It’s not a matter of “nobody should be allowed to be ultra wealthy,” it’s a matter of “nobody should be allowed to be unacceptably poor.”
If our civilization can generate wealth at an astronomical rate, then there is no morally defensible reason for anyone to be homeless, hungry, poorly educated, lacking medical care, drinking unsafe water, worked to death, or any of a number of other baseline metrics of civilization. All of those ills exist because wealth is funneled upwards at an unbelievable rate, leading to the existence of billionaires. All of that wealth should be used to raise everyone’s standard of living, rather than give a handful of people more power and luxury than ever appeared in Caligula’s wet dreams.
Of course the way that you accomplish that is by an exponentially progressive taxation system, and that will… probably make it impractical to be a billionaire, but frankly I think that focusing on helping the bottom end of the economic ladder is more productive than just talking about how it should be illegal to have more than a given amount of wealth.
I’m still surprised that taxing the rich is such a difficult bill to pass. Assuming we live in a democracy, the 1% shouldn’t be able to have such sway over the population.
Might have something to do with almost all relevant politicians being in the 1%. Maybe. Possibly.
Lots of people don’t understand taxes and lots of others think they’ll end up rich someday and then it will affect them.
The rich have special access to the legislative machinery that the rest of us don’t. The end of real democracy in this country began with the Supreme Court’s “corporations are people / money is speech” rulings. Ordinary people can’t compete with the influence that billions of dollars of bribes brings.
Citizens United and Regulatory Capture.
It’s not a matter of “nobody should be allowed to be ultra wealthy,”
It kind of is. the more wealth someone has, the more power they have over other people’s life. They can buy laws and regulations, or have them removed. This is never a good thing. Billionaires simply must not exist. In fact, billionaires only exist because we have so many poor people. They profit from other people’s hard labour and misery. If it was not such a historically charged term, I would call them parasites.
frankly I think that focusing on helping the bottom end of the economic ladder is more productive than just talking about how it should be illegal to have more than a given amount of wealth.
Agreed. Generally easier to sell to the public, too.
That said, there’s also a bunch of stuff that wealth hoarding and extreme capitalism will still cause problems with, which isn’t directly tied to people living in extreme poverty. Climate change is just one example. Infrastructure is another. There are collective challenges that we can’t meet because of wealth disparity.
Maybe we just need to assign billionaires goals to achieve. “Hey, Elno, reduce world hunger sustainably over the next four years by 15% or we take all your money. Jeffy boy, you’re on housing; get us to zero homelessness before 2030, or we’re nationalizing Amazon. Oil execs, you get to tackle greenhouse gas emissions (I mean, you made the problem, you get to solve it). We’re replacing half of the gas stations in the US with fast charging stations, and we’ll sell off 1,000 a year to private owners; get us to net zero emissions and you get to have whichever of them the Federal Government still owns by that point. Whichever one of you chuckleheads gets done first gets all the other guys’ beach houses. And go!”
Ideally you would set the oil companies against the car companies. Electric cars are a bandaid on a bleeding stump. We need mass transportation and efficient cities rather than suburbs. Busses, trains, and efficient last mile solvers like bikes are the goal.
Yes. And also there’s no way to reasonably do that anytime soon; our infrastructure just can’t turn on that dime. Electric cars are the bridge, particularly when charged via renewables.
I totally agree, but also the pop star billionaires are the least offensive type. If you’re targeting them before the other billionaires, you got played and are doing it wrong. The richest most politically powerful billionaires are the biggest threat to freedom.
^ This right here.
I’m so tired of “leftists” focusing on inoffensive targets in the middle of the spectrum when the real problem is far to the right of it.
strat is to target all billionaires equally
To me this is the silliest possible counter propaganda. They want to get people fired up about a super popular billionaire that actually works really hard and over pays her people. So then they can paint a picture of radicals who’d have everyone living in the slums no matter what they were able to do with their talents. They won’t even wait to see the real responses. They’ll put their own in, grab the screen cap and deride us all as anarchists.
