If only people actually understood the subject under discussion:
I never expected to go viral just for saying billionaires shouldn’t exist
Lloyd Russell-Moyle
One useful point is that if government hadn’t progressively devalued the currency then we wouldn’t have billionaires. No one would be at the value of money of 1900 now, would they?
But more:
A tiny percentage of people have become super rich at the expense of everyone else.
It’s not at the expense of.
Aggregate total net wealth of all households in Great Britain was £12.7 trillion in July 2014 to June 2016, up 17% from the July 2012 to June 2014 figure of £10.9 trillion.
The wealth of the people in the country increased by £2 trillon over two years. Or, enough to produce two thousand billionaires. Which is rather more than we have. Therefore the increase in wealth benefited more than the billionaires, didn’t it?
This before we even get to the underlying reality, Which is that you only get a pile ‘o cash if you’re producing something which adds value to consumers.
Exactly; all the billionaires in the Productive Sector did so by offering a product or service that people willingly paid for. Those people got something they valued more than their money. They benefitted along with the billionaire. To the point, though: Do people want to legislate against this level of success? or against some part of the process by which they became successful?
Ok, but what about the argument that they’ve had monopoly or at least restricted markets to help them? Leaving aside the patents argument, why aren’t their profits competed away? Take the Issa brothers as an example. They made their billions in the petrol forecourt business when they were the first to recognise the value as a shop. To be admired and awarded, yes, but why didn’t others step in to the point where their profits and the value of their business was reduced? Did they benefit from planning rules that prevented competition and if so shouldn’t they pay more in… Read more »
One suspects the Issa case is less about monopoly, and more about adding one sort of profitable business (convenience stores) to an existing marginally profitable one (petrol retailing), in order to make it profitable. Petrol retailing is incredibly competitive, particularly in urban areas. The supermarkets sell petrol virtually at cost to get the customers to come to their stores. So independents must compete on price or they’d go bust too. So the ability to sell high margin coffees and snacks etc to people buying low margin petrol means the difference between profit and loss. But no-one is going to start… Read more »
Possibly, no probably, in this case and don’t get me wrong I admire them for what they did within the market that exists. But that doesn’t negate the argument that is being made on the left that billionaires are making monopoly profits.
Lets not forget that we on the free market right often complain about regulation that protects large companies from competition by raising the cost of entry by requiring massive compliance bureaucracies.
Well yes, but thats just another of the Lefts internal contradictions. They never met a ban or regulation of businesses they didn’t like, but then complain about monopoly profits created by businesses protected by said regulations.
If free marketeers suggested that the planning rules and regulations controlling the operation and location of petrol stations were abolished in order to create more competition for the Issas they’d scream blue murder about how we were putting profits ahead of people’s safety.
You can’t win an argument with a hypocrite.
We don’t need to win the argument with the hypocrite but we do need to win it with the average who doesn’t pay much attention to politics. Apparently 70% of the population are falling for this sort of rubbish because it sounds plausible and they like the idea there’s free money on the table.
Is it preferable to live in a country with many billionaires or in one with none? If one believes that wealth is finite or indeed is a bad thing of itself one supposes that the answer is the latter, equally if not the former.
Alexei Sayle on his R4 ‘Sandwich Shop’ recently repeated the old line about: “Show me a millionaire, and I’ll show you 999,999 people who are short of a quid.” This appears now to be Labour party policy (once more).
The problem is that many, even possibly most, people think the economy is a zero sum game.
On the NZ telly the other night they were celebrating the Springboks win, while bemoaning that the country is “one of the most unequal on earth”.
And I’m thinking — I wonder if the South African poor are thinking “I’d much rather be in Zimbabwe where everyone is more equal”?
We had a holiday in RSA 30 years ago, when Mandela was still locked up and apartheid was still in force (albeit somewhat diminished). They had a huge problem with illegals from neighbouring countries trying to get in to the land of milk and honey. (Also, Soweto had the biggest BMW dealership in Africa.)