1. That bar to hurdle is in the earth’s mantle layer.
2. Nobody in a real world economy makes that much money except through wage theft and other exploitative practices
C.T Phipps
Taylor Swift!
🙂
Decidedly Orthogonal
Counter Argument: Music Industry!
Clif
Taylor Swift is responsible for the crimes of the music industry?
anonymsly
As soon as you’re worth eight figures, you deserve nothing but death and suffering and are responsible, PERSONALLY AND DURECTLY, for ALL of the evils in the world. Thus spake the internet.
perpetual summer
so true bestie
Rodrigo
I very much agree. All millionaires are evil.
Achallenger
So true
ResRam
I dont know which internet you move around in.
The critics of wealth inequality I follow? Usually have much more differentiated views on the complex, global systemic development.
The specific construction of the fiat currencys we use. A privatized and secretive banking system that earns profits from managing the money system risks – instead of treating it like the public infrastructure it is. The mathematical provable tendency of wealth to accumulate in our economic system. The psycholgical deformation virtually unlimited resorces can cause in individual people and in-groups. Political corruption systematically being tolerated, even encouraged.
But hey, if you can keep your dogma protected by strawmanning all people seeing and naming a problematic development, more power to you.
Deanatay
AMAB? AMAB.
sickolesbian
she was born enmeshed in it lmao her father is james taylor im certain
shes complicit in all sorts of awful stuff
Chrissy
They’re not related.
Leadsynth
No no no, her father is Elizabeth Taylor. How do people get this so wrong
Andrusi
And her other dad? Zachary Taylor, twelfth President of the United States! This goes ALL THE WAY UP.
sickolesbian
lmfao im stupid her parents are Scott Kingsley Swift and Andrea Gardner Swift
her dad is a stock broker, she was successful because of rich parent/s
Decidedly Orthogonal
Well that’s an extreme and equally absurd extrapolation. No, obviously not. At the same time, there is something grossly wrong with a system where a person can have thousands of lifetimes of wealth accrued to them alone, while people are dying, homeless, in the streets of the same nation. And Ms Swift, for all of her public look, still partakes of the degree of wealth she’s hoarded.
AMagicalDuck
You mean the woman responsible for more CO2 emissions than any other celebrity on the planet?
Odditude
That can’t be true. Isn’t P Diddys plane used a lot more than Taylor swift? Even in jail? He apperently rents it out
eh, whatever
That’s not how she makes her money; it’s how she spends it.
Uratnik
If Taylor increased her Net Worth by $10 million dollars, every single day, it would take her 132 years to be worth as much as Elon.
someone
Always kind of weird to say of people that they’re “worth” what they own. Elon Musk’s personal worth is less than zero IMO; his mere existence makes the world worse.
Anyways, his wealth is mostly smoke and mirrors. He doesn’t own billions upon billions in cash, he owns it mostly in Tesla stock. And Tesla is the most overvalued company in history.
Supposedly, Tesla is worth more than Toyota, Honda, Suzuki, Nissan, General Motors, Ford, BMW, Ferrari, Porsche, Stellantis, Volkswagen, and Mercedes-Benz combined. If you think that’s reasonable and rational, name any bridge you want me to sell you; I’ve got it in stock.
It’s not valuated like a car company, it’s valuated like a meme coin.
Billionaires get to take out loans at 0% interest with no down or payment since there’s no risk of default as long as their net worth keeps going up. So they have to keep net worth line pointed up so they get to live with literally zero concern about money. They live like land rich nobles and southern plantations, where instead of money they trade in favors. They don’t have the actual cash money to give up, and if they did it would pull them out of their infinite money hack. They will never choose to give up their absolute security because the least amount of insecurity feels like a crisis.
Bagfaceman
Dear god this comment section sucks.
More money does not mean more evil. Elon is evil regardless of his net worth.
Taylor Swift has her problems and to deny that is to bury your head in the sand, but I agree she’s kinda the least of our concerns when it comes to billionaires
Nymph
Continuing to be a billionaire in a world where people are starving and dying in poverty is a banal, boring, and real brand of cruelty.
Taylor Swift (since we’re talking about her) COULD choose to give away so much money to good causes that she’s not a billionaire anymore. She could do it by the BAREST margin (leaving herself 900mil if she didn’t bother to claim her donations back as tax relief, which is still a nauseating amount of money) and have given away 700mil. Imagine for a minute what that kind of cash could do for the world if given to the right programs.
Amnesty International, the Acacia Center for Justice, homeless shelters or food kitchens in every city she flies to.
Instead, she hoards that wealth. Keeps it to herself so she can buy houses and cars and fly around with models. I think there are definitely worse people in the world than Taylor Swift, by miles, but I do think she’s part of the problem.
Ellegos
Depending on what it is they’re writing, Authors?
Ymbrael
Taylor Swift is a landlord. She owns enormous capital.
Talent for appealing to the lowest common denominator aside, she has exploited thousands and thousands.
