Wrong, they should CEASE to exist
Well, I don’t know about your but I’d prefer a system where it wouldn’t be possible for a single person to amass that many resources in the first place
Worker co-ops, social safety nets, guaranteed income and a robust, free universal healthcare option are all things we could do RIGHT NOW without hurting our precious capitalist empire at all. In the long run some businesses like the Healthcare companies will suffer and have to downsize, but it’s always been absolutely astonishing to me that a company like Tesla, IBM, Boeing, Walmart or other mega-companies close plants or stores and send tens of thousands of people into joblessness and poverty nobody bats an eye.
The moment we talk about actions that might impact the insurance empires suddenly we have to all worry about the workers and all the businesses that are connected to the insurance company and so on.
Worker co-ops, social safety nets, guaranteed income and a robust, free universal healthcare option are all things we could do RIGHT NOW without hurting our precious capitalist empire at all.
Let’s talk about just one of these, “guaranteed income”. What annual amount do you think we as a country can afford to give everyone in the US?
Edit: The fact that I have negative points for asking a simple question is a textbook example of ideologues’ hostility to even the slightest bit of what one would strain to even call ‘dissent’. Pitiful.
The fact that I have negative points for asking a simple question is a textbook example of ideologues’ hostility to even the slightest bit of what one would strain to even call ‘dissent’. Pitiful.
I’m going to take the rage bait on this one, in hopes that you’re not trolling:
No. It’s stuff like this, which makes several of your comments here earning downvotes.
If it were “a simple question” you wouldn’t whine about getting downvotes. The fact, that you care about votes here and in this context at all is a sign of your “ideologues’ hostility” towards contrary opinions. If it were “a simpue question” you wouldn’t be so condescending to call downvotes “ideologues’ hostility” or “pitiful”.
Your “simple question” can still be suggestive and carry a message which clearly show that your intentions are not to neutrally ask a question but to challenge the readers and the common opinion found among them. Given this context, such questions can even seem ridiculuous to ask at all, as the amount of wealth accumulated by wealthy people is insane. (See for example this one of many illustrations: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/ ) In other words: your question seems a bit like rage bait.
Combined with your other comments here, a clear picture cristallises about your opinion on this topic, which further hardens, that it’s not just “a simple question”.It’s totally fine for me and probably a lot of other users here if you’ve got a different opinion. If people disagree with you or don’t like it, you get downvotes. That’s the way of Lemmy. Heck, I’ll probably earn a downvote from you. Do I care? No. Not really. Of course it would be nice if we could agree. But I accept that you probably won’t like what I’ve written here and that you’re giving me a downvote for that. It’s an expression of your opinion. And that’s ok.
If you were about to get banned for your “simple question”, or your question got removed, then we could talk again about hostility. Until then it’s political discourse. Isn’t democracy beautiful? ;)
How about we take all the money that we’ve been using to bail out corporations along with removing loopholes that allow corporations and the ultra rich to barely pay any taxes, if any.
Also, read up on Modern Monetary Theory. The finances of the federal government cannot be calculated the same way as household finances.
Also also as well in addition, as for the amount, UBI should be a livable income without a job to pay for all necessities, and jobs should be supplimental income for luxuries.
Well let’s see. In October of 2023 there were 735 billionaires in the US. Assuming each had only $1B and could make an average of 8% on that money (the stock market averages 10%) and we taxed them the equivalent of 6 of that percent, giving all of that to say the lowest income people in the US (so no overhead here to distribute it), the money could provide 735,000 people with a salary of $60k/year. They would still be billionaires drawing a salary of only $20m/year each. So three quarters of a million people, could have the average yearly income in the US and it would only mildly inconvenience 735 people.
Knowing that many billionaires have more than just one billion dollars and that other high earners, say people with $100m or more significantly outnumber them imagine how many people could share the prosperity. I didn’t do that math but probably 3-5 million people I guess and it barely even effects the ultra wealthy.
The actual wealth of a billionaire is absolutely staggering.
Okay, so assuming the top end of your guesstimate of 5 million…so, the other 335 million people get a middle finger, or what?
“Guaranteed income” for 1.4% of the population, at most. Not quite how I’d define it.
But fuck the back of the napkin math, we’ve got solid numbers out there to use. The total net worth of all the billionaires in the US is about $5.2 trillion. And I’ll use your 6% that’s $312 billion a year. Now let’s also make the massive assumption (in your favor) that we can wave a magic wand and convert that net worth directly into exactly that much cash, which you obviously never could in real life.
So, $312 billion a year. Spread evenly, that’s literally less than $1,000 per person. Less than the stimulus we got during Covid, and you won’t find anyone who claims they went from poor to not poor after getting that stimulus.
The actual wealth of a billionaire is absolutely staggering.
I find this ironic, since you seem not to understand just how little it actually is, compared to what the government already spends, and among a population of 340 million people.
Did you know the US spends about $1.2 trillion a year on welfare already? The above amount is about a quarter of that; even if we abandon the idea of “guaranteed income” completely and just used this hypothetical amount as additional welfare for the poor, their benefit amount would increase by 25% on average. Do you think anyone who is impoverished is going to be lifted out of poverty with that?
Billionaires are a boogeyman. They’re not the source of poverty, and they literally don’t have enough to forcibly push the poor out of poverty, regardless of whether you try it by ‘skimming’ off their average wealth appreciation, or if you take it all at once.
