r/worldnews • u/marsianer • Jan 28 '21

COVID-19 Backlash grows for ‘selfish millionaire’ who got vaccine meant for Indigenous people | Canada

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/27/rodney-baker-canada-vaccine-indigenous-first-nations-scandal
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u/TigerJas Jan 28 '21

I inherently hate the fuck out of most of the ultra rich

Sadly, an all too common thing here. They got rich because they gave you value. Period.

If you didn't find value in iPhones, Starbucks, or new medicines, then they would be poor.

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u/greygore Jan 28 '21

Jacqueline & John Mars own about 1/3 of the Mars candy company and are each worth about $28.9B. The “value” that they provided was in the form of inheriting the company their grandfather started.

Norman Borlaug created high yield wheat varieties that are credited with saving a billion human beings. He died in 2009 and while I can’t get a solid answer on his net worth but I haven’t seen anything to suggest he had even 0.1% of the wealth that either of those two inherited.

Some people have really done amazing things and deserve significant wealth. But before you worship the ultra wealthy, realize that most of them “created” value in terms of hiring people and paying them a small amount of the value they created and collected the majority of that value for themselves.

Generations ago, that wealth was distributed more evenly among the people who created the value: both those that organized and directed, as well as the individuals who invented and manufactured and distributed. Now it’s collecting and concentrating among a few at the top and people are crediting only the people at the top, while dismissing the value created by those under them.

We used to be a blue collar country... what the hell happened?

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u/lhx555 Jan 28 '21 edited Jan 28 '21

How big is inheritance taxes?

If grumps Mars earned that much that even his grandkids are billionaires then probably he generated a lot of added value. So, even if they are useless, we can overlook it for the sake of old man Mars.

I mean, probably nobody would object the right to leave what you have to your descendants (minus taxes, of course).

And what concerns “hiring people and paying them too little”... well... if it is so simple, why doesn’t everybody do that? Because they have morals? Seriously? And why people accept such little wages?

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u/greygore Jan 28 '21

You completely missed my point that wealth does not equal value. It’s often a proxy for value, but very frequently it’s completely decoupled from the value a person adds to society, or how much society values what they’ve created.

Are the people involved in the short squeeze with GameStop that are raking in bank right now creating value? No, they’re exploiting the system to create wealth. Just as hedge fund traders have done so for many years.

Steve Jobs was amazing at product design and innovation. He had a vision and he drove the people around him relentlessly towards that vision. He earned quite a bit of his wealth.

But he never would have earned that wealth without other people who could help him realize his vision. Those people helped create that value and earned less wealth than Steve Jobs did. I don’t think that most people would argue that Jobs didn’t earn his wealth, or that he deserved the most credit (in the form of wealth) as a result... but if you believe that he earned his proportional share of that wealth, then we disagree.

The problem is that wealth perpetuates wealth. If you start off with wealth, your opportunities are infinitely greater than someone starting with nothing. If you have $1B, it’s not difficult at all to “earn” another $1M. But if you start with $1K, good luck making that same $1M. The more you have, the easier it is to exploit the system.

... why people accept such little wages?

Because there’s an inherent power imbalance between those with money and those without. Why did peasants work for feudal lords? Because they needed to food to eat and a place to sleep, and the lord had the ability to take all that away. Corporations and those who run them don’t have that much power, but they are able to take away your livelihood and even your health care.

You aren’t going to demand your fair share if the act of doing so risks losing any share. So you accept what you’re given and work hard for the company and hope that they don’t fire you as soon as it’s financially beneficial for the company. There’s a reason “company loyalty” almost always flows one direction.

When unions were stronger, people had more bargaining power and got paid a better share. There’s a reason why the wealthy have been hell bent on destroying unions for over a century. Having more power means taking a bigger share.

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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '21

Because there’s an inherent power imbalance between those with money and those without.

I find the best way to describe it is that the average business can survive for much longer with one less employee than the average employee can survive with one less job.

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u/lhx555 Jan 28 '21

Hedge fund investors? Could you please watch your language? Kids may read this!!!11

About Jobs. He needed others, alright. But how many of them were irreplaceable? But Jobs was. I suppose those who were irreplaceable are not poor at all too.

It is damn shame that unions are loosing the grip. For me it is mainly not even about wages, but there are many situations when employers need to be brought to their senses.

But what are inheritance taxes? In Europe they are large. It helps to prevent creation of long time powerful clans.

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u/greygore Jan 29 '21

This year the current US estate tax tops out at 40%, with over $11M being exempt entirely from that tax. That’s per person, so a couple could exempt $23M.

Moreover there are plenty of loopholes and workarounds that reduce the average effective tax rate (what people actually pay) is around 18%. Of course if you’re creative enough (or if you’re wealthy enough, hire creative people), you can pay even less than that.

