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this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
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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 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.
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.