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Notes -
I was talking to a Progressive friend on Friday and the left's favorite topic came up: Billionaires. Or more specifically how it is impossible to be an ethical billionaire. Obviously there are loads of moral axioms loaded into that statement and several different framings that can be used to identify that. I'm curious if you take the idea outside the obvious marxist definitional stance, and look at how the billionaires got their money. Can you have a billionaire who ethically got their money? If we grant things like selling merch made in third world sweatshops a la TSwift or not paying employees the fair "value" of there labor as unethical. Anyone have some ideas. I said Gabe Newell, owner of Steam and did not get a convincing counter-argument for that, even in a marxist theory frame. I wonder if there are others?
I mean I don't think it's possible to be an ethical billionaire in the same it's not possible to be ethical in general - someone is always going to be upset. Superficially Gaben looks like a good answer, but then you find out how many people in the development and publishing space hate him for steam being "freeloaders." Consumer hate is rarer but still comes up with respect to some decisions they make.
So if we reframe the question as "who are the most ethical" billionaires I'm sure you can find some, it's just usually not people the man on the street knows about.
Consider the Duff brothers from Mississippi - they made their money running a tire company.
Or Judy Faulker in the healthcare space, Epic gets a lot of flack but most of that is actually regulatory burden or angry competitors.
Plenty of people make a billion in generally unethical spaces (real estate, investing) while being no more unethical than everyone else in that space, sometimes even more ethical (just very good or lucky).
Upsetting people doesn't make something unethical, though.
I realize I'm probably preaching to the choir, but the most ethical billionaires would have to be those who did the most good* without trampling any particular rights. Given how hard business can incentivize one or another form of such trampling, then, it would be really hard to find a billionaire with clean hands. At some point they'd have signed off on a sketchy deal, or exploited labor laws, or just hired people who did. How much of that responsibility should transfer?
You could probably get a pretty good proxy of political affiliation by asking a series of comparison questions. Ask whether a person is culpable for X, Y, Z, with decreasing levels of personal involvement. Someone who believes in holding a CEO responsible for his bottom-level managers' hiring decisions is much, much more likely to subscribe to various left-wing policy planks. Collectivism is not limited to redistribution.
Assuming OP and his buddy could agree on a standard, they could in theory go down the Forbes list and rule people out accordingly.
*Yes, yes, we also probably disagree on some key points of the "good". Not going there right now.
Probably going to be hard, because I think I really oppose their idea on this, but its interesting from a devil's advocate perspective, if its just impossible to be an ethical billionaire, in that they have created an unprovable tautology, or if even within this framework, one could find an "ethical" billionaire, and essentially prove their statement wrong.
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Right. I bring up Judy because she did a lot of good (made medical records electronic) uses her power and influence the success of people and patients over the success of her company (as she sees these things) and generally does not engage in evil billionaire behavior.
It's so debatable though - lots of people who work for the company hate, lots of the people who work for the company love it, she does lobbying (evil) but it's almost always for the good of the company and the medical record industry (which has some bad parts but is usually good for people).
She's done a wild amount of good for the world but you could easily find people willing to shoot them.
Likewise with the brothers I'm sure you have some underbelly to the tire world and they didn't entirely make their money with right place right time, I Just don't know what it is.
A motivated socialist is going to find both of those and GabeN evil but that's not going to really capture things (or encourage people to not be evil which is a thing society has lost).
I think your comment abuts something which bugs me about the progressive crowd - nobody is ethically if they do something the slightest bit wrong, but if a system results in great evil it can still be good as long as no individual is making an evil move. It's weird.
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