Should billionaires exist? 「Yes or No」

[Claorica]

No, but I don't necessarily think the government should put a hard cap on their earnings or obliterate them for existence: for one I shudder to think what the government would do with such an influx of money - be it another mislead attempt at helping people by a program that wastes most of its cost on overhead or giving people money that immediately goes to drugs or alcohol or another terrifying weapon that we don't actually need that will be used either to try and scare Russia and China not into doing something they already have no reason to do or to murder brown people in the desert for some rich dude's interests or some idiot in DoD's long-term game plan; For two, that money should be disseminated through actual charity and through development, or through ethical business practices to actually better the human race, especially the communities and countries that these successful businessmen work in. Henry Ford created the standards by which we currently measure how workers are treated, Vanderbilt founded a university, Carnegie gave most of his fortune to a variety of causes, and the Rockefellers backed the Arts.

If you wanted to defend business ethics, you should not have picked Gilded Age tycoons who are the poster children of "charity for PR to cover up my horrible abuses"

My point is they at least had the good graces to feel an obligation to those less fortunate, if only for the pictures or for their own good (in the case of Henry Ford). The difference today is that they literally don't care about or feel an obligation towards anyone but themselves and make no attempts to hide that fact. At least with Nobless Oblige, the aristocrats, who recognized that they were such, held certain obligations to their lesser men - unlike the rich aristocrats of today.

[Cordel One]

If you wanted to defend business ethics, you should not have picked Gilded Age tycoons who are the poster children of "charity for PR to cover up my horrible abuses"

My point is they at least had the good graces to feel an obligation to those less fortunate, if only for the pictures or for their own good (in the case of Henry Ford). The difference today is that they literally don't care about or feel an obligation towards anyone but themselves and make no attempts to hide that fact. At least with Nobless Oblige, the aristocrats, who recognized that they were such, held certain obligations to their lesser men - unlike the rich aristocrats of today.

An obligation to those less fortunate? You do know what labor standards were like back then, right?

[UniversalCommons]

There is an assumption that a billionaire won't do a better job of handling the money and investing it back into the economy than the government. In many cases billionaires do a better job with money and investments than governments. There is an assumption that the money is about personal wealth here. This kind of money is not about individual wealth, but power and ability to do things. As long as the money is put back into the economy with proper use and it benefits society, billionaires are not a problem. The problem is with abuse of the money for criminal ends or use that is not beneficial. If someone can increase the pool for everyone, by building up business, then they are responsible with the money.

In the past, they asked if there should be millionaires. In the future they will ask if it is justified to have trillionaires. The kind of capital to build space industries like asteroid mining is in the billions of dollars. It will require the kind of capital and industry that is in the billions. The same is true for mining Helium-3 on the moon. Massive amounts of money and capital. The kind of money that can build an O'neill colony or a Stanford Torus is in the tens of billions of dollars. People will need to be able to handle billions of dollars in capital.

Think of what it took to build the railroads, then multiple it by hundreds of times to get the truly massive space industries in the near future. It will take Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, and Elon Musk. These people will open the frontier, but there will probably come some people with even greater ambitions to mine the asteroid fields, to build colonies on Venus. The amount of wealth involved is staggering. The ability to manage huge industries which could be larger than anything which we have now.

[West Leas Oros 2]

Ultimately, nothing they have contributed to society justifies their wealth. They need the rest of us far more than we need them. Tell me, anyone, what do they do for society that others cannot?

[Claorica]

My point is they at least had the good graces to feel an obligation to those less fortunate, if only for the pictures or for their own good (in the case of Henry Ford). The difference today is that they literally don't care about or feel an obligation towards anyone but themselves and make no attempts to hide that fact. At least with Nobless Oblige, the aristocrats, who recognized that they were such, held certain obligations to their lesser men - unlike the rich aristocrats of today.

An obligation to those less fortunate? You do know what labor standards were like back then, right?

