Billionaire hating is an example of thinking in villains. It's a very human impulse to find someone to blame, but it's not a great way to solve problems.
“ The good news is they have plenty of money and are willing, at the end of the day, to cough some of it up to help build a fairer society.”
I’m one of those rotten conservatives who is all for a fairer society. My problem is with Progressive thinking, which ostensibly is for the same thing. Celebrating victimhood rather than achievement, excusing criminality rather than lauding citizenship, presuming racist bad motives for criticism of manifestly bad conduct in lieu of rational work for improvement, and so on and on.
I know of a substantial, vocal group of conservatives who decry MAGA and Trump, who speak loudly. I don’t know of any group of liberals who are similarly unrelenting in condemnation of broad range of destructive Progressive ideas. A few chip at the margins, which is great, but not nearly enough for effective opposition.
I usually love Matt's "let's actually look at the details" takes that puncture frothy lefty slogans. But I disagree with this one.
This complaint isn't about wealth - that billionaires have too much and we don't have enough -- it's about stewardship, that they have tremendous power and are not wielding that power responsibly, for the common good. How do we know?
1. Americans generally feel the country is going in the wrong direction
2. Billionaires have seen their wealth grow substantially over this same period.
3. Billionaires hold, and from it looks like, have gained tremendous non economic power in that time. That's certainly the perception. Ask people who has more power, one of the top 500 billionaires or their Congressman/woman and they will say the billionaire.
And this isn't an accident. They sought that power. So now, people are demanding some accountability. And this goes well beyond growing their own companies and creating economic growth, good services. You break it you buy it. Fix it!
Where is the patriotism? Where is the concern for the common good? Specifically, where do we see them sacrificing their own, personal interests for the sake of the group? And donating money they don't need and can easily earn again doesn't count.
To quote Matt's excellent post from yesterday. _Where is the HONOR_?
What do the kids call it, ratioed? Ratio’d? Whatever it is, there’s a reason that this take isn’t doing so hot in the “likes” department and yet drawing a large amount of comments. But instead of just saying, “bad take,” and moving on, I’m going to agree in part and disagree in part with your take, Matt (I haven’t read any of the other comments yet before writing this, so apologies if this has been articulated already).
First off, I think this take misses some of the very good reasons why people are angry at the billionaire class in America. As you mentioned, many of them have dumb ideas on politics or other societal problems and those are amplified in our discourse by the halo effect of having wealth; just because you are good (or lucky) at one thing, doesn’t mean you will be good at others, including politics and political thought.
Second, there are many very jarring and in-your-face examples of how billionaires / rich folks make things measurably worse for others while sparing themselves. A microcosm of this is that viral photo of Mark Zuckerberg with his laptop camera and microphone taped over. Sure, he acknowledges that privacy is a concern and that digital tools and services make privacy harder to come by, but then he creates and is chief executive over services that actively violate the privacy of millions or even billions of people for his own gain. The “some for me, none for thee” ethos that is so prevalent among prominent billionaires is a big reason why people despise them as a class.
Part of the social safety net, or good distributive properties, or whatever you might call it, is the idea that while everyone shares in the benefits, sometimes we all have to take some inconveniences. This is another area where “billionaires” do not look good; they seem to never take an inconvenience even when more and more of life is predicated on the fact that the masses are asked to take a bunch more inconveniences as part of everyday life.
“Billionaires” as a word has become a stand in for the pernicious aspects (like privacy violations) of everyday life that seem to be part of a larger and larger wealth gap and a seeming return to the Gilded Age. More and more about our society seems to revolve around money, and the influence that comes with money, and “billionaires” seem like they become winners writ large in that society, not just in the business or market in which they competed and won.
All that to say, you make some good points about the ad hominem and labeling at the end of this piece; a better frame for this might have been the tendency of the left in our country to attack a problem by labeling every person in a particular category as “bad,” instead of taking time to think about the problem and its sources and address those (ACAB, anyone?). However, the idea that ‘the world isn’t a zero-sum game’ is a pretty tone-deaf take at a time when affordability and generational backsliding is at the forefront of the consciousness of many.