See that picture of the homeless man on top? Bill Gates has literally saved hundreds of thousands of men like him through his charitable foundations. It depends on the person not the size of the bank account.
Right. Bill Gates is horribly evil and rich, and like many people in his shoes, he decided to be a philanthropist to fix his image. What if millions of other people had gotten that money instead of him? What if Windows hadn’t been monopolistic? What kind of world would we be in today? A better one, most likely.
You know what would help them?
A house.
That wouldn’t help, as they wouldn’t have the means to furnish it or maintain it or pay the taxes on it. What they need is medical care for the sizeable portion that have mental illness keeping them down. And all of them need an economic system that doesn’t let hard luck cases get thrown under the bus.
You wouldn’t believe how many of them have jobs and just need a house. It’s the majority actually.
Agreed. Any downvotes you got/get are simple shills of the mindsets “rich people bad” and “Windows bad”, both of which are very prevalent here. Multiple people here (not all) throwing those downvotes around would be doing the same shit if they were billionaires, or worse.
Wish we could all be like Pepe.
Idk, when you move from normal wealth to exorbitant wealth AND you’re a international pop star who very clearly has THOUSANDS of workers supporting each show it seems kinda hard to ignore the people who’s work is providing your stage to excess.
They all are a symptom of the same disease, some of them are the disease as well.
Pop stars are just the pretty faces in front of the behemoths that are the music labels. These labels are absolutely very politically powerful. Do you think Taylor Swift for rich by paying her staff fair salaries? The cleaning people from the concert venues, the bartenders, the people taking your tickets, etc, they all earned little crumbs while Swift, the venue, and the label made the big bucks.
No one becomes a billionaire by paying fair wages.
Most of those people work for the venue though, the performer doesn’t control their wages.
Taylor Swift has the power to demand basically anything from the venue.
Expecting a performer to go to lengths like that just isn’t realistic, they’ve got their own job to do.
You can say the same about mega corp CEOs. Poor them, they are so busy with their own job.
Taylor Swift has the power to demand basically anything from the venue.
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You throw out large amounts of table scraps and leftovers daily.
But of course you make sure to poison them so the dog can’t eat it
You decide not to feed it because it’s not your dog - it’s not your problem. But your whole house is completely stocked with food. You throw out large amounts of table scraps and leftovers daily.
How many people would consider that to be evil?
Internally the person can justify his actions “You feed a stray dog one time, it will nag you forever, maybe call up his buddies because there is free food, and now suddenly you have a pack of stray dogs on your farm that are causing all sorts of trouble”. Such nuances are always present(I will stop with the dog analogy, because your original example and my addendum, dehumanizes people in need to dogs). but such is the harsh reality, that often arises with a direct personal transfer of wealth, people tend to form a dependency on the table scraps and those that provide them(even though they are losing literally nothing) resent it.
The solution you may ask to greedy billionaires and hungry homeless people, SOCIETAL or GOVERNMENTAL INTERVENTION, think about it, its the failure of whoever the fuck is in charge that a select few of their citizens have exploited the system so well that their wastage is equivalent to the GDP of a small country, and similarly there are many people that only dream of a roof over their heads!!
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Getting some Pol Pot vibes from this. Ideology can lead to some really weird conclusions.
Somone like Taylor Swift isn’t destroying people’s lives and she’s not overworking other people to make that money.
Sure she has too much money, but that can be solved by having more sensible tax policies. Show me where she’s bribing congress and donating to the GOP to keep her taxes low.
These kinds of memes only exist to prove how edgy people are but they don’t accomplish anything. Saying “I’m so hardcore I even hate the billionaires people like” doesn’t do anything other than push people away from whatever movement you claim to support.
But congratulations, you’re the edgiest socialist edge lord on the internet. That sound you hear is the Swifties (who might otherwise care about the issues you care about) heading towards the door.
People like Elon Musk and Donald Trump divide people so they don’t think about what they’re doing. You’re helping them.
bvbv
and don’t stop to help and the person would have lived if you stopped but instead that person dies then yes, you are evil
Also that’s actually a crime in many places. Well here in Finland at least. You have a duty to render aid if no-one else is there. Obviously you can just drive by an accident if someone is already helping but if there’s no-one else around, you’re required to stop to help, by law.
