And the image/chat was stolen from tumblr, I think?
Reminder that there are only around 750 billionaires in the US. We can eat them.
Or tax them to hell like they did in the 50s I guess. But I prefer the eating thing.
this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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I think billionaires would typically rather get eaten than lose their gains. Hence the willingness to risk human extinction over number not go up so much.
Ide rather ax them than tax them.
Por que no los dos
One of the things that I thought of to help with this problem is, like, what if we figured out how much it costs to meet like all the basics in life - a house (not a rental!), food, soda, internet, heat/hot water - all that stuff. Then add some more, so that people could do nice stuff and enjoy their lