Is Being a Billionaire Immoral?
First, I want to look into the libertarian lens of this question and how it also links into the capitalist view on the issue. Libertarianism mainly believes in the power of individual liberty and as long as we aren’t bringing harm to others. What we do with our rights is our right, and no one should have the right to say otherwise. This view typically makes them anti-government oversight and focuses a high priority on the individual. Now, of course, this is a truncated version of what it means to be a libertarian, but with the primary lens in mind, it’s understandable to see why libertarians may not have any issue with billionaires. If we all as Americans have the right of freedom and the right to make life what we want to make it, then I can see how their conclusion can be sympathetic to the individual who’s achieved billionaire status. How this links into a capitalistic mind frame is the idea of success only earned from hard work, and it’s not the fault of the system if the individual couldn’t navigate or make it in a free market/competitive system. What I believe to be congruent with both of these outlooks is the equality of rights justifies the inequality of the suffering. A check and balance on what a person could or should make is viewed as an attack on rights as opposed to an attack on inequality. Money and value become indistinguishable, which then morphs the view of the question, which leads to an answer which feels right but doesn’t have the full context in mind. As I’ve said before, (but I believe it’s essential to keep bringing up) in an honest debate one must do everything in their power to try and understand the other point of view in the argument.
Understanding opposition may seem scary because there is a potential risk of having a mind change, but once the fear fades I’ve found exploring different ideas or dislikes has only strengthened my understanding of context and the importance of its role in concepts and meaning. It’s increased and expanded many of my current views and has also thrown new ones in the mix. My idea of coexisting ideologies was stemmed from studying the opposition, just as my opinions on capitalism have grown from studying pro-capitalism arguments. So, to explain the lens in which I view this problem, I would consider myself a moderate humanist progressive. Believing in the overall well-being of every American and trying to reduce suffering as much as possible are ideas I have a strong belief in and primarily use that lens for structuring my take on the world and now more specifically is it moral to be a billionaire.
My short answer is no; I believe achieving billionaire status is nothing more than a hoarding of wealth. Which on the surface, I can see how hoarding wealth doesn’t feel like a negative thing, but once put into the context of our current system, it all comes into focus. In a capitalistic system, money is the tool to show value to a worker and is the only measure to gaging success as a company. In our society, money is used to acquire our basic needs, higher education, and power in the form of building capital (to name a few). It’s no secret that wealth generates more wealth and the more bios I read of wealthy people, the more I see the initial capital to start their success most often came from money either lent to or inherited by their families, which makes sense when viewing the scale of capitalism over time. In the origins of capitalism, the opportunity was on a more level playing field. However, as you scale the system over time, the longer we operate, the more wealth created, which systematically tends to stay in the pockets of people who’ve already generated wealth. As we move through the years with more and more people gaining wealth by successfully navigating opportunities, the increasingly more difficult opportunity becomes. This concept may seem off at first glance, but once it’s understood how money is the tool to gain opportunity, it starts to make more sense. Those seeking to gain capital have to acquire the funds to do so.
Banks are one way of getting money for capital, but banks operate on a risk scale, so the higher the risk, the more likely the loan will be denied, which is good business practice for the bank, but has the side effect of providing the already wealthy much higher opportunity to achieve capital gain. The second method is finding investors. Investors are similar to banks in offering money for capital but differ by usually taking higher risks to gain higher rewards. However, with many investors, initial capital needs to be had before investors step in and even though they make take higher risks than banks they’ll most likely take more money in the long run as well as need documentation of positive projected growth. Which again puts the person without money with an unequal opportunity. The second to last way I can think of is mainly the easiest and among the most common of what I’ve seen reading bios and what I talked about early and that is getting help from family, where it be inherited money, trust funds, a family loan, etc. Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump are two very relevant examples of wealth in which their families provided their initial capital. Even the luck of the draw ways of achieving wealth has been increasing more difficult as capitalism scales with time, and the drive of competition is solely profit.
The internet is increasingly becoming more and more monopolized, making it more difficult for small digital business to keep up with giants such as Amazon. Reading Coddling of the American Mind will fill you in on how social media is affecting our brains and increasing anxiety, depression, and suicide to the highest rates we‘ve seen. I’ll touch on getting famous (sports, music, TV, news, YouTube, etc.) as a pathway to wealth for a moment. This avenue of wealth does require factors such as talent, skill, drive, work ethic, money, and most importantly luck. What annoys me most about this pathway is that it’s often used as the prime example for promoting equal opportunity and failing on this opportunity being a direct result of not working hard enough, which I find bullshit to be frank. It is a reverse causation fallacy. Hard work is needed to be successful; therefore if you didn’t succeed, you didn’t work hard enough. Hard work is a factor involved in any form of achieving success but isn’t the sole deciding factor of achieving success. Natural talent, skill, physical fitness, mental fitness, class, oppression, education, etc. all play vital roles in determining success and factoring failure. I probably could honestly go on and on, but the main points I’m trying to drive home here is an opportunity isn’t equal, failure involves many different factors outside of pure hard work, and money is the sole driving force of capitalism which leads to the miss conception of value and wealth.