The fact this labor exploitation is indirect and systemic is no redemption.
drs
Entertainment and other forms of intellectual property provide a way to make tons of money ethically. For all the transphobia of JKR, her making billions by writing children’s books that sold hundreds of millions of copies is hard to indict.
Software, well, Microsoft certainly had a lot of anti-competitive practices. But “create very widely used software” is at least a candidate for getting rich.
Also, I don’t think “wage theft”, strictly defined (failing to pay contracted wages), is at all necessary to get rich. Whether employer-employee wage relations are intrinsically a form of exploitation is another matter.
Sirksome
I don’t think this fully acknowledges the things any one billionaire must be complacent in to achieve their wealth. It’s not as simple as “I wrote a popular book or song, guess I’m billionaire now.” Admittedly I’m not knowledgeable on all the ethical implications of being a billionaire myself, but just the infrastructure alone that you inevitably use to distribute enough of your product to earn a billion in profit, whether that’s planes, the internet, literally the roads trucks drive on to deliver physical merchandise. A billionaire profits from all that without contributing even a fraction of their BILLIONS that could improve that not just regionally but globally. And that’s just the basic taxes argument.
drs
Seems bold to say that bookstores, planes, and roads are unethical. And while there are lots of tax dodges and shelters that get abused, one could logically become a billionaire while fully paying taxes. If you make $3 billion in book royalties, you’ll end up with more than $1 billion of wealth, and I think that’s true in any modern rich country.
(I believe Warren Buffet noted that his biggest “tax dodge” is simply the long-term capital gains tax: without any effort beyond holding onto stock for at least a year, he pays only 15% on income, vs. the higher brackets of his much poorer secretary.)
jflb96
Which is why they didn’t say that; they said that using things for free is exploiting everyone else who has to pay for them. It’s like how oil and gas and coal get a lot more expensive once you start costing in things like having to clean up the atmosphere.
Ellegos
Now I’m interested in kind of exploring that further.
Are we arguing that infrastructure (planes, roads, internet, etc.,) is inherently evil? I personally, I’d need some persuading on that. There are certainly costs in their creation, and I know that there’s plenty of history that makes the WAY our interstates in the U.S. were built (through the neighborhoods of minority groups who didn’t want them there), but the existence of infrastructure as a concept seems to pretty clearly improve the quality of life for the public. If we are looking at use of infrastructure as being a net evil, I don’t think our issue is just whether or not there can be an ethical billionaire. It’s whether there can be ethical large-scale production of goods at all. And eve Karl Marx loved himself some production.
The o5er point is the one about contributing “a fraction of their BILLIONS that could improve that not just regionally but globally”. I mean, there are Billionaires who do large amounts of charitable a philanthropic acts and donation. Bill Gates donates huge amounts to his foundation which works extensively with impoverished communities. Is the issue about donating a fraction, or is there an actual amount of wealth accumulation that is itself unethical? If so, how do we estimate what that amount is?
Lys
John D. Rockefeller became the world’s first billionaire by creating a company that made huge efficiency and economy improvements in the extraction, refining, and distribution of petroleum. In 1870, Standard Oil had a 10 percent market share, three quarters of the refining industry was losing money, and kerosene was 26 cents a gallon. By 1880, Standard Oil’s market share had grown to 90 percent, refining was absurdly profitable, and kerosene had dropped to 9 cents a gallon. I wouldn’t hold up Rockefeller as an example of an ethical businessman, but what made Standard Oil into a titan wasn’t that he was better at stealing wages, it’s that he was was better at making a useful product which improved the life of the average person. I’ll take that over Zuckerberg becoming rich by making Facebook and then selling everyone’s personal information to advertisers.
Rockefeller is the prime example of illegal monopolization and employing unethical, predatory business practices to eliminate competition, like actively colluding with manufacturers and rail lines to prevent other oil companies from transporting their product. His prices depended less on profit and more on undercutting competition and overcharging where he had no competition.
Plus he and his family sold his employees and customers information to the mafia and had dozens of striking miners and their families violently killed while they were asleep.
The world would be a much better place today if Rockefeller had never existed.
Lys
Yes, I said that I would not hold him up as an example of an ethical businessman, because he wasn’t. Yet for all that, Rockefeller’s supposedly predatory business prices were still largely good for society. Production went up, prices went down, and most of the competition that was driven out of business got to go home with money in their pocket because he bought them out. The reason we ban collusion, trusts, and monopolies is because they can lead to inefficient allocation of resources, meaning bad product, bad service, and bad prices. Yet somehow Rockefeller cornered the market in oil refining, drove most of his competition out of business, and still delivered a superior product at a better price. Not saying the man deserved to be a billionaire, nobody deserves to be a billionaire, but he did overall make society better on the way there.
