IMO, billionaires are a symptom of the system in which I’m underpaid, which is the cause of a nontrivial number of my concerns.
Financial stress has been a constant companion for me, money doesn’t solve all my problems, but it certainly would relieve my financial stressors.
If billionaires were less common, it would be because they invested more into their workforce, and paying them appropriately for their contributions to the business. Billionaires exist because a large group of people worked very hard for less money than they deserved, so that they could become a billionaire.
The reason we should be angry at billionaires is because they’re usually the one dictating how much our contributions are worth (or rather, how much they’re not worth). They make the rules, set the goal posts, and determine how valuable we are (how much we are paid).
They’re a symptom of a broken system, they’re also the reason why the system is broken.
So I disagree with the initial assertion that my problems are not because someone is a billionaire. A nontrivial amount of my problems are exactly because someone is a billionaire. They stole the wages that I deserved (along with untold numbers of my co-workers), so they could become a billionaire, and I can be drowning in debt trying to make it through, paycheque to paycheque…
Fuck billionaires.
There’s another layer to it, too. Businesses are built and run with a combination of capital and labour, but all of the power about the direction and continuity if the business goes along with the ownership of the capital.
So not only do the owners decide how to divide up the proceeds generated by the business, they also have the power to completely change it, including who, what, where, when, and how.
