horsefeathers

Karma: 10

horsefeathers 8 Apr 2026 4:18 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Eneasz’s comment on: Stone Age Billionaire Can’t Words Good
I apologize profusely for upsetting you. Contrary to what your tone suggests, I have not lived my life in a sensory deprivation tank. So there is no need to lecture me. You are not being misunderstood. You are being disagreed with.
>But the govt being what it is, all power given to it is exploited to the maximum extent to favor the powerful and the population now is utterly strangled by the tools that were meant to protect it.
Yes, indeed—and who, pray tell, do you think “the powerful” are?
>Ah yes, the golden age of pre-1919. Returning to the economic conditions of pre-1919 in exchange for eliminating billionaires seems like just hurting everyone alive so some people can be hurt even more. If material prosperity nowadays is greater than 1919, maybe the existence of billionaires is a part of that?
You’re strawmanning here. I never suggested the pre-1919 world (i.e. most of history) was a “golden age” of any kind—it wasn’t. My point was that it meandered along just fine without billionaires, and the world could do without them today, too. You seem to assume that individual innovation has been the primary source of billionaire wealth, but I don’t agree with this and believe the entire premise is flawed. I think it’s a matter of historical record that billionaire wealth has mostly been amassed through extraction, corruption, exploitation of labor, elaborate tax evasion schemes, insider trading, political lobbying, aggressive corner-cutting, and regulatory capture. And just think of all the things the public never finds out about.
This is not true in every single case, and people like Chuck Feeney, Yvon Chouinard, and Hamdi Ulukaya deserve credit for setting a good example as billionaires or former billionaires. I am personally indebted to Hamdi Ulukaya for making plain yogurt ubiquitous in the US where it used to be a niche item, because it allows me to drink ayran at home without being subjected to a logistical nightmare, but the difference between these individuals and the average billionaire is that they gave their wealth to other people. Chuck Feeney only kept $2 million USD of his wealth for retirement and is no longer even a billionaire. The others have used their money to take care of their employees and fight the climate crisis.
But they are the exceptions.
I’m not denying that billionaires are innovative. They are innovative. They are also, by and large, ruthless people. Look at John D. Rockefeller, the first billionaire. He was anything but an honest businessman, and he drove countless small businesses into bankruptcy and families into destitution in his pursuit of absurd wealth, because for the vast majority of billionaires that’s what it took to become wealthy to such a degree. They may not have always liked it or felt good about it, but that’s what it took.
That’s the difference between a billionaire and a successful person who has good ideas and passion but whose personal ambitions are nevertheless balanced against their inherent concern for the welfare of others. You can be successful and still pay your employees well, pay your fair share of taxes, and limit your political influence to voting like everybody else, but then you probably won’t ever become a billionaire.
Yes, billionaires have shifted economic conditions and not everything they do is negative. They have given us technological innovations that we would not have otherwise had, at least not exactly at that moment. They have created jobs for entire sectors even if they did end up sending them overseas in order to cut costs and escape regulatory oversight here at home. They have donated to charities and built libraries, etc. But at what cost?
They have also poisoned waterways, given children leukemia, stifled competition and, by extension, innovation. They have degraded manufacturing to the point where the average person is endlessly buying things they already “owned” because their belongings aren’t built to last anymore, contributing to the climate crisis and filling our planet with discarded junk. Industry creates resources but it also uses them and creates insurmountable waste.
I could go on but of course, this is a rather contentious topic even among economists and experts, and our individual opinions are going to be shaped at least in part by experience, so we may have to agree to disagree. My community has been harmed by industry, and there is no recovering from this. People who have lost loved ones to toxic waste poisoning, or gotten ill themselves from pollution, or had their job sent overseas, or lived in hardship because the breadwinner of their family died from faulty safety equipment at work because their employer was cutting corners, etc are not so quick to regard the profiteers of their misery with kindness, because that would be stupid.

horsefeathers 25 Mar 2026 4:35 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Eneasz’s comment on: Stone Age Billionaire Can’t Words Good
I’m not sure I agree with you that the worst parts of the economy are those regulated by the government, but I suppose it depends on your interests and priorities. My state offers a relaxed regulatory environment to corporations in order to entice them to establish themselves here, and to the extent that this has worked it has been environmentally disastrous. No one does anything about it because these corporations establish themselves in rural, low-income areas like mine, where no one has the resources or means to take them to court.
For companies, a lack of government oversight generally means fewer overhead costs and higher profit margins because they don’t have to pay for permitting, inspections, or safety equipment that meets a certain standard. The food industry is free to use the cheapest chemical ingredients they can get away with. Disclosure requirements that would protect public health are patchy. Companies are free to pollute the air we breathe and the water we drink and bathe in. No government oversight also means no OSHA, no EPA, etc.
I frankly don’t understand why you believe government oversight is a bad thing, so perhaps you wouldn’t mind elaborating?
