Do you agree? Disagree? Why?
Please avoid “I’d not waste my time” etc… kind of answers.
I disagree.
If we are talking about starting companies, poor people start companies all the time. You don’t need to be rich to start a company.
As for having access to capital to create our expand a business, that doesn’t need to come from a rich person or a collection of rich people. For instance, a lot of investment comes from pension funds, which are made up of the savings of many people.
“Cancer is needed to provide an outlet for all that ATP”
What are jobs? Are we talking about work that needs to be done, or are we requiring people to keep busy doing nothing to earn the right to stay alive?
Billionaires are job destroyers.
A job is a way of describing an organized, low-entropy state within an economic system. Its existence is in a constant state of opposition with the universe’s natural tendency toward disorder.
A job comes into existence only when we provide sufficient demand such that the there is a supply of near continuous energy to sustain a heightened state. When that demand dissipates, the energy input falls below the threshold near for the job to exist.
Billionaires extract energy from every stage of this process. By skimming value without contributing. They increase the energy required to for our demand to create and maintain a job. This added pressure raises the system’s effective activation energy, reducing the number of jobs the system can support.
In this TED I will discuss how eating the rich is a value add to a capitalistic enconomic system.
You don’t need capital to hire people, you need demand. The job creator thing is a myth if you’re feeling charitable, or propaganda if you aren’t.
I like the Ben Elton line: “He only had one dick & one stomach”.
There comes a point where having more inevitably means hoarding more.An economy is strong not because there are many dollars of value in it, it is strong because many dollars of value move within it. The movement is the key thing people miss. The fact that there is $100 worth of food in a system means nothing if it never moves from the grocery store to a home, to a hungry person. The rich don’t get rich by moving value, they get rich by hoarding it, weakening the economy. A rich person buying all the food and only giving crumbs to the few workers they need would break the system. When food or fuel were scarce during recent history did we allow single rich families to buy it all? In order to keep the system functioning it was rationed. Why is capital any different?
Ask them how many sets of kitchen cabinets a rich person needs compared to a pore person. Then ask them what makes more work, one person buying 1 set of fancy cabinets or a 100 people buying an average set of kitchen cabinets.
“So, you hiring?”
Yes, people meed to litter constantly to provide jobs for people employed to collect it.
Most emplpyment is provoded by small business, they are not billionaires but their business can be destroyed by them.
You should read about the Paris Commune
https://anarchistfaq.org/translations/decree-councils.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune
It’s not a direct argument. But very interesting.
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That sounds a lot like saying that the obese are needed to provide food for the thin.
I wonder how they’d take to being called “morbidly rich”? 🤔️
This needs to be made an actual thing. Being filthy rich should be an actual risk to ones health. It already is to everyone else’s.
Ask them how their experience is with companies taken over by venture capitalists.
Take Walgreens for example. Their new VC “rich people” owners, Sycamore Partners have closed 500 stores and cut 9000 jobs since taking over. They’ve cut so many jobs that the remaining employees no longer even try to answer the phones. The shelves are bare and the prices even higher than they used to be.
“Trickle down” means being pissed on.
My brother owned a local franchise for a few years. When he first got into it he really liked the owners, their methods, etc. Last year the owners sold out to a private equity firm that started squeezing all the franchises with insane demands in order to make them more money. My brother got out as quickly as he could, and ended up barely breaking even.
Fuck private equity firms. I hope there’s a special place in hell for them.
Ask if by rich people they mean funding?
If no: ask them to discuss functions uniquely fulfilled by rich people in the allocation of funding. They will likely need time to reflect, so plan to resume later, but the best answer is expediency/dispatch via unitary agency, and it’s easy to demonstrate why this advantage (A) is outweighed by numerous liabilities via human fallibility and (B) isn’t actually unique.
If yes: they have already conceded, but you might then shift to the question: must there be people who are poor?
That is a meatier conversation, since it challenges their assumption that people require imminent threat of destitution to motivate productivity. You can brute force this argument via strong scientific consensus, but for most you need only rely on their belief in human dignity. Just be aware that the most difficult branches of this conversational pathway are exceptions they might have carved out: groups for whom they hesitate to ascribe human dignity. But the revelation of such bigotry is important for their own personal reflection.
GL