Now, his strikebreaking on the other hand is quite indefensible, and I have no reservations about calling it out as ugly and evil behavior with no social benefit. It was just utterly unnecessary, Rockefeller could have treated his workers fairly and still become the richest man in the world from delivering a revolution in industrial petroleum refining. Though, with respect to having strikebreakers murdered in their sleep, if you mean the Ludlow Massacre that was his son John D. Rockefeller Jr. He was very much a lesser man than his father, which is another problem with billionaires, because as true as it is that nobody deserves to make a billion dollars, it’s even more true that nobody deserves to be born into a billion dollars. That much wealth and power is corrosive to men’s souls.
Lys
To try and clarify a bit, my position on John D. Rockefeller is that he was an insane megalomaniac who hugely benefited society by channeling it in a useful direction, which also made him wealthy beyond reason. Literally beyond reason, because there’s no good reason for anyone to be that rich, but that doesn’t change the fact that his wealth wasn’t stolen in the strict sense of the word. He also did a bunch of unquestionably evil stuff, because even at his most pro-social he was still an insane megalomaniac. The good billionaires aren’t billionaires, but the idea that billionaires are only billionaires because they are thieves is a reductive and misleading view of wealth creation. Though yes, many of them are also thieves.
Needfuldoer
Standard did a ton of unethical and illegal shit to get as big as it became, and when it was broken up under the Sherman act, John D. Rockefeller became even more absurdly wealthy because he was a huge shareholder of all the new companies.
Lys
Standard Oil cornered the petroleum refining market largely by having a flatly superior supply and production line. Their practices during their market consolidation phase in the 1870s were not illegal at the time, and while Rockefeller was by no means an ethical businessman, the net result of his business was that the consumer got a better product at a lower price. During the 20+ years that Standard Oil held a 90 percent market share in oil refining, the quality of their product remained high and prices only continued to drop. Kerosene was 9 cents a gallon in 1880, and was down to 6 cents a gallon before 1900. After that, Standard Oil started losing its efficiency advantage as competition finally caught up, so by the time it was broken up in 1911 its market share had dropped to 64 percent.
jflb96
Even beyond the evil practices of Rockefeller and Standard Oil, fossil fuels are the exemplar of an industry where most of the real price of a commodity never comes up. If Standard Oil had also had to pay for reforestation or inventing artificial trees to clean up after themselves, they probably wouldn’t have been such a runaway success.
Queezle
Rowling is a bad example, even outside her trefyness. She did not just make money with selling books. She also sold a ton of merch, and that often was produced under less than stellar conditions. Until fan’s and human right workers called her out and documented those conditions. I am talking sweat shops and the like.
Ymbrael
Rowling didn’t make money writing, she made it owning capital and exploiting labor.
Pocky
The bar is basically in the underworld at this point; the concept of being a billionaire is amoral on its face. Hell, Elon himself was considered “good” by the electric car buyers before he went full MAGA, even though he was still the same grifter he always had been, just more openly a nazi. And to a lesser extend, Phil Spencer was seen as this guy who worked at MS and was “just a guy”; only for gamers to learn to he’s actually just a rich asshole who cosplays an average Joe to sell XBox stuff.
Carla’s folks can be caring parents, and also be terrible people. The nature of being a billionaire means you have had to do some pretty nasty stuff to obtain and continue to retain that level of wealth. Avoiding taxes, unfair wadges, union busting, arming a genocide. . . y’know, the usual things that tech billionaires and their companies get up to.
JWK
I submit Dolly Parton. Look up what she did during the worst of COVID. Look up all her good deeds. You don’t have to like her music. (I’m not all that fond, myself.)
CallynD
Dolly Parton is worth $650 Million. She’s not a billionaire and while I admit she’s not terrible she doesn’t want to get off the fence when she absolutely should.
The only reason Dolly isn’t a billionaire is because of how generous she is.
Kimi
Haraldur Thorleifsson would also be worth a lot more if he didn’t asked to be paid the way he did when his company was bought out. He wanted to be paid in salary to maximize the amount of tax he would pay in Iceland (his home country). He has had a muscular disease and had to be in a wheelchair since the age of 25, and has a lot of gratitude for the disability benefits he received from his country.
Antsan
I think that’s part of the point being made.
Lys
Always remember: The good billionaires aren’t billionaires.
Kimi
Caroline Bamberger Frank Fuld and her brother Louis Bamberger, who both helped fund the Institute for Advanced Study, are both worth looking into as well. They sold their store for 25-50 million dollars in 1929 (461 to 922.82 million dollars in today’s money) and then used the money to help fund the institute and hire people to research there.
I do think that you don’t tend to hear about the good ones because they tend to want to give most of their money away and not brag about it or be in the media.
Mr D phone posting
What about Gabe Newell? Is he doing that too? Legit question here, afaik dude seems legit.
Needfuldoer
Praise be to GabeN, but there’s still no HL3.
Big Z
Sadly, AFAIK, GabeN is a “yacht guy”, he’s just super quiet about it for whatever reason.
they have it all backwards these days where they favor AAA garbage and hate indies
Steamworks documentation hasn’t been updated in YEARS @-@
Bryy
Gabe Newell only cares about money, wants to eventually make cyber eyes for all of humanity, and owns a bunker in New Zealand an entire yacht company.
