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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28482 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Very few people actually have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending their own money on personal consumption, even if this is "unequal" compared to untalented people who have less money.

If I had a dollar for every time these types have complained about tech millionaires, I'd be a tech billionaire. They absolutely do have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending it on their own personal consumption. As you can see by their complaining about Bezos and Zuckerberg and Musk.

Their complaints about inherited wealth amount to a motte-and-bailey, where the motte contains the Walmart heirs and the bailey extends out to anyone whose parents were wealthy enough that they grew up in a better place than East Baltimore. Somewhere in the middle they use this as an excuse to bash Musk, for instance, claiming he's only rich because his father owned a share in an emerald mine.

Rent seeking is a real issue, but they tend to apply that to things which aren't rent-seeking either, like taking advantage of existing tax deductions and government incentives.

If I had a dollar for every time these types have complained about tech millionaires, I'd be a tech billionaire. They absolutely do have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending it on their own personal consumption. As you can see by their complaining about Bezos and Zuckerberg and Musk.

They dislike those people because they're perceived (in Zuckerberg's case because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in Musk's case because of his culture war views, and in Bezos' case because of alleged mistreatment of warehouse workers) as culture war enemies for the mainstream left.

They don't (outside of a tiny minority of actual anti-capitalists) have a problem with Beyoncé or Michael Jordan or George Clooney or Tom Hanks or the Obamas being extremely rich. They didn't have a problem with Rowling being very rich until she became a TERF.

In Bezos case it is about his wealth being locked in amazon stock and general fiduciary duty towards stockholders. So he both has interests aligned with stockholders and is obligated to take their best interests at heart. Unfortunately this means that labor gets the shaft. Paying the labor (especially the easily replaceable, low leverage, low wage, living paycheck to paycheck labor) the minimum and working them to the max.

That is why usually it is the state's job to put a floor on how low can you push that kind of labor.

Rent seeking is a real issue, but they tend to apply that to things which aren't rent-seeking either, like taking advantage of existing tax deductions and government incentives.

Many people seem to think that "rent-seeking" refers to any business that collects rent from tenants. I suppose this is a product of the linguistic similarity, but it has the unfortunate effect of giving people a belief that disliking their landlord is motivated by some serious political principle.

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