Ramblings from Apalapachia...

i rember when i was in high school, hearing a teacher say “lebron james is rich, the guy who hands him his paycheck is wealthy”, and i think that that’s a really simple illustration of wealth and class that a lot of young leftists these days do not understand

i see a lot of young leftists these days thinking that “having a lot of money = oppressor”, which shows a fundamental misunderstanding in how social classes and the dynamics of power in society work, and as a result they go after actors, athletes, even youtubers, but the thing is most actors, athletes, and youtubers don’t actually own capital. actors don’t own disney or warner bros or 20th century fox, athletes don’t own their stadiums or sponsorship companies, and youtubers certainly don’t own youtube or advertising companies that sponsor youtube channels

many highly successful actors, athletes, and youtubers DO start their own businesses once they’ve amassed enough wealth, but it has to be understood that the large majority acquire their wealth through paychecks given to them, rather than through owning the means of production, and it’s the owning of capital that really determines who runs society and who doesn’t, because it’s those who own the means of production who gets to decide the affluence or poverty of those who don’t

It's a fantastic point, but John Boyega's net worth also puts him at $6 million. When he says eat the rich, he isn't safe either...

There’s a pretty big fucking difference between six million and one trillion lmao

Not to mention the way the money was made

An actor being paid for a role / doing some advertising is a world away form a man setting up a cooperate money machine that horrendously exploits workers

This is something I hate SO MUCH about how tumblr talks about money.

Like, I get that famous actors have large amounts of money, some of them are even probably overpaid (I have complicated thoughts about how actors are paid because of the nature of acting as a career), but they are exchanging labor for money, and their salaries are an expense involved in making a movie.

But like... an actor is paid for a job. They’re a worker like the rest of us. Bezos isn’t paid for a job, he’s paid for being the person who owns Amazon and despite being obscenely wealthy, he does all sorts of shitty things and to underpay and exploit his workers, and avoid paying taxes, so that more of the money Amazon generates will be profit (worker’s salaries are not profit, they’re a business expense). 

These two mechanisms of acquiring money are fundamentally very different. 

The reason why billionaires are evil aren’t because having money is bad, its because to get a billion dollars you have to cheat. You have to take it from someone else. If Bezos paid all his workers and suppliers fairly and treated them well, and paid his fair amount of taxes, and etc, then it literally wouldn’t matter how much money he earned, because he wouldn’t be doing anyone any harm. But its not actually possible to amass a billion dollars (a full order of magnitude bigger than a million) while behaving in an ethical manner. 

image description: screenshot of tumblr tags

#you all can't be trusted to eat the rich

#because you can't identify the rich

#you'll eat a bunch of actors and doctors

#and the rich will just laugh

Sometimes I think about a better scale for explaining obscene wealth inequality in the US and it's still in draft form but goes something like this:

1. already homeless

2. 1 paycheck from homelessness

3. 1 cancer diagnosis from homelessness

4. 1 cancer diagnosis from bankruptcy (this is where homeownership comes into play-- you can't be evicted, bankruptcy will usually protect your residence, etc. but you're still vulnerable. If you have good health insurance or much higher than usual net worth you might be in this category generally but still luck out. Look, it's a draft.)

4.5 Yeah OK it makes sense that you have that much money, I understand the value you bring

5. Why the fuck do you have so much money

Once you get up to category 4 you're including up to like 99+% of the population of the US, including almost all surgeons, software engineers, and -- in fact -- most people who are not executives or owners of large companies. 4.5 is largely people who work for a living in some field like professional athletics or acting in films, but occasionally people who do specialized work in some more-normal field (I know a few people in this category who got that way by being hired to do something very hard and pulling it off, or who had a great idea and sold it for lots of money. that kind of thing. the point is they earn their money mostly through some kind of usual means, such as selling their physical or intellectual labor). People in 4.5 are never billionaires. Let's take an example of someone we all agree has had a long and extremely successful career as an actor, someone paid very highly for a very long time: Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks's net worth is $350 million. That's a lot of money! But we understand how he got it, we know other people (such as the CEOs of movie studios, or directors) made a lot MORE money off of his work, and we understand that as a number. Tom Hanks is about as high as you can go in 4.5, in fact. We're not going to eat Tom Hanks anyway because we like him, but even if we don't like him, we probably shouldn't eat him. Probably. You're borderline, Tom.

Category 5 is the people who need eatin'. Everyone from 4.5 down is more like each other than they are like Category 5. This category contains people like DeVos and Bezos and also Steven Spielberg. Don't want to get eaten, Steven Spielberg? Stop hoarding billions of dollars.

Put another way, if Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and Jeff Bezos magically stopped earning money today, and then decided to pay me $1m/day to be their friend:

Tom Hanks would be flat broke in less than a year.

Spielberg between 10 & 20 years, depending on who you believe about his net worth.

Bezos? 520 years.