Kyulen
There is no way to become that wealthy ethically. Every billionaire got their wealth from a combination of being lucky enough to be born to parents who were already decently well-off, and exploiting workers.
eh, whatever
Again, Taylor Swift?
Kyulen
Every billionaire includes Taylor Swift.
Big Z
Just given the borderline-unethical and decidedly exploitative-of-the-fans way the last couple of albums have been marketed (TLOS and TPS both had what three dozen different variants, with some different bonus tracks and other assorted FOMO associated), I cannot imagine she’s not also doing shady things on the business side of things.
Sirksome
Taylor Swift was also born to a wealthy and connected family and essentially gifted a modeling and singing career in her teens.
Nono
I always relate Miley Cyrus as the ‘good’ version of Taylor Swift. She also got places because of being related to influential people but she’s pulled away from the bad seeds (like her dad). I think Dolly Parton had a lot of good influence on her.
Her store had to remove a necklace recently with strong SS symbolism.
Big Z
THAT was overblown — those lightning bolts were incredibly generic and not particularly close to the SS Doppelte Sig-Rune symbol.
Jon
Okay, gonna bring this back to Dolly Parton, who is only a half-billionaire because she gives away so very much of her income. She became a billionaire by being a damn good writer and songstress, then became not a billionaire by giving away huge sums of money to various causes (most notably a program that purchases books for children in less-advantaged areas of the US). Going looking for controversies regarding her or her career, I keep coming up with things like her support for LGBTQIA+ causing issues with “conservative” fans, and he drawing criticism from the Trump administration for supporting masking and vaccination during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sorry, she’s just not coming across as evil and exploitative here.
drs
Other entertainment near-billionaires:
James Cameron 800 million
Peter Jackson 1.5 billion
Spielberg 8 billion
Lucas 10 billion
I will never find it non-suspicious that Spielberg owns the copyrights to all of MLK’s speeches (-_-)
Li
I think there’s also just, an issue of:
“is it possible to MAKE absurd amounts of money without necessarily exploiting workers” (yes, in the entertainment industry, though vanishingly few people get even close, lots of movie stars and famous musicians wind up destitute)
“is it possible to HOARD absurd amounts of money and still be a good person” (no)
“is this specific famous person unproblematic?” (probably not)
Taylor Swift wasn’t a great example for being unproblematic, but I think she’s a decent enough example of “being able to MAKE millions of dollars without necessarily exploiting workers”.
again, the part where she keeps it, and various other issues with her, are not awesome or anything
The Erymanthian
What if they won the lottery and then used the winnings to buy a second ticket and won a second time tho?
That thing about their still being billionaires is definitely what the story is about, right? she’s called them to follow up about Ruttech being the locus of the “divest” protests. The girlfriend thing is *just* her chickening out. That juxtaposition is baaaarely subtext, like, for maybe one or two more strips.
My guess is Carla chickens out of bringing it up on the call, talks to Charlie some more about the situation, and brings it up face-to-face tomorrow (DoA time, not Monday’s strip).
Seems kinda relevant that her girlfriend researching the topic up and directly talking to Carla about it is what brought the whole issue of Bulmeria using Ruttech miltech to the forefront of Carla’s attention
Even the billionaires that seem nice are still not good, because they’re still hoarding wealth while millions of other people are struggling and dying because they can’t afford food, shelter, necessary medical care, etc.
A fun exercise is to write down everything you’d actually want to own in your wildest fantasy of being Scrooge McDuck rich and having no further need for a job to take up your time, and see how much you’d actually need to have in the bank at ~3% interest to be able to afford all of it without running out of money before you die.
I haven’t yet been able to come up with a number above $100mil, although that’s largely because I have no desire for a yacht or a private airliner. Each of which are about a $200mil purchase if you go whole ham.
IMHO, therefore, any money in any individual’s possession/control that’s more than a couple hundred million maximum is by definition pointless resource hoarding — I don’t think it’s strictly evil to be “so rich you don’t need to deny yourself anything”, but it is pretty strictly evil to be so rich that you’d have money left over after not denying yourself anything for a lifetime.
Add in the whole money is a construct and not real and billionaires “wealth” is tied up in “investments”. I can’t wait for the down fall of capitalism.
the point of the rules of capitalism, of private ownership of vast concentrations of money and thus “value”, combined with the power of bestowing that value to that which others can produce via “investment”,
Is that what you spend your time doing, that your work, is only as valuable as the degree by which it satisfies the desires of the supremely monied classes (-_-)
225 thoughts on “Helicopter”
NGPZ
as much as I’m happy they respect and support their daughter,
mind you they are probably still just like any other IRL billionaires ?
C.T Phipps
I mean they’re the opposite of how Elon Musk treated his children, especially his trans child.
