Fortunately, history has never been short on examples of how to deal with rich assholes who seek to grind the people under their heel.
All it takes is commitment, passion, basic carpentry knowledge, and a rope.
That is ridiculous.
You also need a blacksmith.
In 21st century America, our solutions are handled with gunpowder and lead.
To build a gallows?
Gallows are too slow. The guillotine was introduced precisely because you couldn’t effectively and cleanly eliminate problems fast enough.
But I can admit I misread it and thought we were talking guillotines and not gallows at first.
I’ll back off in the interest of not seeing the revolution get bogged down in infighting over WHICH tool we use to execute the capitalists.
I prefer the above mentioned solution, which requires some level of smithing skills, primarily because of the increased throughput bandwidth.
now we just need a way to track specific billionaires
How about we carve a Swastika into the foreheads of every MAGA?
I want my scalps!!!
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Who’s going to keep the economy running when average people are completely out of money? Who is going to buy new things, when everything becomes too expensive?
These wealthy assholes are due for a rude awakening. Preferably with a sharpened edge that drops from a fixed height.
When you own everything money stops being a factor.
Currently, money to them is just a vehicle for power. That’s why people like Musk will balk at a fine that’s like $2 to them. It’s not about the money, it’s about a challenge to their power.
They are currently changing the system so they pay themselves and don’t need us.
It’s kind of terrifying
AI will, if they have their way, and we’ll be left to die. They’ve already shown their hands. This is clearly their plan.
It is interesting to note that I typically but a lot of computer components for my hobby. I have bought ant new ones in a long time… They’re just too expensive now.
AI is doing this the most, though it was Crypto previously. Just a slurry of shit nobody wants pretty much, but enough avid people believe they do want it.
It’s all bullshit, and it’s bad for us. If the bullshit goes away, there could be a great little boom, though.
The economy of power is all that matters. Once we leave the currency economy we’ll be well into neofeudalism. “No money for food? Just sign on the dotted line and the company will cover your meals…”
There are always enough to buy all the shiny things. Even better if lesser people buy more stuff. Hence why all the food price hikes work so well. Those few customers they lost are well made up for with double prices. This even covers those who are actively boycotting.
As for the awakening. Nah. How should that ever happen? Sheeples are gonna sheep harder, as they have less and less time to ponder about things and are more and more consumed by work and just surviving. Those few inbetween? With a bit of freedom and money but also the POV to see how bad it all is AND the motivation to actually do something about it? Nah. I don’t share that optimistic foresight. Sadly though, I’d like to believe in a better future.
We need socialism, and fast.
That’s about $23,000 per person in the US (estimating 350m population). That’s life changing money for most.
If you push that to the bottom 70-80% and not the top % brackets who probably aren’t in as bad a spot it probably does even better.
Well, except purchasing power would decrease significantly if wealth was distributed that way.
I know it’s counter-intuitive but the real problem with billionaires isn’t that the poor are destitute. The problem is that economic power is political power, and oligarchies use institutionalized violence to keep the poor destitute forever.
I don’t think so as far as purchasing power in this limited case. This assumes capitalists would adjust pricing to soak up the cash. Giving people ~$30k would be almost guaranteed go to bills and food, maybe some would buy a used car or something. Few would save the money. This hypothetical isn’t an annuity, so hiking prices would likely be local and predatory. Scumbag landlords hiking rent. Debt collector vultures. Shitty used car businesses hiking prices. All the usual scumbags preying on the poor. I don’t want to get into the weeds too deeply, but the buying power issue would absolutely be a problem were we to implement something like UBI because businesses like apartments would absolutely jack up the prices and wreck the buying power of the lower income brackets.
Except that every time we print money for some bailout or crooked public works project that never materializes we further devalue the currency and all that money goes to the rich. Simply by being so insanely rich they’re already causing a decrease in everyone elses wealth.
It will trickle down any day now…
I’ve been feeling the trickle for decades now. It’s not money, guys…
We need to adopt using the term obscene to describe billionaires. And treat them like pariahs.
The rich get richer and the rest starve.
Survival Of The Fittest. I’m pretty sure Jeezus said it, and shit.
Gee, would’ve been a shame if all that money was given to all the poor and pious in the world (including the US). Seriously!
People don’t like to hear it, but if you took the money from every single US billionaire and distributed it equally it would only be a bit over $20,000 per person, one time only.
That’s really not a lot when the median annual income is more than three times that.
We don’t need billionaires, but they are not a significant part of the cost of living crisis.
So you’re telling me we get 1 less Elon and 20,000 more dollars? You sure make a compelling argument.
That’s quite a lot of money for some of us. Imagine how transformative it would be for those who desperately need it.
Most people who desperately need $20k would not handle it effectively if given a lump sum. That’s been proven repeatedly.
It would do more good giving it to a social program.
Do you have a source for that?
There are multiple situations that apply, you can look up studies on smaller lottery winners.
Also, inheritance spending.
The median inheritance is much larger than the $20k, but that study shows about half the inheritance money is spent or lost almost immediately.
I’m not saying it wouldn’t benefit anyone, it definitely would, but getting rid of billionaires will not fix any long standing issues with society because they aren’t the primary cause of those issues.
getting rid of billionaires will not fix any long standing issues with society because they aren’t the primary cause of those issues
How are you so confident that this is the case?
