It's big that she said this. It's a big political risk.
It's common knowledge here, but certainly not everywhere it needs to be.
Nah. They are few. We are many.
They own all of the media. I guarantee that the propaganda machine has started up against her already.
The propaganda machine includes this very article. It's already been going since her first primary run, and it will continue churning the propaganda against her out.
The word "billionaire" exists because "slave owner" had a negative connotation.
I like the way both of those words sound, right before the new industrial revolution begins churning out freshly sharpened guillotines.
In both cases, the people rejoice and get a free ball to kick around.
Money, money, money. The artificial middle-man of questionable value that we kill each other over. This is getting embarrassing already. Universal basic income. No-one should lack food, warmth and shelter nowadays, at the very least. Watch progress take off when everyone has a full belly and hope.
I'd hate to be the soulless fool who downvoted you
Probably just a McMansion guy with dreams of a superyacht. /s
Thank you. Idk if this will be beneficial to my emotional wellbeing or not so I will likely forget about it
The problem here is not her message, it is how the headlines present it.
She is not saying that having a billion dollars is wrong per se in a vacuum. she is saying how you go about getting a billion dollars in the real world is what makes it wrong.
That distinction is far too subtle for the average voter. She is talking about the rules of chess while ~50% of the country barely knows how to play checkers.
The better thing to focus on for people is probably the methods by which billionaires go about making their money more so than the specific amounts of money they end up with because of it.
Even leaving out the context, wealth-hoarding has severe negative side effects.
Well, nothing is wrong in a vacuum because there's nothing there to be right or wrong, but having a billion dollars is wrong per se, because no one person, no matter how brilliant or diligent, can actually do something that is worth one billion dollars.
Also, I don't think individuals should have the amount of power that comes with that much wealth.
Whatever AOC! It's super easy, barely an inconvenience, to do. Over the span of a 40 year career you simply need to earn $25,000,000 on average each year without exploiting labor, committing fraud, violating antitrust, cheating investors, market manipulation, stealing, or any of the other ways billionaires became billionaires.
The real story is that having a billion dollars and not aggressively using your wealth to fix the problems in the world/society makes you a monster. Full stop.
Here's the relevant quote from the article:
“You can’t earn a billion dollars,” Ocasio‑Cortez said. “You just can’t earn that. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that.”
If you pay any of your employees a non-living wage you're not "earning" your billions. You hire someone you're expecting them to show up, but also be well rested, hydrated, clothed, physically healthy, mentally fit, and motivated. They can't be all of those things if you're not compensating them well enough and providing them the flexibility life demands. If your employees depend on government services just so they can show up to work then it's the taxpayers that are padding your pocket, not your own "hard work".
Not arguing against you, just using your comment as a jumping off point:
If you are part of the owning class, you aren't "earning" your wage. You are skimming the surplus value created by your employees and calling it "profit"
Capitalism not only encourages exploitation, but requires it. The whole purpose of capitalism is amassing capital, maximization of profit, and the way to do this is through taking the surplus value created by employees.
For example, when a car is created, raw materials go in and are assembled (at least in part) by people. The value created by turning those raw materials into a car is created by the employees that turned it into a car. The difference between the fair market value of that car and the raw materials put in is the value added by the worker.
If we were to actually pay these workers what they are worth, by the value they added to that car, there would be no profit. But because capitalism incentivises maximization of profit, the owning class pays you a wage that is always less than that value added, and they have incentive to make that wage as small as you are willing to take, after all, you can't build the car yourself because you do not own the means of production
And therein lies the fundamental problem of capitalism. He who owns the means of production has the power.
Editing to add: If the workers owned the means of production, then there would be no reason for the owning (billionaire) class to exist -- because they don't actually do anything, they just own things.
Poverty wages are not evidence of a broken system, they are evidence that the system is working exactly as intended. We need an economic system that does not incentivize profit, period.
Even if you could, you shouldn't want to.