NGPZ
1. That bar to hurdle is in the earth’s mantle layer.
2. Nobody in a real world economy makes that much money except through wage theft and other exploitative practices
C.T Phipps
Taylor Swift!
🙂
Decidedly Orthogonal
Counter Argument: Music Industry!
Clif
Taylor Swift is responsible for the crimes of the music industry?
anonymsly
As soon as you’re worth eight figures, you deserve nothing but death and suffering and are responsible, PERSONALLY AND DURECTLY, for ALL of the evils in the world. Thus spake the internet.
perpetual summer
so true bestie
Rodrigo
I very much agree. All millionaires are evil.
Achallenger
So true
ResRam
I dont know which internet you move around in.
The critics of wealth inequality I follow? Usually have much more differentiated views on the complex, global systemic development.
The specific construction of the fiat currencys we use. A privatized and secretive banking system that earns profits from managing the money system risks – instead of treating it like the public infrastructure it is. The mathematical provable tendency of wealth to accumulate in our economic system. The psycholgical deformation virtually unlimited resorces can cause in individual people and in-groups. Political corruption systematically being tolerated, even encouraged.
But hey, if you can keep your dogma protected by strawmanning all people seeing and naming a problematic development, more power to you.
Deanatay
AMAB? AMAB.
sickolesbian
she was born enmeshed in it lmao her father is james taylor im certain
shes complicit in all sorts of awful stuff
Chrissy
They’re not related.
Leadsynth
No no no, her father is Elizabeth Taylor. How do people get this so wrong
Andrusi
And her other dad? Zachary Taylor, twelfth President of the United States! This goes ALL THE WAY UP.
sickolesbian
lmfao im stupid her parents are Scott Kingsley Swift and Andrea Gardner Swift
her dad is a stock broker, she was successful because of rich parent/s
Decidedly Orthogonal
Well that’s an extreme and equally absurd extrapolation. No, obviously not. At the same time, there is something grossly wrong with a system where a person can have thousands of lifetimes of wealth accrued to them alone, while people are dying, homeless, in the streets of the same nation. And Ms Swift, for all of her public look, still partakes of the degree of wealth she’s hoarded.
AMagicalDuck
You mean the woman responsible for more CO2 emissions than any other celebrity on the planet?
Odditude
That can’t be true. Isn’t P Diddys plane used a lot more than Taylor swift? Even in jail? He apperently rents it out
eh, whatever
That’s not how she makes her money; it’s how she spends it.
Uratnik
If Taylor increased her Net Worth by $10 million dollars, every single day, it would take her 132 years to be worth as much as Elon.
someone
Always kind of weird to say of people that they’re “worth” what they own. Elon Musk’s personal worth is less than zero IMO; his mere existence makes the world worse.
Anyways, his wealth is mostly smoke and mirrors. He doesn’t own billions upon billions in cash, he owns it mostly in Tesla stock. And Tesla is the most overvalued company in history.
Supposedly, Tesla is worth more than Toyota, Honda, Suzuki, Nissan, General Motors, Ford, BMW, Ferrari, Porsche, Stellantis, Volkswagen, and Mercedes-Benz combined. If you think that’s reasonable and rational, name any bridge you want me to sell you; I’ve got it in stock.
It’s not valuated like a car company, it’s valuated like a meme coin.
EmCaCo
Billionaires get to take out loans at 0% interest with no down or payment since there’s no risk of default as long as their net worth keeps going up. So they have to keep net worth line pointed up so they get to live with literally zero concern about money. They live like land rich nobles and southern plantations, where instead of money they trade in favors. They don’t have the actual cash money to give up, and if they did it would pull them out of their infinite money hack. They will never choose to give up their absolute security because the least amount of insecurity feels like a crisis.
Bagfaceman
Dear god this comment section sucks.
More money does not mean more evil. Elon is evil regardless of his net worth.
Taylor Swift has her problems and to deny that is to bury your head in the sand, but I agree she’s kinda the least of our concerns when it comes to billionaires
Nymph
Continuing to be a billionaire in a world where people are starving and dying in poverty is a banal, boring, and real brand of cruelty.
Taylor Swift (since we’re talking about her) COULD choose to give away so much money to good causes that she’s not a billionaire anymore. She could do it by the BAREST margin (leaving herself 900mil if she didn’t bother to claim her donations back as tax relief, which is still a nauseating amount of money) and have given away 700mil. Imagine for a minute what that kind of cash could do for the world if given to the right programs.
Amnesty International, the Acacia Center for Justice, homeless shelters or food kitchens in every city she flies to.
Instead, she hoards that wealth. Keeps it to herself so she can buy houses and cars and fly around with models. I think there are definitely worse people in the world than Taylor Swift, by miles, but I do think she’s part of the problem.
Ellegos
Depending on what it is they’re writing, Authors?
Ymbrael
Taylor Swift is a landlord. She owns enormous capital.
Talent for appealing to the lowest common denominator aside, she has exploited thousands and thousands.
