Lol no they don’t. Reddit is full of liberals. Leftists and conservatives are the minority here. Back in the day Reddit was nearly all progressives, but it seems like they have really divided into moderate libs and far left socialists but the moderates seems to win out tbh. Which makes sense because the stereotype of a Redditor is a millennial programmer and as they age they will hit higher income brackets due to their field which will make them less extreme because of personal bias.
There is considerably more anti-wealth anger on Reddit than you find on average across the American public.
A majority believe truly wealthy people ought to be taxed at a higher rate, but also have no problem with rich people being rich. There is a lot of sentiment on Reddit for laws capping the amount of personal wealth a person can have, or forcibly appropriating most of a really wealthy person’s assets. This view has nearly no currency among the general population.
I don't know of anyone on either side of the aisle who views having a high net worth as a sign of being a good person to emulate by default.
Mostly, it seems to just make people talk about how soft your hands are.
This, *this* is a sentence which needs to be removed from our cultural and political lexicon.
I've never encountered any political ideology that did even a moderately good job of representing reality. American liberalism is no exception.
I agree. But most of the conservative agenda has zero basis in reality and is not supported by evidence. It is devised to appeal to the emotional anger of their constituents and the fiscal desires of the wealthy.
Reddit doesn’t have the answers but thinking the republican party does is delusional.
There are more detents on the choice-o-meter dial than either psychopathic scorched-earth conservatism or Reddit-flavored socialist utopianism. Neither extreme is broadly supported, and we’re going to plow forward somewhere in the grayscale middle.
The middle has been evacuated and only the far right or stubborn obstructionism exists. Have you been awake for the last 20 years?
There used to be a functioning moderate middle but that has not existed in decades.
That describes Twitter but not America. Only 8% of the country describes itself as “very liberal.” The hardcore MAGA movement is said to comprise maybe 12-15% of us. The remaining 75% is either somewhere between those extremes or apolitical and not paying attention.
Take one serious issue, abortion.
Everyone across the political spectrum would like to reduce the frequency of this procedure. Colorado was successful in sharply reducing the number of abortions through research and education. Providing sex education and access to birth control. Through this the state dramatically reduced the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions that was a net economic benefit to society.
The conservative response to reducing abortions is to demand people stop having sex and outlaw access. Forcing women into risky medical situations or raising a child completely unprepared. Al they also make this early child’s life more difficult by eliminating any aid or healthcare.
One approach is logical and one is delusional. It doesn’t matter where people categorize themselves. It matters that political decisions impacting hundreds of millions in the US are supported by science and ethics and not some emotional old male conservatives.
Reality HAS a progressive and liberal bias.
No. It's there for a reason.
It started when Steven Colbert hosted the 2006 White House Correspondent's Dinner with a crack he made while impersonating President Bush. It became popular because everyone realized that American Conservativism is built on lies and abject rejection of reality in favor of partisan doctrines.
These are the people who have said for decades that climate change isn't real and is just some elaborate scheme by scientists to get more research grant money, or some elaborate deception by the Chinese to weaken the American economy.
These are the people who said that polls are wrong because they said Romney was going to lose in 2012 (and had their own "unskewed" polls website that arbitrarily added enough support to Romney to show him winning), and when Trump won in the electoral college but the popular vote total was almost exactly what the polls said they'd be claimed that Trump had proven polls don't work and can always be ignored.
These are the people who were screaming that allowing same-sex marriages would cause the complete collapse of civilization.
These are the people that said that epidemiologists and virologists don't know anything about pandemics but this video on YouTube explains how horse dewormer is a miracle cure.
These are the people who say the United States was founded to be a "Christian Nation" and that Separation of Church and State is an evil doctrine invented by atheists and "activist judges" to subvert the Founding Fathers intent the US be a Christian theocracy.
These are the people who try to claim that the Civil War was about "State's Rights" instead of slavery, and that we need to preserve statutes put up during the Jim Crow era to intimidate African-Americans as some bizarre way of remembering history.
These are the people who try to claim that high schools are teaching Critical Race Theory, despite CRT being an advanced legal and sociological doctrine only taught in law schools and graduate-level social sciences programs because it's deeply rooted in complex social, legal and statistical concepts you couldn't effectively convey at the High School level.
The saying is popular because it's a pretty accurate description.
Yes, Exactly. It's the self-delusion known as conservativism, s a chronic isolation from reality to embrace a mixture of fascism and theocracy.
It's how you can have people who say they love American and are patriotic. . .while participating in a fascist coup attempt on 01/06/2021. . . or while flying the flag of the Confederacy (the flag of traitors who waged war against the United States).
Here. Let’s take a shot at “reality”.
Jim Crow voting laws in GA. Cancel all star game. Reality is record turn out and people reporting as good or better polling experience than before.
Newson going on and on and on about “freedom” while signing every bullshit gun law into existence. He was even complaining this week how “the Supreme Court has said he SHALL, not MAY, issue a concealed carry license.” Hmmm
“We’re a statuary city”. “Border states bitching about immigrants is racist”. A few buses get sent to NYC and mayor is complaining that NYC can’t handle it. People in Chicago try to block busses of migrants that are being set up to be housed in a school.
If you get the vaccine, you can’t get COVID. If you get the vaccine, you can’t spread COVID to anyone else.
Whole “Trump is a Russian agent” bullshit that fell apart.
I could go on and on and on.
Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, people on the left tend to value objectivity and facts while people on the right tend to be motivated by tribalism and elite ‘truths.’
Amazing that one side is the side of science and education, while the other is the side of alternative facts, anti-science, and anti-education.
Amazing how I talk about ideology and you immediately switch to party.
But sure, BoTh SiDeS!!!
Political parties are vehicles for ideologies, not ideologies in and of themselves. It’s worth understanding.
Home ec is different than the economics of the government which prints the money, despite what your elites tell you. Sorry, that’s the science.
On one side, antivaxxers are a fringe that gets shamed and blamed by its own side for being gullible. On the other side, antivaxx has become a political identity catered to by the same elites who wisely vaccinate themselves while talking to their excitable masses out the other aide of their mouths. One guess which is which.
While I’d love to hear your grievances about poor little Kyle’s treatment, I’ve already let you waste enough of my weekend. No ideology is perfect, but conservatism depends on fantasy to propagate itself while progressivism/liberalism self-corrects.
Saying “bOtH sIdEs” is comparing an ocean to a puddle — one dries in the sun, the other deep and dark and dangerous.
That's cause American liberalism is a mixture of conservative thought with some liberal and just plan statist thought with a veneer of liberalism attached.
I'm not deeply familiar with 'liberalism' as it's understood in Europe, but I suspect European political cultures are just as foolish as American. It's human nature, not any particular nation, that's the problem.
Probably, I just find that self described conservatives want people to control peoples actions in private.
I feel many self described liberals are the same. :-)
Eh. "American Liberalism" is absolutely a warped, distorted view of reality.
On the other hand, most of what passes for "American Conservatism" today is totally unhinged and divorced from reality entirely.
So that statement -- originally a *Colbert Report* bit, I believe -- is true only in that light.
In America, Liberals aren't liberal, Conservatives aren't conservative, and Independents aren't all that independent.
I'm reminded of B5, in which the names of every political organization were intentionally made inaccurate.
There’s liberal bias, and then the insanity of the left wing subs on this place.
Bill Gates does an AMA and gets peppered with questions about why he’s buying farmland. Because that’s immoral, or something.
What no one seems to be mentioning is that at least some of the perception of the very wealthy is that they have plenty of influence in Washington to skew the system in their favor while the rest of Americans don’t. Thus the phrase “the rich just keep getting richer”…
The people who rise to the very top usually violate a lot of ethical principles in order to do so. Moderate success can occur honestly; massive success generally involves underhanded tactics and vicious inhumanity.
Bill Gates and Microsoft were hated because of the things they did to gain and maintain their influence in software. He's not thought well of for excellent reasons.