If half of the energy complaining about billionaires was put into reducing single parenthood, and all of the other things that we know have a DIRECT correlation, with poverty, WAY more poor would be not only lifted up, but with the right tools and education, they’d STAY up, on their own.
I think you missed the point. First, the back of the napkin exercise I conducted was merely to point out just how big of an impact can be had without even hardly inconveniencing just a handful of people. The people I was referring to, would still have a billion dollars and a 20 million dollar a year income from interest. Second, not ever person in the US is poor. We don’t have to raise every single person in America out of poverty. Third, I Believe billionaires ARE the source of poverty. Fourth, I Believe you were off by three orders of magnitude. Six percent of 5.2 trillion dollars is actually $312 billion dollars, not million dollars. Fifth, I’m not suggesting that billionaires can just be taxed to the point that they alone can provide a salary to every person in America. What I’m suggesting, is if a system existed that was even slightly fair, billionaires wouldn’t exist and hopefully neither would the working poor.
just how big of an impact can be had without even hardly inconveniencing just a handful of people.
Which is to say, no real impact at all. There are 340 million of us, a plan that can potentially help less than 2% of them is no plan at all.
Second, not ever person in the US is poor. We don’t have to raise every single person in America out of poverty.
So you’re not talking about UBI, but just another welfare program.
I redirect you to where I pointed out that the amount of yearly aid your plan produces is nothing compared to the $1.2 TRILLION the US already spends on welfare. It is completely naive to think that a slight increase in welfare spending is going to create the kind of change you’re claiming it would.
Third, I Believe billionaires ARE the source of poverty.
You can believe it all you want, but the evidence simply does not support that conclusion. Go look up how many inflation-adjusted billionaires there were in the world a century ago compared to today, then go compare the incidence of global poverty back then to today, too. It’s literally an inverse correlation.
Fourth, I Believe you were off by three orders of magnitude. Six percent of 5.2 trillion dollars is actually $312 billion dollars, not million dollars.
My mistake, will correct my comment, but the point still stands, because $1000 isn’t anything resembling life-changing money, either.
What I’m suggesting, is if a system existed that was even slightly fair, billionaires wouldn’t exist
Not only can they exist, but it is literally inevitable, and moreso with each passing day, especially as the global population increases, more and more technology becomes more scalable, new technologies emerge, and more and more economy is globalized.
There are over 8 billion people on Earth today. One piece of software that catches on can produce $1 billion in profit in just a handful of years. OnlyFans was founded in 2016, less than a decade ago, and SIX years later, in 2022, it was valued at not $1 billion, but $18 billion.
wouldn’t exist and hopefully neither would the working poor.
Long-term poverty literally cannot be solved with an injection of funds alone–this is a very superficial take. The vast majority of poor people who win lotteries of multi-million amounts that can easily make one ‘set for life’, are broke again in just a few years. And you better believe government welfare isn’t giving any poor person tens of millions of dollars.
On the other hand, simply being raised by two parents instead of one, makes a person up to FIVE TIMES less likely to be impoverished long-term in adulthood. If we reduced the single parenthood incidence by even just 5%, we’d reduce long-term poverty to a degree even completely liquidating all billionaires would not accomplish.
Billionaires are largely a boogeyman, and time and effort and resources spent complaining about them, if applied to creating the changes that we DO empirically know actually lift people out of poverty, would do a hell of a lot more good. That’s what frustrates me.
Hating the rich is not the same as loving the poor.
What annual amount do you think we as a country can afford to give everyone in the US?
It’s ridiculous to try to pin someone down on this. I am an American citizen asking that my tax money, which I pay a helluva lot, go into helping people and giving us all more opportunities as individuals, I am fully aware that something like UBI will come with a huge bag of other issues and necessary regulations and safeguards to guarantee that it actually goes into helping people stay in their homes and fed, but that is still the direction that we and all developed nations should be pushing towards.
I am not designing policy, I am asking the people who’s salary I pay to design policy so that that we put money directly towards the issues and people who need it. I won’t even read any “wELL aKsHulLy” arguments how great everything really is and how we’re all just lazy, entitled peasants who need to know our place. I won’t and the harder you jackoffs push the message that it’s our fault we get laid off, have medical emergencies, health issues and lowered wages, the harder I will advocate and vote for ANY kind of socialist policies and candidates. I am absolutely enraged how easily the general public has become distracted with cultural conflict while ignoring the inequality that is making people so unhappy to begin with.
You can go ahead and reply with your chart that is somehow supposed to make me feel better. I’m sure it will really improve all of our situations.
Yes I am defensive, any reply pointing that it will get blocked before reading.
It’s ridiculous to try to pin someone down on this.
I disagree; not when you’re claiming that it, along with several other expensive things, could be done “RIGHT NOW” as if they’re so obviously doable that only literal malice/stupidity is preventing them from happening.
I’ve crunched the numbers on UBI, and have pretty solidly established the conclusion that it’s simply not feasible currently, from a purely pragmatic perspective. It’s just too expensive. So when that extremely bold claim was made, yes, I had to know how you figured it was so easy, especially as just one of a group of other massive changes. I didn’t even take into account any of the logistics, and asked only for the figure and where the money to pay that figure was going to come from. I’ll be honest, given the research I’d already done, I was expecting either a very paltry annual figure, or a plan to pay for it that literally assumed more available funds than there actually are. But I was open to being wrong, and hearing a proposal (not that I was expecting a white paper or something, but at least an overall ‘plan’) that at least sounded somewhat feasible.
