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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1500 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 7, 2026

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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?

Can you have a billionaire who ethically got their money?

Inheritance.

Yeap, pretty much, I was thinking about this recently and at my current rate of accumulation and throwing money into the stock market, assuming things about passive investing holds true AND my child and grandchild also accumulates the same way I do then maybe my great grandchild will be a billionaire (plus and minus a generation). We would all have gotten our wealth ethically, though I suppose because the immoral capitalist ways of seeking profit (whatever they maybe) has been laundered through broad passive investment in the market. Oh right, that would be a billion not counting inflation so the value is totally different.

No he won't, the fortune will be divided along the way.

I started from 0, and no matter how many kids I have, they definitely won't have to start from 0. But yeah, lots of massive assumptions about how my progeny spend their inheritance.

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