The fact this labor exploitation is indirect and systemic is no redemption.
drs
Entertainment and other forms of intellectual property provide a way to make tons of money ethically. For all the transphobia of JKR, her making billions by writing children’s books that sold hundreds of millions of copies is hard to indict.
Software, well, Microsoft certainly had a lot of anti-competitive practices. But “create very widely used software” is at least a candidate for getting rich.
Also, I don’t think “wage theft”, strictly defined (failing to pay contracted wages), is at all necessary to get rich. Whether employer-employee wage relations are intrinsically a form of exploitation is another matter.
Sirksome
I don’t think this fully acknowledges the things any one billionaire must be complacent in to achieve their wealth. It’s not as simple as “I wrote a popular book or song, guess I’m billionaire now.” Admittedly I’m not knowledgeable on all the ethical implications of being a billionaire myself, but just the infrastructure alone that you inevitably use to distribute enough of your product to earn a billion in profit, whether that’s planes, the internet, literally the roads trucks drive on to deliver physical merchandise. A billionaire profits from all that without contributing even a fraction of their BILLIONS that could improve that not just regionally but globally. And that’s just the basic taxes argument.
drs
Seems bold to say that bookstores, planes, and roads are unethical. And while there are lots of tax dodges and shelters that get abused, one could logically become a billionaire while fully paying taxes. If you make $3 billion in book royalties, you’ll end up with more than $1 billion of wealth, and I think that’s true in any modern rich country.
(I believe Warren Buffet noted that his biggest “tax dodge” is simply the long-term capital gains tax: without any effort beyond holding onto stock for at least a year, he pays only 15% on income, vs. the higher brackets of his much poorer secretary.)
jflb96
Which is why they didn’t say that; they said that using things for free is exploiting everyone else who has to pay for them. It’s like how oil and gas and coal get a lot more expensive once you start costing in things like having to clean up the atmosphere.
Ellegos
Now I’m interested in kind of exploring that further.
Are we arguing that infrastructure (planes, roads, internet, etc.,) is inherently evil? I personally, I’d need some persuading on that. There are certainly costs in their creation, and I know that there’s plenty of history that makes the WAY our interstates in the U.S. were built (through the neighborhoods of minority groups who didn’t want them there), but the existence of infrastructure as a concept seems to pretty clearly improve the quality of life for the public. If we are looking at use of infrastructure as being a net evil, I don’t think our issue is just whether or not there can be an ethical billionaire. It’s whether there can be ethical large-scale production of goods at all. And eve Karl Marx loved himself some production.
The o5er point is the one about contributing “a fraction of their BILLIONS that could improve that not just regionally but globally”. I mean, there are Billionaires who do large amounts of charitable a philanthropic acts and donation. Bill Gates donates huge amounts to his foundation which works extensively with impoverished communities. Is the issue about donating a fraction, or is there an actual amount of wealth accumulation that is itself unethical? If so, how do we estimate what that amount is?
Lys
John D. Rockefeller became the world’s first billionaire by creating a company that made huge efficiency and economy improvements in the extraction, refining, and distribution of petroleum. In 1870, Standard Oil had a 10 percent market share, three quarters of the refining industry was losing money, and kerosene was 26 cents a gallon. By 1880, Standard Oil’s market share had grown to 90 percent, refining was absurdly profitable, and kerosene had dropped to 9 cents a gallon. I wouldn’t hold up Rockefeller as an example of an ethical businessman, but what made Standard Oil into a titan wasn’t that he was better at stealing wages, it’s that he was was better at making a useful product which improved the life of the average person. I’ll take that over Zuckerberg becoming rich by making Facebook and then selling everyone’s personal information to advertisers.
Risky
Rockefeller is the prime example of illegal monopolization and employing unethical, predatory business practices to eliminate competition, like actively colluding with manufacturers and rail lines to prevent other oil companies from transporting their product. His prices depended less on profit and more on undercutting competition and overcharging where he had no competition.
Plus he and his family sold his employees and customers information to the mafia and had dozens of striking miners and their families violently killed while they were asleep.
Risky
The world would be a much better place today if Rockefeller had never existed.
Lys
Yes, I said that I would not hold him up as an example of an ethical businessman, because he wasn’t. Yet for all that, Rockefeller’s supposedly predatory business prices were still largely good for society. Production went up, prices went down, and most of the competition that was driven out of business got to go home with money in their pocket because he bought them out. The reason we ban collusion, trusts, and monopolies is because they can lead to inefficient allocation of resources, meaning bad product, bad service, and bad prices. Yet somehow Rockefeller cornered the market in oil refining, drove most of his competition out of business, and still delivered a superior product at a better price. Not saying the man deserved to be a billionaire, nobody deserves to be a billionaire, but he did overall make society better on the way there.
