I think the argument makes more sense when applied to villainize billionaires. Like there’s makes more money and then there’s makes many orders of magnitude more money. You’re much closer to a millionaire than a billionaire.
Then “anyone with money then me” becomes “anyone with 10,000x more money than me” and you can see where the arguments starts to make sense again. Did this person work 10,000x more than me? Obviously that’s impossible and therefore someone must’ve been exploited.
The issue is that becoming a billionaire has more to do with being lucky than it does with direct exploitation.
If everyone in the US chipped 5 dollars into a pool, and it was randomly given to one person, that person would be a billionaire.
And yes, they have a huge concentration of other people’s labor represented in that cash. But the person who won the pool isn’t a bad person because of that. They didn’t exploit anyone themselves. Just because someone somewhere at some point under capitalism was exploited, that doesn’t lay the moral condemnation at the feet of the lottery winner.
I think the argument makes more sense when applied to villainize billionaires. Like there’s makes more money and then there’s makes many orders of magnitude more money. You’re much closer to a millionaire than a billionaire.
Then “anyone with money then me” becomes “anyone with 10,000x more money than me” and you can see where the arguments starts to make sense again. Did this person work 10,000x more than me? Obviously that’s impossible and therefore someone must’ve been exploited.
The issue is that becoming a billionaire has more to do with being lucky than it does with direct exploitation.
If everyone in the US chipped 5 dollars into a pool, and it was randomly given to one person, that person would be a billionaire.
And yes, they have a huge concentration of other people’s labor represented in that cash. But the person who won the pool isn’t a bad person because of that. They didn’t exploit anyone themselves. Just because someone somewhere at some point under capitalism was exploited, that doesn’t lay the moral condemnation at the feet of the lottery winner.