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  • The statement about billionaires is true, but also the reasons that people end up living on the streets are extremely complex and I'm not sure this sort of thing helps us actually talk about the real problems.

    For instance, a lot of homeless people in the US are foster children who aged out of the care system:

    Nationwide, the data show that an estimated 50 percent of the homeless population spent time in foster care.

    reference

    Money could maybe provide more resources to care for people, but the core issue here is that adults who were foster children lack the support of a family - which no amount of money can fix.

    A more useful question to address homelessness would be "why do so many foster children struggle to become self-supporting adults, and what can we do to prevent that?"

    • if the world weren't so hostile to normal humans then not having the support of a family would not be as devastating

    • Money could maybe provide more resources to care for people, but the core issue here is that adults who were foster children lack the support of a family - which no amount of money can fix.

      billions in dollars taken from billionaires to help them for a few more years would absolutely help. maybe not all of them, but any that it does help would be well worth it. billionaires don't need more than one yacht.

    • That's so brutal. The foster system is also really strange, from my broad thousand-foot view of it.

      Maybe I'm way off base but it feels like some weird dispassionate state shuffle system where kids don't get a stable family situation, they just get passed around a series of "halfway homes", develop psychological problems from these constant disruptions in their development because duh, and then suddenly are "of age" and booted out to go work or something. (And likely end up on the street? Shocker!)

      (This constant attempt to reinstitute child labor scares me even more in this context)

      My wife and I were consulting various sources about adoption. We basically found out adoption is like some weird underground "baby market" that obviously favors the rich, and prices different genetics traits differently. (YEP!)

      Directed to the foster system, it sounds like you just end up as a revolving door extension of a failed, undercut, under funded social program that "processes" kids through your house like inmate transfers.

      No wonder statistics are so grim! My research suggests to me it was a replacement for the antiquated orphanage system of old but... Sheesh was it really an improvement? (Of the best examples, for the sake of argument, not the worst ones).

      All this rabble rabble about abortion being legal or not, but it could be legal again universally, tomorrow, and conservatives wouldn't have to worry about it actually happening so often if they fixed their freaking obtuse child-as-market-product system. If they actually cared about children, that is. Fat chance they'll even think of that though.

      Sorry I didn't know this was such a button with me but I hope I added to the conversation LOL. Thanks for your post. <3 So many people are just...invisible. And it's heartbreaking.

  • I think it's kind of stupid that we're defaulting to the idea that a billion dollars as sort of the default "well, that's too much money, nobody could ever possibly deserve THAT much money!" metric we're using. Not particularly because there are really any good billionaires, I mostly think that's not really the case and agree that any claim to the contrary would probably strain credibility.

    About the most you could point to is somebody like taylor swift, or any musical performer, or athlete, someone who specifically gains money based almost exclusively on their command of cultural capital and ability as a performer rather than necessarily on extracting the surplus labor value of others, though to a certain extent, you have to have some sort of corporate backing or management company to reach that level, and even if those performers don't control it, there's probably some level of loaded complicity going on there. These types would maybe be just above the sorts of people who just run good or more ethical companies, as far as companies can be, on the billionaire morality totem poll.

    No, my criticism isn't so much that billionaires aren't necessarily evil, because I think it's mostly true enough that billionaires are all evil for it to be as true a heuristic as a heuristic can be true. I think my ire draws less from that, and more from how this sort of like, meaningless agreement over this particular example doesn't really necessarily lend itself towards any more in depth analysis. We've put the marker too high, the standard too high. A billion dollars is obviously very extreme, you can see that with the comparisons from a million to a billion. What about a million, though? Is that bad, is that a bad standard of evil, if you have a million dollars, does that make you evil? Where's the cutoff, here? I'm sure plenty of people know someone with a million bucks, you could probably just point at anyone who owns a home in LA.

    My point is that instead of some arbitrary cutoff we should probably just be looking at what's actually going on here in terms of the relationships at work and the constructed hierarchies. If that's the case then we can probably draw the line less at a billion dollars and more at anyone propping up this stupid bullshit type hierarchy, and specifically those more critical lynchpins which hold it together. Perhaps, like a "not necessarily a billionaire" healthcare CEO. Now that, that would be a good start.

    • my ire draws less from that, and more from how this sort of like, meaningless agreement over this particular example doesn’t really necessarily lend itself towards any more in depth analysis. We’ve put the marker too high, the standard too high. A billion dollars is obviously very extreme, you can see that with the comparisons from a million to a billion. What about a million, though? Is that bad, is that a bad standard of evil, if you have a million dollars, does that make you evil? Where’s the cutoff, here?

      You got way too focused on the bottom text of the meme while ignoring the top text.

      It is very clear - As long as extreme poverty exists then people with extreme excess wealth are not good people.
      If the world had no homeless, workers were paid fairly and not exploited, people didn't die from lack of medical coverage or affordability,
      and billionaires didn't poison our planet in search of record quarterly profits, then we might be able to have super rich people who are also good.

      So, you no longer need to ponder about an arbitrary dollar amount.

      The only good billionaire is one who actively becomes a millionaire by choice.
      Here's the only example I know of:

      Charles “Chuck” Feeney, who co-founded retailer Duty Free Shoppers, became a billionaire and donated much of his fortune anonymously.
      Over his lifetime, Feeney made more than $8 billion in grants in a handful of countries, supporting education, health, equity and more.
      Former Billionaire Chuck Feeney, Philanthropist Who Pioneered Giving While Living

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