this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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This has to be some of the most naive text I've ever read.
Inequality will never not exist. Humans are not equally talented, equally diligent, equally intelligent, etc. They don't have equally-capable bodies, they don't have equal desires.
My coworker is lazy and chronically late, I'm not. You will never convince me or anyone with a functioning cerebrum that we deserve to be paid the same. And that's just one tiny example.
I'm talking about systemic inequality not your workplace drama.
Even if meritocracy wasn't a fairy tale, no one deserves to have more money than they could possibly spend in 10 lifetimes while others starve, regardless of how much you hate your dumbass coworker.
So am I, goofball, hence the 'one tiny example' word choice and the fact that it was a tidbit at the very end of the comment. Sneaky, pathetic evasion attempt.
Time for some reality checks you seem to desperately need:
Once again, it's abundantly clear that hurting the rich is a higher priority for than helping the poor, for those pushing these lines of rhetoric.
First, I'd like to say that I personally don't have a problem with someone wanting to be a billionaire or even being a billionaire. I have a problem with how they get there and what they do when they get there.
The question above was whether or not billionaires should exist, NOT how do we solve poverty or hunger or anything else.
I think you keep approaching this incorrectly. You simply equate the number of billionaires with the number of poor or something like that. That is not HOW billionaires cause poverty. Billionaires have influence over those who make laws. Laws that favor them and not us (us being the non-ultrawealthy). They also usually own or control major corporations which employ us. This gives them the ability to hold wages low. There are a myriad variety of other ways they influence who is poor and who is not and how we are treated. They also have a major influence over people's lives. As an example Jeff Bezos has billions of dollars yet there are many documented cases of employees at Amazon being so pressured to make him and the others at the top more money, that they can't even use the fricken bathroom. I believe this is a certain mentality that is shared amongst most, if not all, billionaires and it is despicable.
Do you think it was the average voter who thought it was a great idea to keep the federal minimum wage stagnant for a decade, as if inflation simply didn't exist? If you work full time for minimum wage, you will be very close to the federal poverty level. I don't think that's a fair way to treat a hard working, productive citizen of a wealthy country like the United States.
If you think welfare is a handout that isn't going to help, fine, then let's start at the top and remove the welfare that is so readily doled out to major corporations two third of which don't pay taxes. I personally won't complain too much about handing taxpayer money to taxpayers.
The middle class isn't sending jobs overseas. Poor people aren't giving illegal immigrants American jobs. Minimum wage earners, I'm guessing, don't have lobbyists. No one offered ME the opportunity to buy shares of Facebook during the IPO.
I personally don't suggest just marching into a billionaires home and ripping cash straight from their hands (not sure I would cry about it at this point, though). What I mean is, the system should be set up in such a way that is not so unfairly biased toward them. I mean if the system was fair, they wouldn't exist because they wouldn't be handed all of the wealth in the first place, but WE don't make those decisions. THEY do! If you own 80% of America, you should pay for 80% of America.
Most of the changes you are suggesting can't be legislated. What are you going to do about single parent households? Create a law forbidding divorce? Force people to remarry after a loved one dies. And exactly how would I put this massive amount of energy I'm using to create this post into helping someone on welfare? As if complaining online is so much energy you could somehow power a city off of it.
NO, they emphatically should NOT exist.
And my point is that the former is a complete waste of time and energy, because a society with any size gap of wealth between the poorest and the wealthiest, but also a society with no one in poverty, is absolutely more desirable than a society with less or even no wealth gap, but which has people in poverty.
But the fact that this demographic's growth in numbers is negatively correlated with the incidence of poverty, is a pretty big wrench in the assertion that their existence causes poverty.
You've assumed that billionaires cause poverty, but I'm a step before you. I'm not convinced their existence has a significant causal relationship with poverty, not least because of the above.
At the very least, the above fact needs to be contended with, before moving further. You need to explain, or at least hypothesize, how it can be true that billionaires' actions increase poverty, if as the number of billionaires goes up, poverty goes down.
I'm reminded of when anti-porn activists would claim in the earlier days of the Internet that the proliferation of Internet porn would cause rape and sexual assault to spike massively. There are still such activists out there, still making that same argument, despite the fact that all the data shows that as Internet porn became more widespread, the incidence of sexual crimes actually DEcreased. In fact, "plummeted" would be a fair description, imo.
That's true. A top-down approach won't solve these problems, as they're largely cultural and self-perpetuating (find a girl who got pregnant at 15/16, and chances are good that her mother was under the age of 20 when she got pregnant with her daughter, as well). Education/awareness/outreach and similar, are the only real way to get there, but it needs to be a true, concerted, dedicated, continued effort, and right now, there's only pockets of it scattered around, far as I can tell.
As a grim example, in the 1960s, the Moynihan Report was put out by a guy who was essentially freaking out over the current incidence of 'fatherlessness' in the black population, and calling for action to be taken. Today, we know more than ever about how much worse off kids are (financially, to my point, but also in many other ways) who aren't raised in stable, two-parent homes are, and today, there isn't a single racial demographic in the US that doesn't have a higher rate of single parenthood than the black population did at the time of that Report. And yet, today, despite everything, even beginning to talk about these issues is political suicide, no one will even touch the topic.
What I'm trying to say is that we've got much bigger fish to fry, if the goal is reducing/eradicating poverty. And if indeed y'all care more about whether someone should be "allowed" to have a net worth beyond some arbitrary point, than that, then all I have to say is that you've lost the plot.
Should we not be equally dignified? Should someone be considered lesser than you for being late?
And if we now think about why you see this as a bad thing, we can see how deeply brainwashed you were by our capitalistic, profit-driven, society.