Now, his strikebreaking on the other hand is quite indefensible, and I have no reservations about calling it out as ugly and evil behavior with no social benefit. It was just utterly unnecessary, Rockefeller could have treated his workers fairly and still become the richest man in the world from delivering a revolution in industrial petroleum refining. Though, with respect to having strikebreakers murdered in their sleep, if you mean the Ludlow Massacre that was his son John D. Rockefeller Jr. He was very much a lesser man than his father, which is another problem with billionaires, because as true as it is that nobody deserves to make a billion dollars, it’s even more true that nobody deserves to be born into a billion dollars. That much wealth and power is corrosive to men’s souls.
Lys
To try and clarify a bit, my position on John D. Rockefeller is that he was an insane megalomaniac who hugely benefited society by channeling it in a useful direction, which also made him wealthy beyond reason. Literally beyond reason, because there’s no good reason for anyone to be that rich, but that doesn’t change the fact that his wealth wasn’t stolen in the strict sense of the word. He also did a bunch of unquestionably evil stuff, because even at his most pro-social he was still an insane megalomaniac. The good billionaires aren’t billionaires, but the idea that billionaires are only billionaires because they are thieves is a reductive and misleading view of wealth creation. Though yes, many of them are also thieves.
Needfuldoer
Standard did a ton of unethical and illegal shit to get as big as it became, and when it was broken up under the Sherman act, John D. Rockefeller became even more absurdly wealthy because he was a huge shareholder of all the new companies.
Lys
Standard Oil cornered the petroleum refining market largely by having a flatly superior supply and production line. Their practices during their market consolidation phase in the 1870s were not illegal at the time, and while Rockefeller was by no means an ethical businessman, the net result of his business was that the consumer got a better product at a lower price. During the 20+ years that Standard Oil held a 90 percent market share in oil refining, the quality of their product remained high and prices only continued to drop. Kerosene was 9 cents a gallon in 1880, and was down to 6 cents a gallon before 1900. After that, Standard Oil started losing its efficiency advantage as competition finally caught up, so by the time it was broken up in 1911 its market share had dropped to 64 percent.
jflb96
Even beyond the evil practices of Rockefeller and Standard Oil, fossil fuels are the exemplar of an industry where most of the real price of a commodity never comes up. If Standard Oil had also had to pay for reforestation or inventing artificial trees to clean up after themselves, they probably wouldn’t have been such a runaway success.
Queezle
Rowling is a bad example, even outside her trefyness. She did not just make money with selling books. She also sold a ton of merch, and that often was produced under less than stellar conditions. Until fan’s and human right workers called her out and documented those conditions. I am talking sweat shops and the like.
Ymbrael
Rowling didn’t make money writing, she made it owning capital and exploiting labor.
Pocky
The bar is basically in the underworld at this point; the concept of being a billionaire is amoral on its face. Hell, Elon himself was considered “good” by the electric car buyers before he went full MAGA, even though he was still the same grifter he always had been, just more openly a nazi. And to a lesser extend, Phil Spencer was seen as this guy who worked at MS and was “just a guy”; only for gamers to learn to he’s actually just a rich asshole who cosplays an average Joe to sell XBox stuff.
Carla’s folks can be caring parents, and also be terrible people. The nature of being a billionaire means you have had to do some pretty nasty stuff to obtain and continue to retain that level of wealth. Avoiding taxes, unfair wadges, union busting, arming a genocide. . . y’know, the usual things that tech billionaires and their companies get up to.
JWK
I submit Dolly Parton. Look up what she did during the worst of COVID. Look up all her good deeds. You don’t have to like her music. (I’m not all that fond, myself.)
CallynD
Dolly Parton is worth $650 Million. She’s not a billionaire and while I admit she’s not terrible she doesn’t want to get off the fence when she absolutely should.
BassBone
The only reason Dolly isn’t a billionaire is because of how generous she is.
Kimi
Haraldur Thorleifsson would also be worth a lot more if he didn’t asked to be paid the way he did when his company was bought out. He wanted to be paid in salary to maximize the amount of tax he would pay in Iceland (his home country). He has had a muscular disease and had to be in a wheelchair since the age of 25, and has a lot of gratitude for the disability benefits he received from his country.
Antsan
I think that’s part of the point being made.
Lys
Always remember: The good billionaires aren’t billionaires.
Kimi
Caroline Bamberger Frank Fuld and her brother Louis Bamberger, who both helped fund the Institute for Advanced Study, are both worth looking into as well. They sold their store for 25-50 million dollars in 1929 (461 to 922.82 million dollars in today’s money) and then used the money to help fund the institute and hire people to research there.
I do think that you don’t tend to hear about the good ones because they tend to want to give most of their money away and not brag about it or be in the media.
Mr D phone posting
What about Gabe Newell? Is he doing that too? Legit question here, afaik dude seems legit.
Needfuldoer
Praise be to GabeN, but there’s still no HL3.
Big Z
Sadly, AFAIK, GabeN is a “yacht guy”, he’s just super quiet about it for whatever reason.