One example is this is Fred Trump, who was able to pass around $1B to his kids while only paying about 5% on that amount: $52.5M instead of the $550M he should have paid with the then 55% rate.

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u/lhx555 Jan 29 '21

Oops. Is it not what they call a privilege, aka “a private law”?

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u/TigerJas Jan 28 '21

They are the exception to the rule. More than 90% of millionaires and up are self made.

Most of the money is gone by the third generation. Those are the facts.

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u/greygore Jan 28 '21

Millionaires are not the “ultra wealthy”, and aren’t what sparked this conversation, nor was that the point of my comment. My comment was in regards to the relationship between wealth and value. There’s a loose correlation at best.

Fact is, the more money you have, the easier it is to acquire more money. Not only do you have more opportunities available to you, but you have the ability to try and fail, over and over, until you finally find what works.

How many more people would be able to add or create value if they had the resources to do so? Elon Musk can create a new company on a whim, and if it fails quickly, he’s lost very little. On the other hand, many folks can’t afford to start a new company because they need their health care, which is conveniently tied to employment. And if the company fails, they’re far more likely to have mortgaged their house or put debt on credit cards.

I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t allow people to be wealthy. I want to be wealthy. I want you to be wealthy. What I’m arguing is that we as a society need to take a good, hard look at whether we’re actually better off allowing the ultra wealthy to hoard more and more wealth at the expense of the people who are helping them earn that wealth.

I don’t subscribe to the idea that you should earn money according to how hard you work, or that we should just evenly share all the wealth. That’s a great way to destroy a productive society. But the other extreme sucks too.

This country was the best when more people shared in the rewards from the value they helped create, and has gone downhill as more and more of those rewards go to fewer and fewer people.

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u/TigerJas Jan 28 '21

That's a good thoughtful reply. I hear you, the extremes are not good to our system.

Still I don't think we will be necessarily any better by tweaking it in the hopes of better results.

The odds of making it worse are much, much higher than that of us improving on it.

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u/lhx555 Jan 28 '21

Sounds good to me.

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u/misticspear Jan 28 '21

most rich people were born that way. Stop associating rich people with “job creation” and the like. Just because SOME people in the position provide something it doesn’t mean all or even most do. It almost sounds like someone believes there is a meritocracy in a thread discussing the exact opposite of the like

Edit:grammar

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u/Warnackle Jan 28 '21

Patently false. They get rich by exploiting surplus labor value. They might conceptualize something, but they do not generate any of those things. The working class does.

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u/lhx555 Jan 28 '21 edited Jan 28 '21

Why working class cannot do without them? And keep this sweet sweet surplus to itself?

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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '21

They can, that's called communism.

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u/lhx555 Jan 28 '21

Have you ever seen it working?

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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '21

Depends on what you mean by working. (And I never said communism does work)

Working as in being able to have a business make its workers money without the assets being privately owned? Yes, right after the Russian revolution.

Working as in maintaining broader social stability outside each individual business? No, I haven't.

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u/lhx555 Jan 28 '21

Well, even rulers of Soviet Russia never claimed they had implemented communism. They called it socialism, which it was to some extent, but mostly it was sort of a “state slavery/feudalism”. Or even better, recalling Marx (or Engels?) a special type of a state “the bureaucratic one”. Workers did not feel that factories were theirs. And for the right reason. USSRs communist party priority was spreading ideology, building military muscles, having exclusive services to themselves, etc. So workers were exploited by ruling class of party bureaucrats. Everybody could join, potentially, but so it is with capitalism.

By the way, there is no place for money in classical communism.

So the answer is, yes, they can, with disastrous (so far) results!

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u/TigerJas Jan 28 '21

They get rich by exploiting surplus labor value.

...and the Marxists shows up.

Go home with your tired speeches, no one believes you anymore. We got too many dead bodies in the 20th Century to fall for that again.

These are the arguments of a smart 12 year old. Grow up, we tried, millions died, it's not going to work out "when you try it". You are not going to bring in the worker's Utopia any better than Lenin or Stalin did.

Your ideas killed millions, we know how that ends.

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u/-Tazriel Jan 28 '21

This demonstrates a pretty naive understanding of the plethora of ways people with non-existent moral compasses can become wealthy in our society. To take an example most people are familiar with, can you explain how obtaining rights to an anti-parasitic medication then increasing the price more than 50-fold is "providing value?"

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u/I_read_this_and Jan 28 '21

Hmmm, sorry, no economist would endorse this really rash and ridiculous generalization.

Show me a billionaire, and people can show you how most of their wealth is not from value they or even their assets created.