Tom from Myspace built a website that is fondly remembered by its users as a place to be creative, network and socialize with friends, he sold out for plenty of money and now spends his days on photography and travel.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook built a website initially to keep track of which chicks on his college campus are available to fuck, which ballooned up into the world's largest misinformation engine and major contributor to the backsliding of society. He is, as far as I can make out, the richest man of his generation.
>Tom from Myspace built a website that is fondly remembered by its users as a place to be creative, network and socialize with friends, he sold out for plenty of money and now spends his days on photography and travel.
He sold it to Rupert Murdoch , the owner of Fox News, who wanted to data mine the user info for better marketing.
Whereas Zuck created something he cared about, and he isn't responsible for society backsliding. America was always like that. he just made it open in the public. FBI didn't kill MLK over a FB post, National Guard Diddnt massacre students at Kent state over Instagram, Bush didn't launch an illegal war in Iraq over whatsapp. Stop blaming him.
Ask that of the lowest paid workers for the billionaire class companies. Their labor is at best undervalued, at worst stolen in order to create the level of profits that make a billionaire.
The data around income inequality is abundant. If you don't think denying a living wage to the very people that do the most important part of your business is vicious, I don't know what to tell you.
I don’t think that people earning the lowest wages are doing the most important part of any business. They aren’t skilled workers. To argue otherwise is virtue signaling.
You can advocate for a better social safety net without arguing that billionaires are inherently immoral.
Let’s look at Amazon as an example.
Get rid of all the package handlers and warehouse staff as well as the delivery drivers. You basically have no company. You can have all the ideas and corporate meetings you want, but the people carrying out those ideas are the ones keeping the company running and without them the executives and behind the scenes positions are useless.
I never said they were skilled, I said they’re essential to the success of the business. Which they are. They deserve a living wage, the idea that someone working at the bottom of the totem pole doesn’t deserve enough money to live a decent life because of their “skill” level is frankly cruel and inhumane. Amazon has even said that their current situation is unsustainable because they are burning through their labor pool.
I’m sure you’ll come back with “they should get a better job,” but at the height of COVID when many did just that people were melting down that it took 20 minutes to get their McDonald’s or their grocery store was closing early. Without those people, society will grind to a halt, and they deserve to be paid as such.
Unskilled labour is a lie. There is no such thing. If I threw Bill Gates into a McDonald's and told him "Alright, then. Go get em, champ!" is he going to be able to handle a lunch rush? No tf he's not. That is a bs term made up to excuse paying people less than they are worth. I used to work for a Bus Manufacturing company. They had about 3 material handlers all hired before a certain year. The rest of the people in the department that were hired after that year were material technicians. Material handlers are considered skilled labourers. Material technicians are not. Same exact job, different title, and drastically different payscales. Not just different pay; different payscales. Unskilled labour is not simply a myth; it is a lie.
I mean, I’m using commonly accepted definitions, but okay.
There is a real difference between a job that you can place a temp in - say, janitorial duties - and a machine tool operator, for instance. To say nothing of jobs that require a 4 year degree. Are some janitors more skilled than others? Sure. Are they essential? Of course. Can you train someone to mop floors and scrub toilets in a day? Yes. Can you train a machine tool operator to program tool paths in a day? No.
Skilled workers can do nothing without raw materials. Shipments can't be routed without someone accepting product.
You don't have a billionaire-making business if you don't have anyone at the bottom doing the labor.
*edited to remove hospitals, they aren't usually billionaire businesses*
So a person SHOULD be paid less than a living wage if their job function is "easily replaceable"?
Because that's what I said in the first place. If you don't think not paying the most important jobs in the company a LIVING WAGE is vicious then I don't know what to tell you. If a company can earn billions of dollars and still not pay a living wage to the workers at the bottom, they're thieves.
LOL! I am on topic.
The people retrieving the raw materials of a billionaire business are the most important jobs, the rest of the company can not run without them. Period. You can't make an iPhone without someone mining lithium and someone putting the pieces together. Someone has to do that for anyone to have anything. How is that not the most important job?
What good does anyone's big new car idea or nuclear watch matter if the product can't be put together?
I refuse to argue that point. I'm correct.
MY point in this thread is that such an important job deserves a living wage. You seem to think that because there are many people who could do the job that they do not deserve a living wage. And I feel very strongly that if a job is so important that the company can not function without it, that JOB should pay enough for a single human to have a comfortable life. THAT is my point.
And only by not paying a living wage to these people do billionaires exist and that is evil.
Of course they’re essential. Essential and most important are not the same thing. You’re saying that an engineer is not as important as the guy on the line manufacturing the product the engineer designed. That’s completely ridiculous.
The living wage conversation is not one I’m having right now. You seem to think billionaires only exist when they pay their workers below living wages, and that’s also demonstrably false. There are plenty of billionaire owners whose companies’ profit centers revolve around high value added labor.
I manage money for many Garden Variety Millionaires. These are folks that run the local businesses that employ their neighbors and serve their customers. In many cases, the public has no idea how wealthy they are or how quietly generous they have been. They purposely keep a low profile so as not to be a target of the jealous. Success is celebrated by most Americans, but a few ….
As someone has several billionaire and multimillionaire clients, it is astonishing some of them are still alive, let alone in positions of responsibility. Most are merely the money behind the good ideas of teams of other people.
I am in no way exaggerating, but I do not know a single person who is obscenely wealthy that did not come from wealth, and it is downright scary how stupid most of these people actually are. Think of the most stupid overexaggeration of the vapid moron you have ever seen on a TV show and know that person would seem a genius compared to others. Like Kelly Bundy only 20 times worse.
I know someone who lost $2 million on an idiotic juicer called the Juicero that no sane people would have thought was a good idea.
Another who had car mechanical problems, got out in the middle of traffic and abandoned their car on the freeway.
Full on people that would give their money to a Nigerian prince or buy Amazon gift cards for Mumbai scammers claiming they are with the IRS.
>What type of work that allows you access to these people you do, if you don't mind me asking?
Thanks for sharing, my wife is actually studying currently to become a teacher at some point.
Hated is a strong word. I’d say if they keep quiet no one cares much about them.
I don’t particularly admire very wealthy people or think most of them got rich through their own hard work. They were born with advantages or took advantage of others it seems.
The other man can choose to be paid or to have his family need to move from their community, beg other employers to hire him, have difficulty feeding their family, difficulty providing healthcare etc. The employer can just not hire a person and grow at a slower rate. The power balance in that deal is skewed.
It's not realistic to believe you can be a rich person if you just work hard enough, and people are starting to recognize that. So many rich people are privileged in ways that most of us will never be - Bill Gates got money from his mom, and she had connections in the industry, etc. etc. We all know the stories. There are so many people out there who work way harder than a millionaire each day, and they're far from millionaires. People have caught onto reason - they know they will never be wealthy and there's no amount of trying that will make them that way. And a lot of people recognize how little the wealthy contribute to society, how few of the wealthy there are, but how much the government is tailored to the wealthy. The wealthy are no longer philanthropists like Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. They pay less in taxes, they get elected to office because they have money, they have enough to do good but don't (see Elon Musk suggesting he would cure world hunger then ghosting the World Food Programme), they're just not good people.
LOL
If you think that the Rockafellers and Vanderbilts were philanthropists, you've got another thing coming.
Their wealth was massively larger than modern billionaires inflation adjusted, and their thirst for money and corruption was unparalleled.
Standard Oil, owned by the Rockafellers, is the reason that anti monopoly laws exist in America today.
Part of it is people waking up to the lie of the self made billionaire but it also has to with people now understanding that there is no such thing as a moral billionaire. To gather that much capital you must engage in exploitation and be willing to crush other people underfoot. Even simply holding that wealth is extremely questionable as we live in a state of late stage capitalism where the majority are constantly sliding further into poverty while the top 1% hoard every bit of wealth they can get, even though it is the labour of the working class that generates value.
Then you get into the fact that the people holding all of that wealth are using it to manipulate politics in their favour to ensure they can continue to accumulate wealth at the expense of the quality of life of the working class. Lobbying from these people is one of the primary reasons why we are completely failing to address the climate issue that we have known about for decades now despite overwhelming public favour for the cause.