I don’t think we have enough government oversight. I don’t much care about a company’s profit margins, just as they don’t much care whether their operations give me cancer. The relationship is inherently antagonistic, and that’s because *they* can’t be trusted to operate ethically unless they are forced to by the government. Which is precisely why they spend so much money lobbying in Washington and buying political influence.
I don’t think billionaires are a necessary part of the world. The world got along just fine without them prior to 1919. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being wealthy, but I do think every dollar a person gets that pushes their bank account balance past, say, $10 million USD constitutes an obscene amount of personal wealth and should be automatically taken from them and flushed back out into the economy. If they can’t get by on $10 million, boo hoo, I don’t know what to tell them. They’ll have to figure it out. The vast majority of people who have ever lived got by on far less. There’s no excuse for letting them hoard that much wealth and evade taxes when the money is so desperately needed in the economy. Powering the economy is what money is for.

horsefeathers 6 Mar 2026 6:07 UTC
8 points
−3
on: Stone Age Billionaire Can’t Words Good
I am a woman living in rural poverty.
You seem to believe that the capitalist market is truly what Frederick Hayek called a “spontaneous order” – a system that naturally emerges when people engage in voluntary trade. Prices aggregate dispersed information better than any central human planner ever could. Interference distorts it. The outcomes, whatever they are, reflect the aggregate of free choices.
Under this model, the framework outlined by Eliezer in Traditional Capitalist Values applies, and money is simply the just reward furnished by society to those who create value. Meaning that if someone becomes rich, it’s because they have created enormous value within the context of a neutral system that treats all persons and ideas with equal merit.
By this logic, billionaires are simply winning a fair game, so those who hate billionaires really just hate winners because it reminds them that they could be winning, but aren’t.
Please allow me the right to assert that I find this absurd.
I have never experienced the system as neutral. That’s not to say that others don’t, but I certainly haven’t. It’s not that I think you’re lying or necessarily mistaken – it’s entirely plausible to me that you have never been vulnerable enough to experience how harmful and destructive the system is to so many people by default. I don’t think it’s bad that you personally experience a fair system instead of one that is tilted against you, and I’m not scolding you for it. I’m just pointing out that you may want to integrate the fact that your experience is not universal if your goal is to actually understand the animosity people are feeling toward billionaires, because your underlying assumptions that these feelings are based on some kind of childish, simplistic sense that the billionaires are taking all the “stuff” is incorrect.
No market exists in a vacuum. They all exist, at bottom, on a foundation of government-enforced rules. Take, for example, property rights. What can be owned? A person? An idea? The answers to these are not part of some spontaneous order or neutral system. They are political decisions.
Furthermore, the market does not facilitate voluntary trade in all cases like you are suggesting. The idea that capitalism is somehow producing inordinate wealth via an “Honorable Code” because it supposedly aggregates free choices completely fails to account for all the instances where that isn’t true. There are myriads of transactions that occur under duress or lopsided power dynamics, or as a result of unaccountable deception which our society also rewards with wealth as long as one can get away with it. I contend that such instances are at least as numerous as fair transactions if not much more so.
This becomes very sinister in practice. In a neutral market, if the price of a luxury watch suddenly doubles, you just don’t buy the watch. In our system, when the price of life-saving insulin doubles, a diabetic person finds a way to pay for it or they die.
The executives behind Big Pharma are a perfect counter-example to your post, because their wealth is not, strictly speaking, the result of value creation even though it very much could be. Instead, it is extractive. The Sackler family did not earn their massive fortune through honest means or by creating value. They helped create the opioid crisis, actually, which I guess is arguably valuable to someone. My brother’s friends, so many people I grew up with, paid for this with their lives. Wealth, for the Sacklers, then, is devastation for others. It’s children packed and herded into the underfunded foster care system, sleeping on the floor of the DCS office, crying for parents who won’t come. It’s my niece’s father lying dead on the floor of his mother’s garage at twenty-five years old, his mother finding him there and sitting by him on the floor with a blank expression, as if carved out of stone, while an officer asks her endless questions for his report. It’s the way that she still can’t stand up for a long time after they take her son’s body away.
People don’t resent billionaires for “winning”. People resent billionaires because these individuals have amassed absurd amounts of wealth by operating the economic equivalent of a “paperclip maximizer” for capital, for profit, in which everything else of value—the social contract, public health, the environment, the rights of the vulnerable, etc—is thrown overboard with both hands in order to clear the way for capital acquisition, for ballooning profits, even though this senseless pursuit destroys everything that makes wealth worth having.
You marched because you were horrified by the social acceptance of hatred for billionaires, which you regard as an impulse to “kill the nerds” who built the modern world. Even if that were true (and it’s not), I fail to see how it would apply to a healthcare executive like Brian Thompson – the very person whose death was at the center of the march you attended.
Thompson, first of all, wasn’t a billionaire, but nevertheless he was in the category of people whose wealth came from inflicting social harm – which, I’m sorry to say, is a crowded room and always has been. This is an affront to your idealism about the wealthy, so please allow me to be perfectly clear and nail my flag to the mast on this: “paperclip capitalism” invariably destroys more value than it creates.
