Billionaires Should Not Exist

[d0rkyd00d]

How many agree with just this basic premise?

The idea that one human, one lone animal, one "evolved" primate, is entitled to own such a large amount of resources, while so many others are suffering due to insufficient resources, I think will be viewed by future generations hundreds of years from now as an obvious moral blind spot, akin to how morally repugnant we find slavery from a current perspective.

I would argue that the entire monetary system / economy is artificial and to an extent arbitrary. It is a machination, a love child born from both blind evolutionary forces of progress, and human input fueled by our most primal and most sophisticated desires.

There is no law intrinsic to the fabric of the universe, or even within free market capitalism, that dictates the recipient of profits from labor or goods is entitled to keep 100% of those profits, and IMO, it doesn't seem like a good idea in general to allow any individual to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth.

Yes, the line drawn would need to be arbitrary. Where would you draw it?

[Pedro I Rengel]

Dude hahahhahaha you said you liked a Hitler quote.

How is anybody supposed to take you seriously now?

[Pedro I Rengel]

I didn't even trick you.

It said "Hitler" right there at the bottom.

[phoneutria]

i think you probably don't know
nearly as much as the economists
and company executives
therefore you should retire yourself
to your place of ignorance
and let the people who know what their doing
make all the important decisions
and just trust that they have your best interests at heart
seewhatididthere?

[Pedro I Rengel]

Though in this case it's true.

See the two options he presents is to blindly accept "expert" advise or to make up reasons to reject it. Nazi-think, basic.

The third option is looking into it, understanding the subject thoroughly, and then making an opinion.

Didn't even occur to this poor bastard.

[obsrvr524]

The third option is looking into it, understanding the subject thoroughly, and then making an opinion.

Too much work. But at least he did ask the question (not that he will listen seriously to any answers).

[Urwrongx1000]

The ignorance of Socialists, Marxists, and Communists is limitless.

[Karpel Tunnel]

i think you probably don't know
nearly as much as the economists
and company executives
therefore you should retire yourself
to your place of ignorance
and let the people who know what their doing
make all the important decisions
and just trust that they have your best interests at heart
seewhatididthere?

bullseye!

[Gloominary]

How many agree with just this basic premise?

The idea that one human, one lone animal, one "evolved" primate, is entitled to own such a large amount of resources, while so many others are suffering due to insufficient resources, I think will be viewed by future generations hundreds of years from now as an obvious moral blind spot, akin to how morally repugnant we find slavery from a current perspective.

I would argue that the entire monetary system / economy is artificial and to an extent arbitrary. It is a machination, a love child born from both blind evolutionary forces of progress, and human input fueled by our most primal and most sophisticated desires.

There is no law intrinsic to the fabric of the universe, or even within free market capitalism, that dictates the recipient of profits from labor or goods is entitled to keep 100% of those profits, and IMO, it doesn't seem like a good idea in general to allow any individual to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth.

Yes, the line drawn would need to be arbitrary. Where would you draw it?

Not sure if I agree.
I think there should be UBI, like 1000 dollars a month, that or what they call a living wage.
Pretty hard to abuse 1000 dollars, only enough to pay for rent, or food and other bills.
Unfortunately the political establishment won't give us anything like that without terminating our democracy, freedom and small businesses, which's what they intend to do, yet the masses keep reelecting them.

[Gloominary]

These days, most people on this forum, and in general, fall into 1 of 3 camps, the statists, the libertarians and the centrists.
The statists usually trust the state, libertarians rarely do, and centrists are somewhere in the middle.
The statists usually trust academia and MSM, especially the hard sciences, the libertarians often don't, particularly the soft sciences, which they believe have been infiltrated by Marxists and progressives.
The statists usually lean globalist, the libertarians nationalist.
I'm kind of on my own, because I'd like to see government go after the 1% more, but other than that I'd like to get government out of the way.
And while I'm skeptical of manmade climate change, I think nature conservation, where we don't consume some natural resources faster than they grow back, and nature protection, where we don't consume some natural resources at all, is good thing.
I'm also a nationalist who wants to radically reduce or eliminate all immigration, illegal and legal.
Yea so I don't really fit in, which's fine by me.

