Bhaskar Sunkara
speaker
1,609 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2022
last heard Dec 2022
Bhaskar Sunkara’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I think it's perfectly justified that it's a populist shorthand, right?
So obviously, when I talk about inequality, I often talk about power dynamics, right, between workers and bosses and so on.
Billionaire is just the 99.1% version of it.
It's just a populist shorthand to just explain the fact that
There's a lot of people who have accumulated obscene wealth.
These people aren't, in my mind, parasites in the kind of very, very old school socialist rhetoric in that
Of course, capitalists provide employment, take entrepreneurial risks, come up with new ideas, sometimes themselves, sometimes directly manage work and whatever else.
But they exert so much power over the lives of not just their workers, but society as a whole.
Taking away some of their wealth and power is a way to just empower others.
And again, these things have policy trade-offs.
If you just snap your fingers and say, Elon Musk, all your wealth is gone, you're now on food stamps or whatever else in that kind of arbitrary way, you'd be a totally disincentivized people from trusting the rules of the game as they've been set up in a capitalist society.
And I think that would have negative consequences for workers.
But saying that...
hey, this person has too much power and too much wealth and has too much ability to dictate things about the lives of others, I think is just simply a fact.
And I think it's true in the cases of people who are good people and have risen to this position.
And it's true in the cases of people who are maybe not so good people and who have risen to these positions.
So, you know, I would agree with that.
LeBron James, if he's not already in his lifetime, will be a billionaire.
And he got his money largely through just being an incredible athlete, excelling in his field more than anyone besides for Michael Jordan.
I think he's my number two.
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