Many years ago, I had the opportunity to race against a US Olympic athlete Phil Mahre at a local ski area. It’s a long story but suffice it to say that out of the amateurs, I finished in second place with a time of 1:40. First place was 1:39. I was a good skier and had won a couple medals in local races, one bronze, one silver. Phil Mahre’s time? 1:30. He had beaten me by ten seconds, an eternity in ski racing. He’s two years younger than me, one inch shorter and while I was on the slopes, many people thought I was Phil, or his twin brother,Steve. We had the same ski jackets, same skis, and he beat my time by 10 seconds.
I can accept that. He was a world class skier, an Olympian, probably skied more in one year than I did in my lifetime. He had coaches, massage therapists, the works. Me? I was working full time selling Toyota cars and getting in a day or two each week on the slopes. While humbling, a 10 second beating was understandable.
Today, I am 65 years old, been working pretty much since I was 16. I worked through my last two years of high school, took a year off between high school and college to make a few bucks, then worked through college. After college many of my jobs required 60 hour work weeks. Several of my jobs made the “10 most Dangerous Jobs in the USA” list. Today my net worth is about $600,000 and I can honestly say that I’ve earned much of it. I had some good breaks. Being born a healthy white male with an above average IQ into a stable family and a supportive community was a great start. Let’s say I was born on first base with a good lead on second. I admit that.
How did Bloomberg “earn” $60 Billion?
I have an IQ of 130. According to all of my physicals over the years, I am in excellent physical shape. Even today I can run an 8 minute mile.
How did Bloomberg “earn” $60 Billion? He must be Superman!
To put in into perspective, years ago at the ski slope, Phil Mahre would have had to ski faster than the speed of light to beat me as much as Bloomberg has. He would have finished the race course in 18 ten thousands of a second. Before the sound of the start bell at the top of the hill reached those at the finish line, Phil would be done with the course and taking off his skis.
We’d all stare and wonder: How did he do this? This is not possible, but there he is. In the end, unless somehow laws of physics were tossed out the window, we would discover that clearly, something is awry. The race was rigged. We’d been fooled. No one is that fast.
How did Bloomberg “earn” $60 Billion?
Clearly, he did not. Of course he worked for some of it. Of course he took chances, but to quote George Monbiot, If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.
Bloomberg took $60 Billion.
The system is rigged. Men like Bloomberg rig it, or at the very least, expect us to believe that they have “earned” their wealth and that our relative poverty is the result of our lack of hard work and enterprise.
Mike Bloomberg has no place in the Democratic Party.
For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him.
Are you familiar with Mr. Bloomberg’s history? I ask only because I’m not sure your animus towards him is grounded in anything other than simple envy.
Mr. Bloomberg was born and raised in Medford, MA. His father was a Polish immigrant. He got a BS in engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 1964 and an MBA from Harvard in 1966. He took an entry-level position at Solomon Brothers and worked his way to partner. He was fired from Solomon Brothers at age 39 with a $10M severance package.
He used that to fund a new company that, in 1982, produced the first “Bloomberg Terminal” — a device sold to market traders that provided the ability for them to make informed buy and sell decisions faster than anything else available. He built that business into an industry dominator, spinning off a media outlet (“Bloomberg News”) and several philanthropic companies along the way.
The fundamental behavior of pretty much any wealth distribution network is to create a scale-free network with a handful of ultra-wealthy parties at one end and an enormous number of people with nothing at the other. Various legal systems have been tried — Communism, Stalinism, Lenism, Maoism, Socialism (whatever that means), Fascism (whatever THAT means) and various flavors of Capitalism. These alternatives provide different rule-sets for attempting to manage the underlying wealth distribution mechanism.
It isn’t clear to me that anybody who trades wealth for something else “earns” it. If a collection of workers skilled in a given essential trade join together into a conspiracy that refuses to provide that service except in exchange for a fixed amount of money determined by the tradespeople (and ALWAYS more than the customer wants to pay), isn’t it fair to describe that behavior as “taking”?
I think that vocabulary like “earns”, “deserves”, “takes”, and so on is dangerously provocative because it applies a moralistic judgement on behavior that is as often as not well-intentioned (even if misguided) participation in a system put in place by others.