Believe me, I wasn’t happy to learn how ridiculously expensive UBI would be in the US, and I calculated based on paying out a measly $10,000 a year, and only to citizens of working age. Even that costs trillions annually…
But I digress…if you don’t have any idea how we could actually provide any given amount of “guaranteed income” to the populace, (I even left it open for you to define the amount everyone gets!), then don’t frame it like this effortlessly-achievable goal. You should have expected some amount of pushback for talking about it like ‘obviously we can do this, there’s no good reason we can’t start doing it “RIGHT NOW”’.
Does the above really sound so “ridiculous”?
P.S. You really made a whole heap of assumptions about me and where I’m coming from, in your comment. You should try not to do that.
I stopped reading at the obvious “I crunched the numbers” bullshit, I made assumptions about you because I am not a child I can smell bullshit. I’m not an economist but I can tell when someone else is dumber than rock and lying like a snake. I too can quote corporate propaganda that sounds smart to stupid people. It’s sure amazing that something as complicated and multi-dimensional as this topic can just be fucking CRUNCHED by losers on the internet. Wow, I had no idea it was this simple.
I stopped reading there because I don’t like people who try to confuse issues and shoot down attempts at things we can do to make the world better. You’re arguing from a place of selfish needs and I don’t care. You can reply if you think anyone is reading down this far, it won’t be me.
I stopped reading at the obvious “I crunched the numbers” bullshit
??? It was very simple. I chose a deliberately-small-for-the-sake-of-argument annual figure of $10,000 UBI, learned how name working age people there are in the US (bit over 200 million), and multiplied.
The fact that even a measly $10k UBI, an amount that obviously wouldn’t be enough to replace the systems we presently have in place, would cost several trillions a year, made it clear that any amount of real UBI that actually could offer someone who isn’t working some semblance of financial peace of mind, was not realistically affordable, as things are now.
The point is that if it’s that daunting, even before you take into account all of the complexities that come with it, then obviously it’s not going to be easier after you do a full-on approach.
There’s a reason no UBI proposal ever made for the US has ever survived even the slightest scrutiny of feasibility. If you’ve seen one that has, please feel free to enlighten us all.
Your entire comment is the equivalent of you reacting to someone saying “no matter how strong you are, you simply can’t hit the moon with a thrown rock” with all sorts of angry, smug whining about how they’re full of shit and “lying like a snake” because they didn’t talk about any of the physics such a prospect would entail. As if it takes a physics background to realize that’s impossible.
I know my example is simplistic; that’s the fucking point, lmao. You’re mad that I left out variables that would make the goal even harder to achieve, goofball. Holy shit lol
I stopped reading at the obvious “I crunched the numbers” bullshit,
Wouldn’t be hard to do. Imagine we’re talking $1000/month (so $12000/year) UBI being delivered to every adult US citizen (part of what makes UBI UBI is that it is universal, everyone gets it). Let’s also imagine that the administrative costs of doing this are 0, to make the math simpler. There are roughly 258 million adults in the US.
258,000,000 times 12,000 = 3,096,000,000,000 or 3 trillion, 96 billion dollars in funding needed per year to pay for the disbursements (again assuming no administrative costs at all. That’s the amount you’d need to raise in additional revenue as a starting point to fund the program, and it’s something like half the size of the entire US budget or about a tenth of the current total US debt if you prefer. Some of that is going to cycle back into tax revenue, some you could get by taxing the super wealthy, some more will come from the economic activity created as a consequence that will cycle that money around a few times, but it’s a big amount of revenue to generate from…somewhere and adding an additional 3 trillion of debt every year beyond the current debt spending isn’t really sustainable.
Worker co-ops
There is literally nothing that stops someone starting a business from organizing it as a worker co-op.
That’s what I’m sayin.
While there is a list of cooperatives with varying degrees of worker-ownership and company profit, what usually stops them is the allure of money and how a business owner can easily embrace the long-standing culture of becoming a micro-baron and controlling the flow of wealth without any worry of repercussion or losses.
Too late for that, that’s the problem.
Yeah absolutely true. Frankly I don’t think we’ll be able to unfuck ourselves before it’s much too late from a climate viewpoint – and I’m not entirely convinced we haven’t already passed the point of no return
What’s the most amount of resources that it should be legal to acquire?
The answer is either “None of it” or “No more than you need”, depending on how based you are.
No personal ownership at all? If someone likes that picture you drew, then they should have as much right to it as you?
Without going into the difference between personal and private property, yes, copyright law is bullshit
I agree that copyright is bullshit. We’ve been watching it get the shit kicked out of it for 20 years. I can’t imagine it’s got much more fight in it. I think both personal and private property will not go down nearly so easily - people really really like their special purple pants and their cozy familiar bedrooms.
Accumulation should be removed, there should be no individual Capital Owners trying to collect more and more and more.
Can you clarify a bit more? I have enough money where I could stop working for the next 8 or 9 months if I chose. Should I be allowed to keep this?
What about my neighbor, his house is 3x the size of my wife’s and mine, and he lives alone. He could sell one of his three cars and survive for a year if he had to. I’m sure he has a savings that could last him 5 years or more. How much should he be allowed to keep? Or should he just be forced to take a vacation until he gets closer to average?
Or should the cap be more around one lifetimes worth of savings?
We are within Capitalism, so without replacing it with a better system, we cannot remove accumulation.
I am not advocating for putting a cap on accumulation in Capitalism, I am advocating for replacing the entire Capitalist system with one where accumulation is not only impossible, but unnecessary and unwanted.