And you do know that Henry Ford literally created what we today call the basic labor standards, right?

[Fahran]

The hUmAn NaTuRe argument dies here.

Half of those articles are behind pay walls and the rest do not refute the assertion that greed has a biological basis in human beings, but, rather, simply suggest that altruistic behavior under certain circumstances may have a biological basis as well. Those circumstances include persons acting within genetically-related or communal groups (for the obvious reason that this can increase the likelihood of these populations surviving and reproducing), in children who have not been socialized and who may more easily join a communal group, and amid extraordinary disasters. I'm not denying that altruism, cooperation, and fairness have roots in biology. I'm asserting that you have misunderstood and misapplied the results of studies to make a Kantian argument about man's nature viable.

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Linked are studies demonstrating that falsity of human nature being centered around greed and competition, with psychological surveys demonstrating that altruistic behavior makes people want to be more altruistic, and that young children, who have not fully been socialized are naturally inclined towards altruism. Archaeological evidence that suggests that disabled people, who would have been a net negative to their groups were cared for in spite of the competitive disadvantage that would cause. As well as two demonstrations of some of the most significant medical advancements in history being made without promise of reward but because they were intended to cure social ills.
-PWA

Young children who engage in altruistic behavior towards out-groups can endear themselves to those out-groups and thus ensure their own survival. Additionally, the same valuation of the in-group that leads to beneficial cooperation might well have the side effect of leading to less beneficial cooperation as well. This is a possible effect of group selection on human behavior. With regard to specific instances of people behaving altruistically, I'm not certain you can extrapolate such instances to make credible claims about human nature being altruistic rather than egoistic. In fact, a more nuanced and well-developed picture suggests that human beings are both - depending on the specific circumstances. I do believe an expectation of universal altruism beyond close-knit communities and in-groups is without a sound basis in the studies you cited. In fact, I suspect we'd see a more selfish face of group selection under communism.

A lot of these studies were somewhat difficult to uncover because they were concealed behind three or four pages of psychology blogs or lefty rags proclaiming that some out-of-context study on in-group altruism or altruism in infants meant we were better than had been theorized or that communism was viable as an economic system. Alexander J. Stewart and Joshua B. Plotkin's study had far more dismal findings overall since they add a layer of nuance to theories regarding cooperation, at least in circumstances where greater flexibility is permitted. And I find these to be of more consequence when we begin discussing economic behavior in a more atomized world.

This is the same thing again. I can't really say much if you don't give me something new.

And yet you have offered no refutation or validation of your own theory.

Which is why I'm a Zapatista, not a standard communist. A decentralized but organized structure to make sure everything's running as it should.

Decentralization does not bode well for environmental regulation unless every single community and syndicate is on board with it. The EZLN have met with remarkable success in staving off industrial encroachments into the Lacandon - when it has suited them and been in keeping with the economic interests of their communities. We don't see mining or drilling going on. We don't see litter or certain fertilizers used. We do see logging and deforestation in order to pave the way for settlement though. Milpa agriculture is also still practiced, largely because it's one way to get the soil of the Lacandon to have a modicum of fertility.

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If that were the case we'd have no reason to lie in the first place. You have way too much faith in the government.

Again, they didn't lie. They made an error of judgement when confronted with conflicting reports.

There's really not much I can say because you've given me nothing new to respond to.

I mean your response at the moment essentially boils down to "labor theory of value is accurate but I'm not going to support it or refute subjective preference theory of value."

Decentralization and education are a good start.

I can agree on this to an extent, though decentralization beyond the state level in the US with regard to education is probably going to continue to perpetuate unequal outcomes.

[Kubra]

For real no one has explained to me why the CEO of LVMH degrading vineyards and then selling the substandard product at a premium is justified labour worth the billions the guy is worth.

[Fahran]

There's only so much money, and they have more than their share. Even a fraction of it would improve someone else's life, to an actual measurable degree (like dental work for the pain, shoes that don't leak in the winter, better food ...) and the rich person literally wouldn't notice the difference. Does that sound "ideological" to you?

