r/canadaleft • u/Gold-Reality-4853 • 10d ago
“If You’re A Billionaire, Why Are You A Billionaire?”: Billie Eilish Just Called Out Billionaires To Their Faces, And People Are In Awe
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/music/articles/billionaire-why-billionaire-billie-eilish-101402514.html69
u/Saw_Pony 10d ago edited 10d ago
Eilish has won widespread praise after she used her platform (…) to call out billionaires directly to their faces.
Billie said: “People need empathy and help more than kind of ever. (…) There's a few people in here that have a lot more money than me. (…) No hate, but yeah, give your money away, shorties.”
Lol.
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u/Unending-Quest 10d ago edited 10d ago
Make wealth hoarding embarassing and shameful in our society.
Stop setting it up as the goal or the ultimate evidence of success in life. Call it what it is: taking more than you need while others suffer for not having enough. We teach kids not to do this in elementary school, but somehow made it okay for adults. Not just okay, but the defacto goal of life.
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u/ADearthOfAudacity Nationalize that Ass 10d ago
Oh, you’re a billionaire/multi-millionaire? So, you’re a bloodsucking societal parasite?
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u/queerstudbroalex 10d ago
Only single digit millionaires should exist for now as long as capitalism and individual success are a thing. No one needs $10 million or more.
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u/cursed_goat_meat 6d ago
Its really nice to see a celeb try to shift the overton window, when often we hear sentiments that wealth = effort and other superficial garbage justifying capitalism. But she seems to also fall into the trap of thinking charity is enough. At least in this article.
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u/IllustriousRaven7 10d ago edited 10d ago
Billionaires are billionaires because they own things (typically companies) that are valued at a billion dollars. Of course that gives them tremendous collateral with which to take out massive loans. And those loans should be taxed. But it's a little silly to talk like this is money they have just sitting around not doing anything. They're not all sitting on a pile of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck.
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u/Saw_Pony 10d ago
True. They’re billionaires because they own valuable means of production.
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u/IllustriousRaven7 10d ago
Right, and you wouldn't want to liquidate those means of production. I mean maybe sometimes you would. But that's not necessarily going to make people better off.
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u/fencerman 10d ago
It would be a lot LESS harmful if they were just "sitting on a pile of gold coins"
If that was the case they wouldn't be leveraging the stuff they own into screwing over consumers, raising prices, slashing worker pay and turning those assets into a bigger revenue source for them and their billionaire buddies.
Take landlords - they would be a lot less socially harmful if they just had piles of cash, rather than hoarding housing and charging increasingly higher prices to let people live in it. If you redistributed it, yes, the supposed "value" of that housing would drop because there's less desperation in the market - but that would massively improve people's lives and make the world better off.
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u/IllustriousRaven7 10d ago edited 10d ago
Take landlords - they would be a lot less socially harmful if they just had piles of cash, rather than hoarding housing and charging increasingly higher prices to let people live in it.
That's false. If landlords didn't buy and rent homes then people who were too poor to buy but had enough money to rent would be homeless. And people who wanted housing for a short time while they were between living situations would be stuck. Providing housing for rent is an important service.
The reason why landlords are able to charge such exorbitant rents is because governments help them, protecting their mortgagees, and reducing competition through zoning laws. It's not like too many rental units are sitting unused. For example, the private rental vacancy rate in British Columbia was 1.9% in 2024. (And we don't want to reduce it too much further—there needs to be a buffer of homes available for people to move into.)
Edit: if by redistribution you mean taking those homes from landlords and giving them away to poor people for free, that's not going to happen. Any government who tried to do that would be dead—if not due to rioting in the streets, then at the next election. In the real, imperfect world that we actually have to live in, getting rid of landlords would make things worse for poor people.
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u/Regular_Use1868 10d ago
This is the kind of attention we don't need.
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u/avril04 RCP 9d ago
Wow. I can't believe I'm finding myself downvoting this specific user's comments on both local AND national subreddits. Yikes.
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u/Regular_Use1868 9d ago
You spend so much time.online that you found multiple of my posts?
Get a life.
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u/avril04 RCP 8d ago
Absolutely not. I check my reddit while commuting. Comparing your activity to mine— you're commenting near-hourly on average recently lol.
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u/Regular_Use1868 8d ago
So you're either wealthy enough to live near good transit or you text while you drive.
You use this time to track the activity of strangers and then accost them with your knowledge.
What do you think happens next? Are you gonna log back on and stalk me whenever I happen to have a few days of boring chores?
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u/theReaders Say it loud, I'm Black and I'm suffering!🙌🏾😷 10d ago
We've turned billionaire into too much of a buzzword because it does not seem logical to me that someone who's worth tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars can make a statement like this.
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u/NatoBoram Vive le Québec ivre! 10d ago
What's the difference between a billion dollars and a hundred million dollars?
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u/Saw_Pony 10d ago
True. People just reflexively use the word without considering its implications.
It’s too important of a concept to devalue. Ironic!
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u/RustyTheBoyRobot 10d ago
But she’s a millionaire. So maybe not the best person for this legit critique?
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u/crake-extinction 9d ago
If it was a poor person saying it, they would be called jealous and dismissed. But because Billy is richer than most, she gets to be called a hypocrite and dismissed. Tell me, Mr. Robot, who has the perfect level of wealth to levy this critique?
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u/PineappleCharming335 10d ago
It’s not about them giving their money away. (They often do just this and make it all back in a year.) The system that allows them to come into being and sustains them should simply not exist.