Mike
The staggering wealth amassed by billionaires in today’s world often sparks intense debate and controversy. As towering figures on the global financial stage, these ultra-wealthy individuals wield unprecedented influence and resources, making them subjects of both admiration and scrutiny. While some view billionaires as visionary pioneers and job creators, others contend that their immense wealth and power come at the expense of societal inequality and exploitation. The question looms large: Are billionaires inherently evil people, or is it a more nuanced issue that deserves closer examination?
Recently, John Lestrange, a historian and museum educator, was asked if he could prove all billionaires are evil. A challenge he happily accepted.
“This comment is asking if I could prove that all 2000 of the billionaires are evil people. Yeah, I can. It’s not even very hard”
“So first, let’s put a billion into perspective. 1 million seconds is about 12 days. 1 billion seconds is just under 32 years. Which means that if you earn $1 every single second and never spent any of it, it would take you about 32 years to earn a single billion dollars.”
“If you earned $5000 a day from the time that Columbus started his infamous voyage, it would take you about 527 years to earn a single billion dollars”
“And there are people out there with multiple billions of dollars. Based on that math, we can conclude that there’s no ethical way to acquire a billion dollars because there is no physically possible way to earn that money solely through the value of your own labor, which means that in order to become a billionaire, you have to steal the labor value of thousands if not millions of people.”
“And we know that this is the case.”
“And we know that this is the case because between 1979 and 2021, the average productivity, meaning the average amount of labor value produced by the workers, has increased by 64.6%. Meanwhile, the average wage of workers has only increased by about 17.3%. That’s a difference of nearly 50% labor value. So, already billionaires are stealing 50% or more of their workers’ labor value so that it can sit around in investment funds and stock portfolios, providing nothing of value to society.”
“And when we start to take certain other things into account, it gets even worse”
“There are currently over 582,000 homeless people in the United States, many of which are children. And in the year 2020, there were more than 34 million food-insecure people in the United States. That’s about 10% of the population that doesn’t know where their next meal is going to come from.”
“Now, do you know how much it would cost to end homelessness in the United States?”
“According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, it would cost $20 billion to end homelessness in the United States. And there are currently 770 billionaires in the United States. Putting aside the fact that Elon Musk alone could end homelessness for half the cost of what he paid for Twitter, if we split it up evenly across all 770 of them, each of them would only have to pay out a lowly $26 million.”
“And yet, despite the ease with which they could end homelessness in the United States, billionaires are wasting their money…”
“…on vanity projects like dying in a sub at the bottom of the ocean and buying Twitter. There is no room for billionaires in an ethical society. They quite simply shouldn’t exist.”
@thehistorywizard Replying to @fhdjdhdhdh2 Eat the rich. #thehistorywizard #historytiktok #edutok #learnontiktok #wizardcommunism
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