We can dispose of the first claim with relative ease. There is not limit on the amount of money that can exist within society beyond that provided by material constraints. The issue is that we run into the problem of inflation which renders money useless as a medium of exchange.

How do you define a person's "share"?

If you gave away the money you spend on your education or internet connection, you could make somebody else's life astronomically better as well. But we're not discussing private charity or giving liquid currency away. We're discussing policies relating to taxation and ownership of capital, which have the potential to have negative consequences beyond dismantling billionaires as a class. The most "successful" economic models we have in terms of happiness, upward mobility, and income equality in the industrialized world all have several billionaires in residence so I imagine the best economic model that isn't pure moonshine at this stage does not preclude billionaires from existing.

Yes, it does. Half of the claims you made are ethical claims. Worse still, in light of the above point, it strikes me as exceedingly myopic. I have no idea why we're rushing to the EZLN, Venezuela, or the UK (to be charitable) when Norway, Germany, or Denmark are much nicer places to live by all accounts.

I won't expend time playing Devil's advocate for the libertarians.

[Fahran]

For real no one has explained to me why the CEO of LVMH degrading vineyards and then selling the substandard product at a premium is justified labour worth the billions the guy is worth.

I might have missed the source. I'm more than willing to tackle it.

Mind you, I'm not altogether keen on specific business practices or aspects of our present system. My argument is more in the "socialism still sucks" camp than in the "neoliberalism rocks and capitalists can do whatever they want" camp.

[UniversalCommons]

If you do not have billionaires as private individuals, you will still need people to build monumental projects that cost billions of dollars. This includes shipping, railroads, and other large scale projects like dams, forestry management, and space programs.

[Fahran]

If you do not have billionaires as private individuals, you will still need people to build monumental projects that cost billions of dollars. This includes shipping, railroads, and other large scale projects like dams, forestry management, and space programs.

Pro-Tip: most socialists want the government or other collectives to do all of this.

[West Leas Oros 2]

If you do not have billionaires as private individuals, you will still need people to build monumental projects that cost billions of dollars. This includes shipping, railroads, and other large scale projects like dams, forestry management, and space programs.

There are already organizations in place that do this? The government, for one. Volunteer organizations do stuff like this too sometimes. And of course, worker-owned enterprises are a thing. None of those necessarily need billionaires.

[Nobel Hobos 2]

There is an assumption that a billionaire won't do a better job of handling the money and investing it back into the economy than the government. In many cases billionaires do a better job with money and investments than governments.

"A better job" in making the maximum number of people happy: clearly government does a better job
"A better job" reinvesting money to make more money: clearly billionaires do a better job

Governments shouldn't control the economy: they're not good at that. Individuals and businesses motivated by profit form an economy by trading with each other, it works pretty well except for disabled people, and for people whose labor is valued below what they can live on. Until private enterprise can guarantee the essentials to everyone prepared to work 40 hours a week (and children, and disabled), government should not step out and leave it to capitalism.

Government can however participate in the economy, most obviously by giving the poor money to spend. Also by taxation, mindful that taxation makes businesses less viable by shrinking the market for whatever they sell: this can be used for a social end by reducing trade like tobacco, alcohol or marijuana. I see no reason why government cannot also found or buy businesses, putting what would otherwise be "profits" into expanding the business or into the government budget.

There is an assumption that the money is about personal wealth here. This kind of money is not about individual wealth, but power and ability to do things. As long as the money is put back into the economy with proper use and it benefits society, billionaires are not a problem.

Billionaires have a greater share of the wealth, and absent the legitimacy of ownership there is no justification for 90% lacking money they could use to make their lives better and "do things" that benefit them or their family. A billion is about where having more money would not conceivably make a person's life better ... except by the satisfaction of wielding power.

