Quote Originally Posted by BigFatPie View Post
There?s no doubt those three gentlemen have done things that benefit us all in the process of acquiring their wealth, but that?s not what you originally proposed. What have they done with the wealth they?ve acquired? I suppose some my say Musk has somewhat stepped into the void that has been left by US governments refusing to fund space exploration to the tune that they did, and the starlink program is good, but whether they?re done for altruistic purposes or whether that matters is another question.
That is what they did with their wealth. Musk made his money with Paypal (itself a great innovation) and rolled that into Tesla where he made most of his money. Starlink and spacex etc are also what he did with his money. Admittedly he also spaffed a bunch up the wall buying Twitter and running it into the ground, but AFAIK this too was a public service. If he could just take out Tiktok too that would be great.

Amazon employs 1.6 million people. That's a bit more than I do. Bezos doing his bit. Sure conditions could be better, but I refer back to worker's bargaining power being eroded etc.

META only has 67k employees apparently but that's still a lot of jobs. Facebook also did a bunch of cutting edge stuff with web tech that we're still using to this day. In fact, we're using it right now to communicate on this forum.

These guys also do things with their wealth I don't approve of, of course. Superyachts and the like. But, that's the problem with freedom. People do things I don't like. I have to accept it, so long as they aren't harming anyone. These guys didn't steal their wealth, they built it. They inherited a bunch first tho of course. Still, if you want to point to evil capitalists they're pretty bad examples. Of course, the good examples stay in the shadows as much as they can while these poor fools tapdance in the spotlight 24x7. Well musk does, anyway.

Quote Originally Posted by BigFatPie View Post
No I?m by no means advocating total wealth equality, far from it. But the historic gains we made during the course of the 20th century in partially levelling up to use that awful phrase are in danger of being totally lost by unchecked capitalism, if they haven?t already done so. It will take brave politicians to grasp the nettle, and we?ve already seen the pushback even to the very modest proposals made by Starmer?s government, I?m not sure if he has the stomach to go further. People are easily seduced by demagoguery and easy solutions, and wealth is fantastically efficient at protecting wealth.
I feel like we're on the same page here except I don't follow UK politics at all so this is kinda greek to me. Everyone should pay tax, wealthier people should pay more (%) than poorer. No issues with what you're saying I don't think. Democratically elected governments need to be stronger than corporations and stay stronger. People need to see through the BS and propaganda spewed at them by media corps and actually vote in their interests.

IMO free market capitalism benefits from strong regulation. Markets with no regulation result in criminal cabals running things and don't benefit anyone in the long run.