The success of health insurance companies is tied to profitability just like any other company. Not patient outcomes; not value to customers. Profits increase at United Healthcare when the company keeps the money it collects from policyholders instead of using it to pay out claims or provide preauthorization for requested care even that it supposedly covers.
But as insidious as it is, it’s not so easy to navigate, this whole “keeping the money” thing. And it’s particularly difficult for a health insurance company to justify since it defeats the very purpose for which the company exists as far as policyholders are concerned. Not only that, it’s far too easy to run afoul of contract law, state-level regulations, etc., to say nothing of the moral or humanitarian aspect. Therefore, any person who becomes skilled at threading that needle in a way that favors the company makes themselves indispensable to the company specifically and the industry more broadly. Brian Thompson was one of those people. It’s important to note that Thompson was not born into wealth. At the end of the day, he enriched himself by knowingly causing harm to others – by sending sick patients to an early grave in some cases, subjecting others to prolonged unnecessary misery, and plunging families into financial ruin.
Linda Peeno, a doctor-turned-activist who once worked for Humana as a medical reviewer, has testified before Congress multiple times as a former insider about how the health insurance industry harms patients when they are at their most vulnerable by doing things like delaying or denying coverage for care that is explicitly covered under their policy, issuing boilerplate “rubber stamp” denials based on stupid technicalities, dragging out the appeals process, burdening patients with paperwork requirements and other inconveniences, and so on. All of which are strategies deliberately employed by health insurance companies to avoid paying for patient care. All to save the company money. And if the patient dies in the meantime, so much the better for the company’s bottom line.
How can you believe that someone who gets rich from this is operating by an honorable code in the absence of any evidence to support this and in the face of strong disconfirming evidence? Whether or not Thompson “deserved” to be murdered is a separate issue altogether and the answer would depend on who you ask. But I can tell you that for those who regard his death as poetic justice, this feeling is not coming from a place of simplistic, primitive savagery like you suggested in this post.
The question of right or wrong that emerges from this issue is not so easy to answer. Is it ever morally acceptable to take someone’s life? And if so, when and by what means? What about Ted Bundy? Was terminating his life morally acceptable? What about his potential future victims? Did the state not have a duty to protect the public from Ted Bundy? Was imprisoning him not enough? Are the people who died as a result of Brian Thompson’s policies any less dead than Ted Bundy’s victims? Did they suffer less? Did they suffer enough? Was imprisoning Brian Thompson too much? Was taking his life enough? Has it saved anyone?
You may argue that Thompson’s policies were legal, but that’s not the same thing as his policies being defensible or non-harmful. Are the people who died preventable deaths so that United Healthcare could cut costs unworthy of our concern? Are they members of some subspecies whose lives are devoid of significance? United Healthcare was not struggling to pay its bills and could have prevented countless deaths while still maintaining profitability, so who is to answer for the fact that under Brian Thompson it did not? I’m really asking, because the people who suffered, were dragged through a traumatizing appeals process while sick, and/or died so United Healthcare could cut costs were quite literally the material that Brian Thompson’s wealth was made out of, since part of the money the company saved by not paying for their care went to his bank account instead. And yet these victims extracted not a tithe from Thompson’s social standing until the morning he himself was killed.
Like many wealthy people, this man did not become rich because he created the corresponding amount of value to society that such wealth would warrant under a fair system, so please do not piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. He was rich because he was willing to let people die to protect a margin. If you truly value human life, then you will agree that by designing policies that sacrificed people for profits, Thompson’s wealth literally came from destroying value, not creating it.
I could go on, because the health insurance industry is really just the tip of the iceberg. The rural area where I live – heavily polluted by industry, declared a federal nonattainment zone under the Clean Air Act, limping along through everlasting economic exploitation with outdated infrastructure strained to the max, etc – is getting three new data centers soon, for example. And before you declare it a win because the large tech companies behind them will bring their money with them – ha! Not so fast. Amazon is currently building its data center from behind a shell company, a small local LLC which the tech giant formed specifically for the purpose of securing more favorable contract terms for itself – you know, as a local fledgling small business. The company’s true identity, of course, is protected behind NDAs, of course, and by the time the public realizes what happened (if indeed it ever does) it will be too late to back out of the contract. And as usual, a defenseless, troubled, preoccupied community will get shit and shoved in it while Amazon just keeps on “winning”.
Brian Thompson’s death, while certainly tragic, was also a signal. An alarm bell. People do not have an unlimited capacity to absorb harm. Wealthy people – at least, those among them who have entrenched their interests by leveraging all the political influence money can buy – seem to believe that at this point they can just inflict whatever harm upon others will be most beneficial to themselves, secure in the knowledge that no one can or will do anything about it. I’m afraid the French Aristocrats probably felt much the same way until the very moment when they climbed onto the tumbrils.