From: utzoo!decvax!genradbo!mitccc!rgvdh
Newsgroups: net.politics
Title: rich people
Article-I.D.: mitccc.430
Posted: Sun Mar  6 20:43:00 1983
Received: Thu Mar 10 01:06:00 1983

Reprinted from Coevolution Quarterly, who reprinted it from the Rising
Sun Neighborhood Newsletter, who found it stuck on a bulletin board:

                       What's in a Billion?

A billion dollars is a very elusive concept.  Look at it this way.  Suppose
that every day, seven days a week, you got a thousand dollars.  In a year,
you'd have roughly a third of a million and in roughly three years, a million.
Since a billion is a thousand million, it would take you three thousand years
to earn a billion dollars at a rate of a thousand a day. (We're assuming no
interest and no taxes.)  Now, if at the time of Christ someone started laying
aside a thousand dollars a day to your account, now, two thousand years
later, you'd still be shy almost one third of the amount.  Reflect a moment
on this, and then realize that the Rockefeller family is worth between two
and twelve billion dollars, and that there are perhaps up to a dozen families
in or near the billion dollar mark.  Then ask yourself how could they
possibly have *earned* that money in any realistic sense of *earn*.  And if
they didn't earn it, who did, and how did they come to get hold of it?


Don't get me wrong.  I'm not sure about the author's intent, but I don't mean
to say that Capitalism doesn't handle many situations quite well.  But
there are some bugs, and some regimes where it just doesn't work.  In what
sense is it *fair* that someone should get that much wealth and the resulting
political power by picking the right father?