Capitalism will naturally burn itself out by eventually resulting in such an efficient creation mechanism that there will be no more scarcity. Maybe this mechanism won’t care about preserving humanity, though, so that might suck. I suspect that trying to replace capitalism with something else would just make it continue on in a different costume so it can continue its mission.
Capitalism is juat a reflection of human nature. Not many people are genuinely interested in living in a way that isn’t selfish. It is a spectrum, but have you ever met anyone who always puts the necessities of everyone one else above at least some unnecessary pleasure for themself?
Capitalism will naturally destroy itself, yes. Socialism will then be the next step.
Capitalism isn’t a reflection of human nature, it has been around for less than 1% of Humanity.
I think this is where capitalist understanding of capital goes into contradiction with marxist understanding of capital. I won’t go over everything in Das Kapital that relates to this topic, but I’ll give the short gist. Capitalism takes a very general “everything is capital” approach which means whatever money you collect is capital. Marx defined capital different to show the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system. From the point of view of money it becomes capital when you use that money for the specific purpose of making more money.
Let’s say you give someone the tools to make a thing and then you pay them $40 to make that thing. You then sell that thing for $50 making $10 for yourself from that. If we imagine this as a black box, you put in $40 and you get $50. Collect until you have $80 and then you get back $100. That is capital. You do nothing but you make money and you use that money to make more money.
What isn’t capital is if it costs you $40 to make something, you sell that thing for $50, you take that $10, collect until it’s a million and then buy a house or something. That is not capital because that’s the product of your labor and that money returns into circulation.
You’re allowed to keep your money because you’ve earned it. Your neighbor is allowed to keep his house, his cars and all the savings assuming he did the worth to earn it. There is no actual cap beyond what you’re capable of earning from your labor. I won’t get into the “what if he didn’t earn it” or the “Person X made billions of their own work” discussions because I’m not here for that. I’m here to give a quick explanation to your questions because we’re not taught Marxism. The outcomes of Marxism comes across as very nonsensical and puzzling, when all you’ve been taught is capitalism. If you don’t care to read Das Kapital this is a good summary where the 4-5th video starts to get into the meat of the subject
Thanks for the videos.
It would be amazing if there really was a black box that could guarantee $40 in and $50 out! Sign me up, lol! As it is, the best capitalism has done is ($40 and research in) and (a chance at $50 out). If that first box existed, then everyone would use it. Many people think it exists, and then they are confused when the box just eats their money. That’s because they naively neglected the research input and didn’t realise that it was only ever a chance at $50.
It does exist, it’s called being the owner of a company or in modern times, being an investor.
From Marxs critique those people were factory owners. The factory made X amount of money and the owner chose how it gets split between him and the workers. The factory owners only input in the labor process is owning the tools, they themselves don’t put any labor into what the factory produces.
In modern times you still see the same thing in some companies that are big enough that the owner doesn’t do any work but small enough to not be publicly traded (obviously with some exceptions like Valve corporation), but usually the “owner” is replaced by a board of investors. The investors don’t do any actual work, their input is cash and in return they get more cash back. And what’s the requirement to be an investor? To already have a large amount of money. That’s why everyone can’t do, because they don’t have that kind of money and they never will.
This is why leftists are against billionaires and such, because they’re essentially leeches. The vast majority if not all of them didn’t earn that money, their wealth comes from the collective pocket of the workers like you and me. We do the work, we make the money and they take a part of it because they own our workplace.
You’re assuming that all possible future economic systems would have to work the same way as our current one. Even in the current one eg. taxation could be used to limit wealth after some arbitrary amount of millions owned, but note that I’m not advocating for this, just illustrating the point
I assumed you meant we should be taxing people who make too much money or just not allowing them to acquire more resources. Although this stuff is easily beaten since the people who enforce the taxes are the puppets of actually powerful people who have lots of wealth. I was just curious where you thought that line should be.
I think the actual future will be much more like an AI-powered hippy commune where money is mostly just found in history lessons. Maybe the most powerful people/entities will have something like money in their negotiations, but not the average person. I think this will naturally come about as a result of our current system.
Good luck trying to enforce “this thing you purchased cannot under any circumstances appreciate in value”, lol
Why would I? I am talking about implementing Socialism, not simply trying to achieve Socialism within Capitalism.
Wrong! I agree with you and OP but I also don’t know what the word “wrong” means!
They should exsist, as a footnote in human history.
Nah there should be a whole chapter about oligarchs that make future people go “what the fuck”. Hopefully followed by the one about how we no longer have oligarchs that makes future people go “based”.
%100. No one needs that much money to live comfortably. It is a mental disorder.
“Hey, this stuff you bought/created 40 years ago? It’s worth a lot more now, so you have a mental disorder.”
if something you bought 40 years ago is worth billions then it is probably a part of the mental illness yes
Wealth on that level requires exploitation. No ethical person would engage in the practices necessary in order to become a billionaire.
sounds a bit like the people whose statues are being toppled now a days
Fellas, is it regarded to consider a good or service valuable?
Only if that service doesn’t exploit others.
Which with billionaires is never.
Why would I want to change your mind‽
No. Will not change your mind
Stop using this fucking format
They almost successfully erased the asshole in it, but the mug still has his name.
Are you a bot? If yes, nice bot.
This format is so cringe.
No I’m just sick of it because of the piece of shit who is normally in the image
Who wouldn’t be?
deleted by creator
Is the line right at billion, how rich should people be allowed to be?
