Moving to: m/AskMbin!

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.

In theory, it's defenitely possible. Let's imagine a person who inherited 1 billion dollars. How their parents made that wealth has no impact on the morality of the person who inherited it. The only thing that matters is what they do with the wealth afterward.

While your argument is that a good person would give it away, that's a rather short-sighted approach. If instead, they invest that wealth at a 10% return and donate 99% of the returns to charity after 11 years, they have contributed more than if they would have immediately given away their entire wealth. But they are still considered a billionaire. And they are still making 1 million a year for themselves.

So just because someone has a high net worth doesn’t prevent them from being good. And you don’t have to play any “games” or exploit anyone to stay rich. Obviously, the exact numbers might not match the oversimplified version I presented. So instead of 11 years, it might take 15-20 years to give more than donating everything at once. But if set up correctly this could pay out money to people in need forever. Adjust the payments so that the initial sum keeps up with inflation and you could in theory pay out around 70 million in today's money a year for eternity.

millions to billions of dollars.

2 million and two billion are different worlds.

How rich are we talking about?

If you're a billionaire, you didn't get there through hard work and perseverance, you got there by lying, cheating and manipulating others. There's not one single person in this world who has personally created a billion dollars worth of value. Not Donald Trump, not Elon Musk, not Bill Gates or the Waltons, nobody. The wealth they hoard is generated collectively by their ideas, the work and contributions of their employees, taxpayer funded services like roads and railways that facilitate their ability to do business, the products they use that are produced by other people and companies, etc. If you're a billionaire, that means somebody else along the way (or many somebodies) isn't getting their fair share.

I think a lot of people here are confusing liquid assets/cash and genuinely believe millionaires and billionaires have this as pure cash in their bank accounts.

In reality, a lot of the money is tied up in non-liquid assets like property, physical assets, and stocks.

Sure these wealthy people can sell their shares for example, but if they sell too many at once, it will drop the value of the shares.

This is likely why Elon Musk can't afford to pay his bills. Not only is he a grifter and a loser, he's likely extremely cash poor and doesn't have enough liquidity to pay his debts. It's unlikely he'll ever admit this however.

Arguably, the majority of the money these billionares have is essentially speculative.

The more you think about how the economy works, the more you realize how much of a facade it really is. The stock market is a huge sham as well. Most stocks simply don't exist and the amount of value manipulation that occurs is astounding. It's all fake.

I think the sooner we begin to realize that the economy is one giant paper tiger and if we just start telling banks and other "money" purveyors that lock us into our flawed system to go fuck themselves, we can really take away the power from "the rich."

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.

I don't understand the obsession with rich people and their not spending/giving money in ways that please others. Also, the notion that wealth can ONLY be achieved through exploitation of others is silly. Has SOME wealth been acquired through exploitation? Of course. But it is easily provable with basic math that living beneath your means and steadily investing long term can result in a very comfortable, and sometimes early, retirement. There is no benefit focusing on what others have, focus on what you are doing. This is straight grown-up advice, if you disagree, you don't have enough life experience yet.

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.

forget the rich, YOU are not a good person

I can't believe no-one has mentioned Chuck Feeney.

He's prettymuch the answer to the OP's question: Can you be super rich and a good person? Yes, but you prettymuch have to make it your life's work to not be super rich any more.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2020/09/15/exclusive-the-billionaire-who-wanted-to-die-brokeis-now-officially-broke/

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.

I think a lot of these questions get into philosophical territory, which even when correct isn't particularly useful.

To me, how much wealth you have shouldn't be linked to anything but how much money you've made. The amount of money you e made should be proportional to the impact you've has on the world and others. I don't see a problem with someone being a billionaire if they did something that impacted a billion people lives and collected a dollar for it.

The bigger problem I see is that the current system rewards folks for doing anything that makes money. It also prioritizes money to the point that it's a virtue. So effectively you tell folks you matter more if you have more money, and don't put constraints on making money.

So I guess it's seems pretty true that "behind every great fortune is a great crime ", but it doesn't have to be the case. Which is. 100% useless statement. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Fuck no.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I think the rich can be good, for a given value of “good”. If good is defined as a lack of self-centeredness, then improving the quality of life for the greatest number of people can be considered good.

Good can be complicated. If one uses their wealth to cure disease in the jungle, but in the process upsets the ecosystem to the point where the people are now starving to death, was good actually done?