Thursday, February 7, 2019

New York Times Columnist Calls for Abolishing Billionaires

It is getting absolutely crazy out there and I blame the election of President Trump.

The masses, never deep thinkers, are associating the buffoon Trump with capitalism and see the only alternative as the asset-grabbing socialists and their central planning.

Now, one of the hip followers of trending socialism, the NYT columnist Farhad Manjoo, is calling for the end of billionaires:
Billionaires should not exist — at least not in their present numbers, with their current globe-swallowing power, garnering this level of adulation, while the rest of the economy scrapes by...

Abolishing billionaires might not sound like a practical idea, but if you think about it as a long-term goal in light of today’s deepest economic ills, it feels anything but radical. Instead, banishing billionaires — seeking to cut their economic power, working to reduce their political power and attempting to question their social status — is a pithy, perfectly encapsulated vision for surviving the digital future.

Billionaire abolishment could take many forms. It could mean preventing people from keeping more than a billion in booty, but more likely it would mean higher marginal taxes on income, wealth and estates for billionaires and people on the way to becoming billionaires. These policy ideas turn out to poll very well, even if they’re probably not actually redistributive enough to turn most billionaires into sub-billionaires.

More important, aiming to abolish billionaires would involve reshaping the structure of the digital economy so that it produces a more equitable ratio of superrich to the rest of us.
He then asks this question:
But the adulation we heap upon billionaires obscures the plain moral quandary at the center of their wealth: Why should anyone have a billion dollars, why should anyone be proud to brandish their billions, when there is so much suffering in the world?
There is an answer.

It just so happens that the first episode of the second season of "Robert Wenzel Talks Economics" is about how dangerous these asset grabs are. Coming soon: Season 2, Episode 1 "Capitalism, Crony Capitalism and Inequality."

-RW 

3 comments:

  1. Investment fund manager and Capitalist Pig owner Jonathan Hoenig's 2015 prediction -- that the orange liar and con man would be the face of capitalism for at least a generation if he won the election instead of Hitlery, has come to pass.

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  2. "Why should anyone have a billion dollars, why should anyone be proud to brandish their billions, when there is so much suffering in the world?"

    This shows no intellectual curiosity to ask the more important question, namely, why is there so much suffering in the world?

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  3. One of my acquaintances posted on twitter that all billionaires are thieves. Even Oprah. I really want to ask him how she is a thief and then ask if he believes taxation is theft.

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