Should it matter how the money was acquired?
Should everyone always have to have the same amount of money as everyone else?
Personally, I don’t care how much someone accrues in their life. I do think there should be a cap on inheritance. Peg that cap to some multiple of the minimum wage, let’s say 1million, then if billionaires want to pass on more than $7.25 million they need to raise the minimum wage.
Tax 'em when they die and move on.
Money shouldn’t exist. Hope that helps!
How should goods and services be exchanged?
Should everything be done with bartering?
Basic needs and resources should be provided, the rest by bartering or agreement, yes.
Have you seen Star Trek?
Money would like immediately be reinvented.
“I need my window repaired but I don’t know how to do it”
“I can repair windows but I need someone to help my sick dog”
“I can diagnose animals but I need someone to translate Spanish”.
"I can translate Spanish but I need someone to deliver this package "
They’re not going to all line up and do a series of trades. Someone’s going to be like "what if I give you a token, and we all agree that token is worth work? Then you can take that token to anyone*
Nobody is advocating for keeping the current system and simply removing the concept of money. Money is of course a necessity of the current system, but need not be if the system itself is changed.
The person I replied to literally said “the rest by bartering or agreement”. I guess you could stir money is an agreement but that’s not what I took from their message
Also how are you going to solve the scenario I provided?
Collective ownership of Capital. You don’t need money in every system.
Money is a unit of measurement. This is as insane as talking about removing the concept of length.
No, money is a commodity used to exchange commodities. You can have a functional society without relying on markets.
Star Trek has replicators.
It does, but we have the means to provide the basic needs for everyone already, no replicators required.
We do, but it requires a good deal of manual labour. Which isn’t something people will just do for fun. Even someone who enjoys sowing isn’t going to want to spend all day in a factory making t-shirts, for example.
I don’t like taking out the trash and my partner doesn’t like doing the dishes but we both do them happily because we understand when we contribute to the household we both benefit in vastly greater measure than our individual efforts.
What about if you make flower necklaces and you want a remote-controlled truck, but the person making trucks doesn’t want necklaces? Should you need to go ask all the people making truck parts if they want to trade with you so that you can trade with the truck maker? What if you can’t find anyone who wants to trade with you who also has things that the truck maker wants?
People used to barter long ago, that gradually shifted into everyone bartering for a specific type of seashell. Seashells are the most used “currency” in history. They were really great as a currency because you could measure them individually, or weigh lots of them for bigger trades. Some people stuck with the old bartering system without using seashells, but they didn’t get the stuff they wanted nearly as easily. Eventually, some people switched from seashells to other things that worked even better for them, gold being a very popular one. Alchohol was one for a long time as well. Even muslims that wouldn’t drink it still used it as currency. The advent of strong liquors was incredible because it allowed for easier transport of large quantities of wealth when compared to beer or cider.
One of the most surprising currencies was massive carved donut shaped rocks. They were not divisible, but they were extremely hard to steal since they were so heavy.
I’ve seen a few episodes of Star Trek long ago, back when it was on TV. Did they have a successful barter system?
You seem to think the flower crown maker is making them for profit. You’re stuck in the capitalist mentality. We shouldn’t be defined by what we do and we shouldn’t only do that which is for monetary gain. I don’t want somebody needlessly making an endless supply of flower crowns, I want a person free to make flower crowns only when they want to for pleasure.
Absolutely. I would love for them to be free to make them as well without any worry about survival. I just don’t think that anyone should be able to go to them and demand that they have to give them their flower crowns that they just spent all weekend making. They have friends that they want to give these flower crowns to in exchange for other cute accessories.
Also, I think that if someone spends 3 months making an RC truck, then the flower maker should not be allowed to demand they give them a truck simply because they make flowers crowns that the truck maker doesnt want. The truck maker wants to give this truck to the drone maker who is going to give him a drone.
What have I said that implies they would get to demand anything? Where I have I said everyone gets to have everything they want?
Why does the truck maker need anything? Why can’t he just give the truck for free if his basic needs and resource requirements are being met?
The truck maker spent many years learning how to make trucks, and even still, it is very exhausting and time-consuming. They can’t make very many. Because of this, there are not enough trucks for everyone who wants them. The truck maker likes rare and difficult-to-make things, so they prefer to give their trucks to other people who are willing and able to give them rare and difficult-to-make things.
Honestly, the flower necklaces are kind of sweet. The truck maker can tell that the flower maker tried to put a little smiley face on them, but they fall apart very easily, and any child can make dozens of them in an afternoon.
Then the flower crown maker doesn’t get to have a truck, but that’s okay because all of their needs are still being met. Utopia doesn’t mean everyone having everything they want all the time, it just means having everything they need
I remember watching an intervew with a philosopher dedicated to answering those questions. She says that, in her country (Norway or somewhere near, I can’t remember), surveys show that the majority of citizens consider having 2 million dollars the max amount a family of 4 should have before being “too much money any family should have”. So she suggests putting a cap at 10 millions for an individual. In her country, that’s officially more than enough while not detering people to try to become “rich”. Big emphasis on “in her country”. She believes it should be very dependant of the amount and quality of public services. Good quality and cheap public education etc.
Workers should collectively own the Means of Production and direct it democratically as they see fit.
More and more companies are replacing workers with independent contractors who are running their own businessness where they are in complete control. We have now begun seeing some workers be replaced by AI, and this is a trend that will only continue to grow. This means that we are heading to a future that you described, a board of directors, or maybe even a single CEO who is the sole worker in a company and has complete control.
