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.
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.