>You eliminate homelessness in the United States. Every person living in the US now has the guarantee of a roof over their head.
>This costs you $20 billion, or a trivial 12.8% of your starting net worth. You still have $136,000,540,000.
I really really wish it was that easy.
To get 20B$ in actual money to pay the above-mentioned contractors, you need to sell an additional 7.4B$ in shares (to pay the taxes). Selling 27B$ of your portfolio would inevitably mess with Amazon's stock price, the value of the company would tank and now your 20B$ endeavour effectively cost you 40B$ (remember he doesn't have 136B$ in currency in a vault).
Those homes that you are building needs to have clean water and will consume electricity, this is a maintenance cost that homeless people might not be able to afford so there is a yearly price to this endeavour unless you want to go back to square one. On top of that, the grid can't handle the surge that all these new homes require, you need to scale the producing capacity. This puts an additional strain on the global supply chain, again raising your prices.
Of course the above is just one big conjecture, but the point I am trying to get across is that it is never simple when these amounts of money are involved because other constraints will emerge that will limit what you can do with your seemingly unlimited amount of money.
It's still only one step above complete destitution. Most people would prefer better and would still work hard.
It's a lot easier for a person to get a job, or beat any personal issues they have if they have a stable, safe roof over their heads. You gotta give people boots so they have bootstraps to pull themselves up by.
If you can afford to keep people afloat, you should do it. The less complicated and less strings attached the more effective and cheaper is your solution.
There are people who steer the discussion to those who stay dependent. They claim that some of those are "incentivized" to do so, in other words: they are lazy and greedy. Well that's true, and it's a problem. Primarily because they can be used as an excuse and as a scapegoat to distract from the fact that capital _owners_ are extracting power and value that is generated by workers and small businesses.
What would I do if I were in that position? Be Jeff? I don't know, I'd probably be just as full of myself to believe that I deserve to be treated like a monarch and be able to buy what ever I want, while cheating my business partners, exploiting and surveilling my workers, manipulating my customers and ignoring my responsibilities as a citizen.
Power should be somewhat proportional with responsibility. I'm pretty sure it isn't, not at that scale.
There are 300M Americans. If 999/1,000 people say "hey, free housing is great, but I'm going to keep working" and 1/1,000 people say "hey, free housing! I can just kick back", we now have an extra 300,000 people who are on the dole (almost DOUBLE the current number of homeless).
I think the creator is aware that stock holdings are not legally bound to the income tax rate. That's not the point of the simulation. The point is that the rich have vehicles for their wealth that normal people don't have access to. The point is also that there are pressing, permanent problems in our society that cost less to fix than a quarter of the wealth of one person in our country.
No it isn't, and that's no a self-evident assertion. Jeff Bezos is a billionaire because the company he created and led for the past 20 years is an insanely productive business. People want to own shares in his company and that is why his holdings are worth so much.
>"without underpaying or overcharging others"
This is an impossible standard to meet. In a system as massively complex and chaotic as an economy there is no way for any business to pay/charge the "right amount". Not only is the fair amount an unknown value, anything resembling a fair price is only discovered through overpaying/underpaying until prices regress to some middle ground. And then something inevitably happens in the world that necessitates finding a new value and the process begins again.
The premise being "Is there an amount of wealth one person or family can have, that is so exorbitant in comparison to the average citizen that it is unjustifiable on its face?" - and the easily marketable answer is "billionaire".
Do you think there is no moral limit to the amount of wealth one person can have in society, while millions around him suffer?
This is an intriguing premise. My personal answer is 'no'. This is because I see this as a personal value judgement and not something that can be applied as a moral standard. It is analogous to the question of taxation and what counts as "someone's fair share", because you will never get an agreement as to what constitutes a "fair share" of someone's income. We can certainly agree that people should contribute something via taxes, but we will never arrive at a satisfactory rate of fairness.
Compounding the problem is the second part of the question, "while millions around him suffer". Maybe I'm just too influenced by Buddhist philosophy, but I see suffering as an inescapable aspect of life itself. It could be said that my personal wealth, as modest as it may be for a middle class American, is of a similar magnitude of inequality to the average Burundian citizen. In practical terms, I'm basically a billionaire compared to the world's most impoverished individuals.
Now, we can argue about Jeff Bezos specifically and we can debate what percentage of his equity is by creating new wealth versus what percentage was a transfer from e.g. underpaying his workers, but that's very different than saying being a billionaire is itself morally wrong.
I'm not necessarily against that, mind you, but it's important to see that such a policy would have wide-ranging effects on the stewardship of many companies, and to think it through: if the result of the law is to force founders to sell off most of their stake to other capitalists in order to spread their "wealth", their companies could become even more immoral or exploitative as a result. I think it might be better to simply nationalize something like 0.5% of every company every year, but that may also have unforeseen consequences.
Ah yes, like any other warehouse that has kept stagnate wages for decades, but still manages to squeeze even more efficiency out of its workers, i.e. underpay, overwork, and exploit its workforce (70% of its workforce are, essentially for all intents and purposes, warehouse workers)[1].
Have you worked in a warehouse before? Have you worked at an Amazon warehouse before? Have you atleast read any of the, some may say shakey, news coverage on Amazon warehouses?
It's immoral. It's inhumane. It kills the soul, and keeps poor people with no other options in a tragic 10+ hour death march 5 days a week. There's little time or energy to find a better job, you're too exhausted from working all day to even think. Even if you could, when would you find time for an interview? There's an obvious unwritten rule within this type of work that: 1). You're not getting a day off 2). If you take a day off, management will start looking to replace you for someone more "reliable."
> This is an impossible standard to meet. In a system as massively complex and chaotic as an economy there is no way for any business to pay/charge the "right amount". Not only is the fair amount an unknown value, anything resembling a fair price is only discovered through overpaying/underpaying until prices regress to some middle ground. And then something inevitably happens in the world that necessitates finding a new value and the process begins again.
These are a very handy-wavey 3 sentences. It's not impossible to figure out whether or not you're underpaying workers. It's pretty simple: who makes up the bulk of your workforce? Are they people with options or people without? People without options will take anything.
[1] https://assets.aboutamazon.com/01/fb/29cebd144ec59269fe8ffda...