this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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Showerthoughts
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I'm not sure that I agree. While I would support something like outlawing billionaires or at the very least, a tax bracket that claws back significant chunks of what they are draining from society, there are vast nuances to these issues beyond "the billionaires want it that way." When you say "everything from ... can all be rendered down", I think it's pretty important to recognize how much detail and nuance is lost in that rendering down.
Billionaires and the accumulation of wealth are just stand ins for the accumulation of power in a capitalistic society. When power is removed, it creates a vacuum. Who fills it? In the ideal, I know most of us would say "the people" but this is an insanely complex balancing beam to maintain without some group of assholes finding a new, non-capital way to extract and centralize that power.
None of this is to say that eliminating the notion of a billionaire is a bad idea. I'm with you all that the very idea of a billionaire is heinous and impossible without vast exploitation. I just do not think that issue being solved would be even close to some panacea for all of the world's problems. There would just be twists in the existing problems and fun new ones.
Exactly. Don't hate the players, hate the game. We are too focused on finding a scape goat to see the inherit system is the problem.
Hate both, where it's appropriate. Some of these players perpetuate the game that we all hate. Elon Musk is a player who has become part of the structure of the game, fighting regulations and damaging democracy for the sake of his own capitalistic endeavors. Someone mentioned below that Dolly Parton could be a billionaire. Not gonna hate on Dolly Parton who I assume did not come by her wealth through being an asshole, but more just being successful and our current "game" rewarding her with more than she would have in a better society. I would tax the absolute fuck out of her though.
you know what, give each one the chance for a nice life. dolly wants a recording studio and school and whatever at her ranch? wants to run a theme park? cool, I can't imagine her community saying no.
fuckerberg wants to run a cringe mma gym under his apartment?maybe contribute a few lines to vlc or something every year (with extra review)? sure. no more than anyone should have.
shitty Jeff wants to be an aging beach himbo, maybe help people train at an outdoor gym? be my guest.
but they won't. not until you already have a gun in their mouths, and at that point, its less effort to just kill them.
We're looking at two extreme ends of the pole here. Zuck, Bezos, Musk are the shittiest public billionaires. There are also more secretive ones who are arguably even more destructive. These people have absolutely justified their own downfall, if it ever comes to pass. On the other side, Dolly doesn't even technically count on this list because she has given enough away to not be a billionaire. Those are the easy cases where almost every reasonable person agrees on the "right" thing to do.
Now, we have to remember that there are people who exist at every little increment along that scale of giving back to general shittiness for the global population. Focusing on the billionaires themselves and their lifestyles or whatever is not the answer. We need to focus on making effective tax brackets, effective regulations on the avenues billionaires generally target for power (political institutions, media companies, etc), and effective spending of the increased income from those new taxes to help raise the lower class to a more equitable position. That's a socdem perspective though, because I do not foresee capitalism collapsing in my lifetime and I like to be pragmatic.
well I'm saying billionaires so we absolutely don't catch any splash damage.
what are we even arguing about?
Not sure anybody is really arguing in this entire thread. Just discussion of edge cases and the gray areas on an interesting shower thought.
valid. parton is an edge case, an extreme outlier, or she would be if she counted. which she doesn't.
so I feel like its a pretty good validation of the metric.
The player are the ones writing the rules of the game. They're the ones bribing the refs.
I think theres enough bitterness and hate in my heart for both. I've got too many fucking scars I never needed to have, watched too many people die for no Fucking reason.
I don't agree with that argument.
You're right from the point of view that removing those with immense power from their billionaire wealth will be replaced by someone or another group. It's our natural human condition to always want to be in control and there will always be those among us that will want more power and more control than others.
Removing the ability of any one person accumulating enormous amounts of wealth just levels the playing field. If those with a higher need to want more power don't have the ability to control an entire sector, an entire region, an entire community or even an entire nation than others will have the ability to challenge them and regulate their power and control.
As it is now, when we allow individuals to gain enormous amounts of power, no one has the ability to challenge them. When those with enormous power decide to affect governments, industries, society or finance, there is very little any one can do to challenge them. Sure we can band together and take billionaires to court ... but it comes down to how much money you have ... the ability to challenge power means you need money and whoever has the most money has the most power. It isn't a justice system that treats everyone fairly, it's a legal system that favors those with the most money.
Outlawing billionaires won't create a utopia, it won't remove our conflicts we have with each other. What it would do is level the playing field and distribute power among many other people who would all challenge one another as to what they can or can't do. It would create a more democratic system where power would be spread to more people.
Once we create that distribution of power, we could then spend our energies solving the problems we have with each other and our world, rather than in spending all our time trying to defend finances.
As it is now, democratic power is impossible because power is only centered on those who have the most money.
My argument would be that by eliminating the means of wealth being an avenue to power, it will merely shift to the government that is enforcing those rules. Those same shitty people will infiltrate that government and use it to inflate themselves while oppressing others. There was no utopian society prior to capitalism and fiat currency, and there won't be one after.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that this is an impossible problem to solve. I just do not think eliminating the notion of a billionaire is the cure for all of your listed ills. I agree with you that it would absolutely have impacts on all of them, but we would still wake up to world hunger, climate change, etc.
Each of your listed issues is a complex, multi-faceted problem. We cannot boil down that nuance just so we can point to our favorite enemy, deserving as they might be. Fight them too, but don't lose sight of the bigger picture.
It's an alternative that has never been attempted in human history and yet everyone is afraid of the notion of 'Limiting Wealth'.
I am not arguing from the point of view of utopian socialism or a redistribution of wealth ... rather, I'm saying that everything in our capitalistic world more or less stays the same way. The only difference is that no one person is allowed to gain a certain level of wealth. Everyone is still free to be as ruthless and capitalistic as they please but their ambitions are given an upper ceiling ... for example $100 million of total wealth. All excess wealth beyond that is taxed completely.
Isn't $100 million for one individual more than enough? What is the sense in accumulating more than that other than a pathological desire to want to gather something that you don't need. Even worse is the thought that as one accumulates more wealth than they can possibly require means that they have to siphon it from others around them. Uncontrolled, unlimited and runaway growth at all costs is medically known as a cancer. Billionaires are literally cancerous growths on civilization that are slowly killing the entire organism.
Creating a system of 'Limited Wealth' wouldn't affect the majority of everyone .... it would only affect a handful of individuals ... yet it would benefit all of society.
Can you please point out where I said anything against almost anything you said here? Are you here to have a discussion about your shower thought or just grandstand your political opinion to a group that by large already shares it? Thank you for starting the thread, but not sure I'm going to reply to any additional messages because I'm not sure that you're actually reading any of mine.
Never been tried lol
I think you two are speaking about different steps in this hypothetical transition. You are talking about the long term goal, the other person was talking about the transition from now to the long term scenario. There is very real danger that the power vacuum left by the x-billionaires could be gobbled up by a small group of people. This cannot be dismissed even if we all agree on the end goal.
Secondary critique, set the wealth cap in relation to some other moving metric. I think a multiple of minimum wage would be great, give incentive for the wealthy to increase minimum wage to achieve a higher cap.
I love this take, but sorry it goes against the hate billionaire circlejerk.
The billionaire class really flourished after Reagan eased taxes on the rich in the 80s. We need to go back to a time before him, but idk if that's possible. Genie might be out of the bottle