Capitalism measures value with money. The value of a job is predicated in the wage one is willing to pay for that job, so I’m sympathetic because it’s easy to see how value and money can be mistaken for each other, but these are different, and this distinction is so important when viewing the pro-capitalism rhetoric. When millennials are called “entitled” or “lazy” and the story being pitched is “I refuse to give a handout and give my hard earned money to people who haven’t worked hard and don’t deserve it.” This argument doesn’t hold up when it’s understood those pushing for more wealth equality are merely wanting to be at a higher value in a capitalist system to be able to live instead of surviving when the cost of living is growing faster than wages are. CEO’s and shareholders are increasing, adding more value to themselves while depleting the value of the worker for the sake of profit. Again, viewing this from a scaling perspective: The more years that go by, the higher the cost of living increases
from inflation plus the rise in value shift from the worker to those with capital equals mass wealth inequality and an increasing unleveled playing field of opportunity. For example, the Economic Policy Institute found that the average CEO makes around 271 times more than nearly $58,000 annual average pay of the typical American worker (sourced by an article from CNBC). The focus of our capitalistic system isn’t with money; it’s with value. I’m not taking hard earned money from anyone because the money you earn is decided based on what someone values to pay you, so a shift in value would shift wages, but doesn’t mean the change in wages would be taking your hard earned money. Of course, I think it’s important to note that everything in our lives operates on a scale. I do not mean every local ma and pa business, nor am I saying the value shift needs to be equal. I believe it’s essential to have goals to reach for and a CEO should be valued at a higher rate than the worker, but 271 times more the value (even more so considering a large portion of our country makes well under $58,000) is utterly absurd. Which takes me into my last point, which is my view as a humanist.
It’s essential to define a term, so we’re all on the same page before I talk about it. Humanism is defined as “an outlook or system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters. Humanist beliefs stress the potential value and goodness of human beings, emphasize common human needs, and seek solely rational ways of solving human problems.” If that definition rang a bell with you then congratulations you just found out you were a humanist! I digress, but humanism is different from humanitarianism by the idea of not being driven by a divine or supernatural choice; it’s merely valuing human life and wanting to reduce unnecessary suffering. Money has been around for so long it’s easy to forget that money was constructed by us. Money isn’t divine or supernatural nor does it occur in nature, we as humans decided to move into a system of using currently to buy our basic needs and beyond, which of course has been a detrimental help in the grand scheme of things. But, as Newton has taught us that every action as an equal and opposite reaction and when money is the tool to achieving basic and psychological needs, it creates a form of oppression. Money plays a role in the neighborhood, diet, education, neurodevelopment, and physical development to name a few and the idea of someone having enough wealth to solve world hunger and still have enough money to live serval lifetimes seems disingenuous when my grandma struggles to pay for her medication on her fixed income from her widows pension. The common rebuttal I hear when I make this statement is, “Okay… it isn’t my fault if others are suffering, so why is it my problem when I alone worked hard to gain my wealth.” I have an answer for this. The first thing I would like to point out is the many times I’ve heard this rebuttal, it has come from people who make under $50,000 a year which I know is petty of me to bring up, but I do find it amusing. My second rebuttal to that is the acquisition of said wealth. I often refer to this as naïve realism. People aren’t in control of the situation they're born into. It all comes down to the lottery of life; therefore, being in poverty could be the only life a person knows. A person could have never been encouraged to work harder or could have never been taught the skills needed in childhood to success. I could go on and go with examples, but the point is human life is complicated with context and works on a scale. Self-accountability is valid and isn’t valid depending on the situational context of the person in question. We tend to understand this in extreme cases like with mental or physical illness but can’t seem to know when the scale of accountability can be variant in what we consider the average person.
Understanding how massive a billion dollars is can be tricky putting such a figure into a solid mind frame, but a right way of thinking about it as if every dollar being seconds and look at the time difference between a million and a billion. A million seconds is just about 12 days, while a billion seconds is 31.7 years. Another way to put it into perspective is if you started with a billion dollars and spend 1,000 every day, it would take you 2,740 years until you finally spent it all. Individual liberties as vital as they are isn’t the “be all end all.” The betterment of all human life is up to us. We have set up the systems we use, and we are the ones who decided how we all want to live. We decided how the structure works for our quality of life, and I can’t seem to find a shred of morality for those who have more wealth then one person could ever use in serval lifetimes. People are dying because they can’t afford health care, or extreme underfunding to public education, or mass evasion of taxes, or struggling with rising stress, depression and anxiety.
The list goes on and on. In closing, all systems have been created by human’s, and therefore can be changed by humans. The person who makes a billion dollars may not be immoral, but a faulted system which allows someone to hoard that kind of extreme wealth while we continue to have massive amounts of unnecessary suffering is immoral or am I the only one?
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