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Whatever AOC! It's super easy, barely an inconvenience, to do. Over the span of a 40 year career you simply need to earn $25,000,000 on average each year without exploiting labor, committing fraud, violating antitrust, cheating investors, market manipulation, stealing, or any of the other ways billionaires became billionaires.
The real story is that having a billion dollars and not aggressively using your wealth to fix the problems in the world/society makes you a monster. Full stop.
The problem here is not her message, it is how the headlines present it.
She is not saying that having a billion dollars is wrong per se in a vacuum. she is saying how you go about getting a billion dollars in the real world is what makes it wrong.
That distinction is far too subtle for the average voter. She is talking about the rules of chess while ~50% of the country barely knows how to play checkers.
The better thing to focus on for people is probably the methods by which billionaires go about making their money more so than the specific amounts of money they end up with because of it.
Well, nothing is wrong in a vacuum because there's nothing there to be right or wrong, but having a billion dollars is wrong per se, because no one person, no matter how brilliant or diligent, can actually do something that is worth one billion dollars.
Also, I don't think individuals should have the amount of power that comes with that much wealth.
Money, money, money. The artificial middle-man of questionable value that we kill each other over. This is getting embarrassing already. Universal basic income. No-one should lack food, warmth and shelter nowadays, at the very least. Watch progress take off when everyone has a full belly and hope.
I'd hate to be the soulless fool who downvoted you
Thank you. Idk if this will be beneficial to my emotional wellbeing or not so I will likely forget about it
Even if you could, you shouldn't want to.
This is the problem that needs to be fixed. As long as we embrace greed we will be ruled by it.
Power. The more you have, the others have less. You are more special with each billion extra.
I just don’t get the point. Felon and bozos have more money than they’ll EVER be able to spend. What is the point of hoarding even more? It makes no sense. I just don’t get it
I think at a certain point it becomes about power and money is just a way they measure it
The hoarding becomes the point. It's a form of psychosis.
If you pay any of your employees a non-living wage you're not "earning" your billions. You hire someone you're expecting them to show up, but also be well rested, hydrated, clothed, physically healthy, mentally fit, and motivated. They can't be all of those things if you're not compensating them well enough and providing them the flexibility life demands. If your employees depend on government services just so they can show up to work then it's the taxpayers that are padding your pocket, not your own "hard work".
Not arguing against you, just using your comment as a jumping off point:
If you are part of the owning class, you aren't "earning" your wage. You are skimming the surplus value created by your employees and calling it "profit"
Capitalism not only encourages exploitation, but requires it. The whole purpose of capitalism is amassing capital, maximization of profit, and the way to do this is through taking the surplus value created by employees.
For example, when a car is created, raw materials go in and are assembled (at least in part) by people. The value created by turning those raw materials into a car is created by the employees that turned it into a car. The difference between the fair market value of that car and the raw materials put in is the value added by the worker.
If we were to actually pay these workers what they are worth, by the value they added to that car, there would be no profit. But because capitalism incentivises maximization of profit, the owning class pays you a wage that is always less than that value added, and they have incentive to make that wage as small as you are willing to take, after all, you can't build the car yourself because you do not own the means of production
And therein lies the fundamental problem of capitalism. He who owns the means of production has the power.
Editing to add: If the workers owned the means of production, then there would be no reason for the owning (billionaire) class to exist -- because they don't actually do anything, they just own things.
Poverty wages are not evidence of a broken system, they are evidence that the system is working exactly as intended. We need an economic system that does not incentivize profit, period.
It's big that she said this. It's a big political risk.
It's common knowledge here, but certainly not everywhere it needs to be.
This woman for president, enough is enough!
