One thing to realize - it is paper money, stocks, obligation, not actual resources that rich people own. If you actually spend billions on yourself, like building multiple palaces, huge and multiple yachts, then yes, you are consuming resources egoistically for yourself. If the money are “working”, producing something that not for you to consume (also known as “invested”), and especially if you donate a lot for charities, then sure, you can be a good person.

I think there is a line, and it’s different for every person, but on one side of the line to lift other people up you would have to sacrifice your own life velocity, and on the other side of the line you have the power to lift tens of hundreds or thousands of people out of poverty without impacting more than a fraction of your children’s inheritance.

I understand that there are issues with unchecked charity, for instance, if Bill Gates suddenly decided to take I don’t know 25 billion dollars and distribute it equally to everybody in the 50% or below category of America which is about 250 million people, then he would basically be giving these people a hundred bucks each and saying “there I’ve done my job I gave up 30% of my net worth to help the poor” and that really wouldn’t accomplish anything.

But that same $25 billion targeted at the bottom 1% of America I could do quite a bit but then there’s overhead. Buying houses and repairing them for people to solve the homelessness problem or purchasing all of the debt that you could possibly buy for $25 billion and then forgiving that debt for the poorest people, those things could be better and do more for people but then you have administrative overhead finding and communicating with the debtors and negotiating with them, and then at the end of it it’s likely that you would get a massive tax right off cuz you wouldn’t do this as an individual you do it as a nonprofit, and then bill would get back 8 billion of that in tax rebates or so.

Like there is obviously a line on both sides and while I don’t think people making you know even 200 Grand a year should put themselves at risk for homelessness in order to justify their financial status I also don’t think that any billionaire has any right to strive to continue being a billionaire for the rest of their lives. If you cannot live a happy life on a billion dollars then you cannot live a happy life.

Funny, I was just watching this ‘Some More News’ video about what excessive wealth does to one’s behaviors and morals. It’s a bit of a watch but it’s worth it. It seems that we humans have a lot of cognitive biases that occur regarding wealth. Evidently, and this is backed by experiment, it changes people in ways that are often not good for them or good for society.

At the upper end of the wealth scale, some multi billionaires, like Bezos’ Ex, can’t give away wealth faster than they accrue it through investments.

I suppose it depends upon how it was made and what they do with it once they have it. If it’s hoarding wealth for wealth’s sake then, yea, probably an issue. It seems though, there are some that have obtained wealth and chose philanthropy.

If you’re a billionaire, you didn’t get there through hard work and perseverance, you got there by lying, cheating and manipulating others. There’s not one single person in this world who has personally created a billion dollars worth of value. Not Donald Trump, not Elon Musk, not Bill Gates or the Waltons, nobody. The wealth they hoard is generated collectively by their ideas, the work and contributions of their employees, taxpayer funded services like roads and railways that facilitate their ability to do business, the products they use that are produced by other people and companies, etc. If you’re a billionaire, that means somebody else along the way (or many somebodies) isn’t getting their fair share.

Jesus said “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”.

And then rich Christians made up some shit about an “eye of the needle gate” to justify keeping their wealth.

To me, being good is a function of altruism, while being bad is a function of egoism. This starts to get whacky when you do an altruistic thing for egoistic motives (ie donating for recognition) but it serves me as a baseline, and by that understanding, I would say yes, theoretically it is possible. However, in most scenarios I can think of, the way that a person becomes rich will be filled with egoistical decisions and thus be bad.

I am currently re-reading pedagogy of the oppressed by Freire though, and he brings up a good point: charity and being charitable will always lead to an unjust system, because the person feeing charitable, to be able to do that, needs to perpetuate a system in which they have more, and where there is a poor one to give to. So he would say not really because the being rich in and of itself is a symptom of an amoral system. And I have to say that’s a good point

One thing to realize - it is paper money, stocks, obligation, not actual resources that rich people own. If you actually spend billions on yourself, like building multiple palaces, huge and multiple yachts, then yes, you are consuming resources egoistically for yourself. If the money are “working”, producing something that not for you to consume (also known as “invested”), and especially if you donate a lot for charities, then sure, you can be a good person.

millions to billions of dollars

Those two are very different sums of money.
But if you’re very rich, you can’t be a good person, there’s no way to accumulate that kind of wealth without exploiting others.

But then again, we all live in capitalist societies that have been built on exploiting the shit out of others, so there’s quite a bit of hypocrisy in my post.

TL;DR: I think it is basically impossible to have that much money and claim it was earned ethically. Therefore it is basically impossible to be “good” without giving it away.

I think that it is borderline impossible to ethically accrue that much wealth. Is it possible? Maybe? I’d love to hear more examples of where a company owner made sure all their employees shared in the success when the company is large enough that the owner is that rich. I remember hearing that Google did right by their early employees, but it’s been the exception that makes the rule and was also a long time ago in a different world where their ethics were different anyway.

And if you inherit that much wealth, what are the odds that it came to you free and clear of having been generated from exploiting others? Colonizing/“settling” and redlining making property values super high? Using eminent domain to tear down minority major communities for the sake of putting an interstate down the middle instead of risking devaluing the richest people’s property more? Because odds are that even if they didn’t cause the system they certainly benefited from it.

And unfortunately, “charity” is a horror in the USA because it’s used as a very bad and very biased by rich people version of an actual welfare system that worked. The idea that there are food banks operating off donations while billionaires exist is horrific. If billionaires did not exist I frankly think that a lot more things like food banks (and public transit maybe?) would find themselves with funding.

I suppose it depends. There are plenty of rich people who do actively seem to care and go out of their way to not only donate to charity, but actively get involved in communities and try to improve things. Very clearly putting themselves out there and not for personal fame and prestige.

The big part you have to focus on is whether the charity is being done for tax write-offs or other personal benefits, such as what you see with most conservative rich people like the Kochs.

Of course, no matter how a rich person uses their money, even if they very clearly are spending massive amounts of it on helping others and improving the lives of those around them, they’ll still be considered evil just because they are rich.

It’s an interesting paradox. For some people who have a very narrow view on the subject, they will only consider a rich person “good” if they make themselves not rich. Entirely so. Of course, such a no longer rich person wouldn’t be able to help others at that point.

I think if a good person were to amass half a billion dollars they would spent enough of it on charity that they could never become a billionaire. So there are no good billionaires, but perhaps a few good millionaires moving to ex-millionaire.

I don’t mean doctor-making-150k-a-year rich, I mean properly rich with millions to billions of dollars.

I firmly believe there are no ways to become “properly” rich that don’t require you to be a bad person.

To get out of that “doctor-making-150k-a-year” category you need some combination of greed, exploitative practices, manipulating broken capitalist systems, nepotism, ruthlessness, corruption, bribery, and outright lying.

People who hoard more money than they can spend in several lifetimes while people are literally dying in the streets cannot be good. These things are mutually exclusive.

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