In the US, they make it harder to get better and wider healthcare than it needs to be. Preventing people from getting healthcare or trying to stifle healthcare legislation or raising drug prices way beyond their cost of production qualifies as "evil" for me. I'll just post this again.
We have absolute proof of that, because that is literally how capitalist society works.
Expect money is essential to happiness, because if we live in specific societies we need a certain amount to cover our basic needs... and a HUGE amount of the population doesn't meet those needs.
Money isn't essential to happiness, as long as your needs are met. It's essential to survival in specific countries because we need it to meet our needs. If everyone's basic needs are met, housing, food, etc., then money wouldn't be needed. It's only "essential" to happiness because it determines our ability to survive. Once you've crossed a certain threshold, it's accepted academically that more money doesn't necessarily increase your happiness. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/20/how-much-money-you-need-to-be-happy-according-to-wealth-experts.html
Yes it is, because as explained meeting your basic needs is 100% essential to happiness and you need money to do that.
We're saying the same thing in different ways, essentially. In today's society, it's essential. If needs were covered, outside of monetary value, it wouldn't be.
Yes, so you posting to tell me money isn't needed for happiness when I had already clarified I was talking about meeting basic needs confused me, it wasn't required as a counter to my post.
I was just confused as to the way you presented it... I agree with everything you wrote!
Speaking of 'happiness':
If you're a classic utilitarian and think "more people being happy is better", then it makes more sense to tax Bezos in such a way that 3,437 Amazon employees can hit the $80k threshold than for his current net worth to expand by approximately $275 million per day. You could do this if, for example, Amazon's shares were distributed more to the workers.
How much do they make anyway?
It really is though, and it pays off to view it in the same perspective. We can tussle over the semantics of it (IMO it's applicable even with the common definition), but the point is that it's more than worthwhile to see it that way, it brings a lot of perspective to the big picture. It's nothing but a set of rules by which we all abide with a certain goal (happiness and prosperity to the most amount of people IMO). The only way we make society better is if we keep developing and change it for the better. Making money is inside the context of the game, voting and governing is the context of development. The sad thing is, that some people don't give a fuck about developing our society further, because they're happy where they're at, and defend it by having this fantasy of society being something immutable, something that arises spontaneously because of some sort of principles.
Okay, setting the rest aside for a moment, you do realize that, on a historical scale, we didn't have billionaires until we had millionaires, right? People funded these "massive projects" before billionaires existed. These billionaires were created by said "massive projects", the billionaires didn't appear first. Yes it's more complicated than that, inflation, blah bah blah, whatever. The point is, society was not built off the back of billionaires, because billionaires didn't exist until very recently.
I'm not a proponent of state-run economies, I just want the US government to have a greater say in it than they do now, because the state is democratically accountable while private industries are only accountable to "market forces". If unionization in the US wasn't as anemic as it is, I would care less about democratizing industries, but, would you look at that, the rich hate unions as well and constantly suppress them. Huh, what a surprise.
I can guarantee you that I work harder and longer than every billionaire on Earth.
It can buy a lot of poorer people happiness is the point. Would it be better for a billionaire to be rich and unhappy or for a couple of hundred thousand people to pay their bills and be happy?
