Donald Trump is trying to brush off the fact that he shared A.I.-generated images of Taylor Swift endorsing his campaign to his Truth Social account earlier this week, now claiming that he doesn’t know “anything about them.”
Donald Trump is trying to brush off the fact that he shared A.I.-generated images of Taylor Swift endorsing his campaign to his Truth Social account earlier this week, now claiming that he doesn’t know “anything about them.”
I’d argue there’s a pretty big difference between someone like Bezos and someone like swift. Specifically, it’s almost impossible to make a billion dollar business without exploiting people, and Bezos definitely exploited the hell out of people.
In contrast, I don’t think it would be accurate to say that Swift made her money by exploiting people. Of the ethical ways to make money, I would think selling albums that you wrote and performed, and tickets to concerts that you’re performing would rank pretty highly.
Additionally, a significant portion of her wealth is the valuation of her music catalog being extremely high on account of being a very popular musician.
I’m not saying she’s the most left person in the world or anything, but not aggressively exploiting people, giving a lot of money to charities, and actively championing progressive causes definitely classifies someone as “left leaning” in my book.
Billionaires should not exist, full stop. They literally cannot spend that amount of money.
She could lower the cost of her music, her tour tickets, merchandise…
I love Taylor Swift too but just because she has progressive views doesn’t mean she didn’t extract wealth from people and is hoarding it for herself.
I’m willing to eat my hat if she donates 2/3 of her wealth right now and promises to never have more than a few million in total assets.
But she isn’t. And that makes her a bad billionaire.
If she lowered the price of her tour tickets it would just increase demand (without a commensurate increase in supply, since concert venue size and the number of shows she has time to put on both have limits) and thus further enable scalpers.
Lowering the prices of music sales or merch would be more feasible, but would be relatively complicated due to messing with supply/demand/product quality/employee & supplier compensation, etc. (For example, it could arguably be better to keep the merch prices the same or even raise them, but have the manufacturer increase worker wages or something like that.)
Rather than sit around hoping that she more fairly allocates profits of her own accord, if the societal goal is to prevent billionaires then the easiest way to ensure that would be via government policy, by increasing her income tax.
So, two things: I never said people should be billionaires, I said there’s a difference between her and Bezos. You can’t pretend that a $12 album, or Spotify streaming costs are the same as making people pee in jugs for minimum wage. One of them is actually doing things that people like in exchange for money, and people are saying “yes, I would like to spend my disposable income on this luxury good” often enough that she has more wealth than she can ever spend. Extracting wealth isn’t the same as exploitation.
Second, if you exclude the value of her music catalog, she’s not a billionaire. If she sold every piece of real property she owned, and gave away every last penny, he net worth would still be in excess of $500M on account of that. It doesn’t seem quite fair to say that someone is terrible because the things they made are worth more than an arbitrary line of “a few million”. Saying that someone is hoarding by just owning something they made that people say is worth a lot of money is judging someone for something largely out of their control.
None of this has anything to do with someone being “left leaning” in any case. Left leaning isn’t some short hand for ethical purity of being a member of the proletariat or even the working class. Saying that someone who publicly and materially supports progressive causes is “left leaning” seems pretty fair and reasonable.
I don’t particularly care about swift being some bastion of goodness. I also don’t actually care if someone has a billion dollars. I do care if they exploited people to get it. I care if they exploited people to get less than a billion. So lumping people together by the number without focusing on the conduct misses the point.
Very well put
Edit: downvotes for agreeing with an upvoted comment is interesting