Moving to: m/AskMbin!

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.

Replace money with food. Can they be good?

I think a lot of these questions get into philosophical territory, which even when correct isn't particularly useful.

To me, how much wealth you have shouldn't be linked to anything but how much money you've made. The amount of money you e made should be proportional to the impact you've has on the world and others. I don't see a problem with someone being a billionaire if they did something that impacted a billion people lives and collected a dollar for it.

The bigger problem I see is that the current system rewards folks for doing anything that makes money. It also prioritizes money to the point that it's a virtue. So effectively you tell folks you matter more if you have more money, and don't put constraints on making money.

So I guess it's seems pretty true that "behind every great fortune is a great crime ", but it doesn't have to be the case. Which is. 100% useless statement. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

There are a handful of ex-millionaires who are no longer millionaires because they cared for others in a way they couldn't care for themselves. Only a handful of course, I would say they are good people.

You said it friend.

Funny, I was just watching this 'Some More News' video about what excessive wealth does to one's behaviors and morals. It's a bit of a watch but it's worth it. It seems that we humans have a lot of cognitive biases that occur regarding wealth. Evidently, and this is backed by experiment, it changes people in ways that are often not good for them or good for society.

At the upper end of the wealth scale, some multi billionaires, like Bezos' Ex, can't give away wealth faster than they accrue it through investments.

I don’t really look at it as how much money someone has, but rather how their money was earned. Just like in your example, if someone earns a lot of money because they have an in-demand skill like being a doctor, that’s awesome. You’re making money off your own labor and you’re adding value to the world.

If you make your money off of something like being a landlord, I’m going to respect that less because you aren’t really adding anything to the world, that property would exist without you renting it out and it’s only making you money because you had enough money (usually) to obtain it in the first place.

There’s room for nuance, of course, and you can be poor and still have gotten what you have via unethical means. All this is a generalization. Ultimately people deserve to be judged on an individual basis.

To me, being good is a function of altruism, while being bad is a function of egoism. This starts to get whacky when you do an altruistic thing for egoistic motives (ie donating for recognition) but it serves me as a baseline, and by that understanding, I would say yes, theoretically it is possible. However, in most scenarios I can think of, the way that a person becomes rich will be filled with egoistical decisions and thus be bad.

I am currently re-reading pedagogy of the oppressed by Freire though, and he brings up a good point: charity and being charitable will always lead to an unjust system, because the person feeing charitable, to be able to do that, needs to perpetuate a system in which they have more, and where there is a poor one to give to. So he would say not really because the being rich in and of itself is a symptom of an amoral system. And I have to say that's a good point

I think a lot of people here are confusing liquid assets/cash and genuinely believe millionaires and billionaires have this as pure cash in their bank accounts.

In reality, a lot of the money is tied up in non-liquid assets like property, physical assets, and stocks.

Sure these wealthy people can sell their shares for example, but if they sell too many at once, it will drop the value of the shares.

This is likely why Elon Musk can't afford to pay his bills. Not only is he a grifter and a loser, he's likely extremely cash poor and doesn't have enough liquidity to pay his debts. It's unlikely he'll ever admit this however.

Arguably, the majority of the money these billionares have is essentially speculative.

The more you think about how the economy works, the more you realize how much of a facade it really is. The stock market is a huge sham as well. Most stocks simply don't exist and the amount of value manipulation that occurs is astounding. It's all fake.

I think the sooner we begin to realize that the economy is one giant paper tiger and if we just start telling banks and other "money" purveyors that lock us into our flawed system to go fuck themselves, we can really take away the power from "the rich."

Are any of us good people? I think there is a level of selfishness in wealth that all of us engage in, and so I'm not willing to condemn people for having wealth that seems disproportionate to us. Is John Famousactor a bad person because he lives in a mansion worth ten times the average American's? Is Jake Factoryworker a bad person because he lives in a house worth ten times the world average? What matter of suffering can be alleviated in developing countries by our sacrifices in developed countries? At what level are our sins equal? Is it a matter of principle? Proportion?

The vast majority of people who 'make' millions do so by exploiting others, or by exploiting society to keep it, though, so fuck 'em.

Fuck no.

Can? Yeah, absolutely. Trouble is, most rich people use exploitative measures and fuck the Everyman over just to get as much money as possible.

millions to billions of dollars

Those two are very different sums of money.
But if you're very rich, you can't be a good person, there's no way to accumulate that kind of wealth without exploiting others.

But then again, we all live in capitalist societies that have been built on exploiting the shit out of others, so there's quite a bit of hypocrisy in my post.

The first example I thought of was Bill Gates. He amassed his wealth from a corporation that employed anti-competitive and immoral business practices. That makes him “bad”.

