this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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That's not true you can earn a few million from hard work. Its rare these days, but doable. Still pennies compared to Elon et. al. I think the cutoff should be between 50-100 million. After that we name a park after you and you get a trophy for winning at capitalism. Congrats or whatever, but we're taking the rest.
Whatever the threshold, it needs to be indexed to inflation and COL in the local area.
You definitely can not become a millionaire on YOUR hard work. It takes the hard work of other people working for you. And unless you over charging for their work or under paying them for their work, you aren't going to be making millions.
That's completely, 100% untrue.
I'm going to make these numbers up, but the math checks out.
If you're a nurse making 100k/year, let's assume you take home 60k of that. You'll take home a million dollars after "just" 17 years. Are you really going to tell me that nurses are exploitative labor?
Now, I'm not going to get into the math of expenses because I'm lazy, but I'm also not factoring in any kind of investing either.
Now, those nurses need a supervisor to handle advanced work they aren't familiar with, scheduling, dealing with mgmt, telling Drs to fuck off, etc. So if that nurse lead takes home 100k, they can do it even sooner at just 10 years. You can argue that this is exploitative labor, but you'd be wrong.
At some point you get supervisors that don't do or contribute anything and pull in like 500k/year. Those jobs should probably not exist since they are by definition exploitative. But earning a few million dollars over the course of your lifetime is easily achievable on your own labor alone.
You can't be a billionaire on your own labor. You can be a millionaire on your own labor, but it isn't easy and takes a long time.
My net worth is almost a million dollars because my wife and I don't have kids and our jobs pay decently. We should be millionaires in the next five years or less. We don't have anyone who reports to us. Who have we exploited? In my col area we need (currently) 3 million total to live a modest retirement. Under your plan, this would be impossible to achieve. Do you want to make everyone a wage slave forever? And that's ignoring high COL areas like NYC and LA where a million dollars might get you a small house.
I disagree, since the Internet allows indie studios for things like music and games to reach a massive audience. Selling your indie game that you made with your friends for $20 to 300k people makes you a millionaire without exploiting anyone. As long as you can avoid publishers leeching most of that away... Plenty of people also have become millionaires just by selling their house and moving somewhere cheaper.