this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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This is the circular argument I often have with my friends about wealth and it all boils down to just power.
When billionaires lay claim to enormous amounts of money, it gives them an equal amount of enormous power.
Have that wealth redistributed to millions of people and that wealth no longer matters and no one person has any great level of power.
It's our own belief that we need or see that it is necessary to have individuals with enormous wealth that is the problem. The belief that our world can only exist if there is infinite wealth.
The other side of the argument is that the change of eliminating billionaires won't happen overnight. I wish I could pull a switch right now that could drain the bank accounts of billionaires and instantly transfer that wealth to millions of people but it won't work that way, ever.
I envision a gradual change ... where billionaires are just steadily taxed into non existence, where their wealth is just slowly absorbed into public services everywhere and at the same time any individual that accumulates enormous wealth is discouraged. It would be a process that would last decades or lifetimes and eventually to a point where individual excessive wealth is eliminated.
Why not? "We" designed, built, and used such a switch before. It's #7 in this diagram:
And what is France ruled by now?
Ah, but when was the last time they flipped that switch?
I mean immediately after the French revolution, power passed into the hands of a bunch of (and I'm just looking at them randomly on Wikipedia here) what appear to be noblemen and aristocrats.
They certainly didn't hand it over to the likes of me and you.
That's the problem with big, convulsive revolutions - it's the people who already have power that gets to hijack them. In the American revolution it was a class of rich slave-owners. In the Russian revolution, it was a class of party technocrats.
If you're going to do revolution, you'd better find a way that can't be hijacked by opportunistic racketeers.
There will always be "noblemen", "aristocrats", "rich people", and they will always hold the keys to power.
The question is whether "rich" means ten times or ten million times as much wealth as a commoner.
The question is whether my boss is raking off 9% or 90% of the value I produce.
Kings I presume
yeah this is in line with the plan of not needing money, providing resources and services without need to pay. Things like public housing, free public transit, etc.
That's the frustrating thing I see about this debate about billionaires. There is more than enough wealth and resources around the world to have enough food, water and shelter for every living human being on the planet. If we wanted to we could also provide each one of those individuals with an education for the first 20 years of their lives.
Instead we would rather bottle up all the wealth and resources in the world and keep them under the control of a few hundred people who do nothing but keep that wealth away from everyone else and allow the world to stagnant in place for no reason other than to maintain their positions of power.
If we freed up all the available wealth and energy we have for one another towards creating highly educated, highly mobile productive people .... we would have engineers, doctors, scientists, inventors, technologists and mathematicians everywhere working on every known problem we have.
Instead, we use the majority of all our energy and capabilities in fighting one another for the right to eat, to find a home or just to live another day.
Wealth still isnt the same as resources. Just because you could afford to purchase an education for everyone doesnt mean we can provide one. It also doesnt mean everyone would want or be able to achieve these higher careers.
Correct and I agree .... it's about creating the opportunity for people.
In our current system, not everyone has the opportunity for an education. For those that have the opportunity, they often don't or can't take the chance because they can't afford it. So instead, those that could have possibly become a professional at something do not because they couldn't afford it.
The other half is also true ... there are some people who have the opportunity and have the wealth but choose not to do much with that opportunity because it wasn't their passion.
The same thing would happen if you handed out scholarships to everyone ... some would take up the opportunity to fulfill their goals and do great things ... others wouldn't care and probably wouldn't participate ... and many others would take part without achieving much because they weren't capable.
The difference is that everyone was given a free choice to decide if they wanted to or not ... in our current system, no one has a choice because they have to fight an unfair fight in order to get what they want ... and more often than not, they can not win.
I believe switching away from the currency they hold would achieve your desired result. As for the means of production that generates that wealth, just Eminent domain it and give it to a worker co-op as a loam. Probably could be revenue positive given interest and increased taxation from rising working class salaries