That’s not collective ownership, nor would it actually be a viable system, when production costs are practically 0 there will be no profits.
Why does reducing production costs reduce profits?
If everyone in a company are equal owners, then how is that not collective ownership?
Excellent question. Where do you believe prices come from? We can work from there.
As for individually owned companies of single people, that’s just a bunch of sole proprietorships. I mean the whole of society should own the whole of Capital.
Prices come from what people are willing to pay. Sure, in a distant future where there are super cheap and available robots to make everything with no human labor, everything is free. In the meantime, due to current ownership differences, if you are selling something and your cost of production decreases, but your prices stay the same, then your profits increase.
Who do you imagine choosing what society wants? As of now, we are at a technological wall when it comes to provably fair voting systems. Nobody has invented one yet. Even something as simple as presidential elections are just trust based. Even if we had a hypothetical way for us to all vote on how all resources are used, people simply don’t have the time or interest to constantly be voting on every decision of resources.
Prices come from supply, demand, and value. Prices will naturally fall to Cost of Production where there is Competition. I suggest reading Wage Labor and Capital if you want a thorough explanation, prices don’t materialize out of mid-air.
Society can choose what society wants. You can elect managers and government functions to allocate, manage, and distribute production.
More and more companies are replacing workers with independent contractors who are running their own businessness where they are in complete control.
Lol. In many cases, that’s just a tax dodge. I worked as an “independent contractor” for a cleaning company once, they supplied the equipment and told me where to go and when and what to do, same with all the other workers. The only formal employees were management and the only difference for us was fewer benefits.
Maybe you should step back and realize you’re defending billionaires. Idk if you realize just how much money a billion dollars is. No single person should ever have that much material power, that is an insane amount of money.
At what point should we defend someone’s weath?
100m?
10m?
1m?
100k?
10k?
1 dollar?
How about never?
I’m not defending billionaires. I just don’t care about them because of the amount of money that they have. If they are assholes, then I judge them based on that. Maybe in order to become a billionaire, you have to be an asshole, in which case they are all assholes. I just don’t see the very act of being a certain amount wealthy as itself in itself issue. If Bezos were to wire a billion bucks into your account right now, would you instantly become an asshole? Of course not, that’s absurd.
Life sucked more for everyone before there were billionaires, so who am I to say that I know for sure that they make life worse for everyone? Maybe life would be better in a system in which they can’t exist, I don’t know, and to act like I do know 100% would be disingenuous. Sure, I get that people claim they can perfectly imagine how life in completely different complex systems with billions of individuals would be, but I just don’t choose to give such high regard to my own very hypothetical imaginations. I’m suspicious of people who claim to have such a perfect ability to simulate possible alternate realities in their minds. Especially when they also can’t seem to be able to use their incredible mental powers to get their life comfortable enough to be able to see just what an incredible time it is to be alive.
The immense majority of extremely wealthy people had to be assholes in order to accrue that much money, but even if that wasn’t the case, I would still argue against that much unequality. Why? In a market system, offer of goods and services is determined by how much money each layer of society has: if the poorest people have very little money in comparison with the richest people, the market is going to put less resources and work into providing for cheap, basic needs in comparison to offering vastly luxurious, expensive high tier items.
If everyone alive today could all of a sudden live with the comfort and security that they would have with an extra 3 zeros at the end of their bank statement, but the richest .01% get to have an extra 9 zeros at the end of theirs, should we do it? Would you like to increase inequality in this way, or do you prefer things the way they currently are?
Again: Money is relative. If everyone gets 3 extra zeros on their total money, everyone has the same purchasing power than they had before, so prices would multiply by 1000 and no one would be any richer or poorer. If on top of that, the richest .01% get 6 or 9 extra zeros, then everyone else is getting poorer.
That wasn’t my question. Of course, money is relative. I’m saying if the quality of life were to increase for everyone as if they all had an extra 3 zeros with today’s spending power. Would you like this to happen even if the richest got the spending power or an extra 9 zeros. Inequality would be greater, but we would all be better off. Would you like things to be less equal if this is the case?
Inequality isn’t the worst possible thing. We all almost all way better off than the richest people 100 years ago. Things are way better than ever before, that’s fantastic. If a side effect is that I have to know that Bezos can buy ten story yachts, IDGAF.
I would accept the trade, but it’s a nonsensical one. The economy isn’t a zero sum game, but unequality does harm the economy.
I think the question could be summarised as, how much is “enough”? Is it enough to live on? Enough to feel secure that you know you could pay for that big ticket item? Is that big ticket item the necessity you need or have to pay for?
And for that, alot of people have different lines that are deemed enough.
Exactly. Everyone has their own line. Some people are content to sit in the woods and live off of the land. Some people are content living a life of bartering without as many interesting things to spend their time with. The majority of people are not content no matter what they have. They are always looking for a way to get more than they have now, however much it is.
The trick to justifying extinction level greed is to ask people to draw a fine line between needs and wants.
You are not wrong. But there are a lot of people who would draw the line either before or after extinction level greed.
Whoa! Which one of these questions do people not like and why?
They only exist because we allow it.
I don’t mind billionaires existing, but I absolutely mind them getting special treatment and getting away with crimes.
edit: if you’re mad about this comment, I have to think you’re just jealous of the rich assholes. If billionaires paid their fair share of taxes and were prosecuted for crimes, the world would be objectively a better place. Instead, I guess for some that’s not enough, it’s a fully socialist world or NOTHING.