[Peter Kropotkin]

How many agree with just this basic premise?

The idea that one human, one lone animal, one "evolved" primate, is entitled to own such a large amount of resources, while so many others are suffering due to insufficient resources, I think will be viewed by future generations hundreds of years from now as an obvious moral blind spot, akin to how morally repugnant we find slavery from a current perspective.

I would argue that the entire monetary system / economy is artificial and to an extent arbitrary. It is a machination, a love child born from both blind evolutionary forces of progress, and human input fueled by our most primal and most sophisticated desires.

There is no law intrinsic to the fabric of the universe, or even within free market capitalism, that dictates the recipient of profits from labor or goods is entitled to keep 100% of those profits, and IMO, it doesn't seem like a good idea in general to allow any individual to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth.

Yes, the line drawn would need to be arbitrary. Where would you draw it?

K: this is an excellent question deserving of some thought....we can't just blindly walk
down the same path that has lead to a failed economic system that forces millions
upon millions of people to live in poverty...... those who have answered you above,
don't have the imagination or intellect to even understand the question... Ignore them....

I would start with limiting individual wealth to 25 billion and anything over that is given to
the government.... but you can hold to 50 billion at the start with the provision
that over time, the amount of money will be reduced to 25 billion and then to
10 billion and corporations, they also need to have limits....
that one is a little trickier, I would say, to start, the limit starts
at 100 billion and drops every couple of years by 10 billion? so within
a few years, not a single corporation is worth 50 billion dollars.....
that is of course a start to level out the massive income inequality problem we
have in the west..... but I am open to the actual numbers we may use.....

Kropotkin

[d0rkyd00d]

How many agree with just this basic premise?

The idea that one human, one lone animal, one "evolved" primate, is entitled to own such a large amount of resources, while so many others are suffering due to insufficient resources, I think will be viewed by future generations hundreds of years from now as an obvious moral blind spot, akin to how morally repugnant we find slavery from a current perspective.

I would argue that the entire monetary system / economy is artificial and to an extent arbitrary. It is a machination, a love child born from both blind evolutionary forces of progress, and human input fueled by our most primal and most sophisticated desires.

There is no law intrinsic to the fabric of the universe, or even within free market capitalism, that dictates the recipient of profits from labor or goods is entitled to keep 100% of those profits, and IMO, it doesn't seem like a good idea in general to allow any individual to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth.

Yes, the line drawn would need to be arbitrary. Where would you draw it?

Not sure if I agree.
I think there should be UBI, like 1000 dollars a month, that or what they call a living wage.
Pretty hard to abuse 1000 dollars, only enough to pay for rent, or food and other bills.
Unfortunately the political establishment won't give us anything like that without terminating our democracy, freedom and small businesses, which's what they intend to do, yet the masses keep reelecting them.

Would you reallocate existing tax dollars to pay for this, or derive from another source?

Appreciate the serious response, also. Grazi.

[d0rkyd00d]

How many agree with just this basic premise?

The idea that one human, one lone animal, one "evolved" primate, is entitled to own such a large amount of resources, while so many others are suffering due to insufficient resources, I think will be viewed by future generations hundreds of years from now as an obvious moral blind spot, akin to how morally repugnant we find slavery from a current perspective.

I would argue that the entire monetary system / economy is artificial and to an extent arbitrary. It is a machination, a love child born from both blind evolutionary forces of progress, and human input fueled by our most primal and most sophisticated desires.

There is no law intrinsic to the fabric of the universe, or even within free market capitalism, that dictates the recipient of profits from labor or goods is entitled to keep 100% of those profits, and IMO, it doesn't seem like a good idea in general to allow any individual to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth.

Yes, the line drawn would need to be arbitrary. Where would you draw it?