Ahhh yes. Celebrities can just magically end world hunger and stop world suffering
No, they can’t. They’re just the canary in the coalmine, so to speak.
The point isn’t “Taylor Swift is immoral”. The point is “the system is immoral and the evidence for it can be seen by looking at, for instance, Taylor Swift.”
Being against billionaires doesn’t mean one is genocidal ffs.
People like Elon Musk and Donald Trump divide people so they don’t think about what they’re doing. You’re helping them.
No U, bootlicker.
“Kill all billionaires” isn’t a genocidal statement, since it’s not based on genetics, language, or culture.
I think it’s a bad plan, but we shouldn’t conflate genocide with mere mass murderous intent. (Also, “all billionaires” is only like 10k people at most, so it would be a very small mass murder compared to most genocides.)
If people criticizing your favorite celebrity makes you stop caring about social issues, then you never really cared about those issues in the first place to begin with.
The only smart guy in this thread⏫
These kinds of memes only exist to prove how edgy people are but they don’t accomplish anything. Saying “I’m so hardcore I even hate the billionaires people like” doesn’t do anything other than push people away from whatever movement you claim to support.
So true. Learn from the edgy George Floyd protests and the Palestine protests, which at best accomplished nothing and more likely played a key role in cutting off formerly-rising popular support for the causes they were advocating. Being edgy feels good to the person doing it, but it makes everyone else say “fuck that guy and whatever they’re in favor of.” Be smart not angry.
These meme would be far more effective if it didn’t have the bottom picture at all.
lol at “rational lib”
Such a normie reaction. I just wanna differentiate myself from all the NPCs who have let ideology replace their reasoning capabilities, as well as “rational centrists” who consider conceding to irrational Republican arguments to be a form of rationalty. If I’ve said something irrational, you can feel free to call me out on it. My username is an invitation to do just that.
“I’m a rational person, and as a rational person I think it’s normal to dismiss people with opinions I don’t like as unthinking automations because it’s impossible for me to consider that someone else might legitimately disagree with me.”
Except I am careful with this. It would be a valid criticism if the opinion I don’t like wasn’t “lol at rational lib”. That is fairly described as an NPC opinion, unless you care to help justify it as something deeper. Rationality is not concession, bad opinions should be called out as such. And by the way, it’s not just people I disagree with - after all, this whole thread is me criticizing people who agree with me that billionaire wealth is out of control for choosing shitty argument tactics.
The only people who use the term “NPC” or “normie” are those who realize they aren’t special, and detest that fact. That you’ve used those terms, and have called yourself “rational lib”, tells me you’re male, lonely, and dealing with subconscious feelings of inadequacy that you can only deal with by dehumanizing other people.
I’m sorry I made fun of you, and I hope you end up getting help.
Don’t be sorry, be self-aware. You can look up my comment history, I don’t use this kind of language with everyone, but when in Trollistan, I speak troll.
As far as the Dr. Phil stuff, you’re describing a typical Lemmy user. Of course I’m male, only had about 98% odds with that one. Am I lonely? Occasionally, but less than most. Not that there’s anything wrong with being lonely, which is a very common emotion even among popular people. Subconscious feelings of inadequacy are references to psychoanalytic concepts that have long since been debunked. Dehumanizing? Quite the opposite. I’m trying to persuade the online masses to free themselves from the automated thought process of ideology.
“I’m very careful about who I dehumanize so it’s okay.”
That is fairly described as an NPC opinion
bad opinions should be called out as such
The who pronoun is entirely inappropriate here
Which world do you live in? People voted for Donald Trump, a guy who wanted to shoot BLM protestors and says he’ll let Israel do whatever they want.
The edgelord bullshit only makes you popular with people that agree with you. It has demonstrably failed to bring people to the causes you care about.