This is the problem that needs to be fixed. As long as we embrace greed we will be ruled by it.
I just don’t get the point. Felon and bozos have more money than they’ll EVER be able to spend. What is the point of hoarding even more? It makes no sense. I just don’t get it
I think at a certain point it becomes about power and money is just a way they measure it
The hoarding becomes the point. It's a form of psychosis.
Power. The more you have, the others have less. You are more special with each billion extra.
About the only billionaires that I might excuse are artists, who take a blank page, or a black canvas, and write song, or a book, or create some work of art out of their thin air, using only the ideas in their head. If they can create something out of their head, and get enough people pay them for it, then they deserve the money.
The problem is, in order to transfer than money from the fan to the artist, especially in massive amounts, it usually takes some gargantuan corporation that does all the exploiting on the part of the artist.
So while the artist wasn't exploitive in the creation of his art, his distribution company that collected the money for him, certainly was.
Most actors and singers aren't successful just because they have talent, it's because they have the right connections in Hollywood.
No one deserves to be a billionaire. Most artists are not wealthy in their lifetime. In fact, most art is never even sold. It is so strange that we are so addicted to money that saying an artist deserves billions makes sense to people.
IMO, I think that artists, like any other person, should have wealth and income limits imposed on them. No one should be rich enough to buy influence, and artists would be especially dangerous if they had mogul money and the ability to popularize ideas through their works. JK Rowling, Ronald Reagan, Kanye West, Alex Jones, and others come to mind.
The answer isn't to make artists rich, but rather to eliminate poverty and provide a baseline of living that allows anybody to succeed at life.
All those Gabe lovers will tell you otherwise.
Edit: see. There they are.
The thing with having a billion dollars is that you don't earn it, you divert part of the economy of a given sector into your wallet. I don't know whether Gabe did this dishonestly, but clearly part of the whole gaming industry lands in his bank account... In his case, maybe the biggest gap is a gap of taxation...
I don't know whether Gabe did this dishonestly,
Gabe made his billions by violating the First Sale Doctrine which was ruled by the Supreme Court and passed into law over a hundred years ago.
He was one of the original tech bros: Let's do something illegal and add "on a computer" to the process to claim the law doesn't apply.
I use Steam, but I'm well aware that I used to be able to buy old video games at a huge discount before Steam sidestepped the law with "it's not a game it's a steam key".
I'd rather GabeN has the money than Musk. Ideally neither would.
They're not as bad as Taylor Swift fans when you point out she is a billionaire.
I'm not a fan exactly, but I often see people use her wealth to make other criticisms about her like, "She's not an artist, she's a product." It's a criticism I never hear people make about male artists, and of all wealthy pop stars, she deserves SOME credit. She pays her stage crew well and takes time at every show to recognize them. She has writing credits on all her songs. She endorses Democrats for president (yes, at the last minute, but it's more than most celebrities do.)
See, you're already defending the billionaire. I will say she is an extremely talented artist. Like you said she writes her stuff and for others. She 100% deserves the fame, the accolades, and wealth, but nobody should have that much wealth. Nobody. I always hear the same things about her paying her stage hands and performers well, as well as giving them generous bonuses. Meanwhile she still was able to become a billionaire, she's abusing someone. A lot of it is her abusing her fans. Her latest album had something like 27 different versions on launch. If you wanted the complete album you had to repurchase it several times and from different stores. That's straight up predatory capitalist behavior. Not to mention the cost of a ticket to a performance...
Contrast that with someone like Bad Bunny. He stayed in residency in Puerto Rico making much less money than he could have if he toured. He reserved a certain number of tickets per performance for locals. He did these things specifically to allow his Puerto Rican fans to afford and have the opportunity to see him.
You can't move up that high financially and be a honest person. Some people do get lucky by having a great idea or business model at the right time. What keeps them there is they can look around at others struggling and justify "I deserve this more." Than continue to exploit as much as they can to keep it.
I couldn't access the site with protonvpn but removepaywalls fixed it.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
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