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Mark Zuckerberg's plea for the billionaire class is deeply anti-democratic
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Guardian (One of the UK's leading newspapers)
Posted: October 28th, 2019
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/21/mark-z...
Hitting back against presidential candidate Bernie Sanderss assertion that billionaires should not exist and his calls to tax their wealth at much higher rates Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, worth $70bn, took to Fox News to defend his beleaguered class. Billionaires, he argued, should not exist in a cosmic sense, but in reality most of them are simply people who do really good things and kind of help a lot of other people. And you get well compensated for that. He warned too about the dangers of ceding too much control over their wealth to the government, allegedly bound to stifle innovation and competition. Zuckerbergs reasoning isnt unique among the 1%. As common as this argument is, it also happens not to be true. Take the basis of Mark Zuckerbergs fortune. The internet was developed out of a small Pentagon network intended to allow the military to exchange information during the Cold War. And of the top 88 innovations rated by R & D Magazine as the most important between 1971 and 2006, economists Fred Block and Matthew Keller have found that 77 were the beneficiaries of substantial federal research funding, particularly in early stage development. This isnt all to say that the private sector hasnt played a significant role in driving innovation. But the the fortunes built off of each couldnt exist were it not for the government more often than not taking the first step, funding innovation far riskier than venture capitalists and angel investors can usually stomach.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on income inequality from reliable major media sources.
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