Because the money they have is absolutely tiny compared to other groups of people.
Trillions sounds like a lot, until you start talking about real estate or corporate spending.
They’re just easier to pick on/scapegoat, which is why they’re being targeted.
Irresponsibly spending their own money is their right, tho. Besides, that’s still trillions of dollars injected into the economy, which will have long-lasting positive effects.
And if you took one dollar from each of those people, you could use the money to buy dozens of politicians. 20,000 times that, and you can buy almost all of the politicians for many lifetimes. It’s not just a transformative amount of money for the people who are too cash-poor to risk searching for better employment, it’s an ungodly amount of money that can easily sway power to support the cost of living crisis.
Another way to look at it: when the forecast says .5 inches of rain predicted, that seems like nothing across your entire city. Now imagine all of that landing inside your house, instead. Congratulations, you’re now the billionaire of drowning in your living room.
That’s a pretty singular way of looking at it. Sure, everyone would only get $20k, but there’s more to the cost of living crisis than just money.
Billionaires are absolutely a significant part of the cost of living crisis, and an additional result of redistributing their wealth is no more billionaires. This alone would do more for the average person than anything else.
And yet if you took all the residential real estate in the country and redistributed it. Every single person would have enough for a home, $200,000+
The US residential real estate market is over 60 trillion, making the billionaires look poor by comparison.
Its almost like you’re being lied to about the billionaires being the problem, when really its boomer house owners that hold the majority of the wealth.
There’s more than one contributing factor for the cost of living crisis. Billionaires need to be eliminated, as long as they exist the rich/poor gap will always leave a living (not just cost of living) crisis for the majority. Eliminating billionaires won’t fix everything, sure, but it will cut out the cancer that infects the rest of society. The sickness of such wealth accumulation directly contributes, enables, and increases the current state of wealth inequality.
Its almost like you’re being lied to about the billionaires being the problem, when really its boomer house owners that hold the majority of the wealth.
“Boomer house owners” will never redistribute their wealth as long as the concept of billionaires exists. Again, there are many contributing factors. I agree that billionaires are not the problem, but they certainly are a problem, a problem that needs eliminating for the betterment of society.
The real question is how.
Does any business that becomes successful just immediately turn itself over to the government to be sold off to small investors?
Because the top billionaires today all have almost all their value in single companies that they either started directly or built up themselves.
Combination of 95% personal tax rate over x amount, say 10 million, and if any company is deemed important enough to be necessary to run the country/society (airlines, power companies, telecom, banks, grocery, apparently AI garbage), should those companies require gov’t subsidies or bailouts they immediately become nationalised. No bailouts for private companies.
So elon is completely untouched because none of his companies are vital and he has no “income” because it’s all capital appreciation?
Jeff bezos also untouched…
This is the kind of stupid knee jerk thinking that makes all of this discussion irrelevant.
You don’t even know how to reach the goal you want, you just feel like it should be something.
Well yeah, it should be something. I’m no economist, why are you acting like it’s on me to figure out? I’ll leave the how up to people much smarter than me. The fact is the system as it is is incredibly predatory on the majority, and billionaires are absolutely a big part of why. They need to be eliminated, I don’t really care how.
In your example where the money is literally taken & handed out, it’d result in short-term price surges, and probably have very little re-distributive effect (the money would end up flowing back up rapidly, and flow back down at the same rate as before).
But that’s not the only possibility. It should be possible to perform land & capital reform: altering the ownership & organisational structure of companies, causing them to allocate resources differently, causing the prices of goods (and of labour) to change relative to each other, and this can increase equality & overall standards of living. For instance, elite populations tend to hoard land & buildings, leaving them idle to fulfil their higher-level psychological needs (i.e. a big private estate) whereas that land could house a factory that contributes to lowering the prices of goods (or, I’m sure you can think of some other uses). They also tend to order the overproduction of prestige goods, when the effort that went into producing those could have went into producing goods that more effectively increase living standards. The relative price of bread & champagne isn’t fixed and when the gap is small, it contributes to inequality, but measuring how much is difficult.
Of course, actually figuring out how to do this is the hard part, but it has been done historically. Usually, the longer it lies, the bolder elites get with misallocations of capital, and the easier it is to come up with good suggestions. You are here (cough, datacenters, cough).
CoL crisis is more so the fact we’ve built our entire civilization around ratfucking and incentivizing gambling. combined the two essentially guarantees that actually spending $ is bad, you can make far more just playing with it on the stock/futures markets.
especially funny/sad is the multiple tax-breaks we have designed specifically to allow rent-seeking parasites to safely maximize their rents.
What about the glad handing and lobbying oligarchs? Did you conveniently forget about those?
Plenty of non-billionaires play that game.
And even if you removed billionaires, corporations would continue exist and keep spending on politicians anyways.
Getting rid of billionaires doesn’t fix any of that.
Changing the rules around finances in politics does.
We need to remove billionaires and corporations influence on politics.
The problem is the concentration of wealth into the hands of a few, so that sounds fine to me if the your hypothetical came true and we all gained $20,000. And that’s ignoring all the other positive externalities that may occur with this redistribution of wealth, such as societal change.
$20,000 would go a long way for a lot of people, too. So yes, I do like to hear it. Very much indeed.
How dare you be reasonable!?
