Absolutely I’m willing to agree to that.
I am only pushing back on the statement, “it is impossible to amass a billion dollars without exploiting the labor of the working class.”
I certainly don’t think that’s the majority of billionaires. If your definition of exploiting the labor of the working class includes “having any employees that aren’t part owners of the business,” then of course the number of billionaires who can say that is vanishingly small.
But they do in fact exist, and I think the majority of people are aware of that. Therefore, making statements like “all billionaires exploited labor” makes the average person think your position is uninformed at best and disingenuous at worst.
I think there is a slightly different claim we’re each making, and it’s confused by the term “billion”. I think we both agree that it’s an arbitrary value that was used in the interest of an oversimplified claim above, but I think we can disambiguate the points we’re making if we generalize it.
Your statement that “it is possible to be an X-aire without exploitation of the working class” is technically correct for the value of X=billion.
But I think the claim I’m making (and the oversimplified claim that was originally made) is that: for any given point in time, in any given capitalist society, there is a value X beyond which you cannot reliably amass and retain wealth without unethical exploitation.
The post above set X at a billion, maybe it’s not a billion, maybe it’s 100 billion. 100 years ago maybe it was 100 million, and in 100 years it’ll be 100 trillion. But the point is that there exists a value beyond which ONLY exploitative practices can get you; or in other words, you will never be the richest man in our late-stage capitalist society by winning the lottery or through steady, ethical investments.
Man, I feel like we reached an agreement and now you’re trying to walk it back. :P
And while I don’t necessarily disagree with the point you’re making, it feels like a setup to goal shift. Like, any example that gets brought up to counter the narrative can now just be dismissed as, “oh, but he’s not enough of a billionaire.”
And let’s be real, a billion dollars, right now, is almost certainly beyond that arbitrary dollar amount X you speak of. There’s only 3000 of them in the world! The *world! There’s 8 trillion of us. How much more selective do we need to be??
Yeah, I know it sounds like a goal post movement, but I didn’t make the original claim, and in fact thought the original claim was oversimplified, but that there was a truth to it. I think that in order to best illustrate that truth, “billion” had to be removed as it was a red herring.
And yeah the first half of it sounds like I’m setting a variable X, where X makes me right, but the fact that such an X exists is the point I’m making. If you agree then we’re on the same page. The alternate claim would be that it’s possible in our late stage capitalist society to be the richest person using purely ethical, non-exploitative means, which I don’t believe is possible. And for a value of X=a billion, I think it’s just very unlikely.