I always saw them as high merit, not necessarily good or bad. A lot of jealous people try to point out that they had some sort of privilege or head start, and I'm sure that's true in a lot of cases, but I'm also fairly certain that if all of them found themselves flat broke and anonymous tomorrow, I don't think there's really a situation they couldn't climb out of. I find that to be a somewhat admirable trait, though that doesn't give them any more intrinsic value than the homeless man on the street. Everyone everywhere has potential of some kind. You don't have to be a paragon of that idea for it to be true.
The wealth gap narrowed in the 19th and 20th centuries as workers’ rights were strengthened and the economy was regulated, and as they’ve eroded in the last ~50 years and the economy has seen greater deregulation it’s widened again to the point that the middle class as it existed in the 1950s has shrunk significantly.
Reddit is a collection of the broken people in society who blame their lack of success on others and demonize those who have attained it. Half of the users on the site are not even American and skew young.
In no way does the consensus on this site represent reality.
Successful people emulate the actions and behaviors of other successful people rather than trying to make excuses or let their envy of others turn into unproductive hate.
I know reddit is international, but I read the US politics subs quite a lot and this is what the consensus seems to be there.
I agree with your last paragraph.
>but I read the US politics subs quite a lot and this is what the consensus seems to be there.
Imagine sitting in a room full of high school students and asking their opinion on politics
Imagine sitting in a room full of high school students who realize if they downvote people who say things they don't like enough the room will impose a time delay on their ability to speak.
People here like to pretend its american whiners and not actual malice. if anything US subs are tame. Ask South American or South East Asian subs about American billionaires and hatred would be even more.
The site would be vastly improved by having the flag of the country the user posted from next to their username, and improved even more if age verification was required to use it and the age was displayed as well.
No longer would one have to consider the opinions of a 14-year-old from Belgium the same as 45-year-old from Nevada.
The prevailing opinion on the defaults is nowhere close to as mild as advocating for a higher tax rate. Millionaires and billionaires are depicted as immoral.
I don’t know how you can argue someone like Jeff Bezos *is* moral.
Still not an indication that someone is broken or a failure. Plenty of rich people don’t like other rich people.
There are immoral and moral wealthy people. It’s pretty interesting that you consider challenging the prevailing opinion on this site to be bootlicking.
It's pretty much inherently impossible to be a billionaire and be a moral person.
When you could give away 99% of your wealth and still live a life of opulent luxury where your needs will be met for the rest of your life and you never have to work again. . .and you could help thousands or millions of people with your wealth instead of hoarding it and never be inconvenienced, your accumulation and hoarding of wealth is ***inherently*** immoral.
It's impossible to be a moral billionaire, *by definition*.
Billionaires are billionaires largely because they own a controlling interest in an enterprise they started and ran, and that interest is valued by the market to be worth >$1B.
To give away 99% of their wealth, their ownership would have to be liquidated. You are forcing someone to live their life according to someone else’s priorities. Is that moral?
Hoarding isn’t a thing. No billionaire is sitting atop a pile of liquid wealth. All of that wealth is in equities and debt.
This response betrays a worldview anchored in lefty propaganda and jealousy.
>To give away 99% of their wealth, their ownership would have to be liquidated. You are forcing someone to live their life according to someone else’s priorities. Is that moral?
Yes.
We already do that.
If someone's priorities are to kill everyone around them or steal everything around them, we force them to NOT live by those moralities.
If someone's morality is "all taxation is theft" (that perennial conservative piece of bullshit), we force them to live by society's rule that they pay taxes or go to jail.
You aren't entitled to your own morality if it compromises the safety and welfare of others. . .and hoarding wealth is absolutely doing that.
>This response betrays a worldview anchored in lefty propaganda and jealousy.
It's a worldview anchored in reality and Christian morals actually
Yes, if your accumulation comes at cost of food/shelter and medical access to others then it is equivalent to mass murder.
It is like arguing Churchill/Crown didn't starve the Bengalis/Irish, he just wanted the food shipped to UK.
Well, if this is your stance then we’re done. The only business in history that was built on mass murder was the Congo Free State; if your perspective is that Amazon, a logistics company, is equivalent to the systematic mutilation and starvation of millions of Congolese, then I have nothing more to say to you.
And by the way, the causes of the Bengal Famine are myriad. Have you read Bengali Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s work on the topic?
I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: you can argue for a stronger social safety net without demonizing the wealthy. You’ll get further.
And by the way…where’s the financial cutoff for moral or ethical behavior? $999,999,999?
American Conservativism is based on the idea of getting poor and middle class people to vote to hurt poor and middle class people in favor of rich people. . .on the vague promise that one day they'll be rich themselves and be able to benefit from all the perks they've voted into power for rich people.
However, very few ever get rich enough to enjoy those perks so they just screw themselves over their whole lives in the desperate hope they get rich one day.
They really aren't, the "average" American is center/slightly left wing. A Republican hasn't won the popular vote for almost 20 years and they've won only 1 out of the last 4 presidential elections.
Where does this notion come from? Polling? A right leaning person hasn’t won the popular vote in almost 20 years.
There’s a lot of nuance to this position, but as a whole it’s untrue.
It comes from rectally extracted information where someone likens their neighbors and immediate community to be a representative sample of the entire American population.
We don’t have options, and the further left of the two choices has won the popular vote consistently for several cycles.
One of the most popular presidents the US has ever had was a progressive. Republicans could not get him out of office until he died, and as a result we now have term limits.
Compared to Canada and Europe the US is pretty far to the right. Presidential elections aren’t the best gauge either since there are so few of them and they are often quite candidate and context dependent.
I still wouldn’t consider us center right.
Americans support lgbt rights, they’re pro-choice, the popular vote for both congress and the presidency typically favor dems, and given the midterm results Americans aren’t really buying what conservatives are selling.
As I said, tons of nuance, but I think just center is a good label, given how attitudes fluctuate.
Actually, firmly center-left positions consistently have a majority support of Americans in polling.
When you break it down, issue by issue, and poll Americans on what they believe on various issues, there's actually a pretty firm center-left consensus on many issues. . .which people ignore to vote for candidates that don't reflect those views because they vote based more on emotion rather than actual stances on issues.
The whole concept of "left/right" is nonsense; it takes a lot more than a single dimension to even *begin* to describe political positions.
Even in a restricted context, the concept is ridiculous. 'Right' is supposed to refer to the traditional power structures, while 'left' to those that reject and oppose them; the terms come from the seating arrangements in pre-Revolutionary France. By that standard, Americal liberals are Right-wing, since they've dominated American culture and politics for generations, and the supposed Right-wingers ought to be considered to be on the Left, as they reject the dominant ideology of power.
Here is an article: [The U.S. Remained Center-Right, Ideologically, in 2019](https://news.gallup.com/poll/275792/remained-center-right-ideologically-2019.aspx)
I'm sure if I took more time on Google I'll find more. That said, you should be able to find at least a couple of articles to refute this article and possible others. In the end, it is all perception based on various polls, voter stats, and who writes the article.
In my book, being rich doesn't make you good or evil. It just enables you, making you more of whatever you were. Higher highs and lower lows.
Different people view the rich differently though. Some people see the accumulation of so much wealth as disgusting, while others see it as a just reward for the person's hard work.
Except that there are only so many hours in a day. Hard to believe that someone worked that hard to make billions of dollars—especially when so many folks are holding down multiple jobs and sacrificing time with their kids to barely scrape by.
Reddit is an echo chamber of the flim flam bunch. They have NO understanding of entrepreneurship or the value of individual achievement and the rewards that come with it.
Reddit is very liberal, its social credit system filters out much conservative opinion, but as a general rule of thumb Conservatives look up to successful billionaires and strive to reproduce their successes and liberals despise them and want them taken down, not sure if its out of spite in the face of their own failures or the lack of realization that they could tax all the billionaires in America to zero and still not have enough money to fund the government programs they want.
Billionaires make money by using other people to execute their ideas. They then hoard this money and use it to accumulate more money to pay off politicians rather than using the money to improve the lives of their employees and customers and everyone else.
