this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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I kind of agree that many super rich get their wealth through unscrupulous means. As a counter point, there do exists many ways to become super rich that are not unethical. Divorce, inheritance, lottery winner, revolutionary technology, extremely popular book etc. Once a person gets a certain amount of wealth, simply not spending it too much and leaving it in the market will in the long term leave you one of the wealthiest people.
See this is the thing that always gets me about the critique, right, is, say you had this money foisted upon you. You could give it to the market, right, spend it all on random crap and just kind of leave it, but that's obviously bad because the market sucks and that's a pretty bad way to get rid of your money generally. You can invest a good chunk of it and be set for life/multiple generations, and that's good for your own self-interest and those around you, but bad in the sense that you've taken this excess money or power and you're not doing anything with it, you're just throwing it at the market and kind of living off the return. Hands off capitalism, where you're a hands off capitalist, so, you have the same problems with the system there. Go outside the market, then, start investing it in nonprofits and stuff like that. That's bad, because you both make no money and nonprofits generally kind of suck, and you'll probably drain your money pretty quickly hitting at the symptoms of problems, whack a mole while worse capitalists drain your wallet by basically forcing you to bear their outsourced societal costs.
I think maybe the best strategy would be to start a business in something that you actually give two shits about, maybe a co-op, not exploiting anyone, not leaving it to the market, and still investing your money, and then take any excess and pump it into unions, probably the thing you'd want is to pump it into the unions of your competition. Obviously unions can still be really shitty and union capture can still exist and be really bad, but I'm not sure how much you're escaping that unless you're donating to like, really really direct relief efforts, like housing the homeless (not a bad idea), or [redacted] which will get you killed. I think, certainly, starbucks union, or what have you, is probably better than not.
There are better ways to spend money, than what's conventionally done, but there are not many good ways to spend money. I've not even seen anyone high-profile really attempt to spend money like that in a way that actually makes sense, so it's either just, incredibly uncommon, or maybe we never hear about it, or all of the ideas to spend it basically just suck.