Economcial, Billionaires are the biggest threat to the free market
Train thought, but in the sense of Economy, Billionaires are holding and gather capital without putting or only a fraction of it back to the free market.
So, they are the biggest threat to a free matket Economy.
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Most billionaires nowadays are not the type that have the bulk of their wealth in assets. The lot of them got wealthy because the company they founded or initially employed with became very successful and the stock they accumulated became more valuable over time.
In a way, it’s wealth up there in the ether. It’s the investors who give it value. Somebody says “hey $100 for a share of company x sounds like a good deal” founder has 10M shares of company x, and voila, they’re a billionaire.
In a way, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
A strange thing is happening nowadays with the market though. Markets are supposed to go down from time to time, but due to low barriers to entry so many people are in the market now, investing in ETFs, setting up automated monthly purchases, DRIPs, etc, that markets consistently go up. Even after a major economic shock like the tariffs, the market continues to go up.
And so those billionaires keep getting wealthier.
At some point this carousel will end. Healthy markets do have to go down, it’s one of the mechanisms of how capital gets redistributed from the slovenly to the savvy. There has to be some kind of adjustment or we end up where we are, a new Gilded Age.
China is on the edge of one such adjustment in real estate, but the state is pulling out all of the stops right now to prevent its collapse. What happens there likely is to be a harbinger of what’s to come.
In the US, I’m not so sure. If we keep letting our average population age slip towards middle age and beyond, then we’ll likely see the correction when we have no one left to keep the economic engine running. If we don’t mitigate that we probably have 15 to 20 years left. Unchecked political unrest may be the catalyst for its arrival sooner.
Back to billionaires. The best way to put this back in check in my mind is to tax unrealized gains. Think of it like real estate tax. Every year, you pay a nominal bit of your home’s value to fund the fire department, city planners, etc. if you don’t pay, then they can put a lien on your house. Same should apply with stock. The noninvesting public helped build the infrastructure that made the company thrive, thus, the public should be entitled to a bit of its success. The tax has the nifty little gimmick of distributing a bit of the power too - precisely why the billionaire class hates it.
I like your connecting taxing unrealized gains with property taxes. It connects a new idea to a familiar one. Great contribution!
it’s super fun to talk to a “fiscal conservative” or “neoliberal” that’s real pissed off about the people scalping ps5s or concert tickets or whatever
“They buy up all the supply with unfair advantages like bots and using discord channels to get restock alerts before anyone else can know! Then they drive up the price so high no one can afford it!”
You can get them so close to having the epiphany that you just had but their dream of being a billionaire themselves one day causes so much cognitive dissonance that they will then defend elon musk. Or the neolib will defend all the poor very wealthy CEOs and executives worth 10+ million dollars while secretly wanting to defend billionaires like bill gates because he has better optics, but they realize billionaires in general have bad optics at the moment right now so they shut up
Ultra wealthy people in general are the issue. Billionaires are the absolute worst of it but the single person with an 80 million dollar estate is the same problem just on a smaller scale. That still chokes a fairly large community of resources. Billionaires just do the same thing to an entire nation, or even the world to some degree.
All of that money is equity. Basically none of these dudes are liquid and the bits they have that are liquid are from cashing out stolen equity. It’s because we have this fucked up idea that because I start a company I then hold the bag in perpetuity and you get nothing because I say so. Even if I bring you on in the beginning and you help me build it up from nothing, even if you help me run it as it grows to an empire, even if you help keep the empire running each and every day. I pay you money, as little as possible, and ideally no benefits, and you get absolutely no share of the company that you are helping to build.
So here I sit in my ivory tower, a company valued at 1 million, 5 million, 100 billion, 3 trillion. Who do I share that equity with? People who will loan me money. No one who will actually do any real work to make the company move forward day to day. Those people sweating and bleeding get nothing. The people getting a chunk of the pie are the ones that can afford to buy in and they reap the rewards as a result: they don’t trade their physical health for money, they don’t get paid shit, and as the company grows they make more and more while they sit on their asses like the parasites they are, sucking away your wages and benefits. Your health insurance is worse this year? Or it doesn’t exist at all? Gotta cut costs to please the shareholders and investors to turn a “profit”
That’s why in terms of stock ownership the top 10% of Americans own 87% of American owned stocks and the bottom 90% own 13%. The bottom 50% own 1% and the top 1% own 50%. This excludes the portion of the market owned by foreign investors but that’s still tremendous - the top 1% own 23 trillion dollars worth of equity.
Forcibly take over amazon, Walmart, Google, apple, etc and nationalize them. Give the equity owned by retail investors to the workers. And not just the fancy coders and engineers that probably already had stock options, to the people hocking phones at mall kiosks and doing tech support. Then jail all billionaires for life for crimes against humanity and outlaw advertising and we might save humanity
I'm not a fan of billionaires but you are fundamentally incorrect. And it is very unhelpful to be incorrect in this case because people will be able to dismiss your argument easily.
They don't have a billion on their bank account. They own companies worth that much.
Every warehouse, truck, robot and server that Amazon owns counts towards Bezos wealth. You cannot "reinvest" all of that because the company requires it to function.
Close. Bezos has is wealth from the stock value of Amazon. Amazon's stock value is loosely tied to assets of the company, but strongly tied to expected growth of profits. Additionally, it trades at a high multiple of current profits.
A company may have few assets and a large stock valuation (the stock price multiplied by number of stock shares outstanding).
Yes.
Next step: Think about if some things like food or Housing should be included in the free market at all
How so? Where do they put their wealth? Under the mattress?
Studies and reports show the world's wealthiest have about half the wealth. That fewer than 1000 people who have as much as 8 billion. Why not go where the money is? Go where there is an excess per person instead of repeatedly pulling the same tired taxe hikes from the majority as they can.
Tax the money.
what? how does billionaires not spending all their money create a threat?
When billionaires use those agglomerations of capital to manipulate markets and engage in other types of anti-competitive practices, it turns a free market into a captured market.
Anti-monopoly regulation & enforcement is required to maintain a market's freedom.
There is no such thing as a free market IMO.
Either you have an unregulated market dominated by big players which isn't free because of said big players, or you have a heavily regulated market, that gives a fair chance to anyone, but isn't free at all because of the regulation.
The free market is an illusion, just like the american dream. Which shouldn't be much of a surprise, seeing as the american dream builds off of the illusion of a free market and fair chances for anyone