[dangus]

Not everyone shares that opinion, including myself. This article does a great job of explaining some reasons why:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/bill-gates-foundation-phi...

Something not a lot of people think about a lot is that having a billion dollars is so wildly greater in scale than being a simple multi-millionaire. You have to have 999 million dollars before you have your first billion.

If I make $100k, and I buy a banana for $1, that would be like if someone making $1 million bought a banana for $10. For a billionaire, that would be a $10,000 banana. That means if you're Elon Musk, my yearly salary is like half a banana.

What I'm ultimately getting at is that, to be a billionaire, you have to hoard wealth away from other people in a dramatic way.

These philanthropic organizations are packed with money obtained from customers, and I think it's important to remember where they got that money in the first place, and what alternative activities that money would have engaged in if it wasn't hoarded in the first place.

E.g., how much money does my city have to pay Microsoft for Windows licenses that could have gone toward education, health, and infrastructure? How much less would Windows licenses cost if Microsoft had never been a monopoly and had serious competitors?

[cercatrova]

> to be a billionaire, you have to hoard wealth away from other people in a dramatic way.

Why would it be so? Wealth is not a zero sum game.

[dangus]

On the contrary, there is only so much wealth, because monetary wealth represents the distribution of natural resources.

Natural resources are the root of where all wealth comes from, even services like software. You can follow the chain all the way down: a human types some code in a computer, which was made out of metals and minerals mined from the earth. Oil is used to power the machinery that mines those metals, and the human typing out the code eats food grown in farms and fished from oceans.

There is quite literally a finite amount of wealth to go around, and billionaires keep an extreme amount of that wealth for themselves. When they build a $50 million mansion using bookmatched marble and burn insane amounts of oil for their $200 million yachts, they're taking resources that could have been used by someone else, and those resources are not renewable.

When you look at the most wealthy nations per capita, they all have one thing in common: natural resources, especially oil and gas.

Let's say it's 1999 and I'm a worker and I make $50,000 a year. I bought a new computer that comes with Microsoft Windows 98, and $50-100 of my purchase went directly to Microsoft for the license. Would that price have been lower if there were more alternatives available on the market, if Microsoft software wasn't a baseline requirement for conducting digital business for most companies and individuals?

We actually know the answer to that question, because eventually the Microsoft OS monopoly was broken, and now we see that the most popular operating systems (Linux for servers and Android for smartphones) are provided for free or very little cost, and they even include their source code.

That license money I gave Microsoft is a natural resource I'll never get back.

[rfd4sgmk8u]

And while this is a nice analogy, it doesn't quite work out in the real world. What is important is liquidity of the assets. And things like capital gains taxes if one was to liquidate.

Having most of your wealth in your companies stock is not equivalent to the $10k banana. Its probably more like the $500 banana and a big stack of toilet paper.

Absolute dollar value of wealth is a trick of the misinformed socialists like to play because they want to redistribute. Once things get into the tens of millions of dollars its no longer about absolute value, its cost of capital, leverage, interest rates and liquidity.

[dangus]

Obviously, I'm aware that billionaires can't just liquidate their net worth.

I'm just using the analogy to show just how much more wealthy a billionaire is than a millionaire. For example, millionaires on TV news or playing football for your favorite NFL teams are like minimum wage employees when you consider their relative wealth compared to the owners of those organizations.

The point of the analogy is to show just how much the wealthiest of the wealthy really are, to show that these oligarchs are powerful on the level of a state, on the level of millions of regular people.

You used the boogeyman word, "socialists." In my opinion, capitalist education teaches us to fear "wealth redistribution," but it's not even really about wealth redistribution. It's about excess wealth inequality prevention.

When a small group of people become wildly more wealthy than everyone else, even more wildly wealthy than major business owners and CEOs, they become unelected oligarchs that control the state.

So, if your main argument is "socialism bad," I'd encourage you to think of it more along the lines of wealth and power inequality. I think oligarchs want to distort this message and make it sound like "socialists" are trying to force everyone to make the exact same wage, or increase taxes on regular people, or enact a "nanny state."

Not a lot of people want to end capitalism entirely, they just don't want there to be people out there who are so wealthy and powerful that they can control governments without being fairly and freely elected. They want a relatively level playing field where the best ideas win, not the ideas that come from the people with outsized influence.