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?