What would the world look like if billionaires actually helped the people?
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I can't even imagine what color the sky would be in that world...
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The Owenites and other Utopian Socialists of old would rise from their graves, vindicated at long last for, against all odds, finally succeeding.
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There are near 800 billionaires in the USA. Assuming all only have $1 billion dollars and it is all invested, applying the "4% rule" gives a sustainable $40 million each per year. With $10 million to personally spend, that gives $24 billion a year for charity and public works.
I failed to find a list of the costs to solve various issues. Homelessness could be solved in a couple years.
The numbers provided are just a starting place. Many problems are extremely expensive. Actually working to solve them would help.
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The do this on purpose. Chelsea Fagan from The Financial Diet had a great video about this
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But if you go by net worth Elon alone has like 350-400 billion. Zuckerberg, Buffet, Gates all have many billions. I see where you're coming from but they could really help society, like curing hunger levels of help and the worst part is... They'd still be filthy rich. So as far as quality of life, it wouldn't even cost them anything.
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We don't have the supply to fill the demands to simply throw all billionaires money into solving every crisis. That is why wealth inequality is so vast. Dollars are a made up system. In its raw form it's just paper. Backed by the govt. Where as it used to be backed by the gold standard which is why we hoard so much gold. That is a real tangible asset. Paper is just paper.
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Maybe it's walking the human?
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Its not a dragon hoard, its the perceived value of their companies.
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We don’t have the supply to fill the demands
What makes you say that? Making food and housing and medical care for everyone isn't impossible
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It's a fair point but that's such a smug way to say it
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How am I supposed to enjoy that?
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Gates and his ex were helping. They have pledged to spend half their wealth on various humanitary things. They were trying to convince other billionaires to follow suit also. Looks like musk and bezos didn't get the memo
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Me neither. I have only personally known Millionaires. Both multimillionaires that I know fly totally under the radar by being completely humble, non flashy people.
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That is a big factor, but they also have regular assets and personal imvestments
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It really isn't, but as long as those resources are distributed through a market, there are problems even if you add money. Say the billionaires truly are incorruptible angels and put all their money to providing food and shelter, the not-yet-billionaires in the market suddenly have incentives to raise prices, withhold food to the market while prices are rising as a speculative gambit, stuff like that.
That's one of the mechanisms through which the system itself, that produces billionaires, makes it at least hard or - imo - even impossible to truly undo the damage it does to create such billionaires, even when you have those billions. Another example is corruption: As soon as you put a lot of money into an issue, it creates an incentive there to funnel money away in secret, to provide false solutions that don't solve anything, to scam, etc. A friend of mine worked on projects providing water infrastructure in countries in Africa from philanthropic and international aid funds, and he did get often frustrated telling how some projects simply vanish halfway through, because someone down the line had basically run off with the money (not that the projects were wholly useless, either, but they failed to fundamentally solve things by just throwing money at them). Someone like Bill Gates, as another example, has been unironically doing a lot of good as a philanthropist, but all his money still wasn't able to truly tackle the root causes of the problems in the countries where he supports healthcare and such things - and inevitably, some of the funds he provided were used on glamour projects or ineffectual, nice-sounding strategies, or ended up in outright corruption. And at the same time, the question remains, what the system that made him a billionaire caused in damages to begin with.
That's why I still think you can't really tackle all these problems without doing away with a market structure, exchange value, capital accumulation, etc. - i.e., why I remain a dirty commie, instead of just arguing for redistribution (redistribution and more social-democratic, beneficial investment is still good, but you gotta always aim for the abolition of private property and capital accumulation as an end goal, imo).
Oh, and I just realised my ramble kind of missed OP's point, which is also important: All the money caught up in the three-digit multi-billionaires net worth? It's not representative of true goods and labour, it is what Marx would have called "dead" capital. As soon as it is used for anything but as financial capital, it can drive inflation massively, which connects to part of my first point.
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I read a good post about this before, the summary was: a philanthropist billionaire helps causes specific to their discretion. While their rise to wealth has taken the toll from many victims, some dead directly because of it, their donations back may not even help the location they robbed it from.
You can picture United Health suddenly helping world hunger, it doesn't bring back all the people who died miserably from denied claims, or those who are still alive but became permanently disabled by lack of care.
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To be honest, us getting a dog forces us to go for 3+ walks a day. It has made me lose some weight and lowered my BP, so I think your comment is accurate.
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If billionaire actually helped people it would be pretty much like government spending tax money.
Could've be much more efficient by just taxing the billionaires right away.
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problems arent solved by making up more paper. problems are solved by doing and properly allocating the resources we already have ie not on the whims of billionaires or on the restrictions of money.
we could certainly tackle the worlds problems without printing a single extra penny, if only we eliminated the parasites stopping us and propping up the fake paper system in the first place.
