Wealth no crime in itself

re: "Apple becomes 1st US company to reach $3tn valuation" (BP, January 4, 2022)

Dear editor,

One of the valuable features of the Bangkok Post is that, save the odd unspeakable one,  it enables comments on published articles. This usefully allows some discussion where alternative perspectives can be shared and perhaps debated: we are, of course, all entitled to our own opinion, but once that opinion is broadcast in public, it is fair that its owner be called on to support it against competing views and to answer pertinent questions.

When I read the headline "Apple becomes 1st US company to reach $3tn valuation" (Bangkok Post, January 4), I expected some strong disagreement with my own take on Apple's vast wealth smashing yet another record. Readers who have already viewed the healthy range of different opinions expressed there will know that a popular view is summed up in the one-word response of one regular commentator, who simply posted: "Gross".

Certainly, the wealth of Apple, also Microsoft and Google, which is now measured in trillions of US dollars, as their owners' wealth is measured in multi-billions, or hundred billions, of US dollars, is on any personal human standard vast, even extraordinarily vast. But is mere vastness, however extraordinary, enough to qualify as gross? I think not.

Before assigning adjectives to the wealth of a corporation or of an individual, we need to consider how that wealth came about. Did the likes of Apple and Microsoft, and their owners, become super-rich by just means? Do they deserve their worth? Let's leave aside for now the issue of what such wealthy individuals should do with their assets, whether like Bill Gates they will, if good people, give away literally tens of billions of US dollars to philanthropy, or stingily drop a miserly million or so dollars here and there to keep up a pretense of benevolence.

How did Apple become such a valuable company, making its owners so vastly rich in the process, in a matter of mere decades? In particular, is the current worth of Apple the result of just or unjust processes? If Apple had got rich by conquest, then its current wealth would be unjust; "conquest" is the euphemism history uses to describe stealing from others by use of force, and then imposing your own law on the conquered to legalize that theft. If Apple had got rich by merely inheriting what had been taken by conquest, then its wealth would be unjust. If Apple had come to be worth trillions of US dollars by unfairly getting a monopoly enforced by the state (a famous Thai telecom tycoon might come to mind here), then its wealth would be unjust.

But Apple did none of those things to become what it is today. I have never owned or used any Apple product, being a Windows and Google user, but clearly a billion or more people around the world have found that Apple products contribute so much to their lives in the way of enjoyment and productivity leading to the creation of personal wealth in a wide range of ways, material, creative, and even spiritual (learning, interacting, sharing, and so on all seem spiritual to me), that they have very happily, year after year, paid Apple for those very substantial contributions to their quality of life, just as I and a billion or more other people around the planet happily pay Microsoft and Google for their products that enhance our lives every day in many ways. Apple, Google, Microsoft, like Ford Motor Cars, General Electric, Tesla and so on, are deservedly rich because they have created vastly greater wealth for literally billions of other human beings. Their wealth is richly deserved.

As noted, questions should be, and in a just society will be, asked about what is the morally good uses of such wealth, especially the personal wealth of the individuals who own those companies, but the wealth is not intrinsically a bad thing. Having been acquired in just ways, it is not, as some would say, "gross," unlike some conspicuously vast fortunes not so transparently known to have been justly accumulated. There are also pertinent questions to be raised about how much and how openly (too often too little), is paid in taxes by such vastly wealthy people, but merely being rich is no bad thing in itself, provided the wealth is deserved as a just share of  even greater wealth created for others who each freely paid their bit from the returns on their own labours.  

None of you are perfect, but well done Apple, and Microsoft, and Google. My life is certainly the richer for your efforts to turn an honest profit that is open to healthy scrutiny and debate.

 Felix Qui

 

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag on January 16, 2022, under the title "Wealth no crime in itself" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2248167/not-every-hero-wears-a-cape