K: this is an excellent question deserving of some thought....we can't just blindly walk
down the same path that has lead to a failed economic system that forces millions
upon millions of people to live in poverty...... those who have answered you above,
don't have the imagination or intellect to even understand the question... Ignore them....

I would start with limiting individual wealth to 25 billion and anything over that is given to
the government.... but you can hold to 50 billion at the start with the provision
that over time, the amount of money will be reduced to 25 billion and then to
10 billion and corporations, they also need to have limits....
that one is a little trickier, I would say, to start, the limit starts
at 100 billion and drops every couple of years by 10 billion? so within
a few years, not a single corporation is worth 50 billion dollars.....
that is of course a start to level out the massive income inequality problem we
have in the west..... but I am open to the actual numbers we may use.....

Kropotkin

Thx for the reply PK. So based on your reply, we should continue to allow the existence of individual billionaires, but cap to $10B?

That is much more generous than what I was thinking. I was thinking perhaps any accumulation of wealth over $500mm would be taxed at 99 cents on every dollar (keeping progressive tax system we have currently in U.S.), something along those lines.

[d0rkyd00d]

I would also argue for drastically increasing estate tax, to something like 70%.

[Urwrongx1000]

Socialists are Thieves, shouldn't exist

[phoneutria]

K: this is an excellent question deserving of some thought....we can't just blindly walk
down the same path that has lead to a failed economic system that forces millions
upon millions of people to live in poverty...... those who have answered you above,
don't have the imagination or intellect to even understand the question... Ignore them....

Kropotkin

here you go again kropo
making these unqualified
dramatic sounding claims
and not backing them up with any data

if you're going to advocate for drastic measures
then you data better be iron fucking clad
and i know it ain't

it's disingenuous as fuck
for you to start from a false premise
making an emotional appeal to people's negative perception of the world
essentially letting out a smoke screen
and then offering to put out the fire
when there is no fire
just smoke

because when you look at any quality of life indicator
have your pick of source
and just look at them
for the past 50 years or so
there has been absolutely resounding success

ecmandu

employers always pay as little as possible
but the market itself prevents abuse
because the laws of supply and demand and competition also apply to trained workforce
one cannot pay so little that their labor leaves to work for the competition
thus salary rates go up
thus benefits emerge
thus paid time off is offered

also prices are driven down
which allows the population to live a better life with less money
there hasn't been any other time in history
in which the quality of life which we have now
has been accessible to so many people

mortality rates have dropped dramatically
world poverty and misery are unprecedently low
alphabetization, access to water and sanitation
life expectation
every statistic that you pick, you see drastic improvement just in the last 50 years
so I don't know what everyone is so pissed off about
maybe stop watching the news?

and when i call you out on it
you conveniently forget to reply
i'll make you the same challenge again
same challenge that ecmandu also conveniently forgot to reply
show me the data
let's look at some charts
i love charts

while at that
answer the post from the marxism thread
that i keep pointing out to you
here, I'll paste the exchange here for you
so you don't have to go looking for it
pages 24 and 25 if you need more context

phoneutia:
"don't forget that it is capitalism that is for all effects eliminating absolute poverty from the world
it's not like it's something they put there to replace poverty
it's the thing that is making it go away
so yay for capitalism indeed
and yay for free market"

K: and this is simply not true.. in fact, in the United States, the middle class has
lost ground over the last 40 years, to the point that you basically have two classes
in this country, the upper class and every one else who is in the same boat
of failing wages and a stagnant economy even before the virus shut everything down....
and before you say it, the job growth bragged about by the village idiot is
in service industries and low paying jobs like wal-mart and fast food places...
there was no job growth in areas of that were well paying and had benefits...

look around the world and you will see outside of the industrial west,
Asia, south America and Africa have a great deal of poverty.....
even countries like Mexico, is one step from a failed country.....
and that is one small step.... to complete failure...