So we return to the comparison. Is an individual better at wielding power, than a government? Being a believer in democracy, I say absolutely not. Individual power in the billions scale should not be entrusted to any individual. Particularly not one of such demonstrated selfish motives as to make that much money while paying less tax than a hard-working professional.

It's worth mentioning that not all billionaires are selfish. Selfish ambition may have got them so much money, but finding it unsatisfying, or influenced by others, they began giving it away at the same rate as they earned more, or even at a faster rate. I'd rather if that cut in at about a billion, rather than 60 billion as for Bill Gates, but the intention if not the outcome of substantial charitable giving is hard to deny: these people do not assume that by helping build a new Lithium mine in Peru they're making the world a better place while also seeking profit. Rather they recognize that in making profit they're quite likely making the world a worse place for everyone else, so they seek to counteract that with charity.

Billionaires who pay as little tax as possible, who do not give significant amounts to charity (or even political causes), and keep working hard to make more and more when they already have a damn billion, do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. If they so obviously only care about making money, there is no reason to think they care at all about the consequences beyond profit, of how they invest. There is no doubt in my mind that government could do more to make people happy and fulfilled, if government had that money to spend instead.

Of course billionaires are not all the same. They're people, and they have differing motives. One rule for all still works though: it should be very hard for a billionaire to become any richer, past that point. There should be no further incentive for them to grow the same business (if that will increase its gross profit), or if it does grow they must divest some of it. There should be no incentive to buy high-return shares or derivatives, even if those do have high risk. And any profit-making investments should be balanced by loss-making investments ... semi-charities ... or of course actual charities. If they don't do any of those things, any income that takes them over a billion dollars (any income: unrealized gains in a share portfolio for instance) will attract an additional tax. Starting at 50% and going up steeply to 100% at 2 billion dollars.

The problem is with abuse of the money for criminal ends or use that is not beneficial.

That's the problem. The assumption that profitable enterprises are inherently beneficial has seriously damaged the planet, including causing actual extinctions. Passing laws to protect the environment isn't a sufficient curb to capitalism's tendency to make so many people miserable, and even kill them, because destructive industries just move to some other jurisdiction. It's that assumption: that profitable = beneficial-to-all, which has to be challenged.

That's not to say that making industries pay for their human and environmental externalities is pointless. However it's not enough.

If someone can increase the pool for everyone, by building up business, then they are responsible with the money.

And if the only effect of their business building was, after all, to make other people sick, unhappy and poor ... then they are absolutely irresponsible with the money. Would you buy shares in tobacco for instance? How about a vape manufacturer?

How to build a system which lets responsible billionaires make even more, knowing they will do good in the process AND exercise the power responsibly ... while limiting the money and power of billionaires who have shown a love of nothing but money, and active disdain for the wellbeing of people (ie by paying taxes) ..?

One rule for all isn't going to work. And I'm not quite ready to formulate and alternative 'moral currency', but I have done sufficient damage to the naive idea "all billionaires deserve their money, unless they broke a law, because whatever they did to extract money from everyone else must be a contribution to society". It's essentially a circular argument. "They were rewarded for a contribution, because there's no other way in market theory to explain how they got the money."

At this level of reward, "people work for reward, they wouldn't do that work if the reward wasn't enough, therefore it's a fair exchange" breaks down completely. There's no reason to even mention inheritance ...

In the past, they asked if there should be millionaires. In the future they will ask if it is justified to have trillionaires.

Big whoop. What matters is the difference between rich and poor. The rich are always pretty happy. The knowledge of their own relative poverty makes the majority less happy, and that's even without considering the material misery of poverty and over-work.

So call it "jealousy". As though there's something morally wrong with feeling jealous. OK, is it alright if I'm angry instead?

A billion dollars of power includes some of the power that was taken off me, or off my government if you prefer. This aspect of the free market -- that with every exchange of money comes a little power -- has given me an insight into why untrammeled capitalism is such a horrible and dehumanizing thing. It blurs the line between people and property. I'm thinking a billion dollars might even be a bit high!

