[frank_nitti]

When billionaires make the decisions about what roads get built, they build roads that help them more efficiently exploit the world around them. This has been observed in many developing countries when their industrialization is driven by private capitalist interests: roads emerge from the plantations to the refineries, to the factories and distribution centers. Roads for the local populations are built to get them to/from these places because capital needs them for labor; roads are not built for them to get to and from their e.g. churches or places of recreation where there is no direct value to be extracted by capital.

When roads are built for the common good, it’s only when government acts on behalf of the working class to compel taxpayers to fund it; it must coerce the billionaires to contribute under the implicit threat of force.

I’d love to believe that humans become generally more collectivist when they amass great wealth - and much credit to those who do - but they are much too few and far between for us to rely this as a society

[qsera]

Sure, but that is missing the bigger point.

The point is that the rich has become rich by serving the society enormously (It does not matter if someone become rich by serving ad, and thus not serving in the ideal sense, yet some member of the society paid them to do it). If every service needed (real or made up, does not matter) by common men were provided by government, then these billionaires would not have existed.

No one has the right to deny the rich, if they want to use what society owes them, to save themselves from catastrophe!

[frank_nitti]

Perhaps you’re considering a very select subset of the rich for whom you can argue their wealth was entirely earned through value they delivered to society.

Your statement, as written, ignores that much wealth, power, privilege is inherited from ill-gotten gains like savage conquest, slavery, oppression, corruption, etc. and most great wealth is held by people who had extreme advantages from those endowments being born into those circumstances.

In most cases, it’s very hard to argue that society “owes them” anything.

I would say that debt would be much more appropriate for people like Nikola Tesla who wanted his inventions shared with the world at no cost, or the inventors of insulin who sold the patent for $1 to benefit the common good. Not for the telecom and pharma CEOs who become billionaires by extracting the maximum value from exploiting others’ ingenuity!

[qsera]

>Your statement, as written, ignores that much wealth, power, privilege is inherited from ill-gotten gains like savage conquest, slavery, oppression, corruption, etc. and most great wealth is held by people who had extreme advantages from those endowments being born into those circumstances.

I am not sure you are getting it. If you have 100$ and I steal it from you, you can argue that I don't deserve the 100$ worth of work that I can buy from the society using it (you deserve it). But that is not the contract. The contract is anyone who has the 100$ is entitled for services that is 100$ worth from the society.

And society should not really concerned with who the actual owner is. Its end of the bargain is completed as soon as it does 100$ worth of work and accept the 100$ as payment.

So the billion $ a billionaire have means that society is indebted for that much amount to someone. And the burden to fulfill that commitment is on the society until that billion $ is exhausted from payment.

[frank_nitti]

I understand what you’re saying now, basically boils down to “might is right”.

It’s not a particularly helpful paradigm for solving predicaments without excess violence and suffering, but the model makes sense insofar as it’s consistent

[qsera]

> Might

Money gives you purchasing power. Is that surprising?