It's a pretty simple question. We live in a world where billionaires are giving seminars teaching millionaires to become billionaires while the bottom 44% of Americans earn an average of $18K a year. It's a zero-sum game, fractional reserve banking notwithstanding.

I'm of the opinion it isn't ethical. Prove me wrong.

Please not this again. No, it isn't. Your premise is based on a fallacy that no economist anywhere believes.

Yes the game is rigged (people who own assets have vastly outperformed wage earners due to the current economic environment). But it’s not like any one person can possibly change this, so I don’t see how you can argue that coaching is unethical. The game is the game, for better or worse.

What is coaching directly correlated to in the terrible analogy that you are attempting to make? Assets? Capital?

Please educate me using more than psychological persuasion so I can destroy your arguments.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/3...-game-1757862/

see this discussion, ie the economy is not zero sum.

Thank you for the link.

life needs to be affordable to the masses. but its a fairly bad idea to tax success and hand that money over to people that are proven unsuccessful.

I believe there should be a social contribution mandate for the ultra wealthy, but i dont think we should tax them, and hand over control to politicized whims of the day.

amazon and microsoft are proven in their governance. give them a mandate for some social issues like affordability and environment. but let them run the show...do not take money out of thier pockets to be mismanaged by the political process.

And this is where i see socialist policies fail...finding ways to spread money towards people that have bad ideas will fail. So lets try something different...lets focus our successful people on whats important to society. and this already happens. lets recognize the bilions that buffet and gates contribute to charitable causes, lets recognize musk for pushing the envelope on green tech to the verge of bankrupcy. taxing them and handing that over to be controlled by fox new or cnn stories is a bad solution

We are at peak socialism/ communism right now. Might last another 50 years but the western world is broke and over leveraged. Even if you wanted to take other people's money and spend it on entitlements it is not sustainable over the long term. The U.S. blew all it's money over the last 50 years on military.

i think the game is changing dramatically. there are people becoming rich af on the internet who historically would have no chance of doing so.

Apart from Trump University (which was open/marketed to poor people and which the course instructors encouraged them to max out their credit cards to attend), what billionaires are doing this?
I'm not seeing this. Here's income data from official sources:



Even the bottom 25% gets you over $20K. 44% get you over $33K. And that's without counting subsidies; the poor get large subsidies which increase their income (which are bankrupting the nation):



National socialized healthcare and various forms of payments and subsidies to the poor total 2.7 trillion, the large majority of which flows to the poorest.

So the poor are basically parasites on the hard working rich, who support the poor's incompetence, laziness and stupidity, and pay to raise their kids.

I agree it's not fair - it's not fair to the rich and the hardworking.
Well I covered it above. But to the specific case - I believe it's highly ethical, a huge positive thing, to teach people how to allocate capital effectively. The rich executing effective allocation of capital is the reason the US has done so well and done so much for the global poor.

As for the poor, why are they such worthless scum they're not doing STEM degrees? The US is about 2 million STEM graduates (alone) short in the coming years, and it's holding up the economy and affecting the odds of the very survival of the US. It's also short many millions more in other needed professions.

Instead, the poor go and do economically worthless degrees. Here for example is a racial breakdown of degrees (I use this because it's a decent proxy for poverty):



Poor black people are hurting other black people by not choosing STEM degrees. Why? Math and science and coding are the most meritorious and individualist subjects there are. it's all about ability.

These horrible choices (for individual wealth and societal wealth) are somehow the fault of rich people? Note that Asians are also often poor/disadvantaged and yet choose these fields.

So no, it seems to me that your data is faulty and that you're actually highly unethical by not educating yourself about the realities of our world and falling into the ultra dumb/toxic left wing view of focusing on the rich (who are already saints compared to the poor). It's the poor who hurt themselves and society through their own dumb/selfish choices.

Lol. The poor are worthless scum.

Nice.

If you care about the poor, it's far better to tell them that they're worthless scum creating their own poverty with their dumb choices, who need to do far better and work far harder, than to tell them that they're victims. Asians internalize the former and crush life - half of the poorest Asians rise above middle class in 1 generation, which is extraordinary.

Telling people they're victims in a society with a massive skilled talent shortage, where any talent and/or hard work will get you at middle class or better in 10 years, is so incredibly toxic, for both individuals and society. Every Black Lives Matter march is time spent not studying and mastering a STEM or coding subject. Every minute spent thinking about how unfair it is that others are filthy rich, about racial grievance and vast conspiracies of hidden racism/sexism/classism, is a minute not spent improving your own earning capacity and worth to society.

the western world is far from broke. japan central bank holds 70% of thier jgb's. not sure what it is in us....maybe 30%. that debt is never being paid back and in Japan the gov gets the coupons. debt is a big problem for personal finances. it is not a problem if there is a central bank. that debt doesnt exist. lots of smart business people dont realize the power of central banks, because they mistake the cost ofthe debt

You got my vote. Not exactly politically correct, but well stated.

lets keep this civil and not use inflammatory terms like parasites. you can make your points regardless

Not disagreeing that choices effect wealth outcomes. However, to ignore that there are many factors outside of some people's control that can harm an ability to rise up is not preposterous.

