morality.
Even if you pay your workers a good wage, the reason you are a billionaire or your company makes billions in profit is because you overcharge your clients which might not be in a good financial situation.
the reason you are a billionaire or your company makes billions in profit is because you overcharge your clients
This is an assumption.
Costco’s founder, who was also the CEO up until a few years ago, is a billionaire. And that’s a company that is famous both for its very competitive prices on the customer side (insert infamous story about ‘threatening’ to kill someone if they raised the price of that hot dog), AND for how well it treats its workforce.
You can become a billionaire just by creating something that a large number of people find valuable, and continuing to own it as its value in others’ eyes increases over time. Because that’s what net worth fundamentally is–it’s the price tag of how valuable everyone else thinks shares of that company are worth.
The implication that you HAVE to be ripping people off to acquire wealth (and when it comes to increasing one’s wealth, ‘billionaire’ is just a distinction of scale) is just plain wrong, an ignorant talking point.
It’s not an assumption, the surplus generated to make someone a billionaire comes from the pockets of the customers, they don’t make it appear out of nowhere. Just because something looks like a deal it doesn’t mean that it is, if you’re always paying 5$ for an orange, 3$ feels like a deal because you’ve gotten used to paying 5$, the truth is it’s just not worth either price when you look at the actual cost to bring an orange from the tree to your house.
You are suggesting that $X in profit = $X of having “overcharged” the customer.
This is completely ridiculous on its face. No private entity will or should ever go to all the effort and time and resources to start a new business if there will never be any profit. Obviously.
And ironically, even if the government gets involved in providing X instead, without profit in mind, the bureaucracy is such that its ‘no profit’ price for X is invariably higher than a price a private entity can charge while profiting.
No I’m saying that if their profit didn’t need to take a useless billionaire leech into consideration then prices could be lower.
That last part is complete bullshit as well and you would know it if you knew anything about crown corporations.
Have you ever considered people becoming billionaires of companies that haven’t made a single cent of profit? Spotify never made any profit for example and is still valued at just 96 bn USD
Stock valuation has nothing to do with the current conversation but billionaires shouldn’t exist at all whole homeless people exist, it’s that simple.
I don’t think billionaires shouldn’t exist necessarily, I do think homeless people shouldn’t exist tho.
Thats not how the net worth of a company works. You don’t have to make massive profits for people to value your company highly
As long as the profit margin isn’t to right I think it is ethical for companies to make a slight profit
Slight profit I’ve got no issue with, but if you make a slight profit because the CEO pockets 100m a year then clearly there’s a fucking issue, get rid of the CEO and make 100m more in profit that you can actually use to improve your product OR get rid of that CEO and make it cheaper for your customers to purchase your product and end up with the same profit.
Depends, the market for a high quality CEO is really competitive and they are at least for most companies still needed for the overall strategie and coherent direction. I understand your point tho in discrepancy between workers and CEO wage. A company usually doesn’t do this just to make their CEO rich, they do it as shareholders because they think it is in their best interest
Herp derp “job creators exercising the noblest of impulses: rational self-interest”
The greatest cultural propaganda the owners achieved through their for profit media and captured education, particularly economics, that enabled all others was that greed/avarice was not the personal failing, character deficit, and destructive force that it is, but instead the highest of virtue.
Its not. The Gordon Geckos, Mr. Potters, and Ebenezer Scrooges in fiction were cautionary tales, villains. Yet they’ve convinced us that that is what we should either be or worship.
For most people if you never had to work a day of your life for you to live a decent life you probably would follow your own interests. And I’m not blaming you for that, but mass wealth isn’t accomplished by everyone going on a journey of selffulfillment. Which economic system works better might I ask you?
It’s not just about different systems. It’s about priorities.
The Nordic model keeps capitalism heavily, heavily straightjacked, to power the wellbeing of society.
Taxes aren’t largely resented, because everyone is educated to understand that when you succeed, the society you’re a part of succeeds. No one fears going to a doctor, higher education is based on academic merit because everyone benefits from an educated populace. When you succeed, you are taxed to a degree that would make our capitalists cry. Yet they are the happiest people’s in the world. And if that isn’t the goal of any society, they’re doing it wrong. We don’t prioritize that at all, only how high our most effective sociopaths can fly.
Here, the tail has been wagging the dog for a long time, the false promise of being “free” to attain society warping levels of wealth has toxified our culture into forgeting that freedom devoid of responsibility is a rampage. Meanwhile everyone else is free to die in the gutter alone for the crime of not making them enough money.
