I don’t mean doctor-making-150k-a-year rich, I mean properly rich with millions to billions of dollars.
I think many will say yes, they can be, though it may be rare. I was tempted to. I thought more about it and I wondered, are you really a good person if you’re hoarding enough money you and your family couldn’t spend in 10 lifetimes?
I thought, if you’re a good person, you wouldn’t be rich. And if you’re properly rich you’re probably not a good person.
I don’t know if it’s fair or naive to say, but that’s what I thought. Whether it’s what I believe requires more thought.
There are a handful of ex-millionaires who are no longer millionaires because they cared for others in a way they couldn’t care for themselves. Only a handful of course, I would say they are good people.
And in order to stay rich, you have to play your role and participate in a society that oppresses the poor which in turn maintains your wealth. Are you really still capable of being a good person?
Very curious about people’s thoughts on this.
People who hoard more money than they can spend in several lifetimes while people are literally dying in the streets cannot be good. These things are mutually exclusive.
I find this take so hypocritical.
I bet you have more food than some people. Are you giving it to them?
You have a roof over your head, other people don’t. Are you giving it to them?
You most likely have more money than others, considering your access to the internet and ability to think up this post - are you donating all of your excess that isn’t going to your bills and food?
Calling it “hoarding” is just intentionally vilifying having money. Are some rich people bad? Absolutely. Are they bad because they’re rich? No. Do they have an obligation to give their money away? Also no.
I think you’re missing the points about scale and marginal utility. If you have more food than 3 generations of your family will ever eat, and continue to take more while others are starving, you can make a moral argument that maybe you shouldn’t have so much food. Much less continue to try and get more. It becomes more egregious when you, say, take food from your employees who don’t always have enough.
I think you’re missing the points about scale and marginal utility.
Missing the point and misconstruing the argument to protect the wealthy is the point.
Bear with me here, I’m thinking about all this as a thought experiment…please don’t jump on me all at once :)
I don’t disagree with you, there is a difference in utility, however what would you say to someone who has two homes? Say a vacation home on a lake? This wasn’t uncommon for persons of older generations (before shit got expensive). Because while two homes may not seem egregious to citizens of highly developed countries, it is, relatively speaking, a true extreme luxury in many parts of the world, perhaps even obscene if you consider those who live in shanty towns or those who are homeless.
And what about extra cars? Or any other luxury for that matter? Anything that explains why those in less developed countries see middle-class individuals in developed countries as “rich”?
Now these are nothing in comparison to the several orders of magnitude greater that a billion dollars is, but take them as the best examples I can think of off the top of my head lol.
Remember marginal utility is relative. My point is that, who decides what defines excess to the point where you’d make the argument you just made? where is the line? Certainly billionaires qualify, but how many millions does one need to hit that threshold? And who makes that determination? The individual with the extreme wealth will have warped perceptions (“It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?”), so then it must be the non-wealthy who have insight, if any, or is it all relative?
I’m not trying to defend or apologise for the ultra-rich, but I think about these things in the sense of: what would I do if I won the mega-millions? Or had some secret unknown relative bestow obscene wealth on me? Never in a million years of course, but I’m the kind of person who likes to have positions that don’t change situationally, I’d like to be confident enough of my beliefs that I’d know what I’d do if the situation were reversed.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk lol. Again please don’t think i’m trying troll or something, this is a philosophical question for me.
It’s important to recognize just how much more billionaires make than millionaires, but at the same time, no, neither of them are good or can be while maintaining that amount of wealth, and the reason is because you cannot make that much money by working. The ONLY way to make that much money is by making profit off of others.
Idk man in some areas a house costs a million. If two people go into debt their whole life and work their butts off to pay for a house that now costs a million, I still think of them as normal people somehow yaknow
A lot of that is because we’re in the middle of a housing crisis thanks to enormous companies buying up all the property, pushing normal people out of the house market to renting. On top of that, buying a 1 million dollar house doesn’t make one a millionaire.
?? After you’ve paid off your million dollar house, you are a millionaire by definition.
Most of us don’t pay off a million dollars in one payment??? Paying off mortgages takes a long ass time, In smaller increments. You might “technically” be a millionaire, but you won’t be comparable to the kind of “rich” we’re talking about here. You can make that kind of money by working.
Have you looked up how much a Billion dollars really is? Billionaires are not living paycheck to paycheck. They could do so fucking much with their money and resources, but they choose to invest in shitty submarines and privatized space travel. I am all for pursuing advances in tech and life, but let’s solve the issues with earth first like world hunger, homelessness, and climate change.
For context: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Holy shit somehow this struck harder than the Tom Scot video where he drives the length of the thickness of a billion dollar bills.
Fantastic fucking visual.
Precisely two, who meet the standard of “not completely evil”.
The guy behind Costco, who pays his employees well with a respectable benefits package and allegedly keeps the concession prices cheap.
Bill Gates. Not just the whole Gates Foundation and the work it does to fight malaria and pandemics. But also that he has at least admitted that he’s cutthroat and ruthless. He doesn’t pretend to be nice.
Ah yes, words that go so well together… cutthroat, ruthless, and good.
Based on the very consistent behavior of the ultra wealthy, I feel forced to assume that Gates main motivation is to shift the public conscious from hate to respect, so has been diligently working on PR since the early 00’s. I find myself being extremely wary of charities that are so well known. Makes me think of Susan G. Komen, and their shitty behavior. I’m not saying that fighting malaria is not a good cause, just that it seems there are ulterior motives.
In the case of Gates, as others have pointed out, donating millions (also worth noting the nature of tax breaks), when you have hundreds of billions, sounds amazing but means almost nothing.