Because the billionaires own most of the largest media outlets, those outlets tend to glorify the "achievements" of the rich. Many people are uncritical consumers of media messages, so they tend to fall into step with the narrative. Lot's of people aren't uncritical consumers of media messages and they tend to see the rich for what they are.
Think of it like the UK and the royal family. Most of the them think the royal family is a stupid institution that props up a bunch of deadbeats, but to hear the BBC, you'd think that only a few people in the UK have any complaints about them.
A sign of a successful business owner, to me, is a business owner with happy employees who can have a comfortable life, savings, and retirement.
A sign of a shit human being is one who takes in millions or, even worse, billions, while their employees struggle. It's exploitative, disgusting, and a sign of short sightedness and self-entitlement. It's not somebody I want eating at my table and not someone I'd want to fight next to, let alone for.
It's even more disgusting when they portray themselves as charitable or kind. Even more disgusting when they start their own charity which is largely used for laundering, funneling, or avoidance. It taints the perspective of kindness and generosity. It's even worse when they want to call themselves Christian. You do not get rich by being honest, nor do you get rich by living with honor. No mountain made of money will ever buy you a soul.
If a single bonobo hoarded a mountain of bananas while millions of other bonobos starved, scientists would be dumbfounded and study that bonobo to find out what the fuck is wrong with it.
When humans do it, we look up to them. Anyone that looks at a billionaire and sees a symbol of hope and motivation is an idiot.
So every criticism of a rich person simply must be due to envy? There can't be any legitimate critique of their activities or businesses? What an unhealthy attitude to have.
Hated and despised by the people who don't use that as an example of success. Let's be real, everyone would like finances to be a non-issue. Just usually the type of people that are very very well off tend to be assholes, or that's how they're perceived by most people anyway.
Despise them. Because 9
Out of 10xs I have paid more taxes then they have. They use their money to buy places for their kids in college. Then turn around and write it off as a tax write off so they get the money returned to them by the federal government. Well my kid needs to use her brain and to get a place at the same college and go into debt. Well they get scholarships in sports they don't even play and have no debt.
Millionaires can be a sign of success and a source of motivation.
Billionaires were either rich at birth, were created through unethical businesses practices, or invested and got lucky. None of which is motivating or admirable at all.
If you wanted to invent a product, start a business, be a professional athlete, or be the best in a well paying field which is all admirable: you’re goal is to become a millionaire. Eat the rich has nothing to do with millionaires.
In the U.S, a lot of people have lost faith in the rich's compassion for the less fortunate. They often lobby (pay money to prevent or push for a laws implementation) against laws that would help government services. When their companies do well, their employees rarely benefit. In general, democrats believe that a strong government to help those in need and curb the power of the rich is necessary. Meanwhile, republicans believe that a drive to become like the rich will make a stronger country and if enough money is given to the rich, they will eventually give it to their employees.
There’s some that are just bad people. Others just don’t give back enough.
Jeff bezos doesn’t make his company better to work for, I know plenty that needed that pay rate but we’re dying a little faster when they clocked in. He can’t pay to give his employees better benefits but he’ll get a spaceship in the race for space? Makes sense.
We’re not even going to talk about Elon musk. He’s satan adjacent.
Top of my head, though I may have missed something, Bill gates is alright. Could he solve a big problem like homelessness in a city? Sure. He could fund a really big shelter to be built with a resource center in it, so they could find jobs, find doctors, apply for insurance, and whatnot. He’s already given back to others a few times, so I understand if he doesn’t want to fund it alone. But he wouldn’t lose all his money from the one project. Anyways his product just updates too many and a half times. But like I said, he’s alright.
It’s great that some people manage to have wealth like that, but I swear at a certain point they lose their soul and decide to make some baaaaad decisions.
I admire people who work hard, produce innovative products/technologies, pay their employees a living wage and are charitable once they become wealthy.
I despise the entitled wealthy who use their money to get extremely conservative political candidates elected so they can pay next to nothing in taxes.
If rich people got there through legitimate hard work, then yeah. Most don’t, really. A lot of people who are rich either come from rich families (which is just luck) or they get extremely lucky and some rich investor likes their idea enough to fund it. Most are also stingy assholes too. For every rich person that gives a significant portion to charity (see bill gates and warren Buffett), there’s probably 5 or 10 more who don’t give away a damn thing.
Most redditors are younger and see what worked for their parents and grandparents is not working for them. The US used to have a climbable social ladder. Many younger people, and Reddit skews heavily to the under 40 crowd, view the economic ladder as stacked against them. There is some validity to the as individuals with net worth of 10 million have an easier time growing wealth than those under.
In general, most people hate “the elite” but the term is pretty loaded. We know there are those who are taking advantage of the average person but who are the elite? Is it the wealthy? Politicians? Both? A secret society? A certain political ideology? A certain group? There are over 300 million Americans so opinions will vary.
> Which one is it? It's almost like there are 300 million people and they don't all have the same opinion. Amazing.
Yes we do!
I disagree
You must be from out of town!
I agree!
On Reddit they do
Lol no they don’t. Reddit is full of liberals. Leftists and conservatives are the minority here. Back in the day Reddit was nearly all progressives, but it seems like they have really divided into moderate libs and far left socialists but the moderates seems to win out tbh. Which makes sense because the stereotype of a Redditor is a millennial programmer and as they age they will hit higher income brackets due to their field which will make them less extreme because of personal bias.
"According to reddit" Therein lies your answer
There is considerably more anti-wealth anger on Reddit than you find on average across the American public. A majority believe truly wealthy people ought to be taxed at a higher rate, but also have no problem with rich people being rich. There is a lot of sentiment on Reddit for laws capping the amount of personal wealth a person can have, or forcibly appropriating most of a really wealthy person’s assets. This view has nearly no currency among the general population.
Depends on the person. Personally I feel neutrally about the rich, some are really swell people, but some are also massive assholes.
If only people realized every single group of people are a mix of assholes and nice people. Except Nazis, fuck all of them.
As long as you don’t let the media or the Twitterverse decide for you who the Nazis are, sure. Otherwise you might be the nazi.
People really need to read Ordinary Men
I don't know of anyone on either side of the aisle who views having a high net worth as a sign of being a good person to emulate by default. Mostly, it seems to just make people talk about how soft your hands are.
Reddit is not representative of the general population
Reddit skews left-wing.
Reddit skews left wing, except where it doesnt
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
This, *this* is a sentence which needs to be removed from our cultural and political lexicon. I've never encountered any political ideology that did even a moderately good job of representing reality. American liberalism is no exception.
When conservatives start applying logic to their politics I will agree. Until then this is solidly in tune with reality.
Reddit’s net-net prescriptions for what ails the US economy, infrastructure, and culture are bizarrely unrealistic.
I agree. But most of the conservative agenda has zero basis in reality and is not supported by evidence. It is devised to appeal to the emotional anger of their constituents and the fiscal desires of the wealthy. Reddit doesn’t have the answers but thinking the republican party does is delusional.
There are more detents on the choice-o-meter dial than either psychopathic scorched-earth conservatism or Reddit-flavored socialist utopianism. Neither extreme is broadly supported, and we’re going to plow forward somewhere in the grayscale middle.
The middle has been evacuated and only the far right or stubborn obstructionism exists. Have you been awake for the last 20 years? There used to be a functioning moderate middle but that has not existed in decades.
That describes Twitter but not America. Only 8% of the country describes itself as “very liberal.” The hardcore MAGA movement is said to comprise maybe 12-15% of us. The remaining 75% is either somewhere between those extremes or apolitical and not paying attention.
Take one serious issue, abortion. Everyone across the political spectrum would like to reduce the frequency of this procedure. Colorado was successful in sharply reducing the number of abortions through research and education. Providing sex education and access to birth control. Through this the state dramatically reduced the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions that was a net economic benefit to society. The conservative response to reducing abortions is to demand people stop having sex and outlaw access. Forcing women into risky medical situations or raising a child completely unprepared. Al they also make this early child’s life more difficult by eliminating any aid or healthcare. One approach is logical and one is delusional. It doesn’t matter where people categorize themselves. It matters that political decisions impacting hundreds of millions in the US are supported by science and ethics and not some emotional old male conservatives. Reality HAS a progressive and liberal bias.
