No Stupid Questions

Demand money be removed from politics and follow through to make it happen. Make laws that no longer favor the rich.

It'll never happen, but it's what it would take.

So, let's put aside for a moment the rather shocking number of people casually advocating for murder in this thread.

I want to talk instead about how everyone here is just talking for granted the notion that removing the billionaires, Republican politicians, or whatever "they" you care to think of, would be a solution, or even a positive step, for modern social ills.

There's a big undercurrent in almost any political discussion online, this implication that every one of the world's problems actually has a super simple solution, that The Powerful could just snap their fingers and make it happen if they wanted to, and it's only because of their greed etc that we have any problems that all. Obviously we live in a time of huge inequity and we'd be a lot better off if we found a good way to improve it.

But many (most?) of our biggest problems are inherent to the challenge of keeping 8 billion people alive and happy in a hostile universe, and in fact nobody has ever had a perfect solution. Throwing the entire planet into chaos by causally throwing away human beings' rights and leaving an enormous portion of the world's capital in uncertain hands, ready to be seized by some other set of psychopathic opportunists who happen to be in a position to do so, certainly ain't it.

I mean, take all their money so that they're no longer billionaires.

Tax all billionaires more?

Adjust our economic system to disallow inherited wealth beyond a lavish amount. I don't mind a person getting rich for starting and succeeding with a massive company. I do mind the 100B being passed to their children, who will never have done anything to earn it.

Let the kids have $10 million each or something, the government should take the rest. If they try to "leave" the country the same thing should apply.

This will also adjust the incentive for billionaires to just make more money since they know they won't be able to pass it on maybe they will start actually spending it to keep the

Japan solved the overpaid corporate culture nonsense. Australia has the most wealth equality, without the parasitic billionaire problem. The solutions have existed for a long time.

The real issue in the USA is the lack of effective legislation. There is no political accountability. This is all due to a two party system. All it takes to fix the USA is outlawing gerrymandering, rejecting the electoral college, and institute tiered voting where everyone votes for the candidates based upon their preferred priority order. Popular votes is the only Democratic method. Representative republics are a corruption of democracy that was a necessity with the travel and communication limitations of 300 years ago but not now. Voting for candidates by priority would make party affiliation nearly meaningless and force accountability and substance because the difference between candidates would drastically decrease. It would eliminate the polarized nonsense that all the billionaires want. It isn't about the ridiculous nonsense, it is about ensuring very little productive legislation is possible. No laws means do anything you want. The US has a tenth of the laws and protections of any other western country.

I've always interpreted that idea as "make it so billionaires can't exist" change the system so that people can't actually make all that money.

Befriend them and work to change their hearts, maybe?

There are relatively few steps that would go a long way toward stopping the accumulation of obscene amounts of wealth.

• Make tax rates similar to what we had in the 50s (conservatives love the 50s), with the brackets adjusted for inflation.
• Make all types of income tax at those rates.
• Eliminate taxable income caps including social security withholding.
• Make inheritance and gift taxes equivalent.
• End Citizens United through congressional action.
• Use that tax money on social programs, small business development programs, and infrastructure.

If you want to really jump start things we should also make all campaigns publicly funded.

This is a meme, right? ...right?

Does eating the billionaires count as murder?/s

But seriously though, eliminating bad actors should be the first step. Otherwise they will just drag their heels into the ground preventing any real progress for whatever reason they have. Whether it be greed, malice, or just plain old stupidity.

Death will likely be involved at some point realistically. Either by people refusing to go peacefully, or by a lack of action by the people resulting in groups dying for things like heat stroke/freezing to death, starvation, general unrest.

I wish that things like that wouldn't happen, but I won't be surprised if it does.

Yes, you're supposed to eat them too. This helps reduce world hunger.

In all seriousness, we've dealt with this problem before. We had a time we call the era of the robber barons if you want to read a little about it.

You don't have to eradicate all of them, just each year have the richest person in the world executed. Only one. Watch all these billionaires race to give their money away and put it into philanthropic endeavours.

