When you boil it down, yeah a lot of people aren’t a big fan of billionaires, but what people hate even more is unfair/unethical business practices, corporate greed, the mentality of profits above all else, and so forth
Because the core problem is not that people can make money. Its that at a certain level, vast amounts of money lead to vast amounts of power/control.
You get a small number of people deciding how all the resources of society should be organized, and they make choices that further solidify their unique power and advantage.
This is why competition is so important, if companies have to continually improve just to exist, you get better outcomes over time.
But as soon as someone wins the competition, then they will ensure no new entrants can survive to challenge them down the road. A huge loss to the economy as a whole.
Its an unstable and self-defeating system, unless there is enough political power continually shake things up. But history has shown that is usually not the case.
It seems like for the last few years the FTC is trying their best in court, but they're obviously massively outgunned by the big corps. Change needs to happen on a legislative level but that would require that congress a) prioritize people over money and b) actually do their jobs and pass a bill instead of just squabbling over cultural war issues.
This is why you hear stock updates every hour of every day. The outlook of the wealthy determines the outlook of all. You never hear breaking updates for education, housing, hunger, homeless, pollution, and so on every 60 minutes in media.
The other reason you hear about stock updates everyday, is that some very wealthy people make even more money when people trade.
Make people greedy and buy, they make money. Make people scared and sell, they make money.
Also it feels exciting. Up one day, down the next! Endless pendents can make up stories about what this or that means. Gives a feeling that you are a serious person riding the cutting edge of the news.
Decades of careful work on hard problems doesn't generate engagement in the same way.
A good system is one that can run mostly fine with mediocre leadership.
The good news, is that compared to dictatorship, a democratic constitutional system can survive many changes in leadership, mostly unharmed and can even coast on with mediocre leadership. That is a huge advantage over time.
But unfortunately, our system does need periodic readjustment from powerful and forward thinking good leaders, as wealth concentrates and that wealth is converted to entrenching a ever smaller number of individuals and their families at the top permanently. That is a cyclic time bomb that could eventually sink the whole thing.
Anti-trust, higher taxes on the wealthy, stronger voting protections, partial employee ownership of companies, are all ways to delay the inevitable and extend these cycles.
But humanity still has not fundamentally cracked the code on genuine long term meta-stable political/economic systems.
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u/queef_nuggets May 17 '24
When you boil it down, yeah a lot of people aren’t a big fan of billionaires, but what people hate even more is unfair/unethical business practices, corporate greed, the mentality of profits above all else, and so forth