It's dumb as hell to play apologist for the rich too, yet here we are.

I think I get you guys' (Jon and Antony) point but there's one thing I don't understand.

So basically, people don't get rich off the fruits of their labor because of the untalented white guy exploiting the system. In order to become a millionaire off of anything, like your ability to play a popular spectator sport better than anyone else or create a beloved and hugely popular pop culture franchise, you need to go through channels that benefit the untalented white guy more than yourself. The untalented white guy basically exploits the fact that you can't realize the potential of your talent and hard work without other people and the systems that enable you to do something like play in the NFL or release books and movies to a mass audience. A lot more money ends up being funneled to the rich white guy than yourself, creating a huge disparity between the true market value of your talent and hard work and how much you actually benefit from it.

Now, what I don't get is how it's impossible to get rich despite this abhorrent exploitation. Aaron Rodgers or J.K. Rowling could be a hell of a lot richer, but the former makes 22 million dollars a year and the latter's net worth has apparently exceeded a billion at some point. I could list a myriad of examples of people like these that are very very rich relative to the middle class of their country but who got there on their talent and hard work (such as a lot of other professional athletes besides Aaron Rodgers).

I get that this is a fallacy in the big picture, because for all intents and purposes, for a stupendously overwhelming majority of people it will be impossible to become millionaires no matter their talent and hard work.

Well obviously Rodgers and Rowling are both loaded, but like you said: In the overall big picture, they aren't the ones really getting rich from their efforts. They get a piece of the pie, but the overwhelming majority of that money goes to someone else.

Now, there are odd examples of people who kind of cross over from the earner to the owner, but it's very rare, and I feel like it's practically impossible to do today. For instance, Michael Jordan is the majority owner of the Charlotte Hornets, which is something he was able to achieve (at base level) by being the greatest basketball player in history. But at the end of the day, his basketball playing isn't what got him so much money. It opened up the opportunities for him to make the money, but he because ludicrously rich off of endorsement deals, and his popularity being enough that Nike was willing to create an entire line of athletic gear around a Michael Jordan sub-brand, which Jordan sees a substantial amount of revenue from.

So here we have it. Jordan has kind of sort of crossed over to being an actual rich person from being a professional athlete. At a very basic level, he did this because he's really good at basketball... but also because endorsement deals are very lucrative.

Michael Jordan has an estimated net worth of $1 billion.

Chicago Bulls Owner Jerry Reinsdorf has an estimated net worth of $1.3 billion.

See? Jordan is closing in... But again, don't forget that the majority of Jordan's fortune came from his Nike endorsements, so let's see how Jordan stacks up there...

Oh, Philip Knight has a net worth of $22 billion.

Pretty much sums it up, doesn't it?

It's not impossible for some number of people to become wealthy through exploitative channels. However, to use the example of J.K. Rowling, that so many of you seem to enjoy, & despite her rags to riches story, I think it's naive to overlook the advantages that she was handed by simply being born. First, she was born in a country where it's possible to write books in coffee shops on the tax-payer's dime. There are plenty of places where this particular scenario would be impossible. Second, her parents were both educated--one was an aircraft engineer for Rolls-Royce & the other was a science technician. In other words, it's unlikely that she was born poor, & this almost certainly gave her advantages that many of us aren't just handed (educated parents, decent schools, etc.). We also shouldn't overlook that much of her inspiration came from people, places, & situations (bad & good) that she wouldn't have met, visited, or experienced had she been born in Detroit, to a single mother with a GED who worked part-time cleaning rooms at a Super 8 Motel. That'd be a very different Harry Potter, assuming the unlikely scenario that she would've still become a writer. I'm certainly not trying to belittle someone's hard work, but there are a multitude of other variables involved in her success.

Mentat, are you suggesting that privileged white upper middle class people have an easier time finding success? I've never heard of such a thing.

I merely dislike Harry Potter & am incapable of admitting that Rawling's success was pure bootstrappery.

Well this is all true of course.

Well, considering how goddamn dumb a considerable portion of the universe she created is, I would say it falls more on the public that bought the books than it really does on her. I'm sure she worked hard on the books, but we should probably admit that her popularity exists for the same reason the popularity of Ultimate Fighting Championship exists: The general public ****ing sucks, and is stupid.

It's interesting to note that, though, because the white guys in suits who are making the real money off of all of this **** are counting on you being dumb.

