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.
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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.
Counterpoint - if people don’t need to take crappy jobs just to afford food and shelter, those jobs will have to provide better pay and conditions to get employees.
Also, if more people can afford to get further education, you’ll get more doctors and engineers and high skilled workers, because they’ll be able to do the training instead of getting several minimum wage jobs just to support their families.
I’ve said it before - any society that can afford billionaires can afford to feed, clothe, shelter and provide basic medical care to all is members, it’s just choosing not to.
I'd freaking love to work as a waitress. It was my dream job as a kid and when I tried it here and there I enjoyed it a lot. But the pay is shit and the social status, being looked down on, as someone stupid or lower... Man, I'd love to be a part time waitress. But until socialism hits and a part time waiting job would be sufficient to feed half a family I'll stick with the biomedical industry and PhD program.
It always makes me so sad to think about how children talk about those "shit jobs". You won't find a kid who wants to become a financial advisor or a tax attorney. Most kids want to build homes, cook, wait, clean, work with animals, drive trains, drive trucks, ... Jesus how many kids I see who are freaking fascinated by garbage trucks and want nothing more than to work as garbage men. And then they grow up and society indoctrinates them into thinking these are bad jobs for lower people, and reality shows you that you can't make a living off these jobs, so better do something you cannot even pronounce.
When i was a kid my neighbour was a waiter and he raised 3 kids with his wife. Not an easy Life but they did it. Now a waiter has to choose between a place to live or food to eat
I worked at a restaurant where the waiters were unionized and they did make plenty of money.
I wouldn't waitress but if I did have a lot of money I would love to run a small bar & tapas place, our neighborhood needs a corner bar and my inclination is towards creative food and drinks, I like doing that stuff. Just can't afford to.
And honestly that's part of the issue - sure the top is too bloated but the bottom not vibrant enough. More people making enough money as entrepreneurs would also help with inequality.
Counterpoint - if people don’t need to take crappy jobs just to afford food and shelter, those jobs will have to provide better pay and conditions to get employees.
Most of those jobs will just no longer exist. Why would they? If i can afford what i need without having to deal with another dumb customer, i aint goin back into food service.
Also, if more people can afford to get further education, you’ll get more doctors and engineers and high skilled workers
Schools have limited resources too. One teacher can only reasonably teach so many students. Youre also contending with people not needing to get an education anymore. They can afford what they need already, if their goal before was to get a good paying job then that motivation is gone.
any society that can afford billionaires can afford to feed, clothe, shelter and provide basic medical care to all is members, it’s just choosing not to.
Zimbabwe had 100 trillion dollar bills, they sure couldnt afford all those things with it.
I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew, so I’ll just address the ‘jobs no longer existing’ thing—you seem wholly unaware that people enjoy being chefs, waiters, pizza dough tossers, all sorts of food service roles. Helping feed people is much more directly meaningful than most jobs in the developed world. Unlikely that this is the job sector that disappears, and not say the world of finance
I did say "most" of them. Go to any fast food restaurant and ask the people there if they would still work there if they were given enough money to live comfortably without working there. Sure, there's people with passion for cooking, there would still be some restaurants. But it's fast food businesses that provide the most food to people currently. You get rid of every single fast food chain while also giving everyone the funds to be able to eat at the fancy restaurants still around from people passionate for cooking, and you're gonna see a hell of a bottleneck, I doubt they can handle a fraction of a percentage of the increased demand, meaning most people arent going to get to eat out.
Ah, well whether or not fast food joints continue to exist is interesting to ponder, ideally you’re never in such a hurry that you want to go to a burger joint where you’re being slowly poisoned by 15 year olds reheating decidedly unhealthy meals, but given how many people try starting restaurants and just how intrinsically tied to existence the food industry is, I imagine in an ideal world plenty of people who are stuck in the fast food sector would leave but plenty more who’ve never explored their passions would be drawn to food in a different form
Probably because most people want to thrive, not just survive. Some want to see the world. Get a job and contribute then.