Kropotkin

it's true that the middle class in the US is getting smaller, but it's because it's moving up
the amount of families making more than 100K a year went up from 9% to almost 30% since 1970s
while the amount making less than 35K went down from 37% to around 29%
these are from the US census bureau

world poverty and extreme poverty numbers are even more drastic

but anyway
you're factually incorrect and I don't argue about facts
so why dontcha make some good use of your unprecedented middle class comforts
and look up some charts in your free time from the comfort of your home, alright?

oh yeah i forgot to add that before the 70s most women were housewives
the 70s and 80s had a boom of women going into the workforce
also after computers there was a surge of indian immigrant engineers
and these two groups wages are lower than the average white male
so obviously wage average goes down
but that doesn't mean that people are getting paid less
the women went from zero to more than zero
indias went from like dirt cookies and mangoes to US dollars
and mens wages continued to go up
even as the average went down

so like, you average the height of your kids every year
but this year you had a baby
so when you calculate the average you see that it went down
do you go into a panic that your kids are shrinking?
lol kropo fucks sake

https://youtu.be/hWJX9yUKJeQ?t=18

[Gloominary]

How many agree with just this basic premise?

The idea that one human, one lone animal, one "evolved" primate, is entitled to own such a large amount of resources, while so many others are suffering due to insufficient resources, I think will be viewed by future generations hundreds of years from now as an obvious moral blind spot, akin to how morally repugnant we find slavery from a current perspective.

I would argue that the entire monetary system / economy is artificial and to an extent arbitrary. It is a machination, a love child born from both blind evolutionary forces of progress, and human input fueled by our most primal and most sophisticated desires.

There is no law intrinsic to the fabric of the universe, or even within free market capitalism, that dictates the recipient of profits from labor or goods is entitled to keep 100% of those profits, and IMO, it doesn't seem like a good idea in general to allow any individual to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth.

Yes, the line drawn would need to be arbitrary. Where would you draw it?

Not sure if I agree.
I think there should be UBI, like 1000 dollars a month, that or what they call a living wage.
Pretty hard to abuse 1000 dollars, only enough to pay for rent, or food and other bills.
Unfortunately the political establishment won't give us anything like that without terminating our democracy, freedom and small businesses, which's what they intend to do, yet the masses keep reelecting them.

Would you reallocate existing tax dollars to pay for this, or derive from another source?

Appreciate the serious response, also. Grazi.

Right, I'd reallocate as much money from unnecessary expenditures like excessive bureaucracy, corporate welfare for big business and regime change wars to pay for the UBI.
If that wasn't enough to pay for it, I'd increase taxes on the 1% to pay for the rest.

[Gloominary]

Yea, either we should have UBI or a living wage.
I'd subsidize small business owners with the 1%'s income to make sure they weren't harmed by it.
I'd also tax rich Canadian citizens making money outside Canada, so they couldn't escape the higher taxes.

We should also build more affordable housing.

In Canada we already have relatively free healthcare, we should also have free postsecondary education.

[phoneutria]

i have a comment from that marxism thread about taxes also
heavily taxing the people
as a way to fund services for the people
is a fucking illusion

I can say that I am not completely anti-tax and anti-regulation
I don't want to be taken for a radical, I am not
what I'm against is double taxation
if we already pay tax on everything that we buy
we should not be taxed on income
plus there's yearly property tax on vehicles and estate
and on that subject
most services that you mentioned are afforded by the states
state taxes are a rather dignified spending
it's like a membership fee to a club, i am cool with that
cuz you pay a fee and you get services
with federal taxed you pay a fee and you get zip
education is just over 6% of the discretionary federal spending
for the whole fucking country
science takes a whooping 3.5%
military spending is nearly 54%
and most of these soldiers are not securing the borders
they're fighting wars on the other side of the planet
and these are percentages from the discretionary budget
which is just 30% of the gdp
if you compute in the mandatory spending
those percentages nearly disappear in the charts
taxes in murica are not about servicing the people
if you want to stop this absurd scheme of funneling public money out to corps
in exchange for political power and influence
you do that by defunding the federal government
and by taking their power away
but none of this is a conversation for this thread
i won't reply here because I don't want a derailing
if you want to, start a thread on what capitalism really is or whatever

