Moving to: m/AskMbin!

Fuck no.

There are a handful of ex-millionaires who are no longer millionaires because they cared for others in a way they couldn't care for themselves. Only a handful of course, I would say they are good people.

You said it friend.

I don’t really look at it as how much money someone has, but rather how their money was earned. Just like in your example, if someone earns a lot of money because they have an in-demand skill like being a doctor, that’s awesome. You’re making money off your own labor and you’re adding value to the world.

If you make your money off of something like being a landlord, I’m going to respect that less because you aren’t really adding anything to the world, that property would exist without you renting it out and it’s only making you money because you had enough money (usually) to obtain it in the first place.

There’s room for nuance, of course, and you can be poor and still have gotten what you have via unethical means. All this is a generalization. Ultimately people deserve to be judged on an individual basis.

Can? Yeah, absolutely. Trouble is, most rich people use exploitative measures and fuck the Everyman over just to get as much money as possible.

Funny, I was just watching this 'Some More News' video about what excessive wealth does to one's behaviors and morals. It's a bit of a watch but it's worth it. It seems that we humans have a lot of cognitive biases that occur regarding wealth. Evidently, and this is backed by experiment, it changes people in ways that are often not good for them or good for society.

At the upper end of the wealth scale, some multi billionaires, like Bezos' Ex, can't give away wealth faster than they accrue it through investments.

To me, being good is a function of altruism, while being bad is a function of egoism. This starts to get whacky when you do an altruistic thing for egoistic motives (ie donating for recognition) but it serves me as a baseline, and by that understanding, I would say yes, theoretically it is possible. However, in most scenarios I can think of, the way that a person becomes rich will be filled with egoistical decisions and thus be bad.

I am currently re-reading pedagogy of the oppressed by Freire though, and he brings up a good point: charity and being charitable will always lead to an unjust system, because the person feeing charitable, to be able to do that, needs to perpetuate a system in which they have more, and where there is a poor one to give to. So he would say not really because the being rich in and of itself is a symptom of an amoral system. And I have to say that's a good point

Jesus said "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God".

And then rich Christians made up some shit about an "eye of the needle gate" to justify keeping their wealth.

Precisely two, who meet the standard of "not completely evil".

The guy behind Costco, who pays his employees well with a respectable benefits package and allegedly keeps the concession prices cheap.

Bill Gates. Not just the whole Gates Foundation and the work it does to fight malaria and pandemics. But also that he has at least admitted that he's cutthroat and ruthless. He doesn't pretend to be nice.

fyi, no one in here is entitled to the wealth of wealthy people. wealthy people are people just like you and I. don't pretend you wouldn't change your tune if you became wealthy

imagine if someone less fortunate than you thought you were a bad person just because you have more than they do

It's impossible to become a billionaire without extreme exploitation. You can't exploit people or the planet to this degree and be a good person.

Are any of us good people? I think there is a level of selfishness in wealth that all of us engage in, and so I'm not willing to condemn people for having wealth that seems disproportionate to us. Is John Famousactor a bad person because he lives in a mansion worth ten times the average American's? Is Jake Factoryworker a bad person because he lives in a house worth ten times the world average? What matter of suffering can be alleviated in developing countries by our sacrifices in developed countries? At what level are our sins equal? Is it a matter of principle? Proportion?

The vast majority of people who 'make' millions do so by exploiting others, or by exploiting society to keep it, though, so fuck 'em.

The first example I thought of was Bill Gates. He amassed his wealth from a corporation that employed anti-competitive and immoral business practices. That makes him “bad”.

But what he has done with his fortune in the past few decades definitely doesn’t make him a bad person. Is his foundation and its goals the most efficient way to go from point A to point B? Probably not. Does that make him a bad person? Probably not, but it also doesn’t absolve him of sins he committed in the past.

forget the rich, YOU are not a good person

Theoretically... yes and no? First of all it's a given that any truly rich person in today's day and age is a capitalist, no exceptions.

Modern capitalism is based on the assumption that "maximizing profit" leads to the best outcome for everyone... which is not true. So if theoretically a rich person is trying to be 100% rational then they cannot be "good"

On the other hand... also theoretically, rich ppl have a lot more resources to give and support causes they care about, so on this aspect they could be good? I know ppl who donate a ton to social causes but I honestly don't know how much of their donations can be attributed to tax benefits

In practice... I guess most of what you could call "good" people wouldn't want to make that much money in the first place? Or it could just be probability, good people and rich people are both quite rare, so good+rich is even rarer (if we assume they are independent).

To a certain degree they can but there has been a fair number of times they have not been.

