You are reading a single comment by @chrisbmx116 and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
chrisbmx116
Bear in mind that we're talking about billionaires here, so your example is hardly relevant. A CEO being paid roughly 10x their lowest-paid employee is not outside what most people would consider reasonable. You're also missing the fact that tax is not the only thing that matters. 10 people with 20k will spend all of that on normal living expenses, so that cash goes back into the economy. A large chunk of that 200k might just be saved or invested in assets, so that income doesn't recirculate.
When it comes to actual billionaires, there's a few things that can be said in response to that radio presenters comments. Firstly, we should look very cautiously at anyone who actually aspires to be a billionaire. Lots of people manage to be very entrepreneurial and do positive things in the market and society by being motivated to be merely very rich (i.e., in the 10s of millions), rather than obscenely wealthy. When you get to be a billionaire you start being able to buy things that money simply shouldn't be able to buy, such as elections or substantial policy realignments to benefit you or your company. If someone aspires to this, rather than just being able to live a luxurious lifestyle, we should be asking why.
It's also the case that the excessively wealthy pay proportionally less tax than the rest of us. This is partly because often those billions come from appreciation in the value of assets. Where those assets are naturally limited (like land or property) that leads to rentier capitalism, which is hugely unjust and corrosive, but more generally we should maximally tax the money that is easiest to make (i.e., assets appreciating) and minimally tax money that is hard to make (i.e., through labour). The fact that we fail to do this and therefore have billionaires is, as @cozey said, a policy failure.
Finally, to paraphrase Nick Hannauer, there is something fundamentally toxic about there being a small group of people in a society with essentially unlimited power. What that radio presenter made glaringly obvious is that when you have people with that much money your whole worldview can become skewed to making them happy so they don't take their money overseas, rather than actually working to make most people's lives better. You cannot run a society if it panders to the whims of a small number of people and you can't run a society-enhancing capitalist economy that way. A robust economy cannot be designed to survive on the decision of a few people to buy, say, a second mega-yacht, it should be a broad based system which thrives on the possibility of everyone having a fair chance of accruing capital.
So, yes, people with (that much) money = bad.