This is Ridiculous...

[Different]

I have quite a controversial opinion on this topic and many people might hate me for what I'm about to say. Then again, most people are outside the top 20% who control most of the wealth.

I've collapsed my comments into the sections below:

Note

Before I begin, I want to make it clear that I come from a below average family, and I am below average myself, so nothing I'm saying here is in my own defense. I have, however, read a few books and engaged in online content about personal finance and wealth building over the last few years in an effort to move myself up.

TL DR

Wealth Inequality
• Wealth is a measure of how much value you have brought to society.
• People who have a lot of money will therefore have to do a lot to earn what they have.
• So there is an inequality of how much people are contributing to society.
• Wealth will never be equal because some people are better at growing their wealth than others.
• The Top 1% have a huge amount of wealth because they are able and willing to do what the 99% can't.
• To achieve a more even wealth distribution, people need to contribute a similar amount.
• It's better for poorer people to move themselves up than to try and tear down the rich.

The Rich Are Greedy
• The rich give far more than the average person does.
• Average people can't give much because they don't have much to begin with.
• Average people ask for the rich to be taxed more, and for the government to give them handouts.
• It's people like that who are greedy.
• Being highly successful does not mean you are greedy. Otherwise elite athletes could also be labeled as such.

Wealth Inequality

Wealth Inequality
To me, wealth is a measure of how much value you have brought to society. The more you give, the more you get. Simple. Given that, unless people donated money to rich, they would have had to do something to make their money.

So I don't believe there is any way wealth "should" be divided. Naturally, more money will go to those who do more and things will be as they "should" be.
If you want an equal wealth distribution, here are two possibilities:
• You pay people less the more they do (Thereby penalizing the larger contributors. This sounds very unfair to me)
• Everyone contributes the same amount to society (This will probably never happen)

The first option, unfortunately, is what a lot of people want. They say "tax the rich" to strip the most successful people of what they have earned in hopes it will benefit themselves. Higher income earners do pay more tax anyway, so it's not like this isn't happening.

The second option is probably the fairest way of achieving an even wealth distribution. But of course, those who aren't able to keep up with others will hate this idea.

If wealth became evenly distributed right now, it wouldn't remain that way for very long. The reason why the rich keep getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer is because the rich know how to grow their wealth more effectively. So, even if everyone had exactly the same amount of money, things will eventually return to how it used to be with the skewed distribution of wealth. So the way I see it, distributing wealth equally will do nothing more than provide temporary relief for those who are unable to grow it, and that won't solve anything.

Inequality in Other Areas

While most people think of money when the word 'wealth' is mentioned, you can be wealthy in other areas in your life. I often hear people expressing their unhappiness at the skewed distribution of money, but never hear them showing the same dissatisfaction about other things. So there appears to be some inconsistency in how they apply their views, and that makes part of me think that many of them don't actually believe in wealth equality and are only speaking about it because they're "losing" against other people in the never-ending struggle for financial abundance.

So let's use tennis Grand Slam titles as a form of wealth. Do you believe that Grand Slam titles should be evenly distributed?
If you follow tennis, you probably know that Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic are extremely dominant in the sport. Each of them has far more Grand Slam titles than any other active tennis player at the moment. As of writing this, these three players have won a combined total of 62 Grand Slams, equivalent to winning every Grand Slam for 15.5 years, but do you think this is unfair? I certainly have never heard of anyone asking the them to stop competing so that someone else can win. If anything, there is a lot of support for the them to set a record that will probably stand for decades to come. Why don't people adopt the same attitude towards rich people?

Instead of people encouraging Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to become the first trillionaires, some people propose ideas where an individual's net worth is capped at $999 million, saying that "no one needs a billion dollars". What if I said "no one should be allowed to win more than 4 Grand Slams"? That sounds quite ridiculous, doesn't it?

Instead of asking to limit what the top three are able to achieve, tennis fans cheer on promising young stars to challenge them and potentially win a Grand Slam for themselves. So instead of trying to take money from the rich, people should encourage average people to strive for their own financial success. Moving the lower people up is a better and fairer way of achieving wealth equality than tearing down those at the top.

Getting into the Top 1 Percent

I don't like what the guy in the video says about how a CEO earns 380 times more than the average employee, but suggests that he doesn't work 380 times harder. It really seems like he's trying to make wealthy business owners seem like  bad guys who cheat their way to riches. What a lot of people don't seem to realize is that it's not how hard you work, it's how much you produce. A lot of rich people earn far more than the average person while working less, but simply getting to the point where you can do that is a huge challenge in itself.

When people look at the wealthy, they see nothing but success. All the effort, sacrifices, risks and losses involved go completely unnoticed, as if building a business that earns you $1 million a year, plus millions more to employ a team of workers is easy.

The failure rate for new businesses is incredibly high About half of them fail within the first 5 years, so you have to be exceptional to avoid becoming part of that statistic. How exceptional do you have to be to be an average employee? The word 'average' should make it obvious. Self-made millionaires Grant Cardone and Gary Vaynerchuk suggest that entrepreneurs should work 12-18 hours a day, 7 days a week on their start-up if they're serious about making it work. Keep in mind that businesses are rarely profitable at the beginning, so most entrepreneurs aren't making a single cent from their efforts yet. Then they finally get to the point where they're making enough money to hire someone who has the guts to tell them they're getting paid too much. Now that's ridiculous.