The irritating thing is that the voting population is, on average, stupid, easily led, and anti woman. She would not fair well no matter how good she'd be in charge because brown woman bad or something equally idiotic. We're nothing if not committed to shooting our own feet and wondering how it happened
Don't forget the "id vote for her but she'd never win" crowd
If people say they'd vote for her and don't during the primary, they're fuckasses and can be called out as such. Also the people who vote for her specifically because she's a woman of color. Her skin color and gender are not important. Furthering progressive ideals of "kids and poor people not dying", "healthcare should be between the person and their medical team, not including insurance and landlords", "not having to choose between eating, seeing a doctor, and housing/utilities", and so forth.
Is she perfect? No but the enemy of good is perfect so we need to push for progress, not perfection. We also need to be aware of how any chosen progressive candidate will be maligned and be able to combat it. The red scare is still a factor in today's time as are racism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity. People automatically shut down upon certain words or ideas without listening to the actual content being said. There is no trying to understand, only soundbites and tweets and headlines.
Anyway, back to point. She's a hard sell to the average idiot. Doesn't mean we can't try though. The opportunity is there to push for more progressive movement
The word "billionaire" exists because "slave owner" had a negative connotation.
Here's the relevant quote from the article:
“You can’t earn a billion dollars,” Ocasio‑Cortez said. “You just can’t earn that. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that.”
About the only billionaires that I might excuse are artists, who take a blank page, or a black canvas, and write song, or a book, or create some work of art out of their thin air, using only the ideas in their head. If they can create something out of their head, and get enough people pay them for it, then they deserve the money.
The problem is, in order to transfer than money from the fan to the artist, especially in massive amounts, it usually takes some gargantuan corporation that does all the exploiting on the part of the artist.
So while the artist wasn't exploitive in the creation of his art, his distribution company that collected the money for him, certainly was.
IMO, I think that artists, like any other person, should have wealth and income limits imposed on them. No one should be rich enough to buy influence, and artists would be especially dangerous if they had mogul money and the ability to popularize ideas through their works. JK Rowling, Ronald Reagan, Kanye West, Alex Jones, and others come to mind.
The answer isn't to make artists rich, but rather to eliminate poverty and provide a baseline of living that allows anybody to succeed at life.
Valid.
No one deserves to be a billionaire. Most artists are not wealthy in their lifetime. In fact, most art is never even sold. It is so strange that we are so addicted to money that saying an artist deserves billions makes sense to people.
I didn't say that artists deserve to be billionaires. I said that if an artist writes a song, and enough people buy that song to make him a billionaire, at he hasn't done it by exploiting thousands of workers, and keeping profits that should have been shared with those workers. He got rich because people were willing to buy his ideas.
However, I also acknowledged while his side of the process may be exploitation-free, the side that actually distributes that song in the marketplace is NOT exploitation-free.
I'm not excusing any billionaires, I'm just saying there's a big difference between wealthy artists, and people whose business was conceived with exploitation baked into the business plan from the start.
Sorry, I was not trying to make it out like you said that. Just generally that people are so obsessed with money it has perverted their view of art. Art is not about making money even if a few people successfully do this. It is about expression.
Trying to make art about money is a perversion which can be seen on platforms like Spotify where artists now pay more than streamers to get their music heard. This is not art/expression, it is commercialization.
While I am not against artist trying to sell their works, I am against corporations stealing and taking the lions share of the profits. Think musicians who don't own their works or graphic artists that regularly get ripped off by corporations.
Corporations are so addicted to greed they are even trying to cut out the small portion of profits given to artists with AI and all signs seem to indicate they are going to be wildly successful pushing slop without any human artists.
This, of course, is not the end of art by any means.
Most actors and singers aren't successful just because they have talent, it's because they have the right connections in Hollywood.
You can't move up that high financially and be a honest person. Some people do get lucky by having a great idea or business model at the right time. What keeps them there is they can look around at others struggling and justify "I deserve this more." Than continue to exploit as much as they can to keep it.
i think notch is the epitome of "getting lucky". He made a game he loved, MS bought it for billions and now he's sitting pretty doing whatever the fuck he wants.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
I couldn't access the site with protonvpn but removepaywalls fixed it.
Agreed, it is impossible. Hedgies should be immediately punished and pay reprimands for the rest of their lives