Moving to: m/AskMbin!

I don't understand the obsession with rich people and their not spending/giving money in ways that please others. Also, the notion that wealth can ONLY be achieved through exploitation of others is silly. Has SOME wealth been acquired through exploitation? Of course. But it is easily provable with basic math that living beneath your means and steadily investing long term can result in a very comfortable, and sometimes early, retirement. There is no benefit focusing on what others have, focus on what you are doing. This is straight grown-up advice, if you disagree, you don't have enough life experience yet.

Precisely two, who meet the standard of "not completely evil".

The guy behind Costco, who pays his employees well with a respectable benefits package and allegedly keeps the concession prices cheap.

Bill Gates. Not just the whole Gates Foundation and the work it does to fight malaria and pandemics. But also that he has at least admitted that he's cutthroat and ruthless. He doesn't pretend to be nice.

Are any of us good people? I think there is a level of selfishness in wealth that all of us engage in, and so I'm not willing to condemn people for having wealth that seems disproportionate to us. Is John Famousactor a bad person because he lives in a mansion worth ten times the average American's? Is Jake Factoryworker a bad person because he lives in a house worth ten times the world average? What matter of suffering can be alleviated in developing countries by our sacrifices in developed countries? At what level are our sins equal? Is it a matter of principle? Proportion?

The vast majority of people who 'make' millions do so by exploiting others, or by exploiting society to keep it, though, so fuck 'em.

I think a lot of these questions get into philosophical territory, which even when correct isn't particularly useful.

To me, how much wealth you have shouldn't be linked to anything but how much money you've made. The amount of money you e made should be proportional to the impact you've has on the world and others. I don't see a problem with someone being a billionaire if they did something that impacted a billion people lives and collected a dollar for it.

The bigger problem I see is that the current system rewards folks for doing anything that makes money. It also prioritizes money to the point that it's a virtue. So effectively you tell folks you matter more if you have more money, and don't put constraints on making money.

So I guess it's seems pretty true that "behind every great fortune is a great crime ", but it doesn't have to be the case. Which is. 100% useless statement. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Fuck no.

fyi, no one in here is entitled to the wealth of wealthy people. wealthy people are people just like you and I. don't pretend you wouldn't change your tune if you became wealthy

imagine if someone less fortunate than you thought you were a bad person just because you have more than they do

There are a handful of ex-millionaires who are no longer millionaires because they cared for others in a way they couldn't care for themselves. Only a handful of course, I would say they are good people.

You said it friend.

I don’t really look at it as how much money someone has, but rather how their money was earned. Just like in your example, if someone earns a lot of money because they have an in-demand skill like being a doctor, that’s awesome. You’re making money off your own labor and you’re adding value to the world.

If you make your money off of something like being a landlord, I’m going to respect that less because you aren’t really adding anything to the world, that property would exist without you renting it out and it’s only making you money because you had enough money (usually) to obtain it in the first place.

There’s room for nuance, of course, and you can be poor and still have gotten what you have via unethical means. All this is a generalization. Ultimately people deserve to be judged on an individual basis.

Can? Yeah, absolutely. Trouble is, most rich people use exploitative measures and fuck the Everyman over just to get as much money as possible.

To me, being good is a function of altruism, while being bad is a function of egoism. This starts to get whacky when you do an altruistic thing for egoistic motives (ie donating for recognition) but it serves me as a baseline, and by that understanding, I would say yes, theoretically it is possible. However, in most scenarios I can think of, the way that a person becomes rich will be filled with egoistical decisions and thus be bad.

I am currently re-reading pedagogy of the oppressed by Freire though, and he brings up a good point: charity and being charitable will always lead to an unjust system, because the person feeing charitable, to be able to do that, needs to perpetuate a system in which they have more, and where there is a poor one to give to. So he would say not really because the being rich in and of itself is a symptom of an amoral system. And I have to say that's a good point

Funny, I was just watching this 'Some More News' video about what excessive wealth does to one's behaviors and morals. It's a bit of a watch but it's worth it. It seems that we humans have a lot of cognitive biases that occur regarding wealth. Evidently, and this is backed by experiment, it changes people in ways that are often not good for them or good for society.

At the upper end of the wealth scale, some multi billionaires, like Bezos' Ex, can't give away wealth faster than they accrue it through investments.

I think a lot of people here are confusing liquid assets/cash and genuinely believe millionaires and billionaires have this as pure cash in their bank accounts.

