Barack Obama: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Bernie Sanders: “I don’t think that billionaires should exist.”
AOC: “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars. People become billionaires only by exploiting workers and preying on vulnerable and less privileged people.”
This mindset has become pandemic. It has entered the mind space of virtually anyone left of center and hasn’t let go. So appealing is this argument, so supportive is it of their subjective interpretation of reality that it festers and metastasizes. It won’t let loose. The more they repeat it, the more real it becomes. The more real it becomes the more savage a potential response is validated.
Look, I’m not here in support of billionaires. I’m really, really not. I don’t worship them. I don’t hold them in any higher regard than myself or any of my neighbors. None of us are billionaires BTW.
For all I know every billionaire on the planet is a world class A-hole. It really doesn’t matter. Actually, for argument’s sake, let’s go ahead and assume for this thought experiment that, in fact, every billionaire on the planet and in history is, in fact, a world class A-hole. Just a greedy, malevolent pig who cares nothing about any human on the planet other than themselves.
Let’s just say that’s true. And who knows…..maybe it is?
Let’s also assume that today’s Leftists’ interpretation is objectively correct, economically. Billionaires only amount that level of wealth through unhinged greed and the willful, calculated exploitation of humans less privileged than they.
If that’s true, and we’re assuming that it is, am I the only person in the room who is noticing an immense, once in a lifetime circumstance of opportunity?
If these corporations, led by greedy old white men, are operated in such a manner that those nasty humans have the ability to siphon ludicrous amounts of capital off the top solely for themselves, then wouldn’t a competitive organization, providing the same service(s), in the same market(s) NOT led by a greedy old white man find itself at an historic advantage? Not having to fund the billion-dollar appetite of the 1%er at the top?
Couldn’t you, you being literally anyone, found a company, operate it exactly the same as Evil Inc. and just simply NOT endow the owner (yourself) with billions in capital and the team of apparently white male executives exorbitant salaries, bonuses and stock options and absolutely demolish the competition? Couldn’t you, in a market free from hindrance, absolutely dominate with the competitive advantage you could enjoy by saving literally billions of dollars?
Why is this not happening? Serious question. If your economic interpretation is accurate and true, why is this not happening all over the world?
Even if taken to a lesser extreme. If billionaires have exploited everyone, is there not one single adventurous and daring person out there willing to do the same thing for, I don’t know? Half a billion? Or even just three quarters of a billion? Some amount less than the current manipulative world class A-hole?
Can anyone help me understand this reality? If, in fact, the stated exploitative economic observation is true?
Or, is it really more likely that the people pushing this narrative are economically literate enough to know their statements are over simplified to the point of being untrue, or even, that they are flatly stating realities they know to be false simply for the purpose of playing politics to their base?
In reality. Wealth is created through the most efficient construction of value to any given market and any given consumer with free choice. Profit is a reward for coordinating resources in such a manner as to most efficiently supply the value any market prefers.
Naturally I take offense, like any other free market advocate, to those who have captured wealth by force and fiat (government contractors). But removing those realities from our current argument, wealth in any free marketplace can only be achieved in accordance with the value a service or product provider has created.
Labor itself, is an entirely separate and unique marketplace which is a derivative, but somewhat abstracted from the service or product the company produces.
It is related, no doubt. For instance, no company, anywhere, could afford to compensate an employee to a degree greater than the objective value their role creates for the organization. No company would remain in business. Outside of that however, skill sets and positions are bartered and bid up through voluntary actions of workers and employers within the economy and are just as closely tied to principles of supply and demand as any other product, period.
This really is an open question. For AOC, Bernie, Obama, whomever to answer. If their observations are consistent with objective reality, then where is the competition? Why doesn’t Obama himself (he has free time now, as well as a mountain of seized treasure) create a fulfillment service to compete with Amazon and simply NOT exploit his workers? Because he is, after all, a decent human being who wouldn’t do that, right?
His inherent competitive advantage coupled with his superior drive and intellect should allow him the perfect recipe to literally wipe the floor with Amazon as well as freeing all those poor workers from their existence mired in exploitation.
Why does he not do this? Does he not care? Do any of them?
So really, if you think about it, if these justice seekers really believe in their assertions (I can’t bring myself to believe that they do), then the greatest villains in their own narrative, are themselves.
If you glare zealously at justice long enough, eventually, justice glares back at you.