But what he has done with his fortune in the past few decades definitely doesn’t make him a bad person. Is his foundation and its goals the most efficient way to go from point A to point B? Probably not. Does that make him a bad person? Probably not, but it also doesn’t absolve him of sins he committed in the past.

One thing to realize - it is paper money, stocks, obligation, not actual resources that rich people own. If you actually spend billions on yourself, like building multiple palaces, huge and multiple yachts, then yes, you are consuming resources egoistically for yourself. If the money are "working", producing something that not for you to consume (also known as "invested"), and especially if you donate a lot for charities, then sure, you can be a good person.

I suppose it depends upon how it was made and what they do with it once they have it. If it's hoarding wealth for wealth's sake then, yea, probably an issue. It seems though, there are some that have obtained wealth and chose philanthropy.

yes, they can be - but why do they need to spend their money to benefit the public to be proven as "good"? are you yourself bad because you're unwilling to spend your money to benefit the public?

I dont see myself as greedy, but I am unwilling to spend my own money to help humanity. not even one iota

I think there is a line, and it's different for every person, but on one side of the line to lift other people up you would have to sacrifice your own life velocity, and on the other side of the line you have the power to lift tens of hundreds or thousands of people out of poverty without impacting more than a fraction of your children's inheritance.

I understand that there are issues with unchecked charity, for instance, if Bill Gates suddenly decided to take I don't know 25 billion dollars and distribute it equally to everybody in the 50% or below category of America which is about 250 million people, then he would basically be giving these people a hundred bucks each and saying "there I've done my job I gave up 30% of my net worth to help the poor" and that really wouldn't accomplish anything.

But that same $25 billion targeted at the bottom 1% of America I could do quite a bit but then there's overhead. Buying houses and repairing them for people to solve the homelessness problem or purchasing all of the debt that you could possibly buy for $25 billion and then forgiving that debt for the poorest people, those things could be better and do more for people but then you have administrative overhead finding and communicating with the debtors and negotiating with them, and then at the end of it it's likely that you would get a massive tax right off cuz you wouldn't do this as an individual you do it as a nonprofit, and then bill would get back 8 billion of that in tax rebates or so.

Like there is obviously a line on both sides and while I don't think people making you know even 200 Grand a year should put themselves at risk for homelessness in order to justify their financial status I also don't think that any billionaire has any right to strive to continue being a billionaire for the rest of their lives. If you cannot live a happy life on a billion dollars then you cannot live a happy life.

One thing to realize - it is paper money, stocks, obligation, not actual resources that rich people own. If you actually spend billions on yourself, like building multiple palaces, huge and multiple yachts, then yes, you are consuming resources egoistically for yourself. If the money are "working", producing something that not for you to consume (also known as "invested"), and especially if you donate a lot for charities, then sure, you can be a good person.

TL;DR: I think it is basically impossible to have that much money and claim it was earned ethically. Therefore it is basically impossible to be "good" without giving it away.

I think that it is borderline impossible to ethically accrue that much wealth. Is it possible? Maybe? I'd love to hear more examples of where a company owner made sure all their employees shared in the success when the company is large enough that the owner is that rich. I remember hearing that Google did right by their early employees, but it's been the exception that makes the rule and was also a long time ago in a different world where their ethics were different anyway.

And if you inherit that much wealth, what are the odds that it came to you free and clear of having been generated from exploiting others? Colonizing/"settling" and redlining making property values super high? Using eminent domain to tear down minority major communities for the sake of putting an interstate down the middle instead of risking devaluing the richest people's property more? Because odds are that even if they didn't cause the system they certainly benefited from it.

And unfortunately, "charity" is a horror in the USA because it's used as a very bad and very biased by rich people version of an actual welfare system that worked. The idea that there are food banks operating off donations while billionaires exist is horrific. If billionaires did not exist I frankly think that a lot more things like food banks (and public transit maybe?) would find themselves with funding.

I think the rich can be good, for a given value of “good”. If good is defined as a lack of self-centeredness, then improving the quality of life for the greatest number of people can be considered good.

Good can be complicated. If one uses their wealth to cure disease in the jungle, but in the process upsets the ecosystem to the point where the people are now starving to death, was good actually done?

To a certain degree they can but there has been a fair number of times they have not been.

forget the rich, YOU are not a good person

Precisely two, who meet the standard of "not completely evil".

The guy behind Costco, who pays his employees well with a respectable benefits package and allegedly keeps the concession prices cheap.

Bill Gates. Not just the whole Gates Foundation and the work it does to fight malaria and pandemics. But also that he has at least admitted that he's cutthroat and ruthless. He doesn't pretend to be nice.