Feel like this really dodges the responsibility billionaires have as the people who have benefited the most from our society. The anger at billionaires isn't because they hate other people having more money than them, it's because they feel like their institutions have failed them and the people in charge (or at least benefiting the most) aren't doing their jobs. If you're rich because you make really good widgets, that's fine, but if you're one of the 500 richest men in the world you have obligations to more than just widgets.
My parents get a physical copy of the Washington Post, and they do that - the Metro section is section D, but the coverage is pretty paltry and the culture/arts sections don't have much of a regional bent. The Metro section has shrunk over time.
Another frustration I have with the progressive "it's the billionaires" mentality is that if the US ever has the kind of extra-robust social programs and education spending that progressives want, the US has to tax the middle class too, or at least the upper-middle class.
Just "Tax the billionaires" is intellectually dishonest because though billionaires are astronomically rich compared to a regular person, even if you confiscated all their wealth, it's not a huge amount redistributed to all Americans.
Let's say we took $5 trillion from the country's billionaires, which is actually about 75% of their total wealth. $5 trillion distributed among all 340 million Americans is $15,000 per person. That's a lot of money to get in a lump sum, but it's just over one year of the country's average per pupil school spending. So it' is a lot, but it's also very little compared to the US's current federal+state+local spending. And realistically, we aren't going to tax 100% of billionaire net worth.
To sustain the spending that progressives want, you need to tax the middle class and maybe do as Scandinavia and make healthcare cheaper (new moms in Sweden and Denmark are sent home the day of delivery). Bernie Sanders sometimes admits that he needs to tax the middle class, but most progressives don't.
Billionaires also make a lot of people richer along with them in addition to providing a useful service. Jeff Bezos is worth $244 billion, but Amazon is worth $2.5 trillion. A lot of patient people got rich too off of Amazon, without doing any real work for that.
Agreed but we're going to get much more serious about redistribution if we want to avoid even more extreme future inequality: https://substack.com/home/post/p-182789127
The problem I have with billionaires isn't the high income but rather the passive accumulation of the wealth.
My household income is a bit under $300K with a child in day care in a relatively expensive DC suburb...but I already feel pretty rich! So my imagination at what one can do for oneself with large sums of money more or less completely runs out around $500M. At that point, you have your mansions and penthouses, yachts, private jets, servants, private boarding schools, expensive art...what else can you even buy? And that's still 3-5x short of $1B.
When billionaires do stuff with that money --- build hospitals, schools, and museums; establish research foundations; donate to charities --- that's good! (Though I'm still a bit uncomfortable with the idea of individuals having so much say over such large resource applications). But what I find completely incomprehensible is literally just sitting on multiple billions of dollars. If you could snap your fingers, singlehandedly help hundreds of thousands of people, be widely hailed as a hero, and suffer zero practical impact to your personal wealth, why wouldn't you?
Rare disagreement. The democrats need to return to class warfare and break up this concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. To do this they must moderate on cultural and energy issues. We are living through a second Gilded Age and I’m sorry but Bill Clinton style rhetoric of “rich people are great they should just pay higher taxes” isn’t going to cut it anymore.
This piece, and especially it's headline, is antagonizing to left of center people who aren't high-decouplers. That antagonism doesn't appear to be in service of any particularly worthy policy goal. I think this is a piece where Slow Boring is sacrificing influence within a broader coalition in order to gratify the readership's sense of intellectual superiority. Posting is Praxis and I'm very disappointed in this.
One of these four does not belong: "you need distributive institutions that . . . provides material resources to the elderly, sick, disabled, and to poor kids". Why the elderly? Sure, let them benefit from social security insurance to which they have contributed, but why are they inherently a special needy class? I think it is fair to say that the median septuagenarian is better off than any time in history and does not need by-right access to publicly-funded benefits. The truly needy, the sick, the disabled and poor kids, yes; but oldies like me, not necessarily.
This feels more like rage/click bait content that I wish Matt and Slow boring would preferably skip.
Better yet, M.Y. would make a stronger or better case than progressives do about the problems that billionaires might cause, beyond Elon has now lost it for commercial self-interested reasons.
Billionaire hating is an example of thinking in villains. It's a very human impulse to find someone to blame, but it's not a great way to solve problems.
