Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[evolution]

/.../
This may be thee ACTUAL Truth, from one perspective. But until you can propose, properly and correctly, who "those" are EXACTLY, then maybe what you are imagining here is NOT as true as you would like to believe it is.

I'll try to make this more concise.

Would it be correct to summarize your stance as follows:
It is not possible for others to take away one's power.
One's power is always one's own.
One may give others one's power, but others cannot take it away from one.

Is this your stance?

No.

[baker]

No.

Then could you state your stance in brief?

[Belindi]

In the 1930s A solitary man driving a large brand new Rolls Royce car was touring a poverty stricken region of the Scottish Highlands. And the beautiful car became stuck on a boggy road. Nearby was a ragged gang of roadmen who approached the Rolls to offer grudging help.
The man in the Rolls Royce got out of his car and said cheerfully to the roadmen " I paid for it from a win on the Football pools" . Then the roadmen were all smiles and congratulations.

[HJCarden]

The rich have no obligation to be moral, their only obligation I believe is to follow the laws. The aim is to find methods to legally and efficiently limit their power.

But they are the ones who make the laws (even if often indirectly). Why would they push for laws that would be to their disadvantage?

That is precisely where the rest of us have to come in, and ensure that the legal processes cant be completely overridden by these folks.

[HJCarden]

Thinking about "the pie" leads me to suggest that the heuristic approach to determining whether a billionaire is deserving or not would be to examine their relationship with taxation. I say relationship, because it will be no simple matter in most cases, yet it is only reasonable that a billionaire be given the opportunity to show, for example, that while they may pay little in the way of tax, their actions - which create jobs - have led to an overall increase in state taxation revenue (growing the pie). If, for example, they are buying businesses so as to reduce staffing levels, move production offshore, and hide their wealth offshore as well, then they will not be able to avoid the guillotine (or substitute your preferred punishment). Remember what is being examined is whether that billionaire is STEALING from his own people. The people of a nation have a right to know what is happening with money which should be used for their benefit.

Of course the real problem, as ever, is the lack of political will to achieve possible reform. Banning or limiting political donations would help in that regard, but I see no way of preventing the private acts of hypocrisy which occur at the ballot box, where moderate, liberal, planet-lovers vote into office the very worst offenders against the planet and their people.

I agree a lot with your point about growing the tax base. I think something that opponents of free markets tend to gloss over in their crusade against the ultra wealthy of any society is how much of an economy can be contributed to a few certain capitalists which truly do improve the lives of a great many.

Tangentially, many a time I have heard opponents of capitalism and free market policies argue that the economy should not be favored over people's lives. However, to me it seems that production is so inextricably linked to the quality of life that we are able to enjoy today, that the economy in fact should be favored over lives. Take for instance the "sacrificing grandma for the stock market" phrase that has been consistently thrown around in regards to the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the global economic slowdown, something like 150 million MORE people worldwide now or will soon live on less than a dollar a day (read this somewhere, didn't verify, but makes sense to me). This is a level of poverty that is indeed deadly. People simply die quicker when they are this poor, and their quality of life is greatly adversely affected at this level of poverty. So if you look at this from a base utilitarian standpoint, yes it makes sense to sacrifice grandma for the stock market if you think of the total harm a massive economic slowdown can do to the world's population.

[evolution]

No.

Then could you state your stance in brief?

Also, you did not answer one of my six clarifying questions posed to you in that post but it appears now that you would like me to answer your clarifying question posed to me here now. To answer your question, Yes I could, but my 'views' are not a 'stance'. My view is; Those with less power are at the mercy of those with more power.

[ktz]

Lots of discussion has arisen recently in regards to the ethics of the super wealthy, i.e. should we allow billionaires to exist, and I have seen much conversation as to whether it is ethical for anyone to have that much money.

For me, the problem with the super wealthy does not come from how they achieve their money. There will always be problems of exploitation, and the emergence of the ultra rich in the 21st century does not mean to me that more people are being exploited, just that globalism has opened up the route for this wealth.

Rather, I take issue with the fact that through capitalism, these people have become ultra wealthy to the point where they wield significant power, political, economic, social and all the like. And this has been the issue with the ultra wealthy historically, the trust busters and so on back in American history, the issue arrises not out of a certain level of wealth, but the power that wealth creates.

So my main thrust against the argument that billionaires should not exist is that it is arbitrary to ascribe a level of wealth that should not be achievable, and this is just a slippery slope into state enforced equality of poverty. My counter is that something needs to be done to keep the powerful in check, as we use treaties to ensure peace between nations, the problem of billionaires is how to check their power.

My parameters for a solution are as follows:
Cannot be done by simply reducing their wealth
Cannot lead to "well if we take away billionaires, we shouldn't have millionaires either"
Cannot infringe on the personal right to the pursuit of happiness

Interested to hear anyone's ideas, critiques on my ideas and the parameters set forth.