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.
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.
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
where their wealth is just slowly absorbed into public services
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.
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 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
While that's correct in the short term we know it's possible in terms of resources to feed everyone as we produce more food than we need. Likewise plenty of states have socialised medicine and aren't running out of doctors. All of these problems can be solved in time, especially after eliminating useless jobs created by capitalism.
it's definitely possible, but dont accept it as a given, like I said dont get complacent. You eliminate wealth inequality, you have to think about how that food is getting grown or prepared now and how it's getting distributed. No one has to handle those tasks in order to make enough money to survive anymore. People will have to volunteer to do it, or you'll have to automate it in some way.
You can pay people in a socialist society. You can have people earn more than others too. The only real rule is you can't own a means of production or profit from other people's labor, which is how billionaires became billionaires.
You're talking (partly) about two different things.
The simple truth is that our planet only has a certain amount of replenishable resources which leads to only a certain standard of living being possible for a certain amount of people.
Thus, the problem you're talking about only gets solved by reducing the amount of people or the standard of living, globally.
The problem OP is talking about is inequality in the standard of living between people.
Outlawing billionaires alleviates both problems, but the general resources problem only temporarily until the people with lower standard of living now raise theirs by having more resources available, which is what you talk about.
Inequality gets improved permanently by this, so it's a good change for that problem.
The limited resource problem you're talking about, though, doesn't get solved by this at all, there might be a short dip in less resources used while resources are being reallocated, but then it'll likely go back to before, because most people use as much resources as they can to make their lives as nice as they can.
To solve our problems, both population as well as standard of living need to be limited. Because if either one is allowed to grow infinitely, resources will never suffice long-term.
Outlawing billionaires alleviates both problems, but the general resources problem only temporarily until the people with lower standard of living now raise theirs by having more resources available, which is what you talk about.
no that's the thing, eliminating wealth inequality doesnt make more resources available for anyone, money doesnt create resources. Millions more people suddenly being able to buy a new car or something doesnt mean millions more cars are going to appear.
That's why I said temporarily. If there's demand for millions of more cars, capitalists will find a way to provide the supply very quickly. There'll be less demand for idk, private jets or sth billionaires buy, and the resources previously used for the fulfillment of billionaire demand will start going to fulfilling the demand of the new things desired by lower classes that now have more money. Obviously it'll not happen instantly because stuff needs to be repurposed, new supply paths created, but eventually, the resource usage will be equal again.
capitalists will find a way to provide the supply very quickly.
How and why? It might surprise you to find out money isnt the bottleneck in most industries, its finding enough qualified workers, or having enough equipment or work area. And why would these businesses owned by the billionaire class put in the extra effort to meet this demand when their income got capped?
Because more medium businesses will fill the need, people that are not at the cap yet. And qualified workers, equipment or work areas are all resources, which eventually will be reallocated to whatever is in demand. I didn't specify a timeframe with my "temporarily", but I was talking decades, i.e. also enough time for new workers to be trained.
Getting rid of all the billionaires didnt create more doctors though
Wrong, more people can afford to go to college. The extra tax base also allows for the creation of new schools.
I agree we should switch away from currency. Look at the stuff people do for fake internet points. We don't need money to create.
We certainly have the tech and the numbers to ensure the starving artist meme is finally laid to rest. Imagine what creations or inventions we are missing out on because it's not profitable right now.
more people can afford college, and we can afford to build more schools. But that doesnt mean we have the resources to. You don't throw money on the ground and a school pops out. You pay contractors to build it. Contractors are already pretty busy folks, doing very hard work that's difficult to attract a large workforce. And it takes a lot of time to build large projects. Construction is a huge bottleneck. We can get around this a bit with online education instead, but that's still not limitless, especially if you're teaching such a complex and demanding career as medicine. you need people who are already experts to train doctors, there's only so many and they can only teach so many.