It goes so much further than just having a surplus of goods and services while so many go without. We've organized society into one that decides ownership through money, and that includes things that make more money. It's a real life broken gameplay bug, it's why there are people maxed out in everything they could ever want without making the slightest dent in their wealth. It's also the cause of a lot of problems stemming from the people making the biggest decisions in the world not being in those positions from merit, intelligence, hard work, or credibility. It's just money, an amount of money that can only come from the feedback loop bug of money making more money. Insurance companies deciding medical treatment, people not even living in the same state owning all the homes and only allowing for renting so they get paid indefinitely with no loss of equity. People with no passion for cooking deciding what the largest restaurants in the world can sell, people owning water itself. Owning creative rights, there are people who created original works that arent even allowed to use worlds and characters they created. Just every industry in the world, ownership by wealth has made worse.

I suppose it depends. There are plenty of rich people who do actively seem to care and go out of their way to not only donate to charity, but actively get involved in communities and try to improve things. Very clearly putting themselves out there and not for personal fame and prestige.

The big part you have to focus on is whether the charity is being done for tax write-offs or other personal benefits, such as what you see with most conservative rich people like the Kochs.

Of course, no matter how a rich person uses their money, even if they very clearly are spending massive amounts of it on helping others and improving the lives of those around them, they'll still be considered evil just because they are rich.

It's an interesting paradox. For some people who have a very narrow view on the subject, they will only consider a rich person "good" if they make themselves not rich. Entirely so. Of course, such a no longer rich person wouldn't be able to help others at that point.

One thing to realize - it is paper money, stocks, obligation, not actual resources that rich people own. If you actually spend billions on yourself, like building multiple palaces, huge and multiple yachts, then yes, you are consuming resources egoistically for yourself. If the money are "working", producing something that not for you to consume (also known as "invested"), and especially if you donate a lot for charities, then sure, you can be a good person.

TL;DR: I think it is basically impossible to have that much money and claim it was earned ethically. Therefore it is basically impossible to be "good" without giving it away.

I think that it is borderline impossible to ethically accrue that much wealth. Is it possible? Maybe? I'd love to hear more examples of where a company owner made sure all their employees shared in the success when the company is large enough that the owner is that rich. I remember hearing that Google did right by their early employees, but it's been the exception that makes the rule and was also a long time ago in a different world where their ethics were different anyway.

And if you inherit that much wealth, what are the odds that it came to you free and clear of having been generated from exploiting others? Colonizing/"settling" and redlining making property values super high? Using eminent domain to tear down minority major communities for the sake of putting an interstate down the middle instead of risking devaluing the richest people's property more? Because odds are that even if they didn't cause the system they certainly benefited from it.

And unfortunately, "charity" is a horror in the USA because it's used as a very bad and very biased by rich people version of an actual welfare system that worked. The idea that there are food banks operating off donations while billionaires exist is horrific. If billionaires did not exist I frankly think that a lot more things like food banks (and public transit maybe?) would find themselves with funding.

One thing to realize - it is paper money, stocks, obligation, not actual resources that rich people own. If you actually spend billions on yourself, like building multiple palaces, huge and multiple yachts, then yes, you are consuming resources egoistically for yourself. If the money are "working", producing something that not for you to consume (also known as "invested"), and especially if you donate a lot for charities, then sure, you can be a good person.

I think there is a line, and it's different for every person, but on one side of the line to lift other people up you would have to sacrifice your own life velocity, and on the other side of the line you have the power to lift tens of hundreds or thousands of people out of poverty without impacting more than a fraction of your children's inheritance.

I understand that there are issues with unchecked charity, for instance, if Bill Gates suddenly decided to take I don't know 25 billion dollars and distribute it equally to everybody in the 50% or below category of America which is about 250 million people, then he would basically be giving these people a hundred bucks each and saying "there I've done my job I gave up 30% of my net worth to help the poor" and that really wouldn't accomplish anything.

But that same $25 billion targeted at the bottom 1% of America I could do quite a bit but then there's overhead. Buying houses and repairing them for people to solve the homelessness problem or purchasing all of the debt that you could possibly buy for $25 billion and then forgiving that debt for the poorest people, those things could be better and do more for people but then you have administrative overhead finding and communicating with the debtors and negotiating with them, and then at the end of it it's likely that you would get a massive tax right off cuz you wouldn't do this as an individual you do it as a nonprofit, and then bill would get back 8 billion of that in tax rebates or so.

Like there is obviously a line on both sides and while I don't think people making you know even 200 Grand a year should put themselves at risk for homelessness in order to justify their financial status I also don't think that any billionaire has any right to strive to continue being a billionaire for the rest of their lives. If you cannot live a happy life on a billion dollars then you cannot live a happy life.

millions to billions of dollars

Those two are very different sums of money.
But if you're very rich, you can't be a good person, there's no way to accumulate that kind of wealth without exploiting others.

But then again, we all live in capitalist societies that have been built on exploiting the shit out of others, so there's quite a bit of hypocrisy in my post.