Imagine we are playing a game where every Friday you are in charge of dividing a cake for a group of individuals. The catch is that if some unknown threshold of people fail to get enough cake, they will kill you and change who divides the cake. But the good news is that every week you get sent a bigger cake, and the people do not really notice that the cake is any bigger. One simple strategy would be to divide the cake into equal slices for each person every week. In the mid-20th century, two very evil cake divider communists said they would try that, but at the time their cakes hadn't grown big enough for everyone to have enough so they both ended up killing off lots of people. Now a lot of people get really scared of that strategy and freak out if you say you're going to try that again, so scratch that for now. Anyway, then in America in the 20th century, we tried enacting New Deal reforms where the individuals who get the most cake get taxed higher so they get less cake next week once they've had more cake than everyone else. This worked reasonably well for a while, but the top cake divider in the late 70s realized that didn't need to tax higher net cake individuals if they just tell everyone that the crumbs would trickle down off their cake slices. Because of deregulation in service of these supply-side cake reforms continuing through the 80s and 90s, now the vast majority of cake income no longer increases proportionally with the growth of cake size. Add to that an artificially high capital gains rate and years of dedicated tax cuts from regulatory capture, and now the rich pay a lower tax rate than the middle class and working poor.

At this point in time, billionaires are not incentivized to behave in a way that benefits society. They are incentivized to accumulate wealth. The modern interpretation of the invisible hand was reliant on the Kuznets curve to ensure that accumulating wealth would also benefit society, but Piketty made the case back in 2015 that when the rate of return on capital is higher than growth, inherited wealth will outstrip earned wealth and the EKC is a fantasy. I may be somewhat bastardizing Piketty's point here but my understanding is essentially that the endgame goal for individuals and corporations alike is no longer to perform productive work or meet demand with supply, but instead to get a giant pile of cash by any means possible upon which they can sit like gluttonous dragons. Sometimes the individuals will get off their gold pile to buy sports franchises, create dark money PACs for regulatory capture, and develop media empires whose propaganda is beholden to their interests, and sometimes the corporations have to take a break to purchase competitors, tweet apologies for data breaches, get in a few sucks on the government bailout money teat, and change up their tax havens every now and then.

So I'll offer you an idea that may or may not fit with your parameters -- that our current implementation of money is outdated and needs to be overhauled to realign incentives towards productive and socially conscious behavior. Money became outdated first when we left the gold standard, and then it started becoming a serious liability when we developed infinitely trivially reproducible digital transfer of information. Soon, it's going to be worse than useless when robots and AI begin to perform all meaningful labor -- it will act as a binding chain for individuals to work for the sake of work only. I mean, from the very beginning our current system of economics has some major zero-day vulnerabilities that have continued to prove very difficult to patch: regulatory capture, externalities, privatized gains with socialized losses, monopoly power, price fixing, systemic risk, political instability due to the volatility of market corrections, and another problem particularly highlighted by Adam Smith himself, which I'll quote from an old Atlantic article on the subject: "economic inequality distorts people’s sympathies, leading them to admire and emulate the very rich and to neglect and even scorn the poor." I mean, I don't consider myself some kind of fanatic against capitalism -- I just can't figure out why so many people seem intent on going sailing in a boat that seems like it has a bunch of holes in it. I'll add a reminder from the same article: "Smith states, explicitly and repeatedly, that the true measure of a nation’s wealth is not the size of its king’s treasury or the holdings of an affluent few but rather the wages of 'the laboring poor.'" Does anyone think he would be proud of the billionaires of today?

So getting to your question, what does a solution look like? In short, I imagine the most palatable solution that we will realistically end up with is some combination of China's social credit score system (hopefully one that uses carrots instead of the crazy 1984 stick that's happening over there) to prevent the tragedy of the commons and encourage socially conscious behavior, and then UBI to prevent social instability and unrest.

If we are talking pie-in-the-sky, I do think an optimal solution will make several updated distinctions about money. One aspect of money is its representation of physical goods like food, water, and utilities where not everyone can have enough, and services like maintaining the robots that do all the work -- whether this score is managed by the invisible hand or some centralized algorithm doesn't matter to me as long as it seems egalitarian enough that nobody is starving or whatever. Separate out a different score that represents status. Celebrity culture can be beholden to this number -- we don't need to pay them exorbitant salaries that inflate prices on goods and services for everyone else, when really we just need a number to represent who is hot and who is not in society. Let this number be used for the purchase of scarce luxuries, and hopefully you will also attract the competitive egos of the hoarders and high finance traders to do something useful for society instead of just being a bunch of gambling addict arbitrage vampires. And there should be a third score should be earned by demonstrating the capacity to make good decisions in service of the common welfare -- power. These are independent functions that are currently conflated into the same fantasy pie-in-the-sky number -- I mean, it's not like we have the gold standard anymore where money actually represents some physical quantity in the world. It's literally just a made up digitial number now.

