Questions for billionaires, musings for limitarians

 Some contributions to a Mastodon thread on wealth and the wealthy seemed to me to be worth further reflection.

I really would like media interviewers to ask questions like this. The thread has a few other suggestions too.

One of the replies was helpful, I thought.

billionaires don't 'hoard money' they will 'never use'. the notional billion dollars isn't the amount of cash they have in the bank, it's an estimate of the amount of capital — ownership of stock, real estate, and so forth — they control and extract interest from. the idea of capitalists as 'money hoarders' is a child's understanding of what wealth inequality is & hampers any attempt to address its structural cause, which is social mechanisms of power placing a small group in a position to exploit the labour of the majority, not that small group somehow by their own efforts bringing in more money than they spend  -https://octodon.social/@esvrld/111806450875791439

This chimes with what has been mentioned earlier in the posts here on limitarianism, that it traces back to power and structural factors and that their own efforts are no more valuable than anyone else's; they just occupy a more powerful position to be able to extract rents. A subsequent toot elucidates:

if you accept that money abstracts agency, it's much of a muchness.
They have the money because they can compel conduct and (effectively) vampire your agency; you must do as they demand to live. That's where the money arises, even if it's a consequence rather than a cause. -https://canada.masto.host/@graydon/111818441705185094

I think that the idea that 'money abstracts agency' is worth considering further in this respect. It helps us to understand that money is a social construct and is, in a sense, 'owned' by us all; that is, in the sense that we construct it together by honouring it in re-use, to settle debts and acquire things ourselves. By using money as part of our agency in the social world, we empower others also to use it. I guess it's a kind of network effect. But it's a network which is exploitable if you are in the right position in the network and have means to siphon off some of the flows; to capture the surplus above strict costs -including labour. This was, I think, what Marx was noting about capital exploiting labour.

As to the response to these insights.

#greed used to be considered a bad thing.
We need a stronger, more widespread understanding that it is a threat to justice and freedom.
We desperately need to push for a culture where the accumulation of wealth and power is seen as a danger. -https://functional.cafe/@xarvh/111810773059876175

There are definite resonances to Jesus' teaching there. For Jesus, it was a more personal warning about what wealth does to our 'souls' -though I don't this that this excludes a consideration of the social, it's just a recognition of the relatively constrained political space of 1st century peasantry. In a society where we do have a bit more political agency (though it is hard fought and under threat) we should ask about the social and political dangers and work together to head them off as far as possible.

Going back to that first response, above. It helps us to recall, too, that money stands for the use or potential use of resources in a society which recognises that currency. Every currency unit represents the power to command some resource. The resource might be labour, it might be food, it might be finished goods or it might be raw materials. Very often, it's a combination of several of those things in actuality.

It is our communal faith that when we tender currency units, they will be accepted in exchange for goods or services that gives money its fundamental value. Absent that collective belief and monetary wealth evaporates. What is left in that case would be the raw holding of stuff and the raw volunteering or coercion of labour. At base, that is what money is.

Let's note, then, that the wealthy are relying on our communal faith to be able to be wealthy. Without us they are nothing. It is our existence and willingness to live and work within the monetary system that enables them to have their wealth in as far as they hold their wealth in monetary units or derivatives of them. Money is social, it is 'ours', the wealth have merely found themselves in a position to siphon off so-called 'surplus value'. They do this by dint of having various kinds of power to lay claim to the surplus and then to accumulate it. And note also, most often the power to lay claim is also socially constructed. It is 'given' by the rest of us -or at crucial points it is coerced that is to say, our consent is gained by threats of force. Often these threats are enshrined in what we call a legal system as a last resort enforcement of 'rights' to property.

They can only be wealthy because 'we' allow them to be. Their wealth depends on our consent (freely given or otherwise). They are 'licensed' by us to be wealthy.

What I think we need to do is to examine this license for its moral claims and downsides and ethically critique it. This involves questions like: what are just rewards? Why should power entitle one to more resources? What is the purpose of a monetary system? Are there justifications for wealth inequality? What effects does the accumulation of power (in the form of wealth) have on wider society and what is the basis for a society to morally limit those effects?