Wealth

My friend Frank Dana posted this on Facebook.  He said he was himself stealing it from a comment someone made elsewhere, but he did not name the other person, so I can't name them here, either.

But this goes so much more eloquently to the reasons why I think our disparity of wealth is such a bad thing that I had to share it.

I will have some comments of my own at the bottom.  The stuff in bold italics is quoted and not original to me.

...Why do we tolerate mega-wealth? — Not mere millionaires, but really obscene, couldn't-possibly-use-it-all accumulations of untold multiple billions of dollars? Your Bill Gateses your Saudi sheiks, your Apple Computers. (And this isn't about Apple's corporate value, but its _wealth_ — some say they could be sitting on as much as $100 billion.) Societally, I mean, why do we accept, admire, even praise the "achievement" of consolidating so much wealth into the control of one entity?

If your small fishing village was experiencing a famine, or if your country had instituted wartime rationing of food, it wouldn't be considered "okay" for some morbidly obese glutton to be stuffing himself to death with food while everyone around him fought not to starve. Even if he obtained the food fairly, heck even if he produced every bite of it himself, it would still be viewed as _shameful_ to be wallowing in such excesses of consumption. It wouldn't have to be illegal, or even "wrong", to be viewed as morally lacking, and most people would take a dim view of someone with such a gluttonous appetite, and so little self-awareness or empathy for the other members of the community. Fatso would get the stink-eye, for sure.

Yet, when someone scrapes together a pile of gold big enough to choke the Nile and shoves it in their basement, we marvel at their achievement and praise their "success", as if what they've accumulated are merely points on a scoreboard, and not actual, fungible resources. (Money, dammit, IS a commodity, if perhaps a uniquely volatile one.) Why do we drool over Apple's $100 billion corporate bank account, and devour breathlessly-written pieces on what a "problem" they have trying to figure out how to spend all that cash, without even raising the question of whether their massive wealth is a good thing? How could it not be, right?

Wouldn't it be appropriate (perhaps even more appropriate) to instead react with something like, "Holy shit, Apple so overprices their products, and/or underpays their employees or suppliers, that they're sitting on $100 billion in CASH from being the peddlers of wildly unnecessary digital toys."? Why would it be wrong to consider their massive wealth and the process by which they achieved it just as gluttonous, shameful, and reprehensible as our theoretical food-hoarder?

Or, take Bill Gates. Now, he's done a lot of really amazing things with his wealth, things which are undeniably praiseworthy. I have absolutely no desire to diminish the incredibly generosity he's demonstrated, with his incredibly vast personal fortune. But, thing is, he didn't HAVE to do that. (Which makes it all the more laudable, of course.) He could just as easily have sat on the entire $70+ billion or whatever it was, or swam around in it like Scrooge McDuck. So, why would we (again, societally) favor people having that option? Why was it even "okay" that he became worth so much to begin with, regardless of what he did or didn't ultimately choose to do with the money? Why are we so unquestioningly worshipful of financial gluttony?



I love this take on it.  I usually focus on the difference is value to society and level of effort, and conclude that I simply do not believe a CEO works 300-400 times harder than the average employee at their company.  I certainly don't believe (what with golden parachutes and the like) that CEOs take any more risks than the people below (who oddly seem to often be the ones who take it in the shorts, thus earning the CEO a huge bonus).  And given the performance of a lot of CEOs, it doesn't even seem to be pay-for-performance or pay-for-excellence, it seems to largely be "Find a random person with an MBA, dump a wagon load of cash on them, and pray that they don't fuck up too badly".

Similarly, I do not see what it is that hedge fund managers do that's worthy of hundreds of millions of dollars, and SO worthwhile to society that they deserve to have that income taxed at a much lower rate than anyone else.

That hedge fund manager certainly does not work harder than the construction worker pulling long shifts building bridges or paving roads.  Arguably doesn't provide more to society.  And certainly hasn't risked more.  And yet there they are with the piles of loot and arguing that they shouldn't be taxed any higher because damn it, they EARNED what they have, and they deserve it all.

But I very much like this other way of looking at it.  We watch the TV show "Hoarders" and laugh at or pity the people who feel a compulsion to keep everything, to just amass STUFF.  Someone sitting in their house with every newspaper they ever bought is crazy, but someone sitting on an equivalent pile of money, gathered long after every conceivable need for more had been met, simply because they have a level of greed that demands that they take ever more... this is not laudable behavior.  It is sick.

Do we all want to be rich?  Most of us do, yeah.  And I don't fault people who are lucky enough to have the opportunity to actually get there for taking that opportunity.  But I also don't feel at all bad for someone sitting on an income of a hundred million dollars if we ask them to give half of that back.  They're STILL almost certainly vastly overpaid for their level of effort, risk and value to society.