I think a world without money is a fantasy.
Money is just a means of trading time, time that I put in, for time that you put in.
Some things like being a doctor are harder than being a fast food worker, it takes years of training, and hard work. It makes sense that their time is worth more.
There is a ceiling though where you're not actively contributing "time" you've previously committed time that's just appreciating because it's "invested" in paying people for their time. That's where the problems come in because you have effectively a years work of thousands of people in your pocket, which is a concentration of unchecked power.
Taxing billionaires out of existence ensures that money is invested (in a democracy) by the voters (through their representatives) and keeps the concentration of power from distorting the politics.
This issue isn't billionaires, it isn't capitalism, it's and always has been throughout history, concentration of power. It's past time we fixed this unforeseen loophole created by the modern world where a handful of individuals become as powerful as a country.
When you have bosses that aren't "gods among men", that can't just buy up their competition to squash it, it's much easier to negotiate with them to pay you a fair salary. You're not just a number. Similarly, you can get more done in politics because nobody's got so much money that they can significantly grease palms/run a campaign by themselves/etc.
The "loophole" is how capitalism works. Here's my super simple definition of capitalism. Capitalism just distributes resources based on capital. The problem is that capital is a resource that needs to get distributed. Sure a doctor and fast food worker are both being paid for their time. But not the hospital owner, not the restaurant owner. They're being paid for their capital, they had the capital to own this business, so they own the capital it generates.
I dont think Im really disagreeing with you though, taxing the owner class on a much more aggressive sliding scale of wealth definitely needs to happen, but we need more public sector workers for all that taxed income to be put to use for. The system is flawed and needs changing, just remember that the work still needs to be done regardless of the solution.
The definition of capitalism:
an economic system based on private ownership of capital
I think where I disagree is that capitalism is an untamable beast or that private ownership is bad. Private ownership at the small scale breeds competition and interoperability. At the large scale it becomes a monoculture just like a truly socialist government would be (in both cases the average person's individual buying power and individual vote aren't going to move the needle much).
Putting limits on capitalism so that small and medium businesses dominate and the middle class has enough money to reasonably take chances on creating new businesses without gambling their life savings is what I want to see.
People thought the world without chattel slavery was a fantasy at one point.
Yes we simply added more steps to it, but progress is progress
You make more money that harder you are to replace. In the case of the billionaires, they are theoretically hard to replace so they make a ton.
Of course you don't need to be a billionaire to to be wealthy. You can just be good at business and managing money.
"Taxing them out of existence" is the craziest and dumbest idea I've heard in a while. You can't just do that as it is there money that they rightfully earned. There also would be the issue of the people who have 990 million dollars. Do you want to tax them to oblivion to?
Billionaires are not the problem
There is nobody that's worth a billion dollars, that's wealth hoarding. There is no reason our government should endorse that level of wealth hoarding. It hurts infrastructure, it hurts innovation, it hurts national security, it hurts the press, and it hurts our democracies.
It's the same rational for why we shouldn't have monopolies and why we have laws against them. Concentration of wealth/power is a very bad thing.
I genuinely do not believe you can be a good person and make a billion dollars. You have either scammed your customers, scammed your employees, or both. There should be a limit on individual wealth.
Do agree we should increase competition
The problem is you can't just get rid of billionaires. They are just people who made a lot of money by getting really lucky.
It is also important to note that they do give back there money in many cases as a billion dollars is a huge amount of money. Honestly 10 million dollars is a lot. You can't just make the wealthy successful people go away because you are jealous.
At the end of they day the richer you are the more unhappy you are. If you basic needs are met you can't become more happy with more money.
It's not luck, it's how money works. Money buys you ownership. And there are many things that generate money for the owner. Businesses, stocks, real estate. It's a feedback loop that concentrates wealth like we see today.
It is also important to note that they do give back there money in many cases
no they dont