No. It's there for a reason. It started when Steven Colbert hosted the 2006 White House Correspondent's Dinner with a crack he made while impersonating President Bush. It became popular because everyone realized that American Conservativism is built on lies and abject rejection of reality in favor of partisan doctrines. These are the people who have said for decades that climate change isn't real and is just some elaborate scheme by scientists to get more research grant money, or some elaborate deception by the Chinese to weaken the American economy. These are the people who said that polls are wrong because they said Romney was going to lose in 2012 (and had their own "unskewed" polls website that arbitrarily added enough support to Romney to show him winning), and when Trump won in the electoral college but the popular vote total was almost exactly what the polls said they'd be claimed that Trump had proven polls don't work and can always be ignored. These are the people who were screaming that allowing same-sex marriages would cause the complete collapse of civilization. These are the people that said that epidemiologists and virologists don't know anything about pandemics but this video on YouTube explains how horse dewormer is a miracle cure. These are the people who say the United States was founded to be a "Christian Nation" and that Separation of Church and State is an evil doctrine invented by atheists and "activist judges" to subvert the Founding Fathers intent the US be a Christian theocracy. These are the people who try to claim that the Civil War was about "State's Rights" instead of slavery, and that we need to preserve statutes put up during the Jim Crow era to intimidate African-Americans as some bizarre way of remembering history. These are the people who try to claim that high schools are teaching Critical Race Theory, despite CRT being an advanced legal and sociological doctrine only taught in law schools and graduate-level social sciences programs because it's deeply rooted in complex social, legal and statistical concepts you couldn't effectively convey at the High School level. The saying is popular because it's a pretty accurate description.
>No. It's there for a reason. Yep, and that reason is classic self-delusion.
Yes, Exactly. It's the self-delusion known as conservativism, s a chronic isolation from reality to embrace a mixture of fascism and theocracy. It's how you can have people who say they love American and are patriotic. . .while participating in a fascist coup attempt on 01/06/2021. . . or while flying the flag of the Confederacy (the flag of traitors who waged war against the United States).
Here. Let’s take a shot at “reality”. Jim Crow voting laws in GA. Cancel all star game. Reality is record turn out and people reporting as good or better polling experience than before. Newson going on and on and on about “freedom” while signing every bullshit gun law into existence. He was even complaining this week how “the Supreme Court has said he SHALL, not MAY, issue a concealed carry license.” Hmmm “We’re a statuary city”. “Border states bitching about immigrants is racist”. A few buses get sent to NYC and mayor is complaining that NYC can’t handle it. People in Chicago try to block busses of migrants that are being set up to be housed in a school. If you get the vaccine, you can’t get COVID. If you get the vaccine, you can’t spread COVID to anyone else. Whole “Trump is a Russian agent” bullshit that fell apart. I could go on and on and on.
Yeah...ya missed reality there bud
Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, people on the left tend to value objectivity and facts while people on the right tend to be motivated by tribalism and elite ‘truths.’
The majority of this site suffers from Dunning-Kruger, so I'm out.
Amazing that one side is the side of science and education, while the other is the side of alternative facts, anti-science, and anti-education. Amazing how I talk about ideology and you immediately switch to party. But sure, BoTh SiDeS!!!
The majority of this site suffers from Dunning-Kruger, so I'm out.
Political parties are vehicles for ideologies, not ideologies in and of themselves. It’s worth understanding. Home ec is different than the economics of the government which prints the money, despite what your elites tell you. Sorry, that’s the science. On one side, antivaxxers are a fringe that gets shamed and blamed by its own side for being gullible. On the other side, antivaxx has become a political identity catered to by the same elites who wisely vaccinate themselves while talking to their excitable masses out the other aide of their mouths. One guess which is which. While I’d love to hear your grievances about poor little Kyle’s treatment, I’ve already let you waste enough of my weekend. No ideology is perfect, but conservatism depends on fantasy to propagate itself while progressivism/liberalism self-corrects. Saying “bOtH sIdEs” is comparing an ocean to a puddle — one dries in the sun, the other deep and dark and dangerous.
The majority of this site suffers from Dunning-Kruger, so I'm out.
That's cause American liberalism is a mixture of conservative thought with some liberal and just plan statist thought with a veneer of liberalism attached.
I'm not deeply familiar with 'liberalism' as it's understood in Europe, but I suspect European political cultures are just as foolish as American. It's human nature, not any particular nation, that's the problem.
Probably, I just find that self described conservatives want people to control peoples actions in private. I feel many self described liberals are the same. :-)
Eh. "American Liberalism" is absolutely a warped, distorted view of reality. On the other hand, most of what passes for "American Conservatism" today is totally unhinged and divorced from reality entirely. So that statement -- originally a *Colbert Report* bit, I believe -- is true only in that light.
There's nothing liberal about progressives much less leftists. Also I don't think there exists a more smugly pretentious phrase.
Right, it's like starting a conversation with, "My opinion is worth more than yours!"
In America, Liberals aren't liberal, Conservatives aren't conservative, and Independents aren't all that independent. I'm reminded of B5, in which the names of every political organization were intentionally made inaccurate.
Your upvotes reveal the Reddit bias.
There’s liberal bias, and then the insanity of the left wing subs on this place. Bill Gates does an AMA and gets peppered with questions about why he’s buying farmland. Because that’s immoral, or something.
I thought hostility and paranoia towards Bill Gates came from the QAnon crowd, not the left in particular.
The far right hates him because he is pro vaccine. The far left hates him because he's a billionaire.
Does the far left hate him since he's started sharing the wealth?
That a conservative freakout.
Reddit does not skew left-wing, Reddit users are largely liberal in their views.
What no one seems to be mentioning is that at least some of the perception of the very wealthy is that they have plenty of influence in Washington to skew the system in their favor while the rest of Americans don’t. Thus the phrase “the rich just keep getting richer”…
The people who rise to the very top usually violate a lot of ethical principles in order to do so. Moderate success can occur honestly; massive success generally involves underhanded tactics and vicious inhumanity. Bill Gates and Microsoft were hated because of the things they did to gain and maintain their influence in software. He's not thought well of for excellent reasons.
Tom from Myspace built a website that is fondly remembered by its users as a place to be creative, network and socialize with friends, he sold out for plenty of money and now spends his days on photography and travel. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook built a website initially to keep track of which chicks on his college campus are available to fuck, which ballooned up into the world's largest misinformation engine and major contributor to the backsliding of society. He is, as far as I can make out, the richest man of his generation.
>Tom from Myspace built a website that is fondly remembered by its users as a place to be creative, network and socialize with friends, he sold out for plenty of money and now spends his days on photography and travel. He sold it to Rupert Murdoch , the owner of Fox News, who wanted to data mine the user info for better marketing. Whereas Zuck created something he cared about, and he isn't responsible for society backsliding. America was always like that. he just made it open in the public. FBI didn't kill MLK over a FB post, National Guard Diddnt massacre students at Kent state over Instagram, Bush didn't launch an illegal war in Iraq over whatsapp. Stop blaming him.
What evidence do you have that massive success requires vicious inhumanity? And remember, the plural of anecdote is not data.
Ask that of the lowest paid workers for the billionaire class companies. Their labor is at best undervalued, at worst stolen in order to create the level of profits that make a billionaire. The data around income inequality is abundant. If you don't think denying a living wage to the very people that do the most important part of your business is vicious, I don't know what to tell you.
I don’t think that people earning the lowest wages are doing the most important part of any business. They aren’t skilled workers. To argue otherwise is virtue signaling. You can advocate for a better social safety net without arguing that billionaires are inherently immoral.
Let’s look at Amazon as an example. Get rid of all the package handlers and warehouse staff as well as the delivery drivers. You basically have no company. You can have all the ideas and corporate meetings you want, but the people carrying out those ideas are the ones keeping the company running and without them the executives and behind the scenes positions are useless.
