So, one plus one equals two.
We'll come back to that.
Perhaps I am merely aging, nothing more, but I find that I am becoming a slightly more practically minded person. In my youth (which is perhaps a silly phrase, as I'm only 30) I was a bit more idealistic. Radical philosophical and political ideas were enticing to me, then. Now when I hear about radical ideas, I find myself first questioning the logistics involved. The twinkle went out of my eye when I began to realize just how clunky the actual gears of society are, and thus just how messy any change away from current political structures would be.
I became a pragmatist.
I say all that only to point out that I'm not some starry-eyed youngling who is about to suggest that Mr. Bezos is mean just for being a boss. I accept that there will always be some sort of hierarchy in life. In fact, I think that there should be (healthy, justified) hierarchies if for no other reason than because I cannot fathom a world in which unhealthy, unjustified hierarchies will develop, and there need to be alternatives to keep us away from our species' worse inclinations and habits.
Not only do I think that hierarchies ought to exist, but I think that the people towards the top should make more money. In a healthy system (be it a company or a society), the people who will rise up the hierarchy tend to do so because they know how to do more stuff. They rise because they tend to provide more services to the system. Furthermore, the "more services" that they provide help keep the system stable and functional, which every member, from top to bottom, benefits from. I say all this to point out that I look down on Bezos for simply making more money than other people.
(Note: I know that this is not always the case, and that there are instances of corruption and nepotism. I'm not pretending like those aren't problems, but they aren't the issue I'm focusing on here.)
What does lead my to be deeply disappointed in Bezos is that his wealth is so utterly divorced from any rational productivity he really has that there is no reason I can see why he doesn't dump a vast portion of his treasure either into society as a whole or at least into his organization so that his workers don't have to use food stamps. Even if he just focused on drastically increasing the pay of his employees (currently numbering at 563,100) he could still revel in being the wealthiest person alive and improve the lives of over half a million people. Those workers would then spend more, which would help the economy.
Again, the problem isn't that Bezos is powerful or that he has more money than people further down the ranks. I can see that both of those aren't unfair or intrinsically bad. But when you try to bring up that he should share the wealth with the people who made it possible for him to be that wealthy, some are inclined to treat you as if you just uttered heresy. As if you just uttered something immoral. They counter back by saying that Mr. Bezos is worth that much money; that he got it by being the most important and valuable person in the room.
No, he didn't. And no he's not. If Bezos died today, his company would be fine. I don't know the ins and outs of Amazon's leadership, but no organization like that is without managerial staff that could step up and keep the company functioning if Bezos died or left. So while its fine to say that he deserves to be the boss of his company and make the most money there (both of which I'd agree to), it is ridiculous to pretend that he deserves such an absurd amount of wealth for pragmatic reasons like.
Further, he's not that productive. I mean he's certainly productive, but he's certainly not productive enough to be compensated $230,000 per minute, which is what he averaged out to be making in March of this year. If Bezos was personally running around a warehouse by himself and singlehandedly making sure all Amazon's shipments went out on time, then I could see paying him that much money. His productivity level would be worth it, as he'd be, by himself, responsible for nearly 50% of all online commerce. If one person did all that, I'd be fine paying them exorbitant amounts of money since their real productivity would be worth it. Ditto if just one person somehow paved all the roads, or built all the hospitals, etc.
People should be paid more if they are more productive or more vital to an organization. But at a certain point, the organization of Amazon got too big for Bezos to be meaningfully crucial or productive enough to merit his vast pay.
I'm not against making more money. But what I am against is the unreasonable, untethered, unrealistic wealth that Bezos has in comparison to his workers (or anyone else, for that matter) being treated as if it was a genuinely rational fact about the world. It isn't. It's totally divorced from real-world productivity and work. We can quibble about where that break-off point is (in the hundreds of thousands? the millions? the lower billions?), but at a certain point, the hyper-wealth of some individuals like Bezos simply breaks free from their real-world productivity and value.
So, why did I start this by saying that one plus one equals two? Because that basic additive system seems to be the only moral principle or conceptual scheme at play anymore. If we even try to suggest that some (not all, not even most, but just some) of the unreasonable and unrealistic wealth accumulated by people like Bezos should be put to better uses outside of their private bank accounts, we are told that such a proposition is immoral. "That's his money! He got it! He had $230,000 one minute ago, and he got another $230,000 just now, and taking even some of that is immoral theft!" As if the only system of consideration that mattered in all the world was the additive one.
Again, and for the last time, I am not saying that people who start companies or work hard shouldn't get to be the boss or make more money than their workers. I think both of those are rational, fine, and good.
