Almost every problem in the world would be dealt with meaningfully if we outlawed billionaires.
Almost every problem in the world would be dealt with meaningfully if we outlawed billionaires.
Everytime I look at small problems or big global problems, if you follow the money trail, it all leads to some billionaire who is either working towards increasing their wealth or protecting their wealth from decreasing.
Everything from politics, climate change, workers rights, democratic government, technology, land rights, human rights can all be rendered down to people fighting another group of people who defend the rights of a billionaire to keep their wealth or to expand their control.
If humanity got rid of or outlawed the notion of any one individual owning far too much money than they could ever possibly spend in a lifetime, we could free up so much wealth and energy to do other things like save ourselves from climate change.
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.
Somethin to remember, money is very important to how our current society functions, it gives a lot of power to those that have a lot of it, but it itself isnt something anyone needs. Say, you get rid of all the billionairess and redistribute all of those funds so that everyone is well above the poverty line now. All of these folks that have a lot more money now want to use that money. They've been putting off medical care so they try to setup an appointment. Getting rid of all the billionaires didnt create more doctors though. They can only tend to so many people regardless of ability to pay. Say, folks want to eat out and treat themselves. Certainly more people than before will be able to, but not everyone, kitchens and staff can only output so many meals, again regardless of ability to pay. And that's overlooking how many people no longer work there, that hated it there and only tolerated for the funds to survive.
Basically money does not actually create any resources or services, redistributing the money doesnt mean you have enough resources to cover what that money could buy. That's the main goal here, having resources for everyone. Capitalism sucks and getting rid of billionaires is important, but dont get complacent with that underlying mission. We need to be working on providing needs to people in a way that doesnt require money. It involves a lot of volunteer work and a lot of automation.
The thing keeping us from eliminating the billionaires isn’t the billionaires. It’s the ~40% of society that are convinced we have to have billionaires to survive. Those people always come up with unending lists of reasons why we just can’t survive without people of unimaginable wealth and power.
It’s not the billionaires. It’s the enablers.
Here's a good visualization of the wealth the richest people on earth command vs pretty much everyone else: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Almost every billionaire in the world would immediately target any country that tried this for absolute and total destruction.
Sanctions on day one, exposure of phoney corruption scandal on day two, false flag invasion of another country on day three, deposed leader on day four, and splitting up of territorial sovereignty on day five.
Okay, perhaps not that quickly, but you get my drift. I mean, people like Peter Thiel have used people like Jordan Peterson, along with his own connections to white supremacists, and million dollar contributions to Donald Trump to ruin America in the span of a decade... And that's just one billionaire applying some loose change because he's a weird self-hating gay racist monarchist. Imagine what a bunch of billionaires really trying to destroy a country could do.
Fuckin, extremely doubt it, this strikes me as an extreme oversimplification. You'd get tons of abuse from governments still, just as we did pre-huge amounts of disproportionate wealth, you'd still get tons of slightly poorer but still pretty rich people banding together in interest groups to get their shit passed which would probably also include like, suburban moms in SUVs that were created from white flight.
More than any of that, you wouldn't be solving the core human behavior, of picking short term gains as a strategy to scale up quicker and with more force, to crush or more easily control your opposition, than any strategy which remains morally better, mutually beneficial, and promises better long term gains. It's not just like, stupidity and dumb luck, that causes/has caused the structure of society to turn out like this. Outlawing billionaires just means that they'd take the financial system and cause hyperdeflation, or that they'd pivot to exercising more forms of soft power. More than that I kind of disagree with this extremely common messaging around this issue because I think it oversimplifies things to the point of basically being wrong, even though it's highly agreeable at first and second glance.
The problem with your idea is that it's not just about the amount of money, but the fact that some people will find ways to have more money, more power. As soon as you draw this line, you'll have an new level of the richest people.
So in order to really make a difference you would need to spread wealth evenly and no one would be able to earn more than that. And the same goes for losing money of course. This way people will not have the incentives anymore, but i think this will eventually move to a new commodity , because it is just in our nature.
I think billionaries are a symptom, not a cause, of the disease.
Some people are born in positions where they already have massive wealth and they grow up with connections to make it larger and larger. So that's what they do.
But the real issue is the system that keeps everyone in debt for life. Many would like to stop working and enjoy their lives instead. They don't need much. Just don't want to work and get by with decent living standard.
I've worked for a few small business tyrants that did horrible things as well. It's more of a system issue. Billionaires do the most damage of any individuals, but I think it would be pretty similar if CEOs made small amounts of money (the corporations themselves often lobby for their interests), or if there were only small businesses (they'd probably just form national organizations to lobby for their shared interests).
Agreed.
There is a truism. Will have to come back and give the original quotation author, but it's
"Only poor people pay taxes."
Rich people have the resources to evade and skirt around any tax legislation which they are supposed to be captured within. Most of them use the corporation as holders of wealth of which they have control.
Corporate taxes are almost always lower than personal taxes for that reason.
Banning billionaires is as likely to succeed as veganism.
Its not the billionaires its that they are not paying back 50% to society.
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Where's the line? Is it one billion? Aren't we all trying to make more money and lose less money? Who decides what number equals 'enough'? Does it depend on where you live? Size of your family? How/where you spend, save, donate? They say Dolly Parton could have been a billionaire but she's donated so much that she only has $650 million. Should that be the goal - earn a billion and donate half? Is that better or worse than earning 100 million and donating half?
Let me know when you grow up