They think the billionaires are strong-willed hard workers and the people who need help are lazy bottom feeders. There’s no contradiction for them.
Billionaires are hard workers like middle managers are hard workers. They certainly do things during the day, and they earn a lot more money than the actual workers. But it has nothing to do with the value of their labour, and everything to do with their position.
Anyway, preaching to the choir, I know.
What basic need will they invent for the billionaires?
Dominating and exploiting other people
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Most likely the basic need to exploit others for your own gain, no matter how much money you have it will never be satisfied
You’re telling me Jeff “Three decisions a day” Bezos isn’t a hard worker? Pshaw, next you’ll be saying workers should own the means of production or some crazy shit.
Soon everybody can own the means of production. The rich plan on owning all the intellectual property to make the means actually produce anything.
Billionaires’ basic need for somebody to beat sense into them continues to go unmet no matter how much they “work” or how much money they make because their wealth isolates them from reality as experienced by everybody else.
Boomers: I’m so glad I’m retired and don’t have to work anymore! 😁
Also boomers: No one wants to work anymore! 😠
Billionaires are that guy that breaks an egg in his elbow and thinks he’s built different because of that.
I’m not sure there’s a person who really believes both of these. I think people who believe premise one actually believe this to be a generally true statement about people (or a generally true statement about some racial subset of people) rather than a statement about all people. This dovetails nicely with their love of billionaires due to them being “hard workers” because it shows the billionaire is somewhat unique and better than most people in that regard.
Yeah the thought process goes:
- If you work hard, you’ll succeed.
- Billionaires must have worked hard to become billionaires.
- Poor people must be lazy because if they worked hard they wouldn’t be poor.
- Give a hard worker a billion dollars and they’ll keep working, because they’re a hard worker.
- Give a lazy person basic needs and why would they work again? They’re lazy.
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Go to Tijuana, Mexico, go to the shanty villages by new Amazon building. Ask them how they live their lives. You will be surprised how lazy people can be given everything for free.
I mean, it makes some sense. I suppose people who access vast wealth through inheritance or marriage might not be very motivated, but if someone worked to become a billionaire, this means that long before that point he had the option to retire in absolute luxury and never work again, but he chose to keep working. Even when he had more money than he could ever possibly spend, he kept working. I think it’s hard to have more dedication to one’s work than that.
At a certain point it’s not really working, so much as moving capital around and watching it constantly grow, because of its extractive properties. More of an obsession, like constantly winning at gambling, just one jackpot after another, and still you can’t tear yourself away from the table.
Nobody worked to become a billionaire. It is mathematically impossible to work hard enough to become a billionaire. To make a billion dollars, one must buy something from someone for less than it’s worth, often their labor, and then sell it for more than it’s worth. The money always comes from somewhere, some value that was taken from others.
I’m not sure how that’s related to my post, since I didn’t claim that billionaires necessarily earn the money they have, just that many of them work hard. Look at Elon Musk - he’s so busy that he barely sleeps. He’s doing a lot of stupid stuff now, but he’s putting much more time and effort into that than almost anyone else puts into his job, despite the fact that he never has to worry about having his needs (basic or otherwise) met.
But I’ll take the bait - Marx was wrong. Knowing what to buy, how to transform it, and who to sell it to is in itself valuable. Carrying the risk of loss is also in itself valuable. Putting together the money to do all that is in itself valuable.
This isn’t what Marx thought about buying and selling. Buying and selling involves labor like any other work, so of it’d have value according to Marx.
The other points here simply beg the question. It’s only in the context of capitalism that carrying personal risk of loss or putting together personal money for productive ventures are valuable economic contributions an individual can make.
Please name one person who has independently gone from nothing to billionaire. Every billionaire I am aware of had tons of money from family to begin with and usually a mountain of connections as well.
Nonsense. Zero people claim billionaires are hard workers. That’s not a talking point on any part of the political spectrum.
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Trolling?