But at a certain point, the level of superfluous income that people like Bezos rake in just snaps off of reality like a twig from a tree. It becomes divorced from any rational conception of compensation for actual, real-life work and labor. If there was no homeless problem, no food shortages, no resource scarcity, and no Amazon workers who were struggling to make ends meet despite working a full time job, then perhaps Bezos could make $230,000 per minute and I'd be just fine with it. In a world without those sorts of problems, then the financial resources of the hyper-wealthy could just sit around accruing interest and it wouldn't be of any significance.
However, while all those problems are still problems, I don't think we should pretend that taxing that sort of absurd (literally absurd: "ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous") wealth and using it to try and address some problems is an unreasonable idea. There are more ways to consider the world than merely additive calculations.
Would that really be so horribly bad? At a billion a year, entrepreneurs could still attain an insanely high standard of living for all their hard work. They could still provide inheritances for their families. And while they are enjoying a life of luxury and wealth for all their hard work, the rest of the wealth generated by their company could actually be used to improve the overall conditions of life, as well as be pumped back into the economy to fuel even more entrepreneurial growth and development (as workers would have more money to spend on other goods and services, and even to support other start-up companies).
Some will say that wealth-capping is bad because it deincintivizes people to try harder than whatever the cap is set at. I say, that's a fine argument when you're talking about lower-end or mid-level things like the minimum wage. But I cannot reasonable conceive of someone who was an otherwise entrepreneurial soul looking at a cap of one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) and saying that the work just wouldn't be worth it. We would not be missing out on the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos of that world.
Furthermore, show me someone who cannot conceive of more work being "worth it" if there's a cap at the end and I'll show you someone who simply hasn't come to terms with the fundamentals of life. We all face a cap in the form of death, and yet even the doomed-mortals of the world like Bezos still struggle to be as successful as possible right up until that bitter end. I simply cannot fathom it as being rational or reasonable for someone to not want to struggle do do better simply because there is a financial cap (set at an already ludicrously high level of wealth if we put it at one billion), just as I cannot see it as being rational or reasonable for someone to not want to struggle to do better simply because they're going to die some day.
But maybe that's just me.
We'll come back to that.
Perhaps I am merely aging, nothing more, but I find that I am becoming a slightly more practically minded person. In my youth (which is perhaps a silly phrase, as I'm only 30) I was a bit more idealistic. Radical philosophical and political ideas were enticing to me, then. Now when I hear about radical ideas, I find myself first questioning the logistics involved. The twinkle went out of my eye when I began to realize just how clunky the actual gears of society are, and thus just how messy any change away from current political structures would be.
I became a pragmatist.
I say all that only to point out that I'm not some starry-eyed youngling who is about to suggest that Mr. Bezos is mean just for being a boss. I accept that there will always be some sort of hierarchy in life. In fact, I think that there should be (healthy, justified) hierarchies if for no other reason than because I cannot fathom a world in which unhealthy, unjustified hierarchies will develop, and there need to be alternatives to keep us away from our species' worse inclinations and habits.
Not only do I think that hierarchies ought to exist, but I think that the people towards the top should make more money. In a healthy system (be it a company or a society), the people who will rise up the hierarchy tend to do so because they know how to do more stuff. They rise because they tend to provide more services to the system. Furthermore, the "more services" that they provide help keep the system stable and functional, which every member, from top to bottom, benefits from. I say all this to point out that I look down on Bezos for simply making more money than other people.
(Note: I know that this is not always the case, and that there are instances of corruption and nepotism. I'm not pretending like those aren't problems, but they aren't the issue I'm focusing on here.)
What does lead my to be deeply disappointed in Bezos is that his wealth is so utterly divorced from any rational productivity he really has that there is no reason I can see why he doesn't dump a vast portion of his treasure either into society as a whole or at least into his organization so that his workers don't have to use food stamps. Even if he just focused on drastically increasing the pay of his employees (currently numbering at 563,100) he could still revel in being the wealthiest person alive and improve the lives of over half a million people. Those workers would then spend more, which would help the economy.
Again, the problem isn't that Bezos is powerful or that he has more money than people further down the ranks. I can see that both of those aren't unfair or intrinsically bad. But when you try to bring up that he should share the wealth with the people who made it possible for him to be that wealthy, some are inclined to treat you as if you just uttered heresy. As if you just uttered something immoral. They counter back by saying that Mr. Bezos is worth that much money; that he got it by being the most important and valuable person in the room.
No, he didn't. And no he's not. If Bezos died today, his company would be fine. I don't know the ins and outs of Amazon's leadership, but no organization like that is without managerial staff that could step up and keep the company functioning if Bezos died or left. So while its fine to say that he deserves to be the boss of his company and make the most money there (both of which I'd agree to), it is ridiculous to pretend that he deserves such an absurd amount of wealth for pragmatic reasons like.
