I've worked for a few small business tyrants that did horrible things as well. It's more of a system issue. Billionaires do the most damage of any individuals, but I think it would be pretty similar if CEOs made small amounts of money (the corporations themselves often lobby for their interests), or if there were only small businesses (they'd probably just form national organizations to lobby for their shared interests).
this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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I agree with the idea of compensating someone who worked at managing an organization ... it takes work, talent, education and experience to do that and do it successfully.
What I don't believe is in rewarding leaders who led their organization, business or corporation into ruin while punishing those who worked under them.
The current system rewards and encourages bad immoral behaviour and we wonder why the system is bad and immoral.
Let’s say you get to pass a law in the USA that would make it illegal to have more than a billion dollars. How would you formulate this law and what would you expect to happen when it’s passed?
You'd probably format it as a percentage of GDP per capita, as it's about limiting wealth disparity (and thus protecting social mobility), distributing wealth growth nationally, and limiting the concentration of financial interest as it's a threat to national and democratic security.
You'd probably want it accompanies by various studies that show that that large wealth disparities are detrimental to social mobility (aka the ability to "work your way up" in classes), and probably some political science papers on the ills of concentrations of wealth.
You'd probably want it to come into force along with laws that limit campaign contributions and big money donors in politics... get rid of that whole "political donations are protected as political speech" crap.... and you'd probably want it as a wealth tax that pays into a sovereign wealth fund with rules on what it can be used for.
The better answer would be to just improve antitrust laws
All of the big name billionaires came from the tech industry
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Agreed.
Its not the billionaires its that they are not paying back 50% to society.
There is a truism. Will have to come back and give the original quotation author, but it's
"Only poor people pay taxes."
Rich people have the resources to evade and skirt around any tax legislation which they are supposed to be captured within. Most of them use the corporation as holders of wealth of which they have control.
Corporate taxes are almost always lower than personal taxes for that reason.
Banning billionaires is as likely to succeed as veganism.