Billionaires & The Social Contract

zyx066 (72)in #economy • 5 years ago (edited)

If you earn 1 dollar every 10 seconds, it would take you 19.0 years to become a millionaire. To become a billionaire while earning 1 dollar every 10 seconds, that would take 19,025.8 years!

_{source: The Blue Diamond Gallery}

Let's get that out there first, because most people lose sight of how big a difference there is between the two. When politicians like Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. and Bernie Sanders in the U.S. say that "billionaires should not exist", the right-wing response is deafening, shouting that "the socialists on the left" want to abolish wealth, scare away the job-creators, demonize entrepreneurship or even that they want to do away with the differences that are inherent in the meritocracy and create "equality of outcome" as opposed to "equality of opportunity."

Of course that's all a load of BS. No one claims that there should be no wealth; you're not more wealthy if you have 100 billion than if you have just 1 billion, both figures are impossible to spend in just 1 lifetime. But that's almost besides the point, it's not just about the figures; at some point it becomes a question of ethics and, indeed, merits. Here's the full quote about billionaires by Jeremy Corbyn:

"There are 150 billionaires in the UK while 14 million people live in poverty.

In a fair society there would be no billionaires and no one would live in poverty."
_{source: Twitter - @jeremycorbyn}

Now, I don't know about the 14 million poor in the UK; I believe Corbyn is guilty of some exaggeration there as to increase the effect of the slogan. But there are certainly millions of people living in poverty, there are people that sleep on the streets, there are families that can not afford a higher education for their children; there is enormous inequality, not just of outcome, but of opportunity. This distinction is bogus anyway in a world where my parents' outcome becomes my opportunity. Is it ethical for a society to function in this way? And then there's the meritocracy dilemma: is a billionaire so much more able, so much more deserving than the people that live on the streets? Do they really deserve their lot in life, has the billionaire worked a billion times harder or does he or she have a billion times more talent or ability?

Jeff Bezos is a lot of things, but a "self made man" he is not. He hasn't worked hard for his 130 or so billion dollars, but exploited the labor of his employees, who don't even get payed a living wage. Do you know what this means? This means that we, the tax-paying people, subsidize Jeff Bezos' unjust business model: his employees rely for a great deal on the social safety-nets we pay for as a society by abiding by the social contract that lies at the heart of any functional society. And we have an elected government to enforce that contract, which means that yes, you can be put in jail if you refuse to pay your taxes. The fact that a man like Bezos can get away with paying almost no taxes at all, that his secretary pays more taxes as a percentage of his or her income, shows us just how much the government has become representative of the upper class, as opposed to we, the people.

There are of course problems with our social contract; for one, it's perfectly legitimate to oppose to your tax money being used to wage wars, and of course government isn't always best at deciding where or how to use that money to make people's lifes better on the whole. And then there's the many different interpretations of what "better" is exactly. Even if democracy wasn't as defunct as it is now, with government governing for the rich instead of for the entire population, it would be far from perfect. But it's the best way we've been able to figure out how to control that one ultimate authority that has the right to use force, in order to safeguard the social contract. Without such an authority there's no way, in my opinion, to determine what's mine or what's yours for example. And without such an authority there certainly isn't something that's ours, that belongs to all of us, like clean drinking water, electricity, roads, schools and so on, the things we cal commons, the things every human being needs to survive in modern society. It's not perfect, far from it, but instead of saying that government is bad, that taxation is theft, instead we should look at how we make it better, starting with removing money from government.

What it comes down to, in my opinion, is this: are we just individuals, or are we a society? It's that simple really. Do you believe that a society can function without a social contract that obliges us to contribute to that society? Do you believe that billionaires are that rich because they worked 25 hours a day and 8 days a week, or that they knew the right people, were at the right place in the right time, have people work for them and let them keep only a fraction of the wealth their labor produced for them? And is it ethical for them to do so, while forcing the rest of us who do abide by the social contract to subsidize them by maintaining a social safety net for their under-payed employees? Should we have that safety-net at all? These are just some of the questions raised by the deafening cries of neoliberals and libertarians following the tweets of Sanders and Corbyn. You know my answer: we are a society and should act as such. We can't rely on the charity of the rich alone, as that would mean a return to the times of the robber barons of the 1920s. That's what I think at least ;-) Now here's Mark Zuckerberg admitting that no one deserves to be as rich as he is, but immediately starts talking about his philanthropic endeavors; I hope you all can see the fallacy in this self-propaganda...

_{Mark Zuckerberg Says No One Deserves to Be a Billionaire}

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