Moving to: m/AskMbin!

People who hoard more money than they can spend in several lifetimes while people are literally dying in the streets cannot be good. These things are mutually exclusive.

I don't mean doctor-making-150k-a-year rich, I mean properly rich with millions to billions of dollars.

I firmly believe there are no ways to become "properly" rich that don't require you to be a bad person.

To get out of that "doctor-making-150k-a-year" category you need some combination of greed, exploitative practices, manipulating broken capitalist systems, nepotism, ruthlessness, corruption, bribery, and outright lying.

I find this take so hypocritical.

I bet you have more food than some people. Are you giving it to them?

You have a roof over your head, other people don’t. Are you giving it to them?

You most likely have more money than others, considering your access to the internet and ability to think up this post - are you donating all of your excess that isn’t going to your bills and food?

Calling it “hoarding” is just intentionally vilifying having money. Are some rich people bad? Absolutely. Are they bad because they’re rich? No. Do they have an obligation to give their money away? Also no.

No.

I think if a good person were to amass half a billion dollars they would spent enough of it on charity that they could never become a billionaire. So there are no good billionaires, but perhaps a few good millionaires moving to ex-millionaire.

I'm probably more on the extreme than most people here but I don't completely agree with some of the things others say on here. I do see that in our system, the kind of person and the things that you have to do to attain that kind of money requires that you be a sociopath. There are certain points on the path to that kind of wealth where you consciously make decisions that are unethical.

What that looks like is making the conscious decision to fire thousands of people, real people who have families to feed, health insurance they may depend on their employment which in the end which ultimately simply boils down to wanting to have a bigger profit margin.

I mean even just thinking about it—when you have
much more money than anything for one single person to do with, why hoard it when there's so much you can do in the world with it? The moment you begin to care for things beyond yourself is the moment you realize that no matter how much money in the world you attain, there still would never be enough left over for you to be able to be wealthy.

I think a mistake in thought you might be making is that people are not simply "good" or "bad." I 100% agree with @UziBobuzi that hoarding more wealth than you or your descendants could ever reasonably spend is a "bad thing." And maybe that's a "very bad thing," that would tend to cast a dark shadow on other "good" things the person might do. Still, those good things are not erased; they still exist, and should not be subtracted.

Another important concept is that, while there is a lot of overlap, a person's actions are not the entirety of who they are. We all have bad habits, and regrets, and other shortcomings that we are fully aware of and have difficulty rising above. That doesn't make us bad people, it just makes us people.

Beyond the already presented arguments from the utilitarian perspectives and the perspective of active wealth accumulation that requires a lack of morals, I want to offer a perspective on the control that this much money gives you. Since a billion dollars, or even further, the billions of dollars that billionaires have are hard to imagine/visualize, here is a handy visualization which i urge you to scroll through. (you have to scroll to the right)

Now, beyond being simply astonishingly awful because of the amount of good those people choose not to do, it's evil (I dont like the word in this context but I lack a better one) because of the control these people gain. Having billions of dollars is not just money in the sense you and I think about it. Its control, its capital. Simply through its absurd quantities it gains the emergent property of influencing millions and billions of peoples lifes, often in subtle ways like where factories are built or how resources are allocated, decisions that should by all means have democratic legitimization but are controlled by individuals like feudal lords.

And beyond that, this power influences elections through voters or through plain and simple corruption. But not the kind of small level nepotism we think of where a company wins a bid for some building, but corrpution on a level that influences state legislature and millions of people for decades to come.

No

Many rich people fall into the trap of legitimizing their wealth to themselves the wrong way. Everyone, not just super rich people, had some help during their career. Everyone got lucky at some point too. Connections, inheritances, family friends and so on.

But the wrong way to go about it is to just say, if I can do it and so many others cant, it must be their fault. They must be lazy or stupid or both…

Even people who just won the lottery, so actually really just got lucky, can fall into that trap. And the they start to treat others according to their net worth.

Good people don't become super wealthy because once they get enough to live comfortably they start sharing it with people around them or people that need help.

millions to billions of dollars.

2 million and two billion are different worlds.

How rich are we talking about?

In theory, it's defenitely possible. Let's imagine a person who inherited 1 billion dollars. How their parents made that wealth has no impact on the morality of the person who inherited it. The only thing that matters is what they do with the wealth afterward.

While your argument is that a good person would give it away, that's a rather short-sighted approach. If instead, they invest that wealth at a 10% return and donate 99% of the returns to charity after 11 years, they have contributed more than if they would have immediately given away their entire wealth. But they are still considered a billionaire. And they are still making 1 million a year for themselves.

So just because someone has a high net worth doesn’t prevent them from being good. And you don’t have to play any “games” or exploit anyone to stay rich. Obviously, the exact numbers might not match the oversimplified version I presented. So instead of 11 years, it might take 15-20 years to give more than donating everything at once. But if set up correctly this could pay out money to people in need forever. Adjust the payments so that the initial sum keeps up with inflation and you could in theory pay out around 70 million in today's money a year for eternity.

If you're a billionaire, you didn't get there through hard work and perseverance, you got there by lying, cheating and manipulating others. There's not one single person in this world who has personally created a billion dollars worth of value. Not Donald Trump, not Elon Musk, not Bill Gates or the Waltons, nobody. The wealth they hoard is generated collectively by their ideas, the work and contributions of their employees, taxpayer funded services like roads and railways that facilitate their ability to do business, the products they use that are produced by other people and companies, etc. If you're a billionaire, that means somebody else along the way (or many somebodies) isn't getting their fair share.

Jesus said "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God".

And then rich Christians made up some shit about an "eye of the needle gate" to justify keeping their wealth.