Silicon Valley billionaires in the tech sector used government subsidies, our labor, and intellect yet do as much as possible not to pay back for their good fortune.
Silicon Valley billionaires are psychopaths.
Scott Galloway appeared on MSNBC, where he scolded Silicon Valley billionaires. I think he was much too nice. He was there to promote his book “Adrift: America in 100 Charts,” which is very highly regarded.
Every transaction requires more than one participant. It does not matter what product or service you create; the recipient is just as important. Otherwise, the economic value of your product and service has no value.
Every product or service created is built on the backs of history. Why? All our accumulated knowledge over time is the intellect of those who came before us—adding value and creating a new or modified product or service that society wants is worth something. And that something must be commensurate with the continual effort one puts into the product or service. Absent that reality, any economic system mathematically collapses over time.
Our economic system is filled with band-aids, currently managing a systemic collapse. The stimuli we gave to Americans, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc., are bandaids. The trajectory, however, has not been mitigated. Wealth and income inequality directly result from the economic system our “masters” chose. And the reason is math.
Consider our economy a pie that is growing 3% every year. If the rich’s wealth is growing at 7% per year and the poor and middle-class wealth is growing at 2%, the rich, a tiny group, continue to get a more significant portion of the pie. Eventually, virtually all of the pie belongs to the rich. It is just basic math. And you know what? All your economics professors and business professors know that. But because our economic system is directed by failed ideology decoupled from math, we don’t stress or teach the truth.
The Silicon Valley billionaires, virtually all of them, are psychopaths. Our economic system lends itself to those with capital. It is not wealth envy that should bother us. It is that, too often, most of these billionaires believe they earned that money; they deserve that money. And they continue to fund politicians that allow the pilfering.
But aren’t some billionaires moral? Isn’t Bill Gates a nice person? Aren’t guys like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett nice guys for giving their money away? One should not use morality and billionaire in the same realm.
Capitalism is a great abstraction engine. Think about these billionaires continuing to profit from investments in hundreds of companies. Many companies benefit from overseas slave labor or abused employees in the United States. But a stock owner making millions is abstracted from that evil. If one believes that we are all building on past knowledge, a billionaire is hoarding that which belongs to many.
Let me give an example. An engineer develops a particular circuit for the Intel 8088 CPU. Bill Gates’s fortune was built on some of that knowledge. That engineer gets paid once. Bill Gates made billions on software that used that engineer’s technology repeatedly.
Most do not understand our economic system. They believe that it is a moral system. They are made to feel that all have equal access to be wealthy or successful, not realizing that, in some fashion, one has to be invited. I wrote the book “As I See It: Class Warfare The Only Resort To Right Wing Doom,” where the economy and its realities are explained effortlessly. We must understand the system we live under.