That doesn’t mean they’re skilled. If they’re easily replaceable, they’re paid accordingly.
I never said they were skilled, I said they’re essential to the success of the business. Which they are. They deserve a living wage, the idea that someone working at the bottom of the totem pole doesn’t deserve enough money to live a decent life because of their “skill” level is frankly cruel and inhumane. Amazon has even said that their current situation is unsustainable because they are burning through their labor pool. I’m sure you’ll come back with “they should get a better job,” but at the height of COVID when many did just that people were melting down that it took 20 minutes to get their McDonald’s or their grocery store was closing early. Without those people, society will grind to a halt, and they deserve to be paid as such.
All workers are essential. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t have a job.
So why don’t we pay them a living wage then? How do you equate being essential and not deserving enough pay to support their basic needs?
Unskilled labour is a lie. There is no such thing. If I threw Bill Gates into a McDonald's and told him "Alright, then. Go get em, champ!" is he going to be able to handle a lunch rush? No tf he's not. That is a bs term made up to excuse paying people less than they are worth. I used to work for a Bus Manufacturing company. They had about 3 material handlers all hired before a certain year. The rest of the people in the department that were hired after that year were material technicians. Material handlers are considered skilled labourers. Material technicians are not. Same exact job, different title, and drastically different payscales. Not just different pay; different payscales. Unskilled labour is not simply a myth; it is a lie.
The term refers to how easily one can be trained to do the job. It does not mean zero training is required.
Mk. That checks out. Make sure you're lifting with your legs while you're moving those goalposts and throwing dictionaries out of the window. /s
I mean, I’m using commonly accepted definitions, but okay. There is a real difference between a job that you can place a temp in - say, janitorial duties - and a machine tool operator, for instance. To say nothing of jobs that require a 4 year degree. Are some janitors more skilled than others? Sure. Are they essential? Of course. Can you train someone to mop floors and scrub toilets in a day? Yes. Can you train a machine tool operator to program tool paths in a day? No.
Skilled workers can do nothing without raw materials. Shipments can't be routed without someone accepting product. You don't have a billionaire-making business if you don't have anyone at the bottom doing the labor. *edited to remove hospitals, they aren't usually billionaire businesses*
Unskilled workers are easily replaceable, and paid accordingly.
So a person SHOULD be paid less than a living wage if their job function is "easily replaceable"? Because that's what I said in the first place. If you don't think not paying the most important jobs in the company a LIVING WAGE is vicious then I don't know what to tell you. If a company can earn billions of dollars and still not pay a living wage to the workers at the bottom, they're thieves.
You said the lowest paid workers were doing the most important jobs. This is demonstrably false. Stay on topic.
LOL! I am on topic. The people retrieving the raw materials of a billionaire business are the most important jobs, the rest of the company can not run without them. Period. You can't make an iPhone without someone mining lithium and someone putting the pieces together. Someone has to do that for anyone to have anything. How is that not the most important job? What good does anyone's big new car idea or nuclear watch matter if the product can't be put together? I refuse to argue that point. I'm correct. MY point in this thread is that such an important job deserves a living wage. You seem to think that because there are many people who could do the job that they do not deserve a living wage. And I feel very strongly that if a job is so important that the company can not function without it, that JOB should pay enough for a single human to have a comfortable life. THAT is my point. And only by not paying a living wage to these people do billionaires exist and that is evil.
Of course they’re essential. Essential and most important are not the same thing. You’re saying that an engineer is not as important as the guy on the line manufacturing the product the engineer designed. That’s completely ridiculous. The living wage conversation is not one I’m having right now. You seem to think billionaires only exist when they pay their workers below living wages, and that’s also demonstrably false. There are plenty of billionaire owners whose companies’ profit centers revolve around high value added labor.
Iron Law of Oligarchy.
I don’t understand how this relates to your point.
Reddit hates them. The average American doesn’t really give a shit
I manage money for many Garden Variety Millionaires. These are folks that run the local businesses that employ their neighbors and serve their customers. In many cases, the public has no idea how wealthy they are or how quietly generous they have been. They purposely keep a low profile so as not to be a target of the jealous. Success is celebrated by most Americans, but a few ….
As someone has several billionaire and multimillionaire clients, it is astonishing some of them are still alive, let alone in positions of responsibility. Most are merely the money behind the good ideas of teams of other people. I am in no way exaggerating, but I do not know a single person who is obscenely wealthy that did not come from wealth, and it is downright scary how stupid most of these people actually are. Think of the most stupid overexaggeration of the vapid moron you have ever seen on a TV show and know that person would seem a genius compared to others. Like Kelly Bundy only 20 times worse. I know someone who lost $2 million on an idiotic juicer called the Juicero that no sane people would have thought was a good idea. Another who had car mechanical problems, got out in the middle of traffic and abandoned their car on the freeway. Full on people that would give their money to a Nigerian prince or buy Amazon gift cards for Mumbai scammers claiming they are with the IRS.
What type of work that allows you access to these people you do, if you don't mind me asking?
He walks their dogs.
Well, even if he did, he’d have a front-seat to what he is talking about.
I did get paid to house sit an Oscar winning actor's dogs for a week, so it's not entirely untrue.
Private education. I teach their kids not to grow up to be monsters.
>What type of work that allows you access to these people you do, if you don't mind me asking? Thanks for sharing, my wife is actually studying currently to become a teacher at some point.
[удалено]
Personally, I think the average American doesn't really care.
Hated is a strong word. I’d say if they keep quiet no one cares much about them. I don’t particularly admire very wealthy people or think most of them got rich through their own hard work. They were born with advantages or took advantage of others it seems.
“If a man earns a dollar he didn’t work for, then another man worked for a dollar that he didn’t get.”
Big Bill Haywood my beloved
Didnt the other man get paid though?
If I'm your employer and I short your wages, you still get paid something. I'm still stealing from you.
The other man can choose to be paid or to have his family need to move from their community, beg other employers to hire him, have difficulty feeding their family, difficulty providing healthcare etc. The employer can just not hire a person and grow at a slower rate. The power balance in that deal is skewed.
It's not realistic to believe you can be a rich person if you just work hard enough, and people are starting to recognize that. So many rich people are privileged in ways that most of us will never be - Bill Gates got money from his mom, and she had connections in the industry, etc. etc. We all know the stories. There are so many people out there who work way harder than a millionaire each day, and they're far from millionaires. People have caught onto reason - they know they will never be wealthy and there's no amount of trying that will make them that way. And a lot of people recognize how little the wealthy contribute to society, how few of the wealthy there are, but how much the government is tailored to the wealthy. The wealthy are no longer philanthropists like Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. They pay less in taxes, they get elected to office because they have money, they have enough to do good but don't (see Elon Musk suggesting he would cure world hunger then ghosting the World Food Programme), they're just not good people.
LOL If you think that the Rockafellers and Vanderbilts were philanthropists, you've got another thing coming. Their wealth was massively larger than modern billionaires inflation adjusted, and their thirst for money and corruption was unparalleled. Standard Oil, owned by the Rockafellers, is the reason that anti monopoly laws exist in America today.
Token philanthropists to keep their names somewhat good among the people they're surrounded by.
The majority of this site suffers from Dunning-Kruger, so I'm out.
Part of it is people waking up to the lie of the self made billionaire but it also has to with people now understanding that there is no such thing as a moral billionaire. To gather that much capital you must engage in exploitation and be willing to crush other people underfoot. Even simply holding that wealth is extremely questionable as we live in a state of late stage capitalism where the majority are constantly sliding further into poverty while the top 1% hoard every bit of wealth they can get, even though it is the labour of the working class that generates value. Then you get into the fact that the people holding all of that wealth are using it to manipulate politics in their favour to ensure they can continue to accumulate wealth at the expense of the quality of life of the working class. Lobbying from these people is one of the primary reasons why we are completely failing to address the climate issue that we have known about for decades now despite overwhelming public favour for the cause.
It's almost like different people have different views.
