Zohran Mamdani says 'I don't think we should have billionaires'
Zohran Mamdani says 'I don't think we should have billionaires'
Mamdani, the presumptive Democratic nominee to be the next mayor of New York and a self-identified democratic socialist, said Sunday billionaires contribute to inequality.
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What is the other sides' argument for why we SHOULD have billionaires?
Genuinely asking if they have anything tough to contend with or is it just another critical avoidance of theirs?because
I usually get some variation of “They worked hard and deserve the reward. We shouldn’t take that away from them, they earned it fairly.” Yes, it’s infuriating.
The argument for billionaires is "why should the government be allowed to set arbitrary caps on the amount of wealth you can accumulate" which I generally agree with, but it's clear that wealth hoarding has become a problem. Maybe we say that the most you can keep is 1 billion. Once per year, any personal wealth over 1 billion is surrendered. So you can earn as much money as you want, but you need to spend it or surrender it.
I can imagine an argument for certain artists that are so beloved that their art sells globally or they entertain at a massive scale. Think Taylor Swift, or LeBron James. You can wrangle over the specifics of any individual, of course, but in theory that seems reasonable to me on the face of it. I can also imagine a persuasive argument for a business tycoon that builds up his workforce along with his own coffers and keeps them wanting for nothing. But the circumstances around that are pretty far fetched as far as the typical sociopathic billionaire tycoon goes.
AFAIK even seemingly successful musicians often don't really make out with much cash. They incur a lot of costs even under the most "honest" industry contracts. Then there are cases of getting blatantly scammed like the Backstreet Boys or George Clinton.
I'd imagine it's just the argument for capitalism. You know, profit incentive increasing efficiency and productivity and all that. Now this stuff is true to an extent (though a lot of politically active Lemmy likes to pretend otherwise), but all the good stuff happens before a single person reaches a billion dollars so if that's the idea it would pretty much fall flat on its face.
What is the other sides' argument for why we SHOULD have billionaires?
They think they'll get a chance to bootstrap themselves into being one.