A Positive News Article on Billionaires

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https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/08/investin ... index.html

Billionaires have been getting a lot of heat recently. Headlines about income inequality. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren bashing on them constantly. In my circles I've heard some describe their existence as immoral. WP posters have posted videos about "how even good billionaires are bad."

So here is a rare positive article on billionaires, that explains what should have been self-evident. Billionaires are better at running companies than non-billionaires. As a whole they make good management decisions and take smart risks. They create large numbers of jobs and good returns for investors.

Socialism is an ugly philosophy.

-Criticize successful people

-Claim successful people didn't really earn their money

-Claim successful people are greedy and evil

-Claim successful people owe their success to others

-Advocate successful people should be taxed at 90%

-Advocate successful people should have their wealth taken from them

-Diminish the achievements of EDUCATION, and HARD WORK

-Diminish the rewards of EDUCATION, and HARD WORK

Does it say anything about the amazon warehouse workers peeing in bottles next to the bodies of co-workers who just had a heart-attack? No?

I don't have anything against billionaires, but show me one that got there without subjecting his employees or subcontractors to inhumane conditions, if not modern-day slavery.

You don't need to be a sicialist to recognize that vast sums of money translate into concentration of power. That should worry anyone who thinks of democracy as 'rule of the people'.
If you think of democracy as picking one of two public poster-boys every four years, then high concentrations of power like that needn't be a worry.
Everything's fine.

Woah, that's one misrepresentation of socialism.

Marx' critique of capitalism is not that rich people are evil. But that it doesn't matter whether one is evil or not, rather, the rules of the game will inevitably lead to certain outcomes. I don't care if jeff bezos is the nicest guy in the world and gives his fortune to the poor masses in an act of charity. He should pay his workers a living wage and stop undermining efforts to unionize.
Then there would be far fewer impoverished people in the first place - alas, Bezos also wouldn't have the fortune...

Recently Bill Gates complained about Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax, pretending it was 15 times what she's actually proposing.
But he's running a charity with his money... What's wrong with giving it to the government?
Is it that someone else will decide how to distribute it? Like, democratically?

No one's diminishing the result of education and hard work. But if you ignore the contingency of one's circumstances of birth, you're just reducing 'success' ad absurdum.

Do you define your life with slogans?

Within the framework of the free-market system we live in billionaires are welcome to create jobs and give good returns to investors. That doesn't automatically make them good political leaders.

In the court of public opinion it doesn't really matter what we think of billionaires as they are the ones who fund governments. However, lets not kid ourselves, in the rarefied atmosphere of the worlds/spaces they occupy they are insulated from mundane life decisions that we plebs spend an inordinate percentage of our time dealing with. They exist in a different paradigm which means the distance makes them more likely to make harsh decisions that have consequences for large numbers of common people that have no repercussion for them, their family or their allies.

At no point did I suggest they would be good political leaders. They are however good business leaders. Of course this is a generalization. Individual billionaires may be foolish.

I'm unaware of that particular Amazon story. If conditions at Amazon warehouses are truly so bad, I find it hard to believe the people working there could not find a better situation. If they can't than that indicates Amazon is providing them value, even if we might recoil in horror from the thought of those conditions as value.

I read a lot of criticism of companies using brutal business techniques and exploiting workers. No one is forced to work for any company. Successful companies grow and provide more jobs or higher value jobs. You ask me to show you a billionaire that didn't use aggressive business tactics. I ask you to show me a person who is better off without a job than with one. Good business is good for people. If we can't agree that businesses doing well is good for society as a whole than we're never going to see eye to eye on anything.

Sorry I was following your logic to a potential conclusion:

Billionaires make better business leaders than non-billionaires....ergo....if they are good at running a company then they will be better at running a government....

This type of false correlation is what Trump supporters use to sure up their belief system.

However, thank you for closing that door....it's one I hope the public never open again....

Is this a Libertarian philosophy? sounds like pure free market thinking.

I am echoing the words and actions of modern Socialists.

Socialism has two main objectives:
1. Claim one is morally entitled to other people's money.
2. Take other people's money.

Social justice within the capitalist framework has two objectives
1. where wealth is unfairly concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy individuals ensure this is at least partly redistributed to their fellow citizens through getting these selfish bastards to reinvest in theor own coutnries infrastructure instead of letting them hide their wealth offshore or in trust funds (like the Trump family)
2. Maintain the free market but ensure the rich pay their due such as taxes instead of squirrelling it in offshore tax havens

Inequality is expected.

Successful people will rise to the top.

Lady GAGA, very rich, makes music that billions of humans enjoy.

You object to such a successful person getting mega-rich?

Yeah I have respect for experience. While some aspects of corporate leadership may transfer to government work, in general I think people who have been working in government throughout their life are more likely to be effective.

To make a sports analogy, the world's best professional basketball player may be a lot better at baseball than the average person, but he won't be as good as people who have played professional baseball their entire lives. Michael Jordan never made it past AA ball.

Are you suggesting that libertarian philosophy is not pure free market thinking? By libertarian standards I am pretty modest in how much I embrace free market thinking. There are those who think the Fed should be abolished, minimum wage should be repealed and that government's only role is to safeguard property.

The logic of good business practices -> good business performance -> economic growth -> better benefits for society, seems pretty self-evident to me.

Sorry I'm not entirely familiar with Libertarianism but your answer confirmed what I suspected.