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by frank_nitti
5 days ago
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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 $1 to benefit the common good. Not for the telecom and pharma CEOs who become billionaires by extracting the maximum value from exploiting others’ ingenuity! |
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I am not sure you are getting it. If you have 100$ 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.