Read it.
Although this is a typical ‘populist’ hit-piece on everybody’s favorite whipping-boy, the Billionaire, it does reveal (perhaps inadvertently) some interesting features.
Look carefully at the map. Each private island is marked, not with the name of the guy who owns it, but rather with the business with which that guy is affiliated. The socialist trope of “corporate greed” is so all-pervasive in modern society that we don’t even notice it any more–and, in this particular case, it’s as if the Usual Billionaire Suspects are merely sock-puppets directed by their companies.
Even a moment’s thought outside the box of newspaper-think suffices to demonstrate the absurdity of that approach: The man runs the company, not the company the man; indeed, if it weren’t for the man and his efforts, you would never even heard of the company. (Amazon is Amazon because Jeff Bezos had a dream and busted his ass to make it a reality. The tail doesn’t wag the dog In Real Life.) That reversal of cause and effect is, unfortunately, far too often these days, and tends to dominate the infosphere.
This bit was also interesting:
The Tech Billionaire Land Grab
Technology entrepreneurs have emerged as dominant players in the private island market. There are a few reasons behind this trend:
1. Unprecedented wealth accumulation: The tech boom has created liquidity that enables nine-figure recreational purchases previously reserved for oil barons and industrial magnates.
2. Remote work capabilities: Modern satellite communications and digital infrastructure allow tech leaders to maintain business operations from virtually anywhere, making isolated islands viable as working retreats.
3. Privacy and security concerns: High-profile tech executives increasingly seek refuges from public scrutiny and potential security threats, with private islands offering unparalleled isolation and control.
The characterization of billionaire land purchases as a “land grab” is signature with such hit-pieces. If you had a lot of money, what else would you do with it? From the beginning of time down to about 1700, land was the only productive asset. There were no stocks, there were no bonds, there were no easy secure ways to lend money–it was land or nothing. (Sure, merchants got rich, but they went broke more often than not.) Land was always there, always producing food that people needed to eat and other natural and animal products that daily life required.
But let’s look at the list in detail.
1. Unprecedented wealth accumulation. The plain reason for that is that tech companies have made our lives enormously easier and more convenient. If need a new pair of gym shorts, all I have to do is go to Amazon, look up the brand that I bought five years ago and really liked, and order some new with the click of a button. Then I go about my day (rather than traipsing all over town trying to find a place that carries that brand, has it in stock, and can sell it to me for a price I can afford). That is an orders-of-magnitude increase in my personal productivity. I bless Jeff Bezos every day for the ease he has brought to my life. And yet the author of this article just ignores all that to focus on the fact that some people got rich providing products and services that other people beat down their doors to buy. (The swine!)
2. Remote work capabilities. Before I retired, I could (every day at 2:30 a.m. when the production data warehouse load crapped out, as it regularly did) drag myself to my desk, remote into my computer at work, and do pretty much anything I could have done at the office–all without getting dressed and driving half an hour to work, while being pounded by phone calls “Is it fixed yet? Is it fixed yet?” Again, enormous increase in productivity, to my benefit and to the benefit of the people who depending on my efforts. All of it due to modern technology, the internet and its tendrils. Do the people who created such a system (and maintain it) deserve to get rich? Fuck yes, in a rightly-ordered world. We are greatly blessed to live in times like these, in spite of the very obvious drawbacks that we trip over every day.
3. Privacy and security concerns. Rich people have always been targets for the envious and the crooked, and the problem is, it’s not always possible to see them coming. “Did he have any enemies?” is the classic detective flick question, to which the only reply can be: No, other than the 95% of mankind who didn’t have as much money has he did, and resenting the shit out of him for it. When any random sociopath can find a weapon (knife, gun, bomb, nasty chemicals) and destroy you, your home, and your family, SURE AS SHIT you will get the finest “security” you can find, and HOPE TO GOD it’s enough. Nobody kidnaps the kids of poor people. Nobody wanders up to a shoemaker on a public street and shoots him in the back because of the way he runs an insurance company. Nobody sends death threats to the wife and parents and third-cousins-once-removed of a welder because he is a Jew or is not a communist.
And nobody thinks of the elementary economic fact that investment requires accumulated surplus wealth. If everybody had the same amount of “wealth”, nobody could afford to get the things that rich people buy us, like museums and art galleries and, hell, railroads and airplanes and maybe a cure for cancer and (more to the point) freedom from malaria because there wouldn’t be enough money sitting in one place to do so.
Rich people don’t put their money in a bin like Scrooge McDuck and swim around in it for kicks. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and Warren Buffet don’t keep their riches as pallets of cash tucked in the basement somewhere. That money is out there working, providing jobs, producing products, advancing knowledge, and making life better for everybody. Sure, rich people convert a little bit of it into cash now and then–by selling it to somebody else who is glad to pay them for it–to put a little luxury into their lives. (The amount of money that Jeff Bezos spends on himself, compared to his nominal “wealth”, is the equivalent of the sweat on a racehorse.) That doesn’t take any money out of my pocket; indeed, if Jeff Bezos had kept all of his Amazon stock, all of the other Amazon-stock-rich would have been left sitting on the curb wondering where their next meal come from, and it wouldn’t have done either him or them any good. Thank God for the rich, I say, and may they live long and prosper.