Further, he's not that productive. I mean he's certainly productive, but he's certainly not productive enough to be compensated $230,000 per minute, which is what he averaged out to be making in March of this year. If Bezos was personally running around a warehouse by himself and singlehandedly making sure all Amazon's shipments went out on time, then I could see paying him that much money. His productivity level would be worth it, as he'd be, by himself, responsible for nearly 50% of all online commerce. If one person did all that, I'd be fine paying them exorbitant amounts of money since their real productivity would be worth it. Ditto if just one person somehow paved all the roads, or built all the hospitals, etc.
People should be paid more if they are more productive or more vital to an organization. But at a certain point, the organization of Amazon got too big for Bezos to be meaningfully crucial or productive enough to merit his vast pay.
I'm not against making more money. But what I am against is the unreasonable, untethered, unrealistic wealth that Bezos has in comparison to his workers (or anyone else, for that matter) being treated as if it was a genuinely rational fact about the world. It isn't. It's totally divorced from real-world productivity and work. We can quibble about where that break-off point is (in the hundreds of thousands? the millions? the lower billions?), but at a certain point, the hyper-wealth of some individuals like Bezos simply breaks free from their real-world productivity and value.
So, why did I start this by saying that one plus one equals two? Because that basic additive system seems to be the only moral principle or conceptual scheme at play anymore. If we even try to suggest that some (not all, not even most, but just some) of the unreasonable and unrealistic wealth accumulated by people like Bezos should be put to better uses outside of their private bank accounts, we are told that such a proposition is immoral. "That's his money! He got it! He had $230,000 one minute ago, and he got another $230,000 just now, and taking even some of that is immoral theft!" As if the only system of consideration that mattered in all the world was the additive one.
Again, and for the last time, I am not saying that people who start companies or work hard shouldn't get to be the boss or make more money than their workers. I think both of those are rational, fine, and good.
But at a certain point, the level of superfluous income that people like Bezos rake in just snaps off of reality like a twig from a tree. It becomes divorced from any rational conception of compensation for actual, real-life work and labor. If there was no homeless problem, no food shortages, no resource scarcity, and no Amazon workers who were struggling to make ends meet despite working a full time job, then perhaps Bezos could make $230,000 per minute and I'd be just fine with it. In a world without those sorts of problems, then the financial resources of the hyper-wealthy could just sit around accruing interest and it wouldn't be of any significance.
However, while all those problems are still problems, I don't think we should pretend that taxing that sort of absurd (literally absurd: "ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous") wealth and using it to try and address some problems is an unreasonable idea. There are more ways to consider the world than merely additive calculations.
An Idea:
Say we cap the wealth that one person can accrue in one year at one billion dollars. They can earn no more than that in one given year, though they can save and earn a billion the next year and so on and so forth. Once a company finalized its payroll, operational costs, overhead, and forcasted operational costs for the following year, then that extra money beyond a set profit margin (hundreds of millions, or billions, or whatever) would be taxed at a vastly higher rate instead of only going into the bank accounts of two or three people. Whatever was left over could still be for the company to save as a fund in case of emergency needs, but no more could be funneled into private bank accounts (past that one billion mark). Thus, the wealth generated by hyper-productive companies like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft could actually stay in circulation and keep contributing to more and more production and consumer spending year to year, instead of simply accruing in private accounts and doing nothing. (Thomas Piketty, a French economist, has written a book called "Capital in the Twenty-First Century which makes the case that untaxed hyper-wealth tends to simply accrue in private accounts, does no real work or production, and just passes from one generation to the next.)Would that really be so horribly bad? At a billion a year, entrepreneurs could still attain an insanely high standard of living for all their hard work. They could still provide inheritances for their families. And while they are enjoying a life of luxury and wealth for all their hard work, the rest of the wealth generated by their company could actually be used to improve the overall conditions of life, as well as be pumped back into the economy to fuel even more entrepreneurial growth and development (as workers would have more money to spend on other goods and services, and even to support other start-up companies).
Some will say that wealth-capping is bad because it deincintivizes people to try harder than whatever the cap is set at. I say, that's a fine argument when you're talking about lower-end or mid-level things like the minimum wage. But I cannot reasonable conceive of someone who was an otherwise entrepreneurial soul looking at a cap of one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000) and saying that the work just wouldn't be worth it. We would not be missing out on the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos of that world.
Furthermore, show me someone who cannot conceive of more work being "worth it" if there's a cap at the end and I'll show you someone who simply hasn't come to terms with the fundamentals of life. We all face a cap in the form of death, and yet even the doomed-mortals of the world like Bezos still struggle to be as successful as possible right up until that bitter end. I simply cannot fathom it as being rational or reasonable for someone to not want to struggle do do better simply because there is a financial cap (set at an already ludicrously high level of wealth if we put it at one billion), just as I cannot see it as being rational or reasonable for someone to not want to struggle to do better simply because they're going to die some day.
But maybe that's just me.