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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2254 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?

Steam is only successful because of the availability of servers on which to run it and the proliferation of personal computers allowing everyday people to play video games on them, which they pay Steam for the license of. I'm sure somewhere in the chain of events leading to the production of servers and consumer PCs, one can find some sort of unethical or exploitative behavior by some supplier or vendor somewhere, and so Gabe Newell is clearly an unethical billionaire.

More to the point, you can play this 6-degrees-of-Kevin-Baconunethical-production with anything, and so the entire concept is just a fully general argument that's meant to be pulled out of the quiver and deployed as needed when convenient.

There is a much easier one that another friend pointed out: CS-GO skins are essentially child gambling. Loot crates are absolutely designed to be addictive gambling.

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