this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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I mean buying things wont and fuck this guy, but if I could just casually buy a lake house I would’ve fucked off to an isolated one a long time ago. Like all these rich fucks should have done the moment they made enough money to do so.
It's why I maintain it's some sort a mental illness. There is absolutely something wrong with you if you have more than enough money to buy whatever the fuck you want and decide that's not enough.
So here’s the thing, you aren’t incorrect, but what is really troubling is that it might not be something you have from birth, for some sure it is(Musk is a great example of how being a piece of shit is congenital sometimes) but having that much money and power is straight up bad for your brain. I don’t have a source handy as I’m on mobile while i cook dinner, but I’m pretty certain Cody’s Showdy did an episode on it not too long ago, as in this year.
Doesn’t give an excuse for becoming a bag of severed dicks but it does tell me if I ever luck into some crazy money to get myself set with the smallest amount possible so I never need to work again as quickly as I can, and give the rest away
It's a thing I noticed from self observation. My fantasies about a billion dollar windfall are things like provide free high-speed internet to the populated parts of the world. All of them. It takes about $30 billion to feed the entire human population for a year (mostly freight). A smaller package would be to become a (figurative) god in Haiti by unconditionally rescuing them from a handful of humanitarian crises. A bronze statue of you would be in every public park there for centuries.
There are very real sometimes globe-spaning humanitarian projects that billionaires could afford with a signature (if costing them a Twitter, more or less) that would leave a mark in history dwarfing Carnegie or Rockefeller or Nobel or Gates. And we have thousands of billionaires and not one is trying.
Leeja Miller did a video ( on YouTube ) on how the usual charities billionaires use do actually very little, and they could do way better paying that money as taxes and letting social safety net programs and public science do those things instead. (e.g. Philanthropy is wholly a grift.) So yes, we have zero billionaires doing anything with their money but hoarding it like so many boxes of unused pogs and Funko Pops in the garage.
https://youtu.be/IP2EKTCngiM?si=X6or1a_ViN867nV2
The episode in question.
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Sure would make it more laborious, dragging the guillotine around to each of their doors, amirite?
Honestly, if you make your money, take it and fuck off, and stop/never using it to manipulate/control other people and the world around you. I ain’t got a problem with ya. I can’t think of a single billionaire that does all of those things. I’m sure there’s some quite ones that are still fucking around behind the scenes, fuck them, they should be eaten too.
But some dude that made 100 million on Mindspring or whatever and retired, stopped trying to make more. Isn’t flexing on the locals wherever they ended up. I’ll let that person slide, they’re not the real problem
The issue is that capital is power, it's not just spending money. So the moment you stop using your money as capital to exercise power over others you stop being a capitalist.
The thing is though, nobody got wealthy without using that power, and that process is self-reinforcing. It's a kind of addiction. By the time you're a hundred millionaire you're surrounded by flunkies whose paycheck depends on you sticking around and letting them wield your capital power on your behalf. They will strenuously advise you to keep your investments, and it's hard to work against that pressure.
You are insulated from the day to day minutiae and the consequences of your decisions, and you have to justify in your own mind the decisions that got you here. To break out of that requires a profound crisis of conscience, but you're extremely wealthy and you are insulated from any consequence that could possibly cause that crisis.
I completely agree about your assessment of capital, and that’s sort of what I’m saying. Its really really uncommon for someone to get life changing wealth honestly. But statistically you have to have some outliers, I think ConcernedApe(the guy who made Stardew Valley originally all by himself) is a good example of what I’m talking about, dude is rich as fuck now that game is on all platforms and sells well, but I don’t think he’s a problem because as far as I know, he’s just using his money to keep making games, obviously that could change. But if he just keeps doing what he’s doing I wouldn’t consider him a capitalist even though he is rich.
Obviously this is all a digression about exceptions to the rule, which is fuck the wealthy