this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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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.
I kind of agree that many super rich get their wealth through unscrupulous means. As a counter point, there do exists many ways to become super rich that are not unethical. Divorce, inheritance, lottery winner, revolutionary technology, extremely popular book etc. Once a person gets a certain amount of wealth, simply not spending it too much and leaving it in the market will in the long term leave you one of the wealthiest people.
See this is the thing that always gets me about the critique, right, is, say you had this money foisted upon you. You could give it to the market, right, spend it all on random crap and just kind of leave it, but that's obviously bad because the market sucks and that's a pretty bad way to get rid of your money generally. You can invest a good chunk of it and be set for life/multiple generations, and that's good for your own self-interest and those around you, but bad in the sense that you've taken this excess money or power and you're not doing anything with it, you're just throwing it at the market and kind of living off the return. Hands off capitalism, where you're a hands off capitalist, so, you have the same problems with the system there. Go outside the market, then, start investing it in nonprofits and stuff like that. That's bad, because you both make no money and nonprofits generally kind of suck, and you'll probably drain your money pretty quickly hitting at the symptoms of problems, whack a mole while worse capitalists drain your wallet by basically forcing you to bear their outsourced societal costs.
I think maybe the best strategy would be to start a business in something that you actually give two shits about, maybe a co-op, not exploiting anyone, not leaving it to the market, and still investing your money, and then take any excess and pump it into unions, probably the thing you'd want is to pump it into the unions of your competition. Obviously unions can still be really shitty and union capture can still exist and be really bad, but I'm not sure how much you're escaping that unless you're donating to like, really really direct relief efforts, like housing the homeless (not a bad idea), or [redacted] which will get you killed. I think, certainly, starbucks union, or what have you, is probably better than not.
There are better ways to spend money, than what's conventionally done, but there are not many good ways to spend money. I've not even seen anyone high-profile really attempt to spend money like that in a way that actually makes sense, so it's either just, incredibly uncommon, or maybe we never hear about it, or all of the ideas to spend it basically just suck.