Eight billionaires 'as rich as world's poorest half'

When the CEO makes in a day what his workers make in a year, I would argue that the gap is too wide.

The 3.6bn people could arrest the top 200ish richest people, take all of their wealth away, distribute it equally among everyone else in the world (including the billionaires so they at least have some money).

Arrest them for what crime? Mark Zuckerberg for example made billions of dollars as a businessman and computer scientist and has since pledged to give almost all of his wealth to good causes when he dies, in addition to funding health care and research projects across the globe, what the left needs to learn is that the sum total of global wealth is not constant and that it's perfectly possible to get rich without hurting others and with a few exceptions, most rich people are rich precisely because they improved the world.

People seem to have some inane view that everyone who's super rich got there because of some sort of fraud or corruption and is a bad person.

We don't have to go to a Soviet system to have more fairness and a better, more productive, more growthful economy. The United States and Europe managed it quite happily for 50 years in the postwar consensus until neoliberalism took hold and the rich stopped paying their taxes. The marginal tax rate on the very wealthy was 70 and 80 percent in all western countries and it worked very well, recycling money into important social goals, pushing forwards technology and social progress and making the west inconceivably stronger than the Communist states.

Now we are trapped in low growth and high social dislocation with falling tax revenues and most western governments facing major crises across the board in healthcare and numerous other basic goods for humanity about which there used to be little dispute. Only now, under the weirdo extremism of the neoliberals are we dumping all of the things that made life worthwhile in our countries - everything from public amenities to good roads, from decent schools to proper healthcare free at the point of use - in favour of the right of some billionaires to have bigger and bigger yachts.

It astonishes me, the global GDP is not a constant. If you're making money, it doesn't mean that someone else somewhere is losing money and this fact is the reason I reject the left-wing worldview.




You're utterly delusion if you think things are worse now compared with how they were in the 1970's, when I was a kid I was taught I should laugh at the blue collar reactionaries who claim that the 1950's were the best of times before multiculturalism and liberalism took over, oh how the tables have turned. We now have leftists and their myths about better times, when the lights would go out every week, men worked 14 hour days down mines and the ghettos were filled with crack.

Absolutely this. Why do people think there's a pool of finite amount of money in the world? Someone earning a billion isn't taking wealth away from a regular worker. If he stopped working the regular worker would still earn the same.

It's quite annoying trying to explain this to people over and over. The most common thing you hear is "soldiers should earn more than footballers!!!" well, no. There are millions of soldiers in around the world but there are only a few hundered people who are skilled enough to play top league football.

People seem to have some inane view that everyone who's super rich got there because of some sort of fraud or corruption and is a bad person.

What good is a jet to the poor?

It could be used to spray the tax havens with disgusting odours.

Not all of them did. However, you only have to read about the ways in which Russian and Chinese and Nigerian (to pick a few out) billionaires made their money to realise that there are incredible levels of corruption at work and that many of those billions were made by redirecting government spending to rich individuals in various illegal, corrupt or semi-legal ways.

It's Zimbabwenomics. Kill the productive people who ''stole'' the wealth, wonder why everyone is poorer.

It shows a great hypocrisy too, if you said to a leftist yes you're right, there is a finite pool of wealth, surely they would also have us stop immigration because if immigrants come, we'll have to share with more people. Obviously I don't subscribe to such a retarded worldview because I understand that immigrants can actually add value to society. It shows how confused and internally inconsistent their entire worldview is.



****ing retards Footballers are paid by private companies.

This is the type of **** you see being shared on Facebook and it's utterly enraging. I remember once this was a discussion in my secondary school and the teacher was for paying soldiers more (surprise surprise it was an English 'teacher'

Some CEO's have added literally billions of dollars worth of value to companies, they've been the difference between a business being liquidated and thousands of people in gainful employment. I would never be the sort of guy to mock working class people or the sort of guy who totally worships wealthy accomplished people, we're not our money, our jobs, our clothes or even our names but the only objective measure of value is what someone is willing to pay for whatever the good or service is.

It's a social sin to say, but most soldiers in the modern world are not good people, the only ''squadie'' I've ever known was a violent chyav and racist who would struggle to hold down a normal job. Society places far too much value on soldiers.

You complain about generalisations against the rich, and yet you make sweeping statements about the left-wing and about the majority of soldiers being bad people. Can't you see how hypocritical this is?

I understand what you mean about the poor-rich wage gap and I agree with a lot of the points that you make, but I feel like you're weakening your arguments with some of the things that you say...