The kind of capital to build space industries like asteroid mining is in the billions of dollars. It will require the kind of capital and industry that is in the billions. The same is true for mining Helium-3 on the moon. Massive amounts of money and capital. The kind of money that can build an O'neill colony or a Stanford Torus is in the tens of billions of dollars. People will need to be able to handle billions of dollars in capital.

I have another idea. Government does it, then when the methods are established and are available to all, private industries will decide if the lower per-flight cost without development costs in front of them, is actually worth it for some rare metals that stop being rare, and that damn Helium-3 which we'll be able to make here on Earth.

Oh, but the Shuttle was expensive and unreliable! Yeah. It did kind of suck, but largely because the NASA budget was cut so far they had ONLY the Shuttle, when most of the missions could have been done unmanned by a cheap, partially-reusable booster.

Think of what it took to build the railroads, then multiple it by hundreds of times to get the truly massive space industries in the near future. It will take Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, and Elon Musk. These people will open the frontier, but there will probably come some people with even greater ambitions to mine the asteroid fields, to build colonies on Venus. The amount of wealth involved is staggering. The ability to manage huge industries which could be larger than anything which we have now.

I know why you're invoking individuals instead of corporations. Firstly it's because corporations are notoriously timid about long term projects with big up-front costs. Today's corporations wouldn't have built the railroads. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that consortiums of individuals will do any better. It's not a good argument for a "super-Musk" with a trillion dollars to spend either. The chance that such a person would carry out your dream, is not worth the risk to me that they'll use their power in some more mundane way.

If it was me, I'd buy a country. Just a little one, maybe a million people. They'd absolutely love me, since I just made each and every one of them into a millionaire ...

[UniversalCommons]

Government run socialist projects often do not do a good job. The classic example is in space where you have rocket packages sent to the International Space Station. If you have only one organization like a space agency, there is no competition or variation in the delivery of goods. If you have a space agency, a private corporation, and a worker collective for example, there is more variety and competition leading to a better result.

The assumption that your cooperative or your government agency from a single bureaucratic source is going to do a good job is questionable. Having greater variety which includes private enterprise, government agencies, public private organizations, and other ways to do things creates variety. It is one of the reasons that capitalism or mixed government outdoes socialism. There is often a single source in socialism which lacks variety and innovation. Having monolithic state organizations can be extremely counterproductive.

In a multibillion dollar project is it better to have a company run by a billionaire, a worker cooperative, or a government organization. There are strengths and weaknesses to all three. A particularly capable billionaire like an Elon Musk can do a better job than a government agency or a worker cooperative. The question becomes how do you create a Sergei Brin who is going to run things well and give back, a Bill Gates, or a Warren Buffet who will give the money back and be more productive than many government agencies. There is the spirit of enterprise which when applied correctly can be incredibly beneficial.

[Uinted Communist of Africa]

Mkay I just want to say to all my leftist comrades that I fully support the party and completly agree with the dictatorship of the proletariate but.....even in the USSR some people got rich while others didn't. Some people are literally just money magnets and that not on its own a bad thing. Banning billionares wouldn't do much other than make yet another redundant law. I suggest that we allow billionares to exist but we make it a law that 99% of their networth must be "active". By that I mean their money must be either being invested in public works or back into their business. That way they won't start splurging money on ridiculous items like solid gold toliets. If they are a billion are than 1% of their networth is plenty enough to live and thrive on.(Also if they immigrate from the nation they forfeit all of their money...after all the nation is the one that made you wealthy)

[Ifreann]

I have no objection to engineers being rewarded for their labour in an economic context in which money is required for one to live. I'm just saying that money isn't necessarily the only thing that motivates people, so if we didn't have that whole thing where people need money to live, we could still get enough engineers to keep everything from literally falling apart.

People have other motivations that lie outside of market influence, sure, but these motivations are small, unpredictable, and not in any way aligned with where society needs them to be. Some people chose to kill themselves, but that doesn't mean you can dissolve your army and count on your enemies to all commit suicide. (Unless this "suicide" is the two-bullets to the back of the head kind that communist countries are famous for.) You have to provide additional incentives to net enough people into each career, such as the market does with higher pay for more critical workers.

Have you not been paying attention during the pandemic? The essential workers are mostly "unskilled" workers.

But that aside, think about what it means for money to be an incentive. Why is money motivating? Because we need it to live. We have to buy food and shelter and medicine, without them we will die, so we have to get money. So to say that we need the incentive of money for society to function is saying that we need to threaten people with deprivation and death in order to motivate them to work for society.

---

There is an assumption that a billionaire won't do a better job of handling the money and investing it back into the economy than the government. In many cases billionaires do a better job with money and investments than governments. There is an assumption that the money is about personal wealth here. This kind of money is not about individual wealth, but power and ability to do things. As long as the money is put back into the economy with proper use and it benefits society, billionaires are not a problem. The problem is with abuse of the money for criminal ends or use that is not beneficial. If someone can increase the pool for everyone, by building up business, then they are responsible with the money.

No individual should have the kind of power that billionaires have. What those billionaires might do with that power is irrelevant.

In the past, they asked if there should be millionaires. In the future they will ask if it is justified to have trillionaires. The kind of capital to build space industries like asteroid mining is in the billions of dollars. It will require the kind of capital and industry that is in the billions. The same is true for mining Helium-3 on the moon. Massive amounts of money and capital. The kind of money that can build an O'neill colony or a Stanford Torus is in the tens of billions of dollars. People will need to be able to handle billions of dollars in capital.

No, they won't. Money doesn't do anything. We wouldn't be building an O'Neill cylinder from dollar bills. The need to exchange money for the resources actually required to build an O'Neill cylinder is just a function of our current economic system. We don't need capitalism in order to have mines and foundries and factories, just like we don't need feudal monarchy in order to build castles.

Think of what it took to build the railroads, then multiple it by hundreds of times to get the truly massive space industries in the near future. It will take Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, and Elon Musk. These people will open the frontier, but there will probably come some people with even greater ambitions to mine the asteroid fields, to build colonies on Venus. The amount of wealth involved is staggering. The ability to manage huge industries which could be larger than anything which we have now.

What it took to build railroads was people laying rail, not a tycoon in an office somewhere planning how to get even richer. We don't need Jeff Bezos or Paul Allen or Elon Musk to do any of those things, and if there's another generation of the mega-rich still to come then we won't need them either. Most likely they will be an impediment to our progress as they seek to siphon off the fruits of our labour for themselves.

---

Government run socialist projects often do not do a good job. The classic example is in space where you have rocket packages sent to the International Space Station. If you have only one organization like a space agency, there is no competition or variation in the delivery of goods. If you have a space agency, a private corporation, and a worker collective for example, there is more variety and competition leading to a better result.

Competition impedes innovation. If researchers at one company innovate some better rocket design, their company will jealously guard that knowledge to maintain its competitive advantage. Other companies, seeing the results of this innovation, will put a lot of effort into recreating it so as to nullify that advantage. We'll get a dozen research labs inventing the same thing over and over again, instead of one lab inventing it and then sharing their findings so others can refine their new designs.

The assumption that your cooperative or your government agency from a single bureaucratic source is going to do a good job is questionable. Having greater variety which includes private enterprise, government agencies, public private organizations, and other ways to do things creates variety. It is one of the reasons that capitalism or mixed government outdoes socialism. There is often a single source in socialism which lacks variety and innovation. Having monolithic state organizations can be extremely counterproductive.

Having a research lab funded by Tesla and a research lab funded by Amazon is not more variety than two research labs funded by the government.

In a multibillion dollar project is it better to have a company run by a billionaire, a worker cooperative, or a government organization. There are strengths and weaknesses to all three. A particularly capable billionaire like an Elon Musk can do a better job than a government agency or a worker cooperative.

