We've all fantasized about being rich. About doing whatever we want; buying a nice car, drinking champagne on board our yatch on a way from your spring home in Sveti Stefan, Montenegro, to our summer home in Côte d'Azur, France. The sun can never set on our day, and the can never rise on our nights. In today's day and age there are two-thousand three-hundred twenty-five billionaires in the world right now who hold seven point three trillion dollars, otherwise known as four percent of the world total wealth. Those numbers shocked me. So few people 0.00003% of the the world's people owned 4.00000% of the worlds worth. The author of this article definitely didn't aprove of those numbers. The way he generalized these people with the pronoun "they;" "they love watching athletic competitions." The author generally comments on how these super-rich may give millions of dollars to charity, but are they really philanthropic? To them these hundred million are nothing compared to the sixty-three billion dollars the subject of the article has in the bank. That's not even twenty percent of the money he has in cash right now. That's one and a half percent of their worth. Here is my question of the night. Should the uberwealthy of the world be more generous? Obviously it's their money, and nobody can make them spend it in any certain way, but given the large economic disperity do they have any sort of obligation to society to help more than they do?
2 comments:
Well, I do think that they should, but I don't think you get anywhere in solving world inequality by just asking someone to give up their money. So Thomas Piketty, a very famous economist, published a highly controversial book last year that theorizes about how global wealth has become so concentrated (rate of return on capital is larger that rate of economic growth), and, in the end, proposes system of global taxes to offset this systematic inequality inherent to capitalism. He ends by proposing a global system of progressive income taxes, which is something I agree with. However, in reality, I think that this is an unfeasible goal... But I do support it, as having a global tax would take away someone's ability to not pay a tax by moving away - thus, having a tax wouldn't make a certain place less "competitive." But, as previously stated, I think this is unfeasible. So, in short, my answer to your question is yes, they should be more generous, but you aren't going to get anywhere by just asking him, so ideally you should have a global system of progressive income taxes, though this is unfeasible. In short, I guess this inequality is inevitable to a degree, though we should work towards helping the underprivileged. (I know, an uplifting comment) -Jordan Kranzler (it isn't putting on my last name for some reason, so I am just signing the comment this way)
I believe the uber-wealthy should be in fact, more generous. Though there may be no law or specific social standard that obliges them to, I hope they can attain some sort of moral guideline, a sort of empathetic, pure view of the world, but that's really not the only problem here. Though the uber-wealthy do have a lot of individual money, they still only have 4% of the world's wealth. Though the rest of that 96% may not be disposable towards helping all of society, there must be some amount of it that can be. Jordan, in referencing the solution presented in Piketty's "Capital," raises a very valid, yet hopeful idea. This graduated tax should be the solution, but as Jordan says, is just "unfeasible." Though I may not personally be able to provide my own solution to this problem, given my current role in society as merely a high school student, I can still recognize the presence of this issue, and the need for all, not only (but particularly) the uber-wealthy, to try to benefit society as a whole.
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