[phoneutria]

in sum
i realize that there are good intentions all around
it sucks to see people struggling
knowing that there is so much wealth
really, there is plenty to go around
and we want to help
but the socialist approach to addressing these good intentions
is completely misguided
it's like treating a symptom
instead of treating the source of the disease
except the treatment of the sympton aggravates the disease
if you look at the actual root of the problem
instead of just following your emotions
like walking cunts
you'd realize
that having an entire infinitesimal little cast of society
whose sole purpose is to hold all the power
and control all the public money
as a central unit
is a way to guarantee a perpetuation of abuse

[Gloominary]

We ought to get rid of sales tax.
We should lower income tax for the 99% and raise it for the 1%.
We need to ensure the 1% are paying their taxes, many of them are circumventing them.
Of course none of this will change so long as we keep reelecting establishment libcons/republicrats.

[Pedro I Rengel]

The problem is, Gloom, if you tax the richest people punitively, they will just pick up their shit and gtfo.

And if you chase them around enough, they will just join this weird, creepy-ass globalist cult and strong-arm governments into destroying competition while bribing politicians to never really have to pay the taxes still.

Think about it, who does millions of "environmental" regulations and "green" energy subsidies help?

Companies that are already so rich they can survive it.

On a more basic level: what role do you or the government have deciding how much money anybody should have? As a separate point, what role does the government have in distributing money?

I actually favour a UBI to most other statist schemes. That one is comparatively mild and benign. In a sane world, this could probably be negociated into reality. But that doesn't make it a great idea. You are not even taking into account things like inflation, or that now employers become far less competitive, and that over decades all low wage jobs will eventually just get exported because no one in that country wants to do them. You would essencially be putting people on life support. Still, like I said, it is among the less hare-brained and could be worked out.

[Pedro I Rengel]

i have a comment from that marxism thread about taxes also
heavily taxing the people
as a way to fund services for the people
is a fucking illusion

I can say that I am not completely anti-tax and anti-regulation
I don't want to be taken for a radical, I am not
what I'm against is double taxation
if we already pay tax on everything that we buy
we should not be taxed on income
plus there's yearly property tax on vehicles and estate
and on that subject
most services that you mentioned are afforded by the states
state taxes are a rather dignified spending
it's like a membership fee to a club, i am cool with that
cuz you pay a fee and you get services
with federal taxed you pay a fee and you get zip
education is just over 6% of the discretionary federal spending
for the whole fucking country
science takes a whooping 3.5%
military spending is nearly 54%
and most of these soldiers are not securing the borders
they're fighting wars on the other side of the planet
and these are percentages from the discretionary budget
which is just 30% of the gdp
if you compute in the mandatory spending
those percentages nearly disappear in the charts
taxes in murica are not about servicing the people
if you want to stop this absurd scheme of funneling public money out to corps
in exchange for political power and influence
you do that by defunding the federal government
and by taking their power away
but none of this is a conversation for this thread
i won't reply here because I don't want a derailing
if you want to, start a thread on what capitalism really is or whatever

This is absolutely true. Like Smears erstwhile talking about raising taxes AND jails are bad.

Well lol you raise taxes you get more jails.

If you defund government, you get less.

If you want soldiers doing their actual job, protecting borders and serving as a powerful deterrent to nutjobs, stop being wishy-washy about people like Trump.

[Pedro I Rengel]

People with crazy global schemes will use armies for crazy global schemes. Why in 2021 we still letting them extort us with "the other side is rassis and wants to kill gays," or the pretty flowers, or "we have plans to help the poor and starving?"

Wake up my beautiful people!

[Pedro I Rengel]

People make fun of the entire Republican philosophy being simply "freedom." The brash simplicity of it. What do you want? Freedom. Period. Give me that freedom.

What they don't realize is that the simplicity is the entire point. We don't want no insane scheme that inevitably includes some form of world domination. Keep it simple. Does it increase freedom? Green light. Does it decrease freedom? Nix it.