It’s so hard to know where to even start. Say one thing and it’s like you have to go right back to the basics of how money, capitalism and society work. Nuanced conversation is Impossible.
Me, pulling down a chart when anyone asks me a question about modern society: “Okay, to understand this, we have to go back to early market economics of Mesopotamian city-states…”
I have nothing to add (sorry!) but reading “…back to early market economics of Mesopotamian city-states…” had me rolling, thank you.
History repeats itself… Except now we have climate change and nukes.
Dealing with the billionaire problem should be everyone’s top priority
There’s no solving climate change until we’ve solved billionaires.
Nah, buying a Tesla, a Porsche Taycan or a Volvo XC90 hybrid will solve the climate crisis. Trust me. Some guy on another thread told me.
Ah, yes, lets put the climate crisis on hold
There’s no “solving” climate change.
I think reining them in is enough. We can habe billionaires in a green economy.
I totally agree that billionaires should not exist, but I think climate change is more important and we shouldn’t lose sight of that.
You can’t reign them in when the reigns are for purchase You can’t prevent them from purchasing the reigns because when the price tag is big enough, everything is for sale You can’t stop them from purchasing reigns altogether because they’ll go to a different market who can, then force the market to be open to them They will do everything in their power to KEEP their power, and to prevent them from EVER LOSING their power There IS ONLY ONE WAY to stop billionaires from having power and it is to stop them from being billionaires in any way available
It’s “rein them in”
Reins are for horses, reigns are for kings
And rains are for the plains of Spain!
The planes in Spain fall in the rain
The average billionaire emits 1 million times more CO2 than the average 90%er. There are about 3000 of them
Yeah and it’s easier to transition to clean energy, mitigating their output, than it is to remove them.
Consider how much easier it would be without them though
Yeah but consider how difficult it is to remove them.
Difficult in what way?
Even the billionaires, really. Less income inequality, more income security.
The French Solution. Worked before.
deleted by creator
It can be two things.
Sure, which two things do you think it is?
Vibranium and Adamantium.
Its not hoarded wealth, its spent on things that make them more money. More “ownership” of others work.
There’s actually a stunning amount of simple hoarding of cash. It’s a major contributor to economic stagnation:
https://psmag.com/economics/one-percent-stop-hoarding-much-cash-84996
https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/companies-hoarding-cash
https://pitchforkeconomics.com/episode/the-velocity-of-money-with-ann-pettifor/
[me having a flashback to 2015 when I argued that low velocity of money was going to be a major killer of Western economies if nothing changed]
GOD I HATE BEING RIGHT
I’ve made an argument previously that the real estate market needs to be tanked, with no corporate ownership and a limit of 1 property per person and essentially an abolition of rent through a forced auction pool and no deposit finance. But that is not the point…
A big part of my argument is that we need to move investment from “asset” ownership to corporate ownership - ie make the only viable investments in business and startups, thereby providing jobs and forcing risk on to the wealthy. This gets money moving and pushes up productivity, advancing the human race
It’s money management. Some percentage of wealth in different risk/growth classes and some kept liquid to profit on
tragedyopportunity.
I’m not sure if anyone really believes that the rich hoard immigrants.
[Saudi Arabia has joined the chat]
And honestly, a non-zero amount of Western elites as well. It’s just smaller scale.
Every company that has a small town under it’s thumb.
Super simple analogy I like to use:
You’re a kid and you go to a badly run daycare with nine other kids. Your parents pay for your stay and the person running it gets a daily shipment of food from that money, let’s say, eleven sandwiches [a convenient but not perfect stand-in for workers generating the resources and value for the bourgeoisie]. He should keep one for himself and give ten to the kids, so everyone gets one sandwich, but instead he keeps six and gives all of you five, so you only get half each which is barely just enough. Now, five more kids join, their parents are also paying the daycare owner, and he now gets sixteen sandwiches per day. But he keeps the difference for himself and still gives you all five. Now you each only get a third of a sandwich, barely even a mouthful and you’re hungry all the time. Do you blame the new kids for also being hungry and eating the food, or do you blame the daycare worker for hoarding all the food in the first place?
cop that, straight casssssh
Do you really think that rich hoard cash? Under mattress?
