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Billionaires and Capitalists
Why Bolsheviks don't want to kill Billionaires
Are atheists communists?
Small capitalists are vitally important for the health of the economy. Small capitalists launch new ideas, new projects, new ways of doing things. Small capitalists are creative and dynamic. People like the young Bill Gates. But not like the bloated corporate fat cat that Gates grew into.
Past a certain point individual capitalists cease to be value for money. They no longer are the source of innovation, they stop creating and generating wealth as much as simply accreting it like giant rolling snowballs or black holes. That point is somewhere between the millionaire and the aspiring billionaire. Precisely where we draw the line is not a major issue, the fact that there is a qualitative difference between a thrusting risk-taking millionaire with fresh ideas and fresh products and the billionaire who crushes opposition with his wealth and his lawyers simply ramping up a bigger and bigger version of the same business empire. Billionaires monopolize the opportunities for wealth and innovation, in the process becoming absurdly, pointlessly and stupidly rich. Billionaires are too busy to spend the money they make well. They don't need the money, their apptitude is taking money not spending it well. They don't actually need the money they take. Neither is making money for themselves much of a motivating force. They are motivated by success and ego, currency is simply the scoreboard of choice.
Of course billionaires don't make money. They decide and own. Money is not owned or decided into existence. Making money requires producing, making and selling; millionaires and billionaires pay people to do that dull sort of stuff for them. They do the difficult work: owning stuff.
Please give me a list of products invented by billionaires. Don't bother to give the names of people who weren't billionaires when they did their inventing or the names of billionaires who employ teams of creative people to think for them.
Show me the device, product or service that exists only because a billionaire had a particular vision that nobody else shared.
People become billionaires by owning companies which make money. Many billionaires became billionaires by owning oil or gas fields. That's a job which requires an exceptional one-in-billion talent. Not. Owning an oilfield and not being a billionaire, that is what requires a special talent, a talent for ignoring the advice that is usually freely given to you. If you own an oilfield you can hire half a dozen people smarter than any billionaire who ever lived and they can run the company for you and you get the kudos as a shrewd operator and they can live in luxury and oppulence too.
Billionaires Don't go Bankrupt.
Billionaires don't go bankrupt, millionaires sometimes do, because they take risks. Aspiring millionaires often take risks and fail. But billionaires are immune to real risk, they don't risk everything, they take risks with big numbers but they put less of a proportion of their assets on the line than the average small shopkeeper. Actually in many ways they put less at real risk than a typical person taking out a mortgage to buy a family home.
Billionaires monopolize the opportunities for making money and like any force towards monopoly they are a drag on the market and a blight on the interests of the consumer. Why should all the money-making opportunities (serious money-making opportunities) be taken up by people who don't actually need any more money than they had already earned fifteen years ago? How does that concentration of wealth help the economy and population as a whole? It would make more sense to have the money-making opportunies available for new, young dynamic entrants to the market rather than by bloated plodding dinosaurs who have no hunger at all, only greed, people who make money out of force of habit.