Antony, I honestly took you for someone who liked UFC. I don't mean this as an insult or anything, it was just based on your general appreciation of sports. I've seen a few odd clips and that's pretty much it, I don't have any real interest to watch it or any other combat sport.

The point is that you can get a pretty good war chest going if you get that 'attaboy' from the rentiers, but if you want to move up past that point you cannot do it through more hard work. You have no choice but to use your money to become another minimally-contributing rentier.

Well, kroko, it's not so much that I dislike mixed martial arts as I dislike the culture surrounding it. It became this weird thing of tribal tattoos, shirts with old English writing and iron crosses, ****ty new metal, etc... And it's just ****ing insufferable.

And as time goes on, the fighters become more cartoonish in the way they behave outside of the fights, and there seems to be some kind of connection between being a UFC fighter and spousal abuse.

Mainly, I hate that people act like it makes them a badass because they like UFC. It's like a dumber, white trash version of how people who like the Patriots or the St Louis Cardinals act like they're better people because their team stands for some kind of idealized way to run an organization. These people are the worst ****ing people. They're the ones who actually buy the bull**** that's being sold, instead of just enjoying the sport because it's entertaining. To them it's some kind of bizarre way of life, and they're the reason why all sports broadcasts are insufferable anymore. It's not just about informing the viewer, it's about pandering to the morons who treat it like a ****ing religion.

Are these the same type of folks who would see Fight Club and take the film as a call to manliness and nothing else?

These are the type of people who think your favorite sports team or cage fighter defines you as a human being, so I can imagine they would do a wonderful job of misinterpreting Fight Club.

Curious what the definition of rich is in this context. How much does one have to make to earn your disdain? 100k/yr? 1 million/yr? 1 billion? What's the number?

In addition, what do you do about it? Stop working for the man because you don't want to pay rent? What are the alternatives? I'm not going to let my family starve, and I'm going to continue working to provide a good life for them. Maybe the value I bring to the company I work for could possibly top a few million a year. I get paid a small fraction of that, but what else can I do?

I work in software, so I can quit and try to make it on my own. This leaves my family open to risk and there's some possibility I will fail and have to go back to work for some company again.

I semi-agree with a lot of what has been said, but it seems we are leaving out the rent being charged by the government itself. I "bought" a house, but if I don't pay the monthly tax bill the government (not some greedy rich guy) will take it away, sell it for a fraction of its value to cover the taxes, and not think twice about it. This is not "use" tax, it's not like a gas tax or a sales tax or even an income tax, it's a tax I must pay in order to stay in the house I supposedly own.

I don't have any easy answers. I pay the economic rents and sell my labor because I'm compelled to, same as you. All I know for sure is that pretending there isn't a problem isn't going to solve it.

What's the alternative to taxation? Normally taxes aren't considered rent because you get something in return for your payment, not including the portion which is purely extractive due to e.g. corruption. Going deeper into debt is not a realistic option. 6% of the U.S. Federal budget is spent on debt service, a direct transfer from the U.S. taxpayers to its wealthiest citizens. High debt is pretty much the worst case for the working class, since it represents a permanent claim of the rich upon the labors of the poor (barring some form of "sovereign default" like inflation - which national banks were created to prevent, by the way). This is how low-tax high-debt groups like the republicans operate, they do this on purpose. I would gladly pay higher taxes today if it meant less of a free ride for the do-nothing moocher rich.

Also, it's not a quantity of money that earns scorn, it is the use of that money, and the place and manner in which it was acquired.

Nobody would ever argue that Elon Musk is misusing his fortune. He earned every cent and is using it to improve our society and our transportation and energy storage technologies quite literally across the board. On the other hand, you have white trash like Gina Rinehart, jobless heiress whose two greatest accomplishments in life are, in no particular order, telling poor people to work harder to get rich like she did, and that she was, in fact, able to "eat the whole thing".

A vanishing percentage of our wealthy actually contribute anything back, they have no idea how a society works yet they are suffered an outsized ability to set policy. This is a social and economic crisis. Our rich are as unmotivated and freeloading as the worst of the workers in the Soviet Union, and face even fewer consequences for their lifetime of childishness and irresponsibility.

Somehow we have all been conned into believing that it is only right and proper that one mild success demands that ones ancestors, across all time and all exponential growth, become entirely freed from all responsibility and personal growth. And I say that if you aren't able to leave the world a better place than when you found it, then your exit from the world should be a swift one. Eat the rich.

I think you're kind of missing the point there. We'll use the Michael Jordan example again, just because it's easy.

