There’s been a ton of discussion in the 2020 Presidential Election thread about whether billionaires should be a thing or not, and whether the billionaires we have deserve it. That discussion should really be in this thread, so I’m tagging some people to (maybe, if we’re lucky) pull it over here.
That’s just a sampling, but I think it gets most of the recent posters.
And having pulled a bunch of stuff from the other thread, here’s something else moderately relevant:
Reich lists five things that can make a billionaire:
By “monopoly” here he means “near-total control of a market”, not literally being the only player.
I’m not sure this is a huge problem since we actually do something to try to fight it, but I’m sure there’s some examples.
This is absolutely a problem, and I’d expand it to say “politicians and regulators” since regulatory capture is a thing that happens even beyond political lobbying and buying influence with donations.
WeWork is the timely example here.
Pretty much all of us agree that there’s significant room for improvement in estate taxes to address this.
You don’t see “was smarter and worked harder than everyone else” in this list, and that’s because that doesn’t make you a billionaire. It might make you a tens-of-millions-aire but in order to amass the Scrooge-money-pit-level of a billionaire, at least one of the above is in play.
Thanks for the public service!
The great men of history theory has been tried before too, and found wanting. Many companies had e-stores, many people commented on how B&N was dooming itself (admittedly maybe a bit after 94, but there was plenty of time). Hell, I think even the famous “the internet is actually a big thing” backpedal on Gates’ “The Road Ahead” sponsors the idea.
Even then, why not credit the angel investors who lost money for years for believing in the idea too? Or at least his parents?
The idea is, btw, basically doing mail orders online. Go ahead and read how he described his plan: that’s not how you describe doing something completely new.
Saying that no one else is better than you, and they’re all just lucky, is just rationalizing your own lack of success and achievement.
Speaking for myself, I’ve spent most of my life wondering about how useless I am, so not really. It’s just the sales over the internet wasn’t a stretch.
Banzai
1852
Amazon is the modern, convenient version of the sears catalogue. Lots of people would have done exactly that, and were actively trying, but amazon got there first, and like facebook, there are huge advantages to being there first.
You can still get toppled cough myspace cough, and Alibaba is looking amazon’s way, but being first helps a lot.
Republicans overwhelmingly voted for Civil Rights, while Democrats opposed them. The Republicans Party was formed to oppose slavery, which the Democrats supported. And after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, precisely one senator switched from Democrat to Republican; the rest remained lifelong Democrats.
This idea that the Republicans gained power by becoming “explicitly racist” is just wrong. You can’t get more explicitly racist than actively being members of the KKK, as many Democrats had been.
Cribbing Wikipedia: Civil Rights Act of 1964:
The original House version:
- Democratic Party: 152–96 (61–39%)
- Republican Party: 138–34 (80–20%)
Cloture in the Senate:
- Democratic Party: 44–23 (66–34%)
- Republican Party: 27–6 (82–18%)
The Senate version:
- Democratic Party: 46–21 (69–31%)
- Republican Party: 27–6 (82–18%)
The Senate version, voted on by the House:
- Democratic Party: 153–91 (63–37%)
- Republican Party: 136–35 (80–20%)
Certainly bigger margins on the (R) side, but still eyeballs at 2:1 in favor on the (D) side as well.
We can also mention the Southern Strategy, a Republican Party invention, which handily refutes your notion. Parties evolve, imagine that!
CraigM
1855
And the 1968 realignment was one of the biggest political shifts in our countries history.
Those numbers support what my point that Republicans supported civil rights by a wide margin, and most of the opposition came from Democrats. And of course you have earlier bills like the Civil Rights Act of 1957, where 89% of House Republicans supported it (167–19), while only 52% of House Democrats did (118–107). And in the Senate, 18 Democrats voted against it, while 0 Republicans opposed it.
The South slowly went Republican over the course of several decades, as Civil Rights were no longer an issue, and the older racist Democrats were replaced by younger Republicans.
Somebody want to tell him?
“…where the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was complete, so consolidated party opposition to the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964 were no longer an issue.”
There, is that clearer?
antlers
1859
I count 3 Southern Democratic Senators and 15 Southern House Members who switched parties while in office. Considering that doing so is highly disruptive to your Congressional career and would in most circumstances be avoided, this is consistent with a mass movement of Southern Democrats to the Republican party.
That would be…Storm Thurmond in 1964, Richard Shelby in 1994, and Ben Campbell in 1995? I think we can discount the two who switched 30 years later as unrelated to the Civil Rights Act, since neither of them were Senators when the act was passed. So how does one Senator (out of 21 who opposed the Act) count as “a mass movement of Southern Democrats to the Republican Party”?
For the Representatives, I only see Albert Watson going from Democrat to Republican in 1965, John Jarman in 1975, and a Eugene Atkinson in 1981, and then you see more people switching in the ’80s and ’90s. But again, we’re talking about people who switched because of the Civil Rights Act. It seems unlikely that someone would be so incensed that they would wait 20 years or more to switch parties.
Is Andy Bates really Dinesh D’Souza? That’s the real question.
(D’Souza has been pushing this particular line on twitter for months, while actual historians hand him his ass on it every day.)
Nesrie
1862
Is this the topic where we go to find out elections don’t matter, people don’t matter and inventions don’t matter because everything is just a foregone conclusion. Phew, that takes a load off.
Also, wth. I am the one that asked the literal question are we/you saying billionaires shouldn’t exist, but I guess since I sleep I didn’t get “pulled.” :-P
Oh I like it the Nihilism thread, and so logically income inequality doesn’t matter either.
I think I’ll go back to playing RDR2 where I’m sure none of my choices matter either.
Nesrie
1864
This is why the Bernie crowd in OR doesn’t like me. I am not liberal enough, can’t pass the purity test, because I reject these ridiculous ideas. Also, Amazon isn’t a store front, it’s a logistical master which says a lot considering they took on and won, so far, against the other giant that changed logistics as we know it… Walmart. And that doesn’t include Amazon’s cloud stuff.
Enidigm
1865
These sorts of things Andy sort of poison all of your posting, and i hope you’re able to understand history in a bit more nuanced and broader way than this kind of right-wing literalism, because it looks like you’re just parroting right wing talking points.
Alstein
1866
The way they took it on was just as bad as Walmart in terms of how they treat their regular workers- which is utterly abominable.
My own time at Walmart was what got me interested in unions and pushed me hard to the left, despite my demographic background saying I should probably be a Republican.
Nesrie
1867
I generally support unions, and in the retail space, it seems to be a common theme. The only place I’ve heard anything good about employee treatment is Costco, and even they have a second class group which are those taste testing people because they are not employees but like a contracted group.
Do I think Amazon could actually afford to treat their employees better, sure, but that doesn’t mean Amazon’s arrival is a net negative. They changed retail in ways people can’t even imagine, especially those who think well G someone would’ve delivered books eventually… which just tells you how little that person understands Amazon, and what they’ve done… in one area of all the shit Amazon is doing. Hell they created a whole new category of devices in a space where Google, Microsoft and Apple played and sat back and watched.
