this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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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