Letting people gain enough wealth to warp society beyond their single vote, and more, not punishing trying to infect our politics with life imprisonment, has destroyed our democracy, it’s all for show. You pick a major party, and I’ll show you a party that’s been bought and paid for by the same people, to the point they’ve made it all perfectly legal since Reagan and especially since Citizens United.
Capitalism belongs in making optional widgets for a reasonable profit it has no place in sectors people need to survive. Those should be socialized, because in those sectors stability is more important than economic growth/metastasis.
If it isn’t enough motivation to have a peak of maybe 2 really big homes and 1 really big boat, then I question that person’s motivations and recognition that they are a member of a society and not society’s owner.
No one should have more unelected, unaccountable power over society than their single vote allows. No one. Capital beyond material needs and desires is power.
TLDR start with making attempting to bribe an elected official the highest of capital crimes, life no parole as they’re actively attempting to bend all of society to their desires, only public funds for campaigns, continue by rewarding labor with far lower taxation than speculative, insider info laden gambling that should be taxed astronomically as the vice it is, and then have a maximum wealth tax at let’s say a 100 million dollars where they’re declared the winner, given a cake, and congratulations on all additional wealth going into improving the roads and commons of the society that facilitated their accumulation of such astronomical wealth to begin with.
If someone like Elon wants a kingdom, let him fly to Mars and make one.
I liked the build up but the conclusion really made no sense. Yes, capitalism needs to be strictly regulated and sectors that are irreplaceable and are too important to fail can’t be trusted with private companies. I agree with that notion. If you ask for a 100 mio. max wealth tax then you don’t really understand the meaning of wealth. If I start a company and my company gets valued at over 100 mio dollars what should I do? Sell parts of my company? Net worth is not like money on your bank account, and if other people value it so highly and I’m forced to sell parts of it this money won’t really go into public hands. For one someone needs to buy it, with their capped monetary assets, and secondly only because a company is valued at a certain point doesn’t mean you create more productivity or money out of thin air.
If I start a company and my company gets valued at over 100 mio dollars what should I do? Sell parts of my company?
Absolutely. You won. You want to be pitied because you have enough to live like a modern pharoah for several lifetimes?
Whats wrong with forcing organizations with such an economic footprint to be owned by many members of society? That sounds healthy. That’s just the logical next step of antitrust, no one person should own so much they have the power to make other citizen’s lives harder.
Other people live in this country and on this planet. If someone wants to keep their business all to themselves, give a lot of charity instead of growing operations and keep your net worth at 90 million, everyone wins and your community will love you.
If these people truly want to flex their ego and build an infinite empire without any temperance or restraint, there’s plenty of uninhabited islands where they can do so. They don’t want to though, they want to exploit innumerable other people and use infrastructure they don’t want to pay back into to build their infinite sums. Then hilariously claim they could have done it alone on the moon themselves with a paperclip by their bootstraps.
Our economy should reward Good, Proscial business people and business practices, and we don’t. We reward sociopath hoarders. A good business person would have a nice car and home, but pump most of their profits back into their community, not hoard it like a dragon and influence politicians to lower their taxes to increase their hoards. This used to happen more. When pre Reagan tax slashes on speculative investment, more businesses did instead take those funds and rebuild a courthouse or buy a High school a new gym. They got their name on a building and thank the society that facilitated their success.
Our economy should be reward to elevate the George Baileys and punish the Mister Potters, if we want a society and not this cesspool of desperation and greed without limit.
You think it’s wrong to split YOUR 100 million dollar company up, I ask why you want an infinite sized company taking up an entire economic sector, and what it is you want to do with 200 million dollars that you can’t do with 100. I think something of whatever scale you’re working on ought to have other voices brought in because again, other people live here and public good > your ego feelings.
Its not like they’re hoarding it on their bank account. And ones the stocks of my company fall my 100 mio might not be worth anything or like just a part of it. And still… who would buy the company thats over these assets, and how should the company increase productivity which is in public interest if it does not have a stable ownership situation and it keeps changing due to the cap.
Just because a company is valued like 3 trillion like nvidia you couldn’t just cash out just like that. Money doesn’t just spawn and the productivity doesn’t just go up. I don’t necessarily want an infinitely sized company but if a company value keeps rising it indicates rising productivity and success which is good for society. A company doesn’t need to make profit to be valued at a certain mark.
