this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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I dont know her name
Jeff bezos ex wife, who has donated a lot of money to charity
MacKenzie
where did they get that money in the first place? the dollar mines? the grand tree of bills? if the only way to get money is to work for it and dollars don't magically fall from the sky, which I think is a reasonable theory, then it's necessarily true that they stole it from us. not even being glib, that individual person didn't do the labor to get that much money - it's literally impossible, it would take millions of years of work to get billions of dollars at any reasonable wage - they had to take the surplus value of the labor of other people to obtain it.
it's akin to a thief stealing the money of a group of people and then giving a fifth of it back and demanding we bask in the light of their charity
Well, not to diss on giving to charity but two technical arguments against. One is, you are acting as an additional tax on the worker (the source of the surplus) and then redirecting that tax to charity. It's fine but the elected government has democratically selected priorities that they can rarely fund so it is better to just give it to the treasury. And 2, just don't collect this tax in the first place, allowing the worker to spend it on the local economy.
Wrong