Let’s ask Bloomberg and that other whacko nut billionaire Tom Steyer.
So what should we do with them? Shoot them?
Raise the minimum wage to a billion dollars and we’ll all be billionaires. Plus, with the increased tax revenue we could pay off the national debt very quickly.
Literally, no LEFT-WINGER should be a billionaire. Fixed that.
I’d be happy to help make a billionaire out of the scientist who cured cancer; found a way of neutralizing nuclear waste; or any number of other achievements.
I do agree that career politicians probably don’t deserve to make that much money at it...
To some degree, Billionaires just happen.
“I’m not sure anybody cosmically or morally deserves to have a billion dollars,” as South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg put it.
We need to debate cosmic rays with Pete Buttgig? What the heck?
Most honest leftist slogan:
“EAT THE RICH!”
The prospect of a billion dollars motivates people to take enormous steps to improve humanity.
Waltons have made home goods accessible and affordable.
Musk is slashing costs of transportation, finance, and communication.
Bezos improved the Sears model a thousand fold.
And so on.
What many can’t grasp: one person can literally be >1000x more productive than another, and thus earn >1000x as much.
OK. Let’s take this further. NO ONE should have a second home in the Hamptons. NO ONE should have a private jet. NO ONE should own a Rolls Royce. NO ONE should own an island. etc. etc.
In the meantime, if you are the former Vice Presidents son, you can rake in millions and the left doesn’t care.
At this very moment, I’m watching Leslie Stahl interview Jamie Dimon, billionaire chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest of the big four American banks,.
Guy is fascinating. High-energy, tense, clever... I’m fascinated because I have two “third degree of separation” connections to him. My Japanese friend at the gym has a brilliant sister who Dimon promoted to West Coast Director. Dimon has a fraternal twin, Ted Dimon, who is in the same very small profession that I studied for. Ted and Jamie could not be more different.
Anyway, Jamie Dimomn is so blazingly smart, you have to love him. Or at least, I have to.. Begrudge him nothing.
We are here: “If there are no absolutes by which to judge society, then society is absolute.” Francis Schaeffer, How Shall We Then Live? (Old Tappan NJ: Fleming H Revell Company, 1976), p. 224.
Thou shall not covet, Exodus 20:17. How about having too many horses, or husbands (or ex-husbands) as Ilhan Omar has, or too many spoons or clothes or shoes? Is that wrong too? Idiocy runs rampant on the left and cannot be corrected or overcome.
Some people made some money.
Under a different arrangement, a form of worker-elected committee could run the company just fine.
The term for a worker's committee in the Russian language is "Soviet". It's been tried. It almost broke the nascent Soviet Union in a single year until Lenin put a stop to it.
When you think large, successful corporations, at their heart are (initially) a small number of people who build something a large number of other people are willing to buy (or in the case of The Facebook and Google, a large number of people supplying eyeballs that can be sold to lots of client companies). Some of those companies are monopolies, others get in before the cost of market entry rises too much.
What is a billionaire? Someone who was either very lucky or very astute in the choice of efforts. Sometimes breaking the law and getting away with it. Sometimes building their pile on the backs of others without paying them much of anything.
Isn’t everyone in Venezuela a billionaire?
I developed an app to measure the number of wipes left on a roll of toilet paper. I figure that the VC’s on Sand Hill Road will give me at least a billion