Elon Musk's capabilities extend to believing that he is Iron Man and nothing else. He says stupid shit and his fans tie themselves in knots arguing that actually the stupid shit he said is actually so smart that we puny mortals cannot understand it.

The question becomes how do you create a Sergei Brin who is going to run things well and give back, a Bill Gates, or a Warren Buffet who will give the money back and be more productive than many government agencies. There is the spirit of enterprise which when applied correctly can be incredibly beneficial.

The question is why we allow these people to have so much power over us.

[HIreland]

People have other motivations that lie outside of market influence, sure, but these motivations are small, unpredictable, and not in any way aligned with where society needs them to be. Some people chose to kill themselves, but that doesn't mean you can dissolve your army and count on your enemies to all commit suicide. (Unless this "suicide" is the two-bullets to the back of the head kind that communist countries are famous for.) You have to provide additional incentives to net enough people into each career, such as the market does with higher pay for more critical workers.

Have you not been paying attention during the pandemic? The essential workers are mostly "unskilled" workers.

But that aside, think about what it means for money to be an incentive. Why is money motivating? Because we need it to live. We have to buy food and shelter and medicine, without them we will die, so we have to get money. So to say that we need the incentive of money for society to function is saying that we need to threaten people with deprivation and death in order to motivate them to work for society.

You fail to discern the difference between a critical worker and a critical job. The value of a job is determined by how much it is required by society, and menial labor is needed for our society to function, but the value of a worker is determined by supply and demand, and since just about anyone can do menial labor with little to no training, there is a huge supply. Especially now that there is a recession, the supply of available workers to hire from is larger than ever, and the demand is smaller than ever. The pandemic is also temporary, so we can function without many of the more advanced skills for a time, we can go a while without needing new skyscrapers or nuclear power plants built, but we can't go forever.

Money allows us to live better than we would have otherwise. It does not threaten them with death but rewards them with luxuries. You can live in a cardboard box eating only rice and beans but I don't think anyone would want to. People are really only in danger of starvation in laissez faire capitalism with no provisions for the poor or in extreme situations where food is physically not available. I doubt many people want to get that promotion so they won't starve, unless you're in some third world country, they want that promotion so they can buy a better car or remodel their house. I don't think you're being deprived if you can't afford a Ferrari, and if you feel like you are then I think your judgement of what is essential is very, very flawed. If you think that the capitalist incentivization method is flawed, then please, by all means, give me an example of a better one.

[Sanghyeok]

Mkay I just want to say to all my leftist comrades that I fully support the party and completly agree with the dictatorship of the proletariate but.....even in the USSR some people got rich while others didn't. Some people are literally just money magnets and that not on its own a bad thing. Banning billionares wouldn't do much other than make yet another redundant law. I suggest that we allow billionares to exist but we make it a law that 99% of their networth must be "active". By that I mean their money must be either being invested in public works or back into their business. That way they won't start splurging money on ridiculous items like solid gold toliets. If they are a billion are than 1% of their networth is plenty enough to live and thrive on.(Also if they immigrate from the nation they forfeit all of their money...after all the nation is the one that made you wealthy)

You mention that 1% of one's net worth is more than enough to live on if they're a billionaire, yet you still don't want to tax all of the income after 1 billion?

[Kungsu]

Mkay I just want to say to all my leftist comrades that I fully support the party and completly agree with the dictatorship of the proletariate but.....even in the USSR some people got rich while others didn't. Some people are literally just money magnets and that not on its own a bad thing. Banning billionares wouldn't do much other than make yet another redundant law. I suggest that we allow billionares to exist but we make it a law that 99% of their networth must be "active". By that I mean their money must be either being invested in public works or back into their business. That way they won't start splurging money on ridiculous items like solid gold toliets. If they are a billion are than 1% of their networth is plenty enough to live and thrive on.(Also if they immigrate from the nation they forfeit all of their money...after all the nation is the one that made you wealthy)

You mention that 1% of one's net worth is more than enough to live on if they're a billionaire, yet you still don't want to tax all of the income after 1 billion?