Do you think they stay rich by spending it?
They stay rich by investing it into stocks, or even into CDs. Nobody holds cash in large amounts. At very least you put it into bank (and bank invests it).
That sounds like a complicated way of saying hoarding.
No. You can hoard resources, and resources would stay without action, without helping anyone. You CAN hoard cash as well. But rich do not do that. Invested money are working in economy.
How does invested money help anyone but other investors?
Nearly all manufacturing and business is created this way. This is what capitalism is. Is the “capital” part of capitalism.
Then it’s weird that it happens that way in countries like Cuba. Or did you not realize they also have manufacturing?
I was having a talk with my 73 year old dad the other night and he still swears up and down that it’s the illegal immigrants crossing the border that are stealing all of our money. I asked him where he got this info from, he said he reads things on the internet. I had my laptop out and said “show me” and then of course he said “I don’t know how to search for it!”. I then told him that he was full of shit, he said the same things about the points that I was bringing up. I told him the difference between my points and his is that 95% of my points I can find a source for, his is always a form of “do your research!”.
He said he never believes online surveys because he’s never been asked to participate in one, so he thinks it’s always a small perfectly chosen group of people in order to sway the results. I read him Pew Research’s surveying methodology and they said that they have all the datasets available. I mentioned that the GOP is almost entirely white people, and he said “How come there were ‘Black People for Trump’ in the last election?”. He wanted to know the results of a particular survey that had to do with politics, but of course wouldn’t look them up himself so I registered for an account, downloaded the datasets and showed it to him. From 2018 until now the GOP has been almost entirely white people, from 88%-92%, it even said that a quarter of them were “males over the age of 65 who identified as Protestant”.
I asked my mom if she had seen that one Presidential debate where Trump was asked by Chris Wallace to say denounce white supremacy and the man literally contorted his brain into a pretzel to fudge out “stand by and stand back.” It was a 100% crystal clear call to “those type of supporters.” When I told my mom this, her rebuttable was “I didn’t watch it” so for her if she didn’t watch it, then it didn’t happen and even if it did happen, she doesn’t have to believe it. It floors me that white supremacist are emboldened these days, but the ignorance, complacency, and lack of empathy and critical thinking from the Right will probably doom us all in a long enough time line.
Convincing people that transwomen are women and transmen are men is right up there too.
We need to shift away from traditional coporate ownership and move towards worker cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, and/or syndicates. Labor ownership invariably leads to the accumulation of wealth as you make money off a larger and larger percentage of workers.
Technically they don’t hoard the cash, they loan it out to other rich people with the expectation of a return on their investment. Or theyhoarfd property.
Its not even the loaning out of the cash that is the problem. The real problem is that they spend the cash on ways to prevent other people from having the opportunity they had. This goes for political routes, such as donations to influence tax breaks, goverment backed monopoly, etc. Its also spent buying competitors or losing money to crush conpetition.
adamantium >> vibranium
How does mythril compare to vibranium though?
It would really fucking help if we stop giving billionaires a god damn microphone. All these news sites and even social media shares. Stop it.
Oh, climate change issue?
Let’s see what “self-made” billionaire CEO of Oilerson Oils, Oily Oilerson, grandchild of another billionaire, has to say.
“With these unprecedented times, we must bond together and move forward, else we move backwards.”
Wait, but what did elon musk say about it? /s
Wait, but what did the kardashians say? /s
Etc etc
They keep buying the microphones.
The wise words from those smelly old men…
And after microphones, they’ve moved on to buying education. Really recommend that you watch this video.
This is exactly the kind of thing a billionaire would say.
