Why do we allow billionaires to hoard all the world's resources?

Question

A handful of people are making billions of dollars from resources they did not create, such as oil, water, land, trees and plants.

Answer 1

You make it sound as if they're just picking money up off the ground as if it grows on trees. Oil, water and trees are resources that require a very sophisticated operation to bring to consumers.

Exxon didn't "create" oil but they also spend $270 billion in 2005 to pay tens of thousands of people to spend millions of man hours to 1) explore for oil 2) dig up the oil 3) transport the oil 4) refine the oil 5) and coordinate with hundreds of other businesses to get it to consumers so they can drive their car to the beach. And then they invest in research in development so that they can do it more efficiently and at lower cost next year.

They should be rewarded with a profit that provides enough incentive to get the management/engineers/technicians to work far more than the standard 40 hours per week.

That being said, their profit margins aren't really all that impressive compared to other sectors and their business is very volatile. They make profits now. But they also made losses in the early 90s.


I hope you like my answer.

Answer 2

The media is owned by them. The structure of most media companies is top-down - the guy at the top has ultimate say over what and how new stories are reported. If a story threatens the rule of the wealthy, then it is axed or rewritten into a version the wealthy find acceptable.

Big money goes to politicians in the form of campaign contributions. If a politician threatens the wealthy, he doesn't get any funds to run an effective campaign, so he'd never get elected. Elected politicians have learned that it is the wealthy contributors they really need to court during election season.

The wealthy also fund think tanks and university research. If there's a theory they don't like, then they fund people to debunk it or promote alternative theories.

When the average person is bombarded from all sides with messages saying how great it is to be ruled by the wealthy, ever since they were kids, there's usually too much indoctrination to prevent them from thinking otherwise.

Answer 3

In any economic system, the inequality can be explained by the fact that different investments have different returns; and, that the people who have had successful investments have more money to make even more investments.

Regarding the "allow them" part of the question, in most of the developed countries, the wealthy also pay most of the taxes. The percentage of taxes obtained from the Top 0.1%, 1.0%, 5.0%, etc. is usually quite closely proportional to the wealthy peoples' share of that country's wealth.

In that context, we allow them to be wealthy because that way we get on keep on milking them every year. Whereas, in those countries that attempted radical redistribution of the wealth, the outcomes were very unfortunate-- just after the initial party time ;-)

Answer 4

I don't think anyone is LETTING them do it. Being that they have succeeded in hoarding all the resources, however, the resources that are left to fight them are very limited. If you are serious about it, you can help by boycotting big corporations. Stop buying name-brand clothes. Stop eating processed food. Stop buying all the latest gadgets that you don't need. We give these billionaires their hoard by buying their stuff. If people spread their wealth out more, the world's resources would be better spread out as well.

Answer 5

It's called capitalism. Like it or not it's here to stay until people wake up and find a better system.

Answer 6

b/c government would do an even worse job.
USSR had abundant resources, and it's people were still living in ghettoes.

Answer 7

maybe because money buys power and they are also the same people controlling it.

Answer 8

lets go rob them, heh. i wonder why sometimes.