Everytime I look at small problems or big global problems, if you follow the money trail, it all leads to some billionaire who is either working towards increasing their wealth or protecting their wealth from decreasing.
Everything from politics, climate change, workers rights, democratic government, technology, land rights, human rights can all be rendered down to people fighting another group of people who defend the rights of a billionaire to keep their wealth or to expand their control.
If humanity got rid of or outlawed the notion of any one individual owning far too much money than they could ever possibly spend in a lifetime, we could free up so much wealth and energy to do other things like save ourselves from climate change.
Why are you do concerned just about billionaires? Why don’t add millionaires to the pool too?
Yup. This is why the world had no problems before billionaires existed.
The problems were always the same since we left the cave our ancestors emerged from … modern billionaires only exacerbate the existing problems we always had a billion times more.
They are also the ones stonewalling everyone’s incentive to want to do anything significant about our world’s problems. Instead of doing anything to fight about climate change which will severely affect our world … we are fighting regional wars that shouldn’t even be conflicts in the first place. And yes, much of the global problems we are facing today stem from a global corporate system which is controlled by a handful of billionaires … they are the root of why we fight and they are also the solution to how these conflicts will end.
Fuckin, extremely doubt it, this strikes me as an extreme oversimplification. You’d get tons of abuse from governments still, just as we did pre-huge amounts of disproportionate wealth, you’d still get tons of slightly poorer but still pretty rich people banding together in interest groups to get their shit passed which would probably also include like, suburban moms in SUVs that were created from white flight.
More than any of that, you wouldn’t be solving the core human behavior, of picking short term gains as a strategy to scale up quicker and with more force, to crush or more easily control your opposition, than any strategy which remains morally better, mutually beneficial, and promises better long term gains. It’s not just like, stupidity and dumb luck, that causes/has caused the structure of society to turn out like this. Outlawing billionaires just means that they’d take the financial system and cause hyperdeflation, or that they’d pivot to exercising more forms of soft power. More than that I kind of disagree with this extremely common messaging around this issue because I think it oversimplifies things to the point of basically being wrong, even though it’s highly agreeable at first and second glance.
True and I agree with most of what you said … but I would prefer a world where power was distributed to more people than concentrated to a small group of people.
It wouldn’t solve the world’s problems because we all seem to have a hard time existing with one another. But at the very least, it would make it far easier for us to solve our problems everywhere.
It’s actually quite difficult to cause hyper-flation in either direction. You generally need an external destination for the money that’s outside the economy being targeted. Japan had a deflationary economy for 30 years, which was produced by falling population numbers and negative interest rates. Their quality of life didn’t drastically decline, just the international purchasing power of the yen (and even that wasn’t too bad).
Let’s say you get to pass a law in the USA that would make it illegal to have more than a billion dollars. How would you formulate this law and what would you expect to happen when it’s passed?
You’d probably format it as a percentage of GDP per capita, as it’s about limiting wealth disparity (and thus protecting social mobility), distributing wealth growth nationally, and limiting the concentration of financial interest as it’s a threat to national and democratic security.
You’d probably want it accompanies by various studies that show that that large wealth disparities are detrimental to social mobility (aka the ability to “work your way up” in classes), and probably some political science papers on the ills of concentrations of wealth.
You’d probably want it to come into force along with laws that limit campaign contributions and big money donors in politics… get rid of that whole “political donations are protected as political speech” crap… and you’d probably want it as a wealth tax that pays into a sovereign wealth fund with rules on what it can be used for.
There wouldn’t be an immediate law to just have a roving gang of enforcers knock down a billionaire’s door and send them to jail … that is just wishful thinking.
Billionaire’s would still continue to exist except that anything beyond a certain level of wealth is just taxed either completely or near fully. It would remove the incentive for anyone to own or gain billions of dollars. And it wouldn’t occur immediately, it would take years, decades or even lifetimes to make a difference.
Wealth is just one means of power. Destroying all billionaires, while a good step, would not even come close to solving almost every problem in the world.
Throughout history power has been used to obtain wealth and comfort. So if you remove the ability to leverage power for wealth, you remove the primary motivator for obtaining power for most people. There are certainly people who want power for the sake of power, but most people want power to obtain comfort.
Right now billionaires are a huge bottleneck to global development and those people who actually want to do something about our worlds problems. Getting rid of them won’t solve our world’s problems … it will just make our problems easier to solve. Leaving them alone means our problems persist while they actively block everyone else from dealing with the world’s problems.