I think the person you are replying to agrees with you
I’ll share it again…
That time Oprah and Ellen cosplayed as poor people by going to the bank…
No but see these psychopaths aren’t physically that dangerous and are smiling in a not-unpleasant way, so it’s okay. /s
There may not be good ones, but like everything there are different grades.
Someone who became a billionaire selling weapons to conflict zones after pushing them into conflict is a lot worse than an artist that is popular and actually works for their riches.
If you have billions there are no excuses, dont defend this shit.
That person was already evil before they became a billionaire.
The amount of evilness from being a billionaire, separate from how they got there, is approximately the same for both of them.
Nobody “works for” a billion dollars.
Yeah, and every day they don’t give back and horde more than they could ever spend, the more evil they are.
It’s interesting to me that Swifties look over the fact that she entertains company with Patrick Mahomes’ brother, someone that is in the midst of settling his sexual assault case and only received probation (likely b/c his connections). Or that she continues to attend events of an organization that routinely tries to stifle legitimate protests and would treat their players like garbage if the NFLPA didn’t exist.
In the end, she’s like everyone else. You look over the sins of those that are somehow tied to your group but make a huge stink about when it’s others.
I understand why Queen B or T Swift aren’t doing it, but the only moral activity (beyond survival tasks) that a “good billionaire” can be engaged in is redistributing their wealth to marginalized workers.
You can figure out your next album / tour or how to benefit your friends and family once you get to 999M USD.
Why do you understand why Swift and Queen B arent doing it?
I don’t know about other people, but I tend to drift toward doing things that are fun, comfortable, and familiar, unless I do some “internal parenting”. Even if they found a way to make redistributing their wealth fun, they are shaped by capitalism even more than myself, so I doubt they’d find it comfortable or familiar.
That’s how I understand it.
I’m going to get comfortable and familiar with community investment of my own resources well before I reach 1B, by intention.
They aren’t doing it? Everyone’s doing it!
Everyones at it.
Swifties triggered.
I know how to fix the economy!
After 1 million, you win at life so you can stop working and get a basic income with food included, housing, etc. You won, you don’t get to play anymore. No w2 forms or banking or anything. If you buy something, the government just makes the funny money to pay for that which then means more jobs for those still playing the games. Big projects and big companies all public owned and only players get to work there and decide. Anyone who reaches the 1 Million mark gets kicked out into permanent retirement. Once you reach this level you get a party and you can invite anyone you want.
One benefit of winning is that you can be completely naked the entire time. Because why not. At your party you can request everyone to be naked too.
You can be married to a winner but you must keep working until you reach the 1million mark.
That’s it!
What if I want to build a rocket or iPhone or supercomputer or cancer therapy and I need more than $1 million for parts and labor?
Is Dolly Parton a billionaire? She has numerous assistance programs. I figure she wouldn’t be.
People don’t understand just how much money a billion dollars is. Once you are that rich it’s really REALLY hard not to get richer. Just putting your money in basic savings accounts would just keep piling on money. Invest it even conservatively and you’ll grow like crazy. Invest aggressively and you’ll have another billion soon.
Billionaires simply shouldn’t exist.
I’m more charitable than most, I say you get to have up to 100 million, after that you’ve won life. Any extra money money you make goes back into your community.
Turns out she isn’t. I guess the constant donation of huge amounts of money prevented her from getting there.
With 3 million in an account you’re already making over 100k/year out of interest. With 100 million you never have to care about money even if you live in lavish luxury. 1bil is absolutely ridiculous.
I would go so far as to say: they will never be a good billionaire, unless that means a median income in a poor country
Empire is devaluing its currency so fast that we’ll all be billionaires soon.
Zimbabwe style
Oh jeeze, you mentioned Swift in a meme. I feel sorry for your inbox.
There’s vastly worse billionaires than Taylor Swift. Idk what Swifties on Lemmy you’re trying to trigger. Thompson wasn’t even billionaire but I’d say he was worse than Swift.
if you get that bar any lower, you’re gonna need a shovel.
Posts like this meme are just angry 19 year olds who hate their little sister’s music and think this makes them “political”.
Its because they get pushback from swifties. Its the conflict they are seeking not advancing any political goal.