No one is “mad” at your comment. People just think it’s stupid to think inequality should exist
I never said fuck-all about what should exist. I said “I don’t mind [with an important caveat]”. Indicating that I’d prefer a step toward equality than a less realistic absolutist approach to it
There can be no billionaires without inequality. If you’re ok with billionaires existing, you’re ok with inequality.
Right. Absolutism is the only way.
Humanity will destroy itself because of this mind virus. All or nothing. Destroys lives at every level and it will lead to our extinction. But go ahead and embrace it. Because you’re RIGHT, after all.
I also hate that people don’t want bad things instead of wanting bad things with a little less bad. Fucking absolutists.
By painting me as “wanting inequality” you have freed yourself from considering another perspective. You don’t need to care about details like “basically no one on Lemmy would actually believe that” or “I’ve demonstrated that’s false”. Congratulations. Thought and actual conversation avoided. Me bad, you good.
You may not want inequality, but that’s, by definition, what a world with billionaires has. Wether you want it or not.
A genuine attempt at civil discussion:
What you’re pointed at is that, unless the world’s GDP suddenly skyrockets millions of percents, we can’t make everyone a billionaire.
And if only select few can be billionaires, this is inequality.
Thereby, what is suggested is to redistribute money more evenly so that non-billionaires (i.e. pretty much everyone) could enjoy a better life, as opposed to few people buying their second golden toilet for the sake of it.
I’m not sure I follow. Thanks for seemingly being non-reactionary though.
If I could wave a magic wand, I’d first come up with some new form of socialism where maybe not everyone is 100% equal, but where literally everyone would get to live a fully comfortable life without fear of death or suffering. They’d get to take extended vacations and have fully paid healthcare. No starvation and no being limited to the shittiest food available. Maybe some people could have more than that, if they accomplished something to justify it.
Since I don’t have that magic wand, I’d just settle for billionaires paying equal percentages of taxes and being jailed when they break the law.
Apparently, suggesting the latter, for a lot of these commenters, means that I am a huge capitalist who loves inequality. Because I couldn’t possibly recognize that capitalism is both a huge piece of shit in practice but also does provide motivation to workers.
that capitalism […] does provide motivation to workers
I wonder how all of those people in other civilisations survived which didn’t had a capitalistic system.
In other words: I hope you’re aware that capitalism is not the only way to motivate people to do stuff. As if people weren’t interested in ensuring their survival or even progress.
Essentially, equality is directly proportional to the share of economy regular people enjoy, the only question is how equality affects the size of the economy itself.
In my opinion, billionaires should absolutely be taxed more, in percentage terms, and consideration should be taken to nationalization of industries further down the road.
mind virus
uh oh
From the evil garbage can, I wish you happiness in your completely duelist attitude.
People just think it’s stupid to think inequality should exist
This has to be some of the most naive text I’ve ever read.
Inequality will never not exist. Humans are not equally talented, equally diligent, equally intelligent, etc. They don’t have equally-capable bodies, they don’t have equal desires.
My coworker is lazy and chronically late, I’m not. You will never convince me or anyone with a functioning cerebrum that we deserve to be paid the same. And that’s just one tiny example.
I’m talking about systemic inequality not your workplace drama.
Even if meritocracy wasn’t a fairy tale, no one deserves to have more money than they could possibly spend in 10 lifetimes while others starve, regardless of how much you hate your dumbass coworker.
I’m talking about systemic inequality not your workplace drama.
So am I, goofball, hence the ‘one tiny example’ word choice and the fact that it was a tidbit at the very end of the comment. Sneaky, pathetic evasion attempt.
Time for some reality checks you seem to desperately need:
- The poor aren’t poor because billionaires exist. There are far more billionaires in the world than there were 100 years ago, and yet, somehow, global poverty was several orders of magnitude worse back then.
- Net worth is a price tag, not cash money, and cash money is what the poor lack. As an example, if Amazon suddenly ceased to exist tomorrow, its $1 trillion plus of value would also vanish. Not a single poor person would get a single extra dollar in their wallet if that happened.
- The US spends about $1.2 trillion, with a T, every year on welfare programs and the like. The combined net worth of all US billionaires is $5.2 trillion. Even assuming for the sake of argument that we could wave a magic wand and convert, straight across, that net worth figure into cash money one to one, the implication that increasing a year’s welfare benefits payouts by 4.3x, ONCE, would actually have any measurable effect on long-term poverty, is pitiably ignorant. Hell, the vast majority of poor multi-million lottery winners are broke again inside of a couple of years.
- No one, regardless of how wealthy they are or aren’t, ought to give any amount of care to how much wealth you think they deserve to have.
Once again, it’s abundantly clear that hurting the rich is a higher priority for than helping the poor, for those pushing these lines of rhetoric.
First, I’d like to say that I personally don’t have a problem with someone wanting to be a billionaire or even being a billionaire. I have a problem with how they get there and what they do when they get there.
The question above was whether or not billionaires should exist, NOT how do we solve poverty or hunger or anything else.
I think you keep approaching this incorrectly. You simply equate the number of billionaires with the number of poor or something like that. That is not HOW billionaires cause poverty. Billionaires have influence over those who make laws. Laws that favor them and not us (us being the non-ultrawealthy). They also usually own or control major corporations which employ us. This gives them the ability to hold wages low. There are a myriad variety of other ways they influence who is poor and who is not and how we are treated. They also have a major influence over people’s lives. As an example Jeff Bezos has billions of dollars yet there are many documented cases of employees at Amazon being so pressured to make him and the others at the top more money, that they can’t even use the fricken bathroom. I believe this is a certain mentality that is shared amongst most, if not all, billionaires and it is despicable.