“ The good news is they have plenty of money and are willing, at the end of the day, to cough some of it up to help build a fairer society.”
I’m one of those rotten conservatives who is all for a fairer society. My problem is with Progressive thinking, which ostensibly is for the same thing. Celebrating victimhood rather than achievement, excusing criminality rather than lauding citizenship, presuming racist bad motives for criticism of manifestly bad conduct in lieu of rational work for improvement, and so on and on.
I know of a substantial, vocal group of conservatives who decry MAGA and Trump, who speak loudly. I don’t know of any group of liberals who are similarly unrelenting in condemnation of broad range of destructive Progressive ideas. A few chip at the margins, which is great, but not nearly enough for effective opposition.
I usually love Matt's "let's actually look at the details" takes that puncture frothy lefty slogans. But I disagree with this one.
This complaint isn't about wealth - that billionaires have too much and we don't have enough -- it's about stewardship, that they have tremendous power and are not wielding that power responsibly, for the common good. How do we know?
1. Americans generally feel the country is going in the wrong direction
2. Billionaires have seen their wealth grow substantially over this same period.
3. Billionaires hold, and from it looks like, have gained tremendous non economic power in that time. That's certainly the perception. Ask people who has more power, one of the top 500 billionaires or their Congressman/woman and they will say the billionaire.
And this isn't an accident. They sought that power. So now, people are demanding some accountability. And this goes well beyond growing their own companies and creating economic growth, good services. You break it you buy it. Fix it!
Where is the patriotism? Where is the concern for the common good? Specifically, where do we see them sacrificing their own, personal interests for the sake of the group? And donating money they don't need and can easily earn again doesn't count.
To quote Matt's excellent post from yesterday. _Where is the HONOR_?
What do the kids call it, ratioed? Ratio’d? Whatever it is, there’s a reason that this take isn’t doing so hot in the “likes” department and yet drawing a large amount of comments. But instead of just saying, “bad take,” and moving on, I’m going to agree in part and disagree in part with your take, Matt (I haven’t read any of the other comments yet before writing this, so apologies if this has been articulated already).
First off, I think this take misses some of the very good reasons why people are angry at the billionaire class in America. As you mentioned, many of them have dumb ideas on politics or other societal problems and those are amplified in our discourse by the halo effect of having wealth; just because you are good (or lucky) at one thing, doesn’t mean you will be good at others, including politics and political thought.
Second, there are many very jarring and in-your-face examples of how billionaires / rich folks make things measurably worse for others while sparing themselves. A microcosm of this is that viral photo of Mark Zuckerberg with his laptop camera and microphone taped over. Sure, he acknowledges that privacy is a concern and that digital tools and services make privacy harder to come by, but then he creates and is chief executive over services that actively violate the privacy of millions or even billions of people for his own gain. The “some for me, none for thee” ethos that is so prevalent among prominent billionaires is a big reason why people despise them as a class.
Part of the social safety net, or good distributive properties, or whatever you might call it, is the idea that while everyone shares in the benefits, sometimes we all have to take some inconveniences. This is another area where “billionaires” do not look good; they seem to never take an inconvenience even when more and more of life is predicated on the fact that the masses are asked to take a bunch more inconveniences as part of everyday life.
“Billionaires” as a word has become a stand in for the pernicious aspects (like privacy violations) of everyday life that seem to be part of a larger and larger wealth gap and a seeming return to the Gilded Age. More and more about our society seems to revolve around money, and the influence that comes with money, and “billionaires” seem like they become winners writ large in that society, not just in the business or market in which they competed and won.
All that to say, you make some good points about the ad hominem and labeling at the end of this piece; a better frame for this might have been the tendency of the left in our country to attack a problem by labeling every person in a particular category as “bad,” instead of taking time to think about the problem and its sources and address those (ACAB, anyone?). However, the idea that ‘the world isn’t a zero-sum game’ is a pretty tone-deaf take at a time when affordability and generational backsliding is at the forefront of the consciousness of many.