NGPZ
all the people who made Steam left Valve
they have it all backwards these days where they favor AAA garbage and hate indies
Steamworks documentation hasn’t been updated in YEARS @-@
Bryy
Gabe Newell only cares about money, wants to eventually make cyber eyes for all of humanity, and owns a bunker in New Zealand an entire yacht company.
Kyulen
There is no way to become that wealthy ethically. Every billionaire got their wealth from a combination of being lucky enough to be born to parents who were already decently well-off, and exploiting workers.
eh, whatever
Again, Taylor Swift?
Kyulen
Every billionaire includes Taylor Swift.
Big Z
Just given the borderline-unethical and decidedly exploitative-of-the-fans way the last couple of albums have been marketed (TLOS and TPS both had what three dozen different variants, with some different bonus tracks and other assorted FOMO associated), I cannot imagine she’s not also doing shady things on the business side of things.
Sirksome
Taylor Swift was also born to a wealthy and connected family and essentially gifted a modeling and singing career in her teens.
Nono
I always relate Miley Cyrus as the ‘good’ version of Taylor Swift. She also got places because of being related to influential people but she’s pulled away from the bad seeds (like her dad). I think Dolly Parton had a lot of good influence on her.
Cimorene
Her store had to remove a necklace recently with strong SS symbolism.
Big Z
THAT was overblown — those lightning bolts were incredibly generic and not particularly close to the SS Doppelte Sig-Rune symbol.
Jon
Okay, gonna bring this back to Dolly Parton, who is only a half-billionaire because she gives away so very much of her income. She became a billionaire by being a damn good writer and songstress, then became not a billionaire by giving away huge sums of money to various causes (most notably a program that purchases books for children in less-advantaged areas of the US). Going looking for controversies regarding her or her career, I keep coming up with things like her support for LGBTQIA+ causing issues with “conservative” fans, and he drawing criticism from the Trump administration for supporting masking and vaccination during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sorry, she’s just not coming across as evil and exploitative here.
drs
Other entertainment near-billionaires:
James Cameron 800 million
Peter Jackson 1.5 billion
Spielberg 8 billion
Lucas 10 billion
NGPZ
I will never find it non-suspicious that Spielberg owns the copyrights to all of MLK’s speeches (-_-)
Li
I think there’s also just, an issue of:
“is it possible to MAKE absurd amounts of money without necessarily exploiting workers” (yes, in the entertainment industry, though vanishingly few people get even close, lots of movie stars and famous musicians wind up destitute)
“is it possible to HOARD absurd amounts of money and still be a good person” (no)
“is this specific famous person unproblematic?” (probably not)
Taylor Swift wasn’t a great example for being unproblematic, but I think she’s a decent enough example of “being able to MAKE millions of dollars without necessarily exploiting workers”.
again, the part where she keeps it, and various other issues with her, are not awesome or anything
The Erymanthian
What if they won the lottery and then used the winnings to buy a second ticket and won a second time tho?
Frelance
That thing about their still being billionaires is definitely what the story is about, right? she’s called them to follow up about Ruttech being the locus of the “divest” protests. The girlfriend thing is *just* her chickening out. That juxtaposition is baaaarely subtext, like, for maybe one or two more strips.
Thing 2
Yeah but, nah, but Willis still got us good, eh? However it pans out in the end.
Needfuldoer
My guess is Carla chickens out of bringing it up on the call, talks to Charlie some more about the situation, and brings it up face-to-face tomorrow (DoA time, not Monday’s strip).
Steamweed
So we gotta wait until January to see it? :O
Owlmirror
Seems kinda relevant that her girlfriend researching the topic up and directly talking to Carla about it is what brought the whole issue of Bulmeria using Ruttech miltech to the forefront of Carla’s attention
Kyulen
Even the billionaires that seem nice are still not good, because they’re still hoarding wealth while millions of other people are struggling and dying because they can’t afford food, shelter, necessary medical care, etc.
Big Z
This.
A fun exercise is to write down everything you’d actually want to own in your wildest fantasy of being Scrooge McDuck rich and having no further need for a job to take up your time, and see how much you’d actually need to have in the bank at ~3% interest to be able to afford all of it without running out of money before you die.
I haven’t yet been able to come up with a number above $100mil, although that’s largely because I have no desire for a yacht or a private airliner. Each of which are about a $200mil purchase if you go whole ham.
IMHO, therefore, any money in any individual’s possession/control that’s more than a couple hundred million maximum is by definition pointless resource hoarding — I don’t think it’s strictly evil to be “so rich you don’t need to deny yourself anything”, but it is pretty strictly evil to be so rich that you’d have money left over after not denying yourself anything for a lifetime.
Cimorene
Add in the whole money is a construct and not real and billionaires “wealth” is tied up in “investments”. I can’t wait for the down fall of capitalism.
NGPZ
the point of the rules of capitalism, of private ownership of vast concentrations of money and thus “value”, combined with the power of bestowing that value to that which others can produce via “investment”,
Is that what you spend your time doing, that your work, is only as valuable as the degree by which it satisfies the desires of the supremely monied classes (-_-)