In reality, a lot of the money is tied up in non-liquid assets like property, physical assets, and stocks.

Sure these wealthy people can sell their shares for example, but if they sell too many at once, it will drop the value of the shares.

This is likely why Elon Musk can't afford to pay his bills. Not only is he a grifter and a loser, he's likely extremely cash poor and doesn't have enough liquidity to pay his debts. It's unlikely he'll ever admit this however.

Arguably, the majority of the money these billionares have is essentially speculative.

The more you think about how the economy works, the more you realize how much of a facade it really is. The stock market is a huge sham as well. Most stocks simply don't exist and the amount of value manipulation that occurs is astounding. It's all fake.

I think the sooner we begin to realize that the economy is one giant paper tiger and if we just start telling banks and other "money" purveyors that lock us into our flawed system to go fuck themselves, we can really take away the power from "the rich."

forget the rich, YOU are not a good person

It goes so much further than just having a surplus of goods and services while so many go without. We've organized society into one that decides ownership through money, and that includes things that make more money. It's a real life broken gameplay bug, it's why there are people maxed out in everything they could ever want without making the slightest dent in their wealth. It's also the cause of a lot of problems stemming from the people making the biggest decisions in the world not being in those positions from merit, intelligence, hard work, or credibility. It's just money, an amount of money that can only come from the feedback loop bug of money making more money. Insurance companies deciding medical treatment, people not even living in the same state owning all the homes and only allowing for renting so they get paid indefinitely with no loss of equity. People with no passion for cooking deciding what the largest restaurants in the world can sell, people owning water itself. Owning creative rights, there are people who created original works that arent even allowed to use worlds and characters they created. Just every industry in the world, ownership by wealth has made worse.

It's impossible to become a billionaire without extreme exploitation. You can't exploit people or the planet to this degree and be a good person.

I can't believe no-one has mentioned Chuck Feeney.

He's prettymuch the answer to the OP's question: Can you be super rich and a good person? Yes, but you prettymuch have to make it your life's work to not be super rich any more.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2020/09/15/exclusive-the-billionaire-who-wanted-to-die-brokeis-now-officially-broke/

One thing to realize - it is paper money, stocks, obligation, not actual resources that rich people own. If you actually spend billions on yourself, like building multiple palaces, huge and multiple yachts, then yes, you are consuming resources egoistically for yourself. If the money are "working", producing something that not for you to consume (also known as "invested"), and especially if you donate a lot for charities, then sure, you can be a good person.

I think there is a line, and it's different for every person, but on one side of the line to lift other people up you would have to sacrifice your own life velocity, and on the other side of the line you have the power to lift tens of hundreds or thousands of people out of poverty without impacting more than a fraction of your children's inheritance.

I understand that there are issues with unchecked charity, for instance, if Bill Gates suddenly decided to take I don't know 25 billion dollars and distribute it equally to everybody in the 50% or below category of America which is about 250 million people, then he would basically be giving these people a hundred bucks each and saying "there I've done my job I gave up 30% of my net worth to help the poor" and that really wouldn't accomplish anything.

But that same $25 billion targeted at the bottom 1% of America I could do quite a bit but then there's overhead. Buying houses and repairing them for people to solve the homelessness problem or purchasing all of the debt that you could possibly buy for $25 billion and then forgiving that debt for the poorest people, those things could be better and do more for people but then you have administrative overhead finding and communicating with the debtors and negotiating with them, and then at the end of it it's likely that you would get a massive tax right off cuz you wouldn't do this as an individual you do it as a nonprofit, and then bill would get back 8 billion of that in tax rebates or so.

Like there is obviously a line on both sides and while I don't think people making you know even 200 Grand a year should put themselves at risk for homelessness in order to justify their financial status I also don't think that any billionaire has any right to strive to continue being a billionaire for the rest of their lives. If you cannot live a happy life on a billion dollars then you cannot live a happy life.

To a certain degree they can but there has been a fair number of times they have not been.

millions to billions of dollars

Those two are very different sums of money.
But if you're very rich, you can't be a good person, there's no way to accumulate that kind of wealth without exploiting others.

But then again, we all live in capitalist societies that have been built on exploiting the shit out of others, so there's quite a bit of hypocrisy in my post.

I suppose it depends upon how it was made and what they do with it once they have it. If it's hoarding wealth for wealth's sake then, yea, probably an issue. It seems though, there are some that have obtained wealth and chose philanthropy.