In my view, we make a terrible mistake by demonizing the aggregation of wealth into the wallets of a handful of ultrawealthy men and women as immoral behavior. We make a mistake in part because the participants who give up that wealth are just as “guilty” as the few who receive it.
I think we must instead make a collective determination of whether and how to impose limits and constraints on the underlying wealth distribution system, and then impose strict enforcement of those limits and constraints.
The obscene wealth concentration causing so much suffering today is NOT the result of evil and immoral acts of the very wealthy (even if some of those are evil and immoral). It is instead the result of taking wealth away from everybody else.
The solution is to find a way to avoid that wealth concentration that all of us are willing to live with.
I don’t like Mike Bloomberg as a nominee for president. I don’t like him because of the kind of arrogance and tone-deafness that was on full display in last week’s debate. My dislike would be the same whether he was a multi-billionaire or a destitute community organizer.
Mr. Bloomberg has as much right to claim that he earned his wealth as Steve Jobs, Mitch Kapor, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, or any other successful entrepreneur.
Bloomberg was Allston Mike (Brainerd Road), then Brookline Mike, before he became Medford Mike. You should know how that works, Tom.
What’s that got to do with anything?
Yes. He backed Scott Brown over Elizabeth Warren back in 2012. He also has stated publicly stated that he is against raising the minimum wage. Are we talking about the same Mr. Bloomberg?
Why would I envy anyone who supported Brown and is against better wages for working class citizens>
I’ll let Elizabeth Warren reply to that: ““You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did.
“Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
We have previously suggested that philanthropy combines genuine pity with the display of power and that the latter element explains why the powerful are more inclined to be generous than to grant social justice.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 1932
And Bloomberg offers NO solutions. He and his ilk, including Steve Jobs, Mitch Kapor, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, are complicit with this rigged economy that they have built.
I agree with your premise that not all of $60 billion can truthfully be said to be “earned”.
As Barack Obama so eloquently said (to many. brickbats from the right), “You didn’t build that business”, meaning, ‘You didn’t build that business ALONE.’
The word “earned” has semantic and even etymological issues. If you are talking “earned” in the technical numbers sense, he earned it, and it is a separate and distinct question from whether he has a right in a democratic society to keep it. FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower would say no.
But “earned” in the sense of ‘deserves’? Absolutely not.
That being said, I completely and wholeheartedly disagree with you that he has no place in the Democratic Party.
We need to have a big tent and use it like Lyndon Johnson did.
Not shoo the ideologically perfect away.
I agree wholeheartedly which is why I’m glad Sanders choose to run as a Democrat and have no problem he is still a registered independent. His values are Democratic. While I lament that Mike Bloomberg is too liberal for today’s Republicans, and I genuinely think he is, he is also too conservative for today’s Democrats on Wall Street, #MeToo, foreign policy, and race. Considering all the Baker bashing that happens around here, Baker is more progressive than Mike Bloomberg on some issues, especially education.
Doesn’t Bloomberg have more wealth than the bottom 100 million Americans? That’s obviously not the result of hard work. The free market rewards people based on their utility to markets, rather than hard work or merit.
My biggest issue with Bloomberg is he does not have a record of supporting this at any point during his public life. He opposed Obamacare, opposed Dodd Frank, and for a ‘days’ guy supported an obviously racist policing strategy that was ineffective. He did nothing to lower the cost of living for ordinary people. Make no mistake, I’ll hold my nose for an inanimate carbon rod if it means beating Trump. I’d hold my nose for Gabbard. I’ll hold it for Mike. Nominating him risks surrendering all of our advantages against Trump in this race. Two billionaires from the same tiny network of New Yorkers is not the change America wants.
He also said Romney would have been better than Obama. All his ads are misleading, but the boldest are the ones claiming he has a close relationship with Obama. He endorsed McCain and then tepidly endorsed Obama in 2012 with a lot of bothsiderism.
Steven Kinzer makes a reasonable case for Gabbard https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/02/22/opinion/why-im-voting-tulsi-gabbard/
I respect Kinzer a lot and he makes the best case he can here, but Sanders is just as good as Gabbard is on the issues Kinzer cares about without any of her baggage. Bernie’s also a lot likelier to become the nominee.