No of course not. The company he built from the ground up did.
Those workers are paid as per their employment contract. That's it. That doesn't give them rights to take pieces of ownership in that company.
I am a millionaire and I am thinking about how to use it to build a community, and while I dont think we should use force to take wealth, I did believe we need a new leadership class to inspire and influence how ownership is shared.
For instance, I'm not a religious person but that's one of the true virtues of a religious community. Giving to the less fortunate but you feel the pressure to do good with it, and you're expected to give back when you have the means to. If you abused that generosity, it would become apparent fast and your community would cut you off.
When you do this at a national level though, the tragedy of the commons come into play and no one cares who the money is coming from so long as they get it. There is very little social pressure not to game the system at that point.
I don't pretend to have a complete solution for all of these problems, I just think giving everyone a blank check each month is just adding more fuel to the fire.
The possibility of having small communities joining in once again, in addition would be great. That would require unwinding much of the neoliberal Thatcher/Reagan view of things though. Community or collective bad, "there's no such thing as society" as a matter of dogma.
We've all been made economic individuals, everything should be paid for individually, community and cooperation is old tech to be eliminated. No wonder there's a crisis of loneliness.
In most UBI proposals (such as A. Yang's) those programs would mostly go away.
> Which is surely an argument in favour of UBI?
In a vacuum sure. But UBI will inevitably lead to inflation of things like food, cars, rent etc. Especially so in the poorer communities that already are heavily subsidized (which would go away under UBI in favor of a single payment).
If your landlord knew that everyone all of a sudden had an extra $1000/mo of disposable income they wouldn't be worried to raise the rent because they know you have it. We will then be in the same position with the option to either raise it to $2k/mo or re-introduce programs like SNAP/WIC/etc to earmark money for food/rent so people don't just go broke paying rent.
Yeah, and that guy is Bezos (and you, it seems). Where did that $150 billion come from? Are you really suggesting one man created it?