Comment by cortesoft
3 hours ago
I don't think it is a crazy opinion to think the desire to be rich is morally troubling. It is a desire to consume more than your share of the world's resources.
3 hours ago
I don't think it is a crazy opinion to think the desire to be rich is morally troubling. It is a desire to consume more than your share of the world's resources.
Easy to say that, isn’t it? I can almost guarantee that YOU also want and do consume much more than an average human on this planet. Never mind the fact that humans consume more than their share of the planets resources anyway. Whatever the definition of “their share” is.
This is why I used the word troubling, instead of wrong or evil or anything like that.
Yes, the devil is in the details. I just don't think it is unreasonable to be troubled by people wanting to be rich.
And if you invent or create something which brings a lot of value to other people, then your share should be just as big as everybody else's?
30% of the food eaten on the planet by people today is grown thanks to a German scientist who invented a way to extract fertilizer from air. He is directly responsible for the ability of billions of people to live and survive. What would be his fair compensation?
I don't have some sort of definitive answer to this, and I don't think there is an objectively right answer. It is very open to debate.
My point is that it isn't unreasonable to think it is troublesome to want to be rich.
Personally, I think there is some appropriate compromise between "people should take as much as they can for themselves, however much they can negotiate" and "people should never take more than the poorest person". So no, I don't think everyone should get the exact same share as everyone else, but I also don't think anyone should take a million times as much as the average person.