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this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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It’s grotesque for ANYONE to have a billion dollars. Arguably the lottery winner is the only one to achieve that wealth by even sort-of ethical means.
By that measure, playing the stock exchange is just an advanced version of lottery.
It is
Yep. Kind of ethical if you ask me... :P
Not really. Dividends always include value stolen from the workforce and the end customer in low pay and shoddier quality as enforced via a policy of shareholder primacy.
Anyone who hold stocks in a private company is stealing from the public.
Gross oversimplification
Not since Dodge v. Ford Motor Company
Das Kapital explains its inevitability.
Where is an ethical place I can put my retirement money then?
A coffee can? A vault? In our agrarian economy, your extended family would take care of you in your geriatric years, but now because of the nuclear family we have to manage our own retirement (and suffer intergenerational mental illness).
401Ks and such are the proffered substitutes, but in good times they depend on exploitation. In bad times (such as right after the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis) they collapse with the rest of the economy and the banks throw their customers to the elements.
It's a situation much like the US dependence on cars, since alternatives are dismantled or delayed, and regulations turn our urban areas into an untraversable sprawl. Cars are bad, but we've been systematically stripped of alternatives.
My guess you never heard of stock manipulation.
The Spiffing Brit enters the chat
Technically you are investing in stocks they allow you to. Perfectly ethical.
It is, except for the way that money is derived from the labour of the workers, and the fact that you're not likely to make lifestyle changing amounts of money without already having a significant amount of money to gamble in the first place.
Not to mention the system is arguably much more "rigged" thanks to the major players in the scene, when you buy a lottery ticket you aren't competing against giant corporations that spend millions on figuring out the best way to buy lottery tickets.
Well it's like a lottery but with more variables and where better knowledge or analysis can mean some "players"are more likely to win than others. It's inherently less fair than a lottery, which should be totally random.
there are people who have over a billion dollars worth of positive impact on the world.
That's not grotesque and that's not wealth. But still a nice thought to keep in mind.
I wish these people were as famous as the loud-ass billionaires we have.
There certainly have been such people. But none were ever billionaires. Such people do something which creates great value. Billionaires are parasites who do nothing but siphon value away from society.
Albert Einstein, Nikolai Vavilov, Marie Curie, Martin Luther King Jr, Alan Turing, Abraham Lincoln, Michael Faraday, Nelson Mandela, Isaac Newton, Edward Jenner, Harriet Tubman, Louis Pasteur, etc.