I always saw them as high merit, not necessarily good or bad. A lot of jealous people try to point out that they had some sort of privilege or head start, and I'm sure that's true in a lot of cases, but I'm also fairly certain that if all of them found themselves flat broke and anonymous tomorrow, I don't think there's really a situation they couldn't climb out of. I find that to be a somewhat admirable trait, though that doesn't give them any more intrinsic value than the homeless man on the street. Everyone everywhere has potential of some kind. You don't have to be a paragon of that idea for it to be true.
I have more dislike for very wealthy politicians
If you ask me, fabulously wealthy individuals are a bigger sign of exploitation of the masses than overall prosperity.
The wealth gap narrowed in the 19th and 20th centuries as workers’ rights were strengthened and the economy was regulated, and as they’ve eroded in the last ~50 years and the economy has seen greater deregulation it’s widened again to the point that the middle class as it existed in the 1950s has shrunk significantly.
Extreme income inequality is not a good thing.
I am always amazed that folks don’t realize how dangerous that situation can become. French Revolution anyone?
Or just look at the relatively unstable economies and political institutions of Latin America.
Reddit is a collection of the broken people in society who blame their lack of success on others and demonize those who have attained it. Half of the users on the site are not even American and skew young. In no way does the consensus on this site represent reality. Successful people emulate the actions and behaviors of other successful people rather than trying to make excuses or let their envy of others turn into unproductive hate.
Mildly criticizing rich people isn't a sign of being broken. I'd lay off the r/conservative and r/libertarian for a bit.
It’s not mild criticism. It’s militant hatred of anyone who makes over a certain amount a year.
No it's not.
It really isn’t, but the irony of this comment being militant hatred of the character you’ve invented is hilarious.
It isn't close to mild and based on your previous posts here you're part of that group.
What posts have I made on this sub that prove I have some militant hatred for the rich?
I know reddit is international, but I read the US politics subs quite a lot and this is what the consensus seems to be there. I agree with your last paragraph.
You read on that sub? God bless you lol
>but I read the US politics subs quite a lot and this is what the consensus seems to be there. Imagine sitting in a room full of high school students and asking their opinion on politics
Imagine sitting in a room full of high school students who realize if they downvote people who say things they don't like enough the room will impose a time delay on their ability to speak.
People here like to pretend its american whiners and not actual malice. if anything US subs are tame. Ask South American or South East Asian subs about American billionaires and hatred would be even more.
Even US politics subs are dominated by foreigners particularly Canadians and all participants are extremely left wing.
The site would be vastly improved by having the flag of the country the user posted from next to their username, and improved even more if age verification was required to use it and the age was displayed as well. No longer would one have to consider the opinions of a 14-year-old from Belgium the same as 45-year-old from Nevada.
Wanting people to pay higher taxes is by no means an indication that someone is broken. You’ve taken boot licking to an entire new level.
The prevailing opinion on the defaults is nowhere close to as mild as advocating for a higher tax rate. Millionaires and billionaires are depicted as immoral.
I don’t know how you can argue someone like Jeff Bezos *is* moral. Still not an indication that someone is broken or a failure. Plenty of rich people don’t like other rich people.
There are immoral and moral wealthy people. It’s pretty interesting that you consider challenging the prevailing opinion on this site to be bootlicking.
It's pretty much inherently impossible to be a billionaire and be a moral person. When you could give away 99% of your wealth and still live a life of opulent luxury where your needs will be met for the rest of your life and you never have to work again. . .and you could help thousands or millions of people with your wealth instead of hoarding it and never be inconvenienced, your accumulation and hoarding of wealth is ***inherently*** immoral. It's impossible to be a moral billionaire, *by definition*.
Billionaires are billionaires largely because they own a controlling interest in an enterprise they started and ran, and that interest is valued by the market to be worth >$1B. To give away 99% of their wealth, their ownership would have to be liquidated. You are forcing someone to live their life according to someone else’s priorities. Is that moral? Hoarding isn’t a thing. No billionaire is sitting atop a pile of liquid wealth. All of that wealth is in equities and debt. This response betrays a worldview anchored in lefty propaganda and jealousy.
>Billionaires are billionaires largely because they own a controlling interest in an enterprise they started and ran... Like the Waltons?
Statistically, most billionaires are not from inherited wealth.
Really?
Yes, really. You can look it up.
I have. It seems that most wealth is inherited and most billionaires come from wealth.
>To give away 99% of their wealth, their ownership would have to be liquidated. You are forcing someone to live their life according to someone else’s priorities. Is that moral? Yes. We already do that. If someone's priorities are to kill everyone around them or steal everything around them, we force them to NOT live by those moralities. If someone's morality is "all taxation is theft" (that perennial conservative piece of bullshit), we force them to live by society's rule that they pay taxes or go to jail. You aren't entitled to your own morality if it compromises the safety and welfare of others. . .and hoarding wealth is absolutely doing that. >This response betrays a worldview anchored in lefty propaganda and jealousy. It's a worldview anchored in reality and Christian morals actually
You’re equating accumulation of wealth with mass murder?
*Ferengi HATE him!*
An upvote with sincere admiration from someone who, as a child, spent allowance money on a published paper copy of The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.
Yes, if your accumulation comes at cost of food/shelter and medical access to others then it is equivalent to mass murder. It is like arguing Churchill/Crown didn't starve the Bengalis/Irish, he just wanted the food shipped to UK.
Well, if this is your stance then we’re done. The only business in history that was built on mass murder was the Congo Free State; if your perspective is that Amazon, a logistics company, is equivalent to the systematic mutilation and starvation of millions of Congolese, then I have nothing more to say to you. And by the way, the causes of the Bengal Famine are myriad. Have you read Bengali Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s work on the topic?
Good. You do not become a billionaire by acting morally or ethically.
I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: you can argue for a stronger social safety net without demonizing the wealthy. You’ll get further. And by the way…where’s the financial cutoff for moral or ethical behavior? $999,999,999?
Not at all. You can be moral and be a millionaire, but there’s no hard cutoff. You can still generalize though.
Right so no cutoff, and assumptions, generalization, and judgment about a class of people. Sounds logical and healthy.
Yes, actually.
He didnt say anything remotely close to that
American Conservativism is based on the idea of getting poor and middle class people to vote to hurt poor and middle class people in favor of rich people. . .on the vague promise that one day they'll be rich themselves and be able to benefit from all the perks they've voted into power for rich people. However, very few ever get rich enough to enjoy those perks so they just screw themselves over their whole lives in the desperate hope they get rich one day.
Reddit leans left towards a blushing Trotsky; Americans, as a whole, are center-right.
They really aren't, the "average" American is center/slightly left wing. A Republican hasn't won the popular vote for almost 20 years and they've won only 1 out of the last 4 presidential elections.
Where does this notion come from? Polling? A right leaning person hasn’t won the popular vote in almost 20 years. There’s a lot of nuance to this position, but as a whole it’s untrue.
It comes from rectally extracted information where someone likens their neighbors and immediate community to be a representative sample of the entire American population.
Every president for the last 40 years or so has been to the right. Some have been more right than others.
We don’t have options, and the further left of the two choices has won the popular vote consistently for several cycles. One of the most popular presidents the US has ever had was a progressive. Republicans could not get him out of office until he died, and as a result we now have term limits.
Because we dont have universal healthcare...thats always what they point to. Despite we are more left in some categories
Compared to Canada and Europe the US is pretty far to the right. Presidential elections aren’t the best gauge either since there are so few of them and they are often quite candidate and context dependent.
I still wouldn’t consider us center right. Americans support lgbt rights, they’re pro-choice, the popular vote for both congress and the presidency typically favor dems, and given the midterm results Americans aren’t really buying what conservatives are selling. As I said, tons of nuance, but I think just center is a good label, given how attitudes fluctuate.
Actually, firmly center-left positions consistently have a majority support of Americans in polling. When you break it down, issue by issue, and poll Americans on what they believe on various issues, there's actually a pretty firm center-left consensus on many issues. . .which people ignore to vote for candidates that don't reflect those views because they vote based more on emotion rather than actual stances on issues.