Feel like this really dodges the responsibility billionaires have as the people who have benefited the most from our society. The anger at billionaires isn't because they hate other people having more money than them, it's because they feel like their institutions have failed them and the people in charge (or at least benefiting the most) aren't doing their jobs. If you're rich because you make really good widgets, that's fine, but if you're one of the 500 richest men in the world you have obligations to more than just widgets.
My parents get a physical copy of the Washington Post, and they do that - the Metro section is section D, but the coverage is pretty paltry and the culture/arts sections don't have much of a regional bent. The Metro section has shrunk over time.
DC needs a real local paper.
I think that billionaires seeking favor and politicians selling it is bad no matter who is involved, but you seem to only care when it's Trump.
Another frustration I have with the progressive "it's the billionaires" mentality is that if the US ever has the kind of extra-robust social programs and education spending that progressives want, the US has to tax the middle class too, or at least the upper-middle class.
Just "Tax the billionaires" is intellectually dishonest because though billionaires are astronomically rich compared to a regular person, even if you confiscated all their wealth, it's not a huge amount redistributed to all Americans.
Let's say we took $5 trillion from the country's billionaires, which is actually about 75% of their total wealth. $5 trillion distributed among all 340 million Americans is $15,000 per person. That's a lot of money to get in a lump sum, but it's just over one year of the country's average per pupil school spending. So it' is a lot, but it's also very little compared to the US's current federal+state+local spending. And realistically, we aren't going to tax 100% of billionaire net worth.
To sustain the spending that progressives want, you need to tax the middle class and maybe do as Scandinavia and make healthcare cheaper (new moms in Sweden and Denmark are sent home the day of delivery). Bernie Sanders sometimes admits that he needs to tax the middle class, but most progressives don't.
Billionaires also make a lot of people richer along with them in addition to providing a useful service. Jeff Bezos is worth $244 billion, but Amazon is worth $2.5 trillion. A lot of patient people got rich too off of Amazon, without doing any real work for that.
Agreed but we're going to get much more serious about redistribution if we want to avoid even more extreme future inequality: https://substack.com/home/post/p-182789127
The problem I have with billionaires isn't the high income but rather the passive accumulation of the wealth.
My household income is a bit under $300K with a child in day care in a relatively expensive DC suburb...but I already feel pretty rich! So my imagination at what one can do for oneself with large sums of money more or less completely runs out around $500M. At that point, you have your mansions and penthouses, yachts, private jets, servants, private boarding schools, expensive art...what else can you even buy? And that's still 3-5x short of $1B.
When billionaires do stuff with that money --- build hospitals, schools, and museums; establish research foundations; donate to charities --- that's good! (Though I'm still a bit uncomfortable with the idea of individuals having so much say over such large resource applications). But what I find completely incomprehensible is literally just sitting on multiple billions of dollars. If you could snap your fingers, singlehandedly help hundreds of thousands of people, be widely hailed as a hero, and suffer zero practical impact to your personal wealth, why wouldn't you?
The upper middle class is the real class enemy of the working class, but no one wants to talk about that
Rare disagreement. The democrats need to return to class warfare and break up this concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. To do this they must moderate on cultural and energy issues. We are living through a second Gilded Age and I’m sorry but Bill Clinton style rhetoric of “rich people are great they should just pay higher taxes” isn’t going to cut it anymore.
This piece, and especially it's headline, is antagonizing to left of center people who aren't high-decouplers. That antagonism doesn't appear to be in service of any particularly worthy policy goal. I think this is a piece where Slow Boring is sacrificing influence within a broader coalition in order to gratify the readership's sense of intellectual superiority. Posting is Praxis and I'm very disappointed in this.
One of these four does not belong: "you need distributive institutions that . . . provides material resources to the elderly, sick, disabled, and to poor kids". Why the elderly? Sure, let them benefit from social security insurance to which they have contributed, but why are they inherently a special needy class? I think it is fair to say that the median septuagenarian is better off than any time in history and does not need by-right access to publicly-funded benefits. The truly needy, the sick, the disabled and poor kids, yes; but oldies like me, not necessarily.
Based article
This feels more like rage/click bait content that I wish Matt and Slow boring would preferably skip.
Better yet, M.Y. would make a stronger or better case than progressives do about the problems that billionaires might cause, beyond Elon has now lost it for commercial self-interested reasons.