One example of the top of my head are parents that abuse their children's credit. Next, would be medical debt owed because of a sick spouse etc. I know plenty of wealthy people that have had to file bankruptcy because of liability judgments etc. It's not as easy or straightforward as you want it to be.

BTW you should credit that argument to Ben Shapiro. It's obvious you are just regurgitating his talking points.

I think this question is flawed. Ethics is for debate in philosophy class, where you can go round and round and round for intellectual exercise but rarely show a winner.

I would change the question to “Is it amoral to take advantage of a system, that has eroded the founding father’s anti-trust and monopoly laws due to corrupt politicians taking large amounts of money from corporations to change laws in their favor and to load a Supreme Court that wont act in accordance of the law, but by their personal views by deciding that said corporations are “people”. “Is it then amoral to hoard money and do nothing to change the broken system that is failing a majority of us? All while preaching trickle down economics when everyone knows its mostly trickling up?” And using these lies to get the very people who are suffering the most to vote for the politicians you have essentially bought off?

Yes, it is immoral.

First, the economy is not a zero-sum game. Here's a simple example: I buy an apple from the grocery store. Who lost in this transaction: me or the grocer? It's clearly win-win: I got an apple and saved massive time trying to track down an apple orchard, grocery store profited $0.01. If there was a loser in this transaction, why did we transact? This is how 99.9% of transactions work in the economy.

Jeff Bezos created 116 billion of value for himself out of nothing. This in turn created 800 billion of shareholder value for others, myself included. He literally made me and every s&p 500 shareholder richer, which probably is like half the population of our country. Further, he created amazing value to the population that uses his service. He has saved me countless hours in shopping alone. Then he changed how the web works and saved billions of manhours to allow for every company to not have to recreate the wheel of inhouse data hosting. People like to pretend billionaires stole their wealth. They generally get money by creating (not extracting) massive value for the world (or inheriting the value that their parents created). Billionaires teaching millionaires how to create more value sounds like a good thing to me.

The fact that some people are "poor" is unrelated to anything.

They are teaching people who want to learn and want to work hard for the money. Most (obviously not all) poor people in the US (I can't speak for all countries) remain poor because they're not willing to do what it takes to get out of poverty. Why should we be held back because of them?

So no, it's not unethical.

The Great Equalizer

The ethical versus unethical argument can go on (unresolved) ad infinitum, but here's something to consider …

Author Walter Scheidel has taken a close look (over a long span of history) at how gross income inequality tends to get resolved.

https://www.amazon.com/Great-Leveler...s=books&sr=1-2

I think (hope) that the gap between rich and poor here in the United States - as well as the rest of the world - does not become so stark that violent revolution(s) become the norm. Here in the U.S., a small (but growing) minority of the one percent, (i.e. Marc Benioff and a few others), recognize the problem. (Mr. Benioff recently stated that capitalism - as currently practiced - will have to change.) Fortune magazine recently ran an article highlighting "The Future of Capitalism" and what changes business (and the wealthy) may have to make. Jamie Dimon and the Business Roundtable recently adopted a resolution changing a longstanding BRT policy with respect to what obligations "Big Business" has to the rest of society.

The key to a stable "free enterprise" capitalist society is a large (prosperous) middle class. If the view prevails that it's OK for the rich to own everything - and it's your fault if you're not one of the rich - eventually the rich will find their heads handed to them on pikes. Donald Trump says you're either a winner or a loser - there's no in-between. If being a "winner" means you're in the one percent and everybody else is a loser, history suggests the winners will become the biggest losers. This is the one thing - the only thing - that Karl Marx got right: In a capitalist society, once the middle class disappears, the rich are doomed.

I choose to be optimistic. At the one time in our history when the country was under great economic stress, (i.e. The Great Depression), with communists marching in the streets predicting the end of capitalism, a beneficent "dictator" (Franklin Roosevelt) stepped in [literally] saving the country. A lot of the programs he instituted, (i.e. deposit insurance to protect money people deposit in their bank accounts, Social Security, unemployment compensation, various Government-funded programs to put people to work), were deeply resented by the rich. Over time other programs have come about, (i.e. Medicare and Medicaid), to prevent people from sinking into desperate poverty. These programs have given people hope - and neutralized the arguments of anti-capitalist fascists and would be dictators.

We were lucky - we got FDR - while Germany was not so lucky … Their dictator turned out to be a murderous tyrant. Thus far we've been lucky in that we have a Government which tends to self correct and deal with problems before they get too far out of hand. If we (collectively) allow the middle class to disappear with all the wealth going to the top, we may run out of luck and lose all of the good things we take for granted.

I agree with you

No it is not unethical. Its actually super beneficial for society for more wealth to be created. It's actually benevolent for someone to teach others to make more money.

If it was a zero sum game, you would still be walking around on a horse from wooden shack to wooden shack, sending love letters via pigeon.

This question sort of reminds me of Kenneth Langone (Home Depot founder/billionaire). He donates 100's of millions to provide free tuition to NYU medical students. One could argue these med students are already smart and ambitious and the help could go towards the lower rungs of society instead. But I would argue that would be throwing money down a sink hole and would provide far less (if anything at all) for society than taking so much financial stress away from our future doctors. I would much rather have a Langone helping future doctors than paying that money in taxes to fund God knows what the government wants to waste it on.