this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
549 points (93.2% liked)
Political Memes
5054 readers
1813 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Like Buffet, Bill Gates has been publicly supportive of increased taxes for the rich. One could argue that he should disperse his wealth without being forced to, but one could also argue that if every good rich person gave away their money, without the bad rich people being forced to, we would only have bad rich people controlling our politicians. One could also argue that a good rich person can invest in good things that the public run government would not be able to or willing to. For instance vaccinating the entire world to make tuberculosis extinct would never be supported by the US government as a majority of americans don't care about the poor in other countries and don't want to pay for it. I find the whole "all rich people are evil" arguement to not hold up to pragmatic logic.
On this note, Bill Gates started a club for billionaires in which the only requirement to join was to donate enough of your fortune during the time you're in the club that you're not longer a billionaire.
So he kind of checks every box here in your sentence, for better or for worse.
The argument is basically just that there's not much of a way to make a billion dollars, as a relatively arbitrary metric, without resulting to unethical means, and trying to make up for it with ethical strategies afterwards is kind of a losing game, you're starting from behind. There's rent-seeking behavior and the ownership of the means of production yadda yadda ya, but really, it's just that the rich tend to hold a large portion of undemocratic power, control over other people. You can maybe say it's democratic on the basis that people "voted with their dollar" to make them rich or some shit, but that's kind of a stupid chain of logic and I just want to bash it without contestation right now.
I think the counterpoint to "we would only have rich people controlling our politicians", would be, we should not have lobbying, you know. Nobody should be controlling our politicians, sort of thing. Or, we should all equally be controlling our politicians, I guess. Which isn't really something that I've seen any of these guys trying to get politicians to do, and I don't think it'd be effective if they did, because it would be both against their own self-interest, so there's a selection bias against that, and it'd be against the interest of the politician that wants to make money, so there would be a selection bias against that. You're also getting a selection bias for the politicians and the rich in the form of, they both probably believe the system works, or, they both believe that money being allocated to someone generally means that person is capable, and is simply valuable to the economy. If they didn't believe either of those, the chances that they find themselves in their positions goes down.
Bill Gates supports higher taxes for the rich, that is true. However, he does not support a taxation policy that would eliminate billionaire status.