I mean, if we put a hard cap at a billion, maybe billionaires would stop trying to squeeze another hundred million out of their workers as well. What could they gain from being greedy beyond that?

[The Huskar Social Union]

We should eat the billionaires

[Kungsu]

We should eat the billionaires

Well that's vague. How should we prepare them? What is going with them? This is fine dining we are talking about!

[Duvniask]

Marxian economics and the labor theory of value may have failed to anticipate some nuance, but it remains largely relevant. You already heard what I have to say about wages and expltation so I'll skip that, but a you haven't discredited the theory my point still stands.

No, it's completely irrelevant because the entire premise is nonsensical. Labor has no intrinsic value and, in many cases, is not determinant of the value of a good or service produced. If those premises are accepted, then the entire notion of exploitation becomes wholly meaningless and arbitrary. Marxists are trying to recyle ideas that originated as a semi-coherent critique 19th century industrialized economies into 21st century service economies where capital has even more importance and provides even more value than it historically did.

Nowhere in Marx's works will you find the claim that labor has "intrinsic value". I don't think you understand the LTV if you think Sisyphus is considered to be creating value by rolling the bolder up the hill again and again for eternity, or that value is created when a hole is dug up only to be filled again. It would also not surprise me if you're fundamentally misunderstanding what value means in the context of the LVT and how it is not equivalent to price. You should, frankly, refrain from commenting on the LVT if you don't understand the basics.

[Jankau-Helmutsberg]

History-wise, it seems unwise to have too many or too few in the long term.

[Fahran]

Nowhere in Marx's works will you find the claim that labor has "intrinsic value". I don't think you understand the LTV if you think Sisyphus is considered to be creating value by rolling the bolder up the hill again and again for eternity, or that value is created when a hole is dug up only to be filled again. It would also not surprise me if you're fundamentally misunderstanding what value means in the context of the LVT and how it is not equivalent to price. You should, frankly, refrain from commenting on the LVT if you don't understand the basics.

I have yet to discover a source, be it communist, capitalist, or unspecified, that defines the labour theory of value in a way that would make it accurate or true. Investopedia defines it thus:

"The labor theory of value (LTV) was an early attempt by economists to explain why goods were exchanged for certain relative prices on the market. It suggested that the value of a commodity was determined by and could be measured objectively by the average number of labor hours necessary to produce it. In the labor theory of value, the amount of labor that goes into producing an economic good is the source of that good's value. The best-known advocates of the labor theory were Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx. Since the 19th century, the labor theory of value has fallen out of favor among most mainstream economists.

The labor theory of value suggested that two commodities will trade for the same price if they embody the same amount of labor time, or else they will exchange at a ratio fixed by the relative differences in the two labor times. For instance, if it takes 20 hours to hunt a deer and 10 hours to trap a beaver, then the exchange ratio would be two beavers for one deer."

Source.

This definition assumes implicitly that labor has some intrinsic value so long as it does not exceed socially necessary labor required in the production of a good or service since it ties the price of goods and services to the number of labor hours spent to produce them and employs this to dictate an exchange rate. Naturally, Investopedia is a bourgeois source so I'll pull up one that should, in theory, be more charitable to LTV and Marxian economics more broadly.

Source.

In defining the labor theory of value, Professor Wolff, who appears to find the theory quite compelling, states that the "labor in them (commodities)... will tell us something about society." He then asserted that "the labor that's done produces more [value] than is given to the people, the laborers, who are doing the work." None of that is intuitive or given in the face of modern capital or the function of markets. The subjective theory of value can explain these discrepancies adequately without all the mental gymnastics.

[Sanghyeok]

We should eat the billionaires

Well that's vague. How should we prepare them? What is going with them? This is fine dining we are talking about!

Tempura.