Do you think it was the average voter who thought it was a great idea to keep the federal minimum wage stagnant for a decade, as if inflation simply didn’t exist? If you work full time for minimum wage, you will be very close to the federal poverty level. I don’t think that’s a fair way to treat a hard working, productive citizen of a wealthy country like the United States.
If you think welfare is a handout that isn’t going to help, fine, then let’s start at the top and remove the welfare that is so readily doled out to major corporations two third of which don’t pay taxes. I personally won’t complain too much about handing taxpayer money to taxpayers.
The middle class isn’t sending jobs overseas. Poor people aren’t giving illegal immigrants American jobs. Minimum wage earners, I’m guessing, don’t have lobbyists. No one offered ME the opportunity to buy shares of Facebook during the IPO.
I personally don’t suggest just marching into a billionaires home and ripping cash straight from their hands (not sure I would cry about it at this point, though). What I mean is, the system should be set up in such a way that is not so unfairly biased toward them. I mean if the system was fair, they wouldn’t exist because they wouldn’t be handed all of the wealth in the first place, but WE don’t make those decisions. THEY do! If you own 80% of America, you should pay for 80% of America.
Most of the changes you are suggesting can’t be legislated. What are you going to do about single parent households? Create a law forbidding divorce? Force people to remarry after a loved one dies. And exactly how would I put this massive amount of energy I’m using to create this post into helping someone on welfare? As if complaining online is so much energy you could somehow power a city off of it.
NO, they emphatically should NOT exist.
The question above was whether or not billionaires should exist, NOT how do we solve poverty or hunger or anything else.
And my point is that the former is a complete waste of time and energy, because a society with any size gap of wealth between the poorest and the wealthiest, but also a society with no one in poverty, is absolutely more desirable than a society with less or even no wealth gap, but which has people in poverty.
I think you keep approaching this incorrectly. You simply equate the number of billionaires with the number of poor or something like that. That is not HOW billionaires cause poverty.
But the fact that this demographic’s growth in numbers is negatively correlated with the incidence of poverty, is a pretty big wrench in the assertion that their existence causes poverty.
You’ve assumed that billionaires cause poverty, but I’m a step before you. I’m not convinced their existence has a significant causal relationship with poverty, not least because of the above.
At the very least, the above fact needs to be contended with, before moving further. You need to explain, or at least hypothesize, how it can be true that billionaires’ actions increase poverty, if as the number of billionaires goes up, poverty goes down.
I’m reminded of when anti-porn activists would claim in the earlier days of the Internet that the proliferation of Internet porn would cause rape and sexual assault to spike massively. There are still such activists out there, still making that same argument, despite the fact that all the data shows that as Internet porn became more widespread, the incidence of sexual crimes actually DEcreased. In fact, “plummeted” would be a fair description, imo.
Most of the changes you are suggesting can’t be legislated.
That’s true. A top-down approach won’t solve these problems, as they’re largely cultural and self-perpetuating (find a girl who got pregnant at 15/16, and chances are good that her mother was under the age of 20 when she got pregnant with her daughter, as well). Education/awareness/outreach and similar, are the only real way to get there, but it needs to be a true, concerted, dedicated, continued effort, and right now, there’s only pockets of it scattered around, far as I can tell.
As a grim example, in the 1960s, the Moynihan Report was put out by a guy who was essentially freaking out over the current incidence of ‘fatherlessness’ in the black population, and calling for action to be taken. Today, we know more than ever about how much worse off kids are (financially, to my point, but also in many other ways) who aren’t raised in stable, two-parent homes are, and today, there isn’t a single racial demographic in the US that doesn’t have a higher rate of single parenthood than the black population did at the time of that Report. And yet, today, despite everything, even beginning to talk about these issues is political suicide, no one will even touch the topic.
What I’m trying to say is that we’ve got much bigger fish to fry, if the goal is reducing/eradicating poverty. And if indeed y’all care more about whether someone should be “allowed” to have a net worth beyond some arbitrary point, than that, then all I have to say is that you’ve lost the plot.
My coworker is lazy […] I’m not.
And if we now think about why you see this as a bad thing, we can see how deeply brainwashed you were by our capitalistic, profit-driven, society.
Should we not be equally dignified? Should someone be considered lesser than you for being late?
Why the fuck is Gritty a member of Crowder’s mug club? Fucking cancelled.
(If you’re not going to fully Photoshop that fascist out of the meme, use the Calvin & Hobbes version)
This one, right?
Gritty is really a far leftist on X:
I’m not clicking that fucking spam link.
Thought this guy looked familiar, turns out I was thinking of the Honey Monster from UK ads in the 90s.
Has gritty acknowledged this relation???
Many have promised that when they die the money should be used for charity. Warren Buffet started this trend.
The bad part here is they can waste all the money however they want and nothing can stop them. Example, they buy cars just to blow them up, not one but 1000. They can afford it. Good for the environment? No, but fun for them as they might have found a new sport.
Often the “claims” of donating the money are complete bullshit. They set up their own charities that they or their children control and “donate” The money to it.
It is just another way to evade taxes and perseverance their generational wealth
Lots of Zimbabweans would disagree.
I’m with Jesse Ventura on this one. There should be a Maximum wage
