This is emotional pleading, not a serious argument of any sort, based on the core premise of "this person has more money than me, and I don't like that, therefore I should get some".
Wealth and income inequality has well-studied negative effects on society.
The ability for a single person to own over $100m in assets is not a human right. It's not a protected class or status. It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake.
And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth. This completely insane $100 million figure is so small to those men that you would have to earn $100 million every single year for over 30 lifetimes to get to their level of wealth.
It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy. That's a shallow way to think about it. It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this.
Think for a second what would happen to you if Jeff Bezos banned you from using all Amazon products. Would the Internet even work anymore for you? You know, every company has the right to refuse service to anyone. This one man can basically cut you off from television, e-commerce, Internet, employment (if you do engineering work on AWS), even Thursday Night Football.
Because, factually, the statement "Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive." is emotional and meritless. There's literally zero value here. It's an opinion. In fact, you doubled down on this throughout your response.
> It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake.
This is also factless, meritless, emotional pleading.
> And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth...
As is all of this.
> It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy.
That's literally what you're doing.
> It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this.
It's clearly not about the power imbalance and exploitation, because someone genuinely interested in curbing those effects would address them directly. The fact that everyone who claims to care about the destabilizing effects of concentrated wealth immediately goes to "we should take the wealth away" instead of "we should try to figure out why concentrated wealth is destabilizing and address that" is extremely strong evidence that the goal is, actually, to take money from the wealthy.
If you consider pointing out that you're not making logical arguments, and instead engaging in emotional pleading, to be insulting (especially when, upon that being pointed out, you can't make a rational argument and instead continue pleading), then you should take a step back, because there's a good chance you're engaging in advocacy and emotional manipulation as opposed to genuine, rational arguments in good faith.
I come over and tell you, “this isn’t healthy! Nobody should weigh 10,000 pounds, we weren’t designed to exist that way!”
You come back to me and tell me that I’m making an emotional argument that isn’t backed up by facts.
But, the problem with that is that this is common sense, and it’s even backed by a bunch of science and observed reality. Someone who weighs 10,000 pounds basically can’t exist, and if they did it would be so ridiculous it’s almost incomprehensible.
I think it actually should be on you and not me to prove that people owning that much wealth is something that should be considered to be okay, not the other way around. You counter my “emotional pleading” with your own emotional “nuh uh, you are wrong” argument.
Who do you know that has over $100 million in net worth that you feel would be hurt by a proposal to tax unearned gains on people with $100 million net worth and above? I don’t know anyone like that. What I do know is that I would personally benefit from my government having more income to fix potholes and pay teacher salaries.
And that’s the other double standard: when the wealthy people advocate for policy that hurts the majority like tax cuts for the wealthy, they are seen as smart businessmen. But as soon as I advocate for something that hurts the wealthy, I’m being emotional and unreasonable.
Sorry dude, I’m just advocating for what’s in my best interest. It’s in my best interest as an average person who isn’t a billionaire or millionaire for these wealthy people to not exist. They’ve done nothing positive for me and everything negative. Every penny or nickel or dime that goes to their extravagant pay package is a penny or nickel that could have gone back to me, their customer. It would be better for me if my company CEO made $200,000 a year instead of $20,000,000 a year. That could at least buy us a solid pizza patty.
No, I won't. This is a logical fallacy, that of the false allegory. It's not an argument in general, and in this particular case it's an extremely bad allegory that's also trivially inapplicable to this situation. There's plenty of scientific evidence that being physically overweight is directly unhealthy for you. Meanwhile, there's zero evidence that having a lot of money is the sole cause of any negative societal phenomenon. Think I'm wrong? Drop a link right here. Correlation isn't causal, by the way - if you show me a study that merely demonstrates correlation without causality (and sole causality, as opposed to multiple factors), then it's invalid.
> You come back to me and tell me that I’m making an emotional argument that isn’t backed up by facts.
In the case of your actual comments (as opposed to this irrelevant story you're spinning), this is true, because you are repeatedly making emotional non-arguments without providing any facts whatsoever: "very serious argument", "somewhat insulting", "abhorrent misappropriation", "societal mistake", "multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth", "completely insane $100 million figure", etc. These are purely manipulative, emotional, non-arguments that are meritless and valueless, and are a symptom of someone actively trying to manipulate others. Repeatedly pointing out how much money someone has is not a valid argument.
You're inventing a completely fictional, irrelevant world because you're unwilling to or incapable of either providing a single rational argument, or a single piece of evidence.
> I think it actually should be on you and not me to prove that people owning that much wealth is something that should be considered to be okay
Over a hundred million people in the US, where I live, disagree with you. I have nothing to prove, because it's an extremely popular belief that it's ok to be rich.
Additionally, you have it exactly backwards: in almost every country in the world (and especially the US), things are assumed to be OK to do unless people explicitly decide otherwise. You can invent a new sport, make a new game, write a new book, and do whatever, and that's OK unless it violates established laws, or people decide that your specific thing is bad. This idea of "things are bad to do by default unless you prove otherwise" is completely hypocritical, because you have absolutely done novel things in your life that nobody else has done before, and felt not a shred of guilt, because you do not hold the internal belief that your actions are bad by default unless you explicitly justify them to others.
> You counter my “emotional pleading” with your own emotional “nuh uh, you are wrong” argument.
False. I've made extremely rational and detached counter-arguments to your fallacies. You are the one making objectively emotionally pleading statements like "very serious argument", "somewhat insulting", "abhorrent misappropriation", "societal mistake", "multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth", "completely insane $100 million figure", and fallacies like the false allegory, the appeal to pity, and the red herring. I've pointed out your fallacies - you've continued to make more of them. You've shown that you don't even know the difference between arguments and emotional pleading.
> And that’s the other double standard: when the wealthy people advocate for policy that hurts the majority like tax cuts for the wealthy, they are seen as smart businessmen. But as soon as I advocate for something that hurts the wealthy, I’m being emotional and unreasonable.
This is a red herring. Nobody else brought up this double standard, nor did I mention it, nor is it relevant to this argument. It's just another way for you to emotionally manipulate.
> Sorry dude, I’m just advocating for what’s in my best interest
This can be used to justify every single kind of evil. Someone can make this argument to justify why they can murder, rape, steal, lie, and cheat, and it works exactly the same way, because they're just doing "what's in their best interest".
Your comments demonstrate an inability to differentiate between opinions and facts, and between emotions and logic. You should stop confidently conflating those things.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
Here’s a Harvard philosopher who points out many of the same points I did regarding political power:
https://ideas.ted.com/the-4-biggest-reasons-why-inequality-i...
Here’s an article from the council on foreign relations that talks about how inequality is a drag on the economy and fuels populist authoritarian movements,:
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-inequality-debate
Here’s a Saint Louis Federal Reserve article which doesn’t necessarily prove that wealth inequality is bad, but helps to detail how wealth inequality has grown along the lines of education and generation (so you might need to explain how “the younger generation is more poor than previous generations at their age” is good for the economy): https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2019/august/wealth-ine...
Let me know when you’ll be dropping your links that say that wealth inequality is totally cool and awesome.
I think you need to stop debating people by attacking their logic and reasoning abilities just because they disagree with you. I mean, one of your points was that 100 million people agree with you that being rich is okay. Well, that’s an opinion that 100 million people hold, right? There are more than 100 million Christian’s and over 100 million Muslims, but they can’t both be right.