Patagonia founder gives away the company

Re:Patagonia founder gives away the company by orwin on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @06:40PM (#32844435)

Money is just an arbitrary mean of distributing production. In a capitalist society (and at a lesser extent in a mercantile one too), having a lot of "things", in this case money and capital: we can call wealth, is power (this has implication for anarchist beliefs).

Democracy and in a limited way, socialism (pensions for the elderly, healthcare, subsidized public transportation, i know this is not the original meaning, but for this its good enough) counterbalance the power gap between wealthy people and non-wealthy people, but clearly in the western world (at least in my country), the counterbalance is weaker and weaker.

I don't think a random millionaire like Eric Finman should have more power than a random citizen, and yet he have.

I don't think the "billionaire shouldn't exist" crowd actually exist. But i'm part of the "billionaires shouldn't have this much power" crowd, since it feels like in my country, they own the press, the executive and 40% of the legislative power. The judiciary power is the only one that might be a bit free from influence, but i'm not certain.

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Re:Patagonia founder gives away the company by int_19h on Thursday September 15, 2022 @12:46AM (#32847153)

Billionaires existing is ipso facto evidence of extreme inequality in allocation of generated wealth - so extreme that there is no feasible justification for it. Therefore, billionaires should not exist. A more verbose way to say the same thing is that society should be structured in ways that make it impossible to collect so much wealth produced by other people as economic rent.

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Re:Patagonia founder gives away the company by orwin on Thursday September 15, 2022 @06:14AM (#32849623)

Ok, i agree with the later point. I don't know yet if I agree with the first.

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Re:Patagonia founder gives away the company by sokoloff on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @07:04PM (#32844659)

There are commenters on this very page who count themselves among the “billionaires should not exist” crowd.

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Re:Patagonia founder gives away the company by orwin on Thursday September 15, 2022 @05:57AM (#32849484)

Let me rephrase this: i don't think people saying 'billionaires shouldn't exist' are against their existence, but against the disproportionate amount of power they have.

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