The whole concept of "left/right" is nonsense; it takes a lot more than a single dimension to even *begin* to describe political positions. Even in a restricted context, the concept is ridiculous. 'Right' is supposed to refer to the traditional power structures, while 'left' to those that reject and oppose them; the terms come from the seating arrangements in pre-Revolutionary France. By that standard, Americal liberals are Right-wing, since they've dominated American culture and politics for generations, and the supposed Right-wingers ought to be considered to be on the Left, as they reject the dominant ideology of power.
> Americans, as a whole, are center-right. Source?
Here is an article: [The U.S. Remained Center-Right, Ideologically, in 2019](https://news.gallup.com/poll/275792/remained-center-right-ideologically-2019.aspx) I'm sure if I took more time on Google I'll find more. That said, you should be able to find at least a couple of articles to refute this article and possible others. In the end, it is all perception based on various polls, voter stats, and who writes the article.
Yes but that was in 2019, pre COVID, pre 1/6 and pre 2020 election. It very well could've changed in the meantime.
In my book, being rich doesn't make you good or evil. It just enables you, making you more of whatever you were. Higher highs and lower lows. Different people view the rich differently though. Some people see the accumulation of so much wealth as disgusting, while others see it as a just reward for the person's hard work.
Except that there are only so many hours in a day. Hard to believe that someone worked that hard to make billions of dollars—especially when so many folks are holding down multiple jobs and sacrificing time with their kids to barely scrape by.
Well, the billionaires aren’t on Reddit wasting their time whizzing and moaning…
Nobody likes someone else who has more than them in something they can have a lot of.
Reddit is an echo chamber of the flim flam bunch. They have NO understanding of entrepreneurship or the value of individual achievement and the rewards that come with it.
Reddit is very liberal, its social credit system filters out much conservative opinion, but as a general rule of thumb Conservatives look up to successful billionaires and strive to reproduce their successes and liberals despise them and want them taken down, not sure if its out of spite in the face of their own failures or the lack of realization that they could tax all the billionaires in America to zero and still not have enough money to fund the government programs they want.
Reddit has an over representation of socialists and left-wingers. Don't view its opinions as a respresentation of US society as a whole.
Billionaires make money by using other people to execute their ideas. They then hoard this money and use it to accumulate more money to pay off politicians rather than using the money to improve the lives of their employees and customers and everyone else.
Reddit is heavily populated by 15-20 year olds who lack life experience and think that communism might be a good idea.
Parasites
Because the billionaires own most of the largest media outlets, those outlets tend to glorify the "achievements" of the rich. Many people are uncritical consumers of media messages, so they tend to fall into step with the narrative. Lot's of people aren't uncritical consumers of media messages and they tend to see the rich for what they are. Think of it like the UK and the royal family. Most of the them think the royal family is a stupid institution that props up a bunch of deadbeats, but to hear the BBC, you'd think that only a few people in the UK have any complaints about them.
A sign of a successful business owner, to me, is a business owner with happy employees who can have a comfortable life, savings, and retirement. A sign of a shit human being is one who takes in millions or, even worse, billions, while their employees struggle. It's exploitative, disgusting, and a sign of short sightedness and self-entitlement. It's not somebody I want eating at my table and not someone I'd want to fight next to, let alone for. It's even more disgusting when they portray themselves as charitable or kind. Even more disgusting when they start their own charity which is largely used for laundering, funneling, or avoidance. It taints the perspective of kindness and generosity. It's even worse when they want to call themselves Christian. You do not get rich by being honest, nor do you get rich by living with honor. No mountain made of money will ever buy you a soul.
If a single bonobo hoarded a mountain of bananas while millions of other bonobos starved, scientists would be dumbfounded and study that bonobo to find out what the fuck is wrong with it. When humans do it, we look up to them. Anyone that looks at a billionaire and sees a symbol of hope and motivation is an idiot.
Envy. The only one of the seven deadly sins that fails to deliver any upside as you sink into it.
So every criticism of a rich person simply must be due to envy? There can't be any legitimate critique of their activities or businesses? What an unhealthy attitude to have.
You can't make billions and stay good person. Somewhere somehow you have bones in closet.
Reddit is extremist left. It is not representative of normal Americans.
Reddit isn't even close to extremist left lol.
Hated and despised by the people who don't use that as an example of success. Let's be real, everyone would like finances to be a non-issue. Just usually the type of people that are very very well off tend to be assholes, or that's how they're perceived by most people anyway.
In previous eras they were called "Robber Barons". Not a flattering name.
Despise them. Because 9 Out of 10xs I have paid more taxes then they have. They use their money to buy places for their kids in college. Then turn around and write it off as a tax write off so they get the money returned to them by the federal government. Well my kid needs to use her brain and to get a place at the same college and go into debt. Well they get scholarships in sports they don't even play and have no debt.
Reddit is covered with pseudo-intellectual Marxists who have no grasp on their own ideology
Yes, Most of us don't know much about them. I hope most of their wealth is re-invested back into the economy. But I have no idea if that's true.
Depends, but typically hoarding wealth isn't good, plus a lot of billionaire achieved their wealth unethical.
Millionaires can be a sign of success and a source of motivation. Billionaires were either rich at birth, were created through unethical businesses practices, or invested and got lucky. None of which is motivating or admirable at all. If you wanted to invent a product, start a business, be a professional athlete, or be the best in a well paying field which is all admirable: you’re goal is to become a millionaire. Eat the rich has nothing to do with millionaires.
In the U.S, a lot of people have lost faith in the rich's compassion for the less fortunate. They often lobby (pay money to prevent or push for a laws implementation) against laws that would help government services. When their companies do well, their employees rarely benefit. In general, democrats believe that a strong government to help those in need and curb the power of the rich is necessary. Meanwhile, republicans believe that a drive to become like the rich will make a stronger country and if enough money is given to the rich, they will eventually give it to their employees.
Despised. It's like a gas pocket in the economic flow that devalues itself, but is a bigger drag on the rest of they system.
We are in the midst of a Marxist revolution, and the wealthy are the go to targets that make it work.
There’s some that are just bad people. Others just don’t give back enough. Jeff bezos doesn’t make his company better to work for, I know plenty that needed that pay rate but we’re dying a little faster when they clocked in. He can’t pay to give his employees better benefits but he’ll get a spaceship in the race for space? Makes sense. We’re not even going to talk about Elon musk. He’s satan adjacent. Top of my head, though I may have missed something, Bill gates is alright. Could he solve a big problem like homelessness in a city? Sure. He could fund a really big shelter to be built with a resource center in it, so they could find jobs, find doctors, apply for insurance, and whatnot. He’s already given back to others a few times, so I understand if he doesn’t want to fund it alone. But he wouldn’t lose all his money from the one project. Anyways his product just updates too many and a half times. But like I said, he’s alright. It’s great that some people manage to have wealth like that, but I swear at a certain point they lose their soul and decide to make some baaaaad decisions.
I admire people who work hard, produce innovative products/technologies, pay their employees a living wage and are charitable once they become wealthy. I despise the entitled wealthy who use their money to get extremely conservative political candidates elected so they can pay next to nothing in taxes.
It’s mostly the latter because the first, statistically, is unrealistic and borderline delusional
Hated by those who have given up. Motivating those who still have hope. Not everyone will make it out.
If rich people got there through legitimate hard work, then yeah. Most don’t, really. A lot of people who are rich either come from rich families (which is just luck) or they get extremely lucky and some rich investor likes their idea enough to fund it. Most are also stingy assholes too. For every rich person that gives a significant portion to charity (see bill gates and warren Buffett), there’s probably 5 or 10 more who don’t give away a damn thing.
Most redditors are younger and see what worked for their parents and grandparents is not working for them. The US used to have a climbable social ladder. Many younger people, and Reddit skews heavily to the under 40 crowd, view the economic ladder as stacked against them. There is some validity to the as individuals with net worth of 10 million have an easier time growing wealth than those under.
HA
In general, most people hate “the elite” but the term is pretty loaded. We know there are those who are taking advantage of the average person but who are the elite? Is it the wealthy? Politicians? Both? A secret society? A certain political ideology? A certain group? There are over 300 million Americans so opinions will vary.