Of course Michael Jordan is rich. He's a goddamn billionaire. The point is that he's the guy who got rich by working his ass off over a period of several decades to be the best basketball player who ever lived, but a lot of other people made a hell of a lot more money off of him doing that than he ever made for himself.

The point is that you can work and work and work to make as much money as possible, and be as successful as possible, but at the end of the day you aren't the one who's really getting rich off of it. Yes, maybe you become a millionaire (or in Jordan's case a billionaire, but just barely), but someone else is making your earnings look paltry, and they're not even the one who worked for it.

If you ask me, even that is missing the point. It shouldn't be possible to get that obscenely rich, even if you work your ass off for it. Wealth caps.

"But that would be communism"

- someone who unironically thinks they will eventually be allowed to retire

You are the one complaining that billionaire J.K Rowling is not makeing enough profit from the Harry Potter Films.

I think this just shows that the problem is cultural. No matter what you do some minority of people will be in charge of things, and if they are selfish, they will abuse their responsibilities for their own interests. You can socialize everything, but then you just get a bunch of bureaucrats fighting over the budgets of their own person empires. If you have crappy people they will ruin any system you come up with. We have bad leaders because the electorate is more interested in finding reasons to confirm their comfortable ideological platforms than they are in integrity. There's not much you can do about that.

I don't have any fundamental problem with taxes. I have a problem with property tax (where I must keep working and paying it or I lose my house). There are many instances of older people who bought waterfront property here many decades ago and then were forced out because the property taxes got too high for them to afford. It's wrong. I also have a problem with "used item" sales tax. When a person here buys a car, they pay 10% of the price as sales tax. Then when it's sold used to a private party, that private party again has to pay sales tax on that used item. The state keeps taxing the same item over and over. However, there is a government-sponsored scheme wherein if you trade your car in at a dealership, they reduce the amount of tax you pay based on the amount your old car was worth. But if you sell your car on craigslist, and then buy another off craigslist, you don't get that discount, which is asinine.

Anyway, regarding the definition of rich: if it's really not about how much money you have, but rather, how you got it, I think a different term is needed. I have no ill will whatsoever for people who go out and make some stupid app and earn 100 million dollars. I have no problem with athletes that get paid a ridiculous amount of money to play ball.

I do have a problem with huge corporations (and those that lead them) that don't follow the rules, don't pay their fair share of taxes, **** all over the environment, **** all over the little guy, etc. It seems like the problem is more the abuse of wealth and power than the having of money itself. But we can't point the finger solely at the rich guys when the government colludes with them to maintain the status quo. Government-sponsored monopolies (cable/internet companies, landline phone companies, wireless providers, trash collectors, etc.), greedy, competition-stifling regulations (prohibition of community broadband, lame car dealership requirements prohibiting tesla from selling cars direct, etc.). My point is that it seems to me the problems could be helped if the government had the balls to actually govern, and do what is right and good instead of protecting entrenched players.

I'd prefer to rant about the rentiers but 1.) basically nobody has any clue what that word means and 2.) 99% of our rich people are rentiers, so this is really just an effort thing

The problem is that you can only get rich by making those who already rich even richer.

And any time the government actually tries to govern, everyone starts vomiting platitudes about overreach and interference and bla bla bla. See: The EPA doing absolutely anything sensible is met with people flipping their ****, because apparently we forget that when unregulated, we end up with rivers (which are made of water) catching on fire.

You have to regulate things like this, because rich people are in charge of them, and the only thing they care about is getting more rich. You cannot pass any kind of comprehensive legislation to curb this **** either, because rich people pay lobbyists tons of money to make sure no one ever hurts their profit margin.

Outlaw lobbying and start killing the rich, and in a few generations we'll be back where we started, because people are the problem. We're greedy, selfish, and can't see ten feet past our own noses. We are the problem. A comet the size of the moon would be a pretty good solution.

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Cutting edge new ways that rich people are infringing upon our rights to free speech.

Murdering people who say things Tumblr disagrees with. Well, really firing them, but in our Malthusian hellscape not having a job is effectively death by exposure and starvation, so let's be honest.

Suing over criticism (even if true) because apparently anything that causes a stock drop is a form of illegal capital expropriation.

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White may not imply rich but 999 times out of 1000 rich implies white

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I generally have a hard time understanding what kind of point I was trying to get across, so I appreciate having it cleared up.

The benefits of having not only Jon`C, but a store-brand Jon`C as well are limitless.

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Are you implying that black people are not systematically discriminated against?

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