In Cardone's book The Millionaire Booklet: How to Get Super Rich, he mentions that he gave up doing all the fun things in life for 26 years while pursuing his financial goals. Do you think you could manage working 7 days a week for 20+ years with only 1 or 2 vacations in between? I can say with 100% certainty that I wouldn't be able to.

So tell me why there should be wealth equality when there's clearly an inequality in the amount of work that people do. It's quite bold of average people working 9-5 to say that people who work 90 hour weeks with no guarantee of income should help them with their finances.

The more I think about this, the more I believe the 1% actually deserve what they have. And if you still don't, I encourage you to watch Cardone in Undercover Billionaire: Season 2 where he's given the seemingly impossible task of turning $100 into $1 million in 90 days. Spoiler alert, he smashes that target. How many people could do that? 1%? 0.1%? Maybe that's why the rest of the population don't have a tower of cash that stretches 10 times higher than the video frame.

It's obvious that the 1% are where they are because they're willing and able to do what the other 99% can't, and that doesn't seem like an issue to me.

The Rich Are Greedy

The Rich Are Greedy
Based on what I said in Wealth Inequality, I don't believe that the rich are greedy. The fact is that they would have had to contribute more to society than most people to become rich.


Nope. But I don't see the average person trying to help out with those things either. In fact, a lot of average people can't even help themselves! They're sitting ducks who are desperate for someone else to fix things for them.

The thing is, they are so busy trying to take care of themselves that they barely have anything left to give to others. How can you donate a million dollars towards a cause you care about when you don't even have a million dollars? Rich people are able to give far more, and many have done so.

Take Team Trees, for example. Most of the top donators are deca-millionaires and billionaires who have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars each, far more than most people would ever donate in their entire lives. Switch over to the most recent donations and you see average people donating near-insignificant amounts. If it wasn't for the rich people, Team Trees wouldn't have reached their target of 20 million trees.

And it's not just that. It's the attitude that the average people have.
They say that:
• The rich should pay all the taxes
• The government should help take care of them
• Wealth should be redistributed more evenly (meaning they get money that someone else earned)

If anyone's greedy, it's people like that.
Those who think the rich are greedy for having large amounts of wealth need to realize that taking wealth away from the rich so that they can have it is even greedier. Wealth shouldn't just be distributed, it should be earned. And it seems like average people are trying to find ways to get more than they worked for.

Asking the rich to help out everyone else is like asking the smartest kid in the class to do everyone else's homework because those other people don't know the answers.
Instead of relying on the smartest kid to do your homework for you, why not take the time to learn how to do it yourself?
Instead of depending on rich people to help you out, why not find out how you can help yourself out?

A good way to not be greedy is to get as much money as you can and use it all to help other people, not to earn less. Having less money reduces your ability to help. I do agree that if all the rich people in the world gave away significant amounts of their money, far fewer people would be suffering, so let's hope that they are all generous people. However, no one has the right to tell them what to do with their money. And why would they want to help people who call them greedy and selfish?

Greed in Other Areas

Similar to wealth inequality, it seems like people also apply this viewpoint on greed quite inconsistently. There's a lot of anger and hatred directed towards rich people who don't share their money, but almost none directed towards people who have ample amounts of non-monetary things.

Going back to the tennis Grand Slams analogy, would you say that the top three tennis players, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic are greedy for winning 20+ Grand Slams each? Would you call them greedy for not intentionally losing a match against someone who hasn't won a Grand Slam yet? Of course not. That would be ridiculous, wouldn't it? 

So why are people suddenly labeled as greedy for earning a lot of money, or for not giving up opportunities to make money? They are simply very good at making money, just like how those three tennis players are very good at winning Grand Slams. Since when did being highly successful make you greedy?

Final Comments

I think it's quite unhealthy to depend on external factors for your success. Relying on a redistribution of wealth or rich people giving their money away is a terrible way to go about your life, and chances are, you'll never end up getting what you want. If you take it upon yourself to fulfill your desires, you will be the one who determines whether they happen, not someone else. And even if you believe that, one day, something will change that ends the suffering of the poor and middle-class, what if it doesn't?

I will end this with the following quote which sums up my feelings towards this topic:

"I have nothing in common with lazy people who blame others for their lack of success. Great things come from hard work and perseverance. No excuses."
- Kobe Bryant

If you have read everything above, I hope it has been valuable to you. However, I am not an expert in this and some things I have said may not be feasible in real life, I dunno. These are just my thoughts.
I understand that this is a sensitive topic, so I apologize if I caused offense to you; it was not intended.

I hope this brings about a constructive discussion that we can all learn something from.   

Well said, man! 🤝 I couldn't have said it any better. One of the most valuable things you said in your post is that the average person won't even take care of themselves. This is true because a lot of people who are not helpless, try to take shortcuts and find the easy way out. Also yes, you're right. Wealth will never be distributed equally because there are those in higher places who find ways to keep growing their money at least 5 to 10x better than the average person.

I do have one question for you, though: Do you think that the 1% elite are raising gas prices, taxes, paying farmers to destroy their crops, and purposely dividing the social classes into two groups (99% poor and 1% ultra rich) to make us suffer? Or is there another explanation as to what's leading to this?

However, the one thing I disagree with you about, is that the rich are greedy. I'd say "some" rich folks are greedy. Like the higher 1% elites who live underground and control all the wealth, from what I heard. I also heard that these people are extremely evil and they try to find ways to make us suffer, financially.