And then, call me a communist but pretty soon, when robots take over all the work, shouldn't we check and see if the cake is big enough now that everyone can get a slice?

[baker]

Also, you did not answer one of my six clarifying questions posed to you in that post but it appears now that you would like me to answer your clarifying question posed to me here now. To answer your question, Yes I could, but my 'views' are not a 'stance'. My view is; Those with less power are at the mercy of those with more power.

Like I said, I wanted to make the conversation more concise and to clarify first what might have been a misunderstanding on my part, before continuing.

If something like this
It is not possible for others to take away one's power.
One's power is always one's own.
One may give others one's power, but others cannot take it away from one.
is not your view, then I don't understand what you meant when you said earlier:

See, to me there is NO real actual 'power disparity' among you adult human beings, other than the 'power disparity', which you give to, and take from, each other.

These people only have, so called, "power" because it is people like 'you' who has, and is giving, "them", so called, "power".
These people only have, so called, "power" if 'you', people, give it to "them". They do NOT have any, ACTUAL, real 'power' over 'you' nor "others".

[evolution]

Also, you did not answer one of my six clarifying questions posed to you in that post but it appears now that you would like me to answer your clarifying question posed to me here now. To answer your question, Yes I could, but my 'views' are not a 'stance'. My view is; Those with less power are at the mercy of those with more power.

Like I said, I wanted to make the conversation more concise and to clarify first what might have been a misunderstanding on my part, before continuing.

If something like this
It is not possible for others to take away one's power.
One's power is always one's own.
One may give others one's power, but others cannot take it away from one.
is not your view, then I don't understand what you meant when you said earlier:

See, to me there is NO real actual 'power disparity' among you adult human beings, other than the 'power disparity', which you give to, and take from, each other.

These people only have, so called, "power" because it is people like 'you' who has, and is giving, "them", so called, "power".
These people only have, so called, "power" if 'you', people, give it to "them". They do NOT have any, ACTUAL, real 'power' over 'you' nor "others".

That is not my view, so I acknowledge that you do not understand what I meant when I said that.

Now, as you do not understand what I meant, and if you Truly do want to understand what I meant, then I very strongly suggest that you just ask me a very specific clarifying question, instead of just informing that you do not understand what I meant, when I said some thing.

[Belindi]

The context within which the individual got his wealth is what makes the wealth immoral or not so bad, or even quite good really.

[evolution]

The context within which the individual got his wealth is what makes the wealth immoral or not so bad, or even quite good really.

In what context/s could an individual get their wealth and that context be quite good really?

[baker]

That is not my view, so I acknowledge that you do not understand what I meant when I said that.

Now, as you do not understand what I meant, and if you Truly do want to understand what I meant, then I very strongly suggest that you just ask me a very specific clarifying question, instead of just informing that you do not understand what I meant, when I said some thing.

At this point, I am too much at a loss. Perhaps further discussion with others will make things clearer.

[evolution]

That is not my view, so I acknowledge that you do not understand what I meant when I said that.

Now, as you do not understand what I meant, and if you Truly do want to understand what I meant, then I very strongly suggest that you just ask me a very specific clarifying question, instead of just informing that you do not understand what I meant, when I said some thing.

At this point, I am too much at a loss. Perhaps further discussion with others will make things clearer.

Okay.

[baker]

The context within which the individual got his wealth is what makes the wealth immoral or not so bad, or even quite good really.

In what context/s could an individual get their wealth and that context be quite good really?

The way, for example, Bill Gates earned his fortune. In his case, it had a lot to do with there being a major economic niche (that then grew into a major category) and some luck. In his case, the major factors because of which he was able to become so wealthy were not in his control.

The people who seem to have the most control over earning wealth are conmen, thieves, and robbers.

[evolution]

In what context/s could an individual get their wealth and that context be quite good really?

The way, for example, Bill Gates earned his fortune.

And how was this way actually 'quite good really'?

Who was 'this way' good for, exactly?

In his case, it had a lot to do with there being a major economic niche (that then grew into a major category) and some luck. In his case, the major factors because of which he was able to become so wealthy were not in his control.

Are you here 'trying to' suggest that that person had ABSOLUTELY NO control over lessening the amount they charged you for the products that you bought from them?

The people who seem to have the most control over earning wealth are conmen, thieves, and robbers.

And EVERY adult human being who earns some sort of monetary wealth is, in a sense, a thief, a con artist, and a robber. For EVERY one of these human beings who deprives another one of some money, which that one could have used for food or for medicine, which would have then helped them or someone else to sustain a longer or healthier life, then they are stealing from another.