Of course, if any of them are found to be evading or hiding the true extent of their wealth, execution. And money invested in their own organisations/businesses would also of course be counted as theirs.

All it is necessary to do is to abolish all other forms of taxation until the weight of taxation rests upon the value of land irrespective of improvements, and take the ground-rent for the public benefit.
~ Henry George, Social Problems

A hundred and fifty years ago, a journalist, sociologist, and economist from San Francisco asked a simple question. Why does wealth seem to create poverty? Henry George figured out the underlying economic limitations and corrupting social influence of the English Model of internal revenue. Roughly, this is a taxation system based on nationalizing the resources of the productive and the "sinful" (whatever that means to you), which works really well when your principal form of expansion is inter-continental colonialism, but not so much when it evolves into urban industrialization. He proposed a simple, logical alternative: a single tax on Economic Rent, which is the value added to land by the growth of society as opposed to the contributions of labor and capital. Unfortunately for the United States, he died before he could be elected Mayor of New York.

The United States is now too culturally polarized to collectively realize that the basic inefficiency of our internal revenue system exaggerates healthy asymmetry to a point of desperate conflict. When the right wing deregulates markets and cuts social programs, they ignore the tyranny of the monopoly, giving established industry free reign over individuals. When the left wing steals from the rich and restricts property and trade according to committee morality, they fail to differentiate between productive and unproductive application of capital, and create perverse incentives for the wealthy to insulate themselves from the reach of the public. Both of these political paradigms are characterized by subjective justifications for violations of individual rights.

Henry George did not invent anything. He simply put aside the cultural fervor of his day and looked deep into the system, at the underlying purposes for the components of the system. As the United States evolves into the post-industrial era, we have an opportunity to do the same.

The problem with some of them is that they can do whatever they want for just a little more money and they do it all the time, thats why regulation is a must if the people is what matters, CMV

While I'd say that it is absolutely the case that the ruling class must be eliminated before there can be meaningful change, since they're too far removed from common life (or sanity for that matter) to make any of the necessary concessions of their own volition, I think it's undeniably the case that a rational society cannot be built by people who believe that killing people is an acceptable approach to problems.

I think the only hope is that our descendants, when they rebuild civilization out of the rubble we leave behind, will do a better job of it - at the very least, that they'll know better than to let psychopaths gain power.

Nice try CIA/FBI

Yes, and it's simple and effective - Tax them and limit the huge transfers of intergenerational wealth. When the US had a robust taxation system with high marginal rates for the highest income levels, we also had the strongest and most robust middle class. It powered the "American Dream." Having individuals hoard billions of dollars and build familial dynasties isn't good for society as a whole.
In my opinion, it all begins with ending the system of legalized political bribery, getting dark money out of politics, and making politicians accountable to citizens again.

Make it illegal to even have that much money, since literally no one needs that much, and take it from them. No idea what that would look like though. Whatever theoretically is done their wealth should be redistributed to the people that made it for them. Workers need to own the means of production.

Return the tax rate for the uppermost bracket to what it was before 1981 when Reagan screwed us all over. That rate is 70%, by the by.

Tax them into millionaires.

The problems is not that rich people exist, millionaires are few and far between, but that rich people that are able to screw everyone over.

What we have to do is to stop giving the rich so much power, especially over the government. Less corruption means that we can better regulate large companies, including enforcing pollution emission limts.

In fact, you are already helping with that, by using Lemmy and not corporate social media like Twitter or Reddit.

Raise taxes on people making billions of dollars a year. Redo the tax code to make it impossible for them to avoid paying a fair share.

Also while were at it, I'd be in favor of a maximum allowed compensation (for hot shots) based off the salary of rank and file employees.

Murdering them would be a little wasteful? Just put them and their highest paid lackeys on a remote Pacific Island where the only way they can purchase external supplies is with the plastics they have managed to retrieve from the ocean.

Murder implies a moral judgement that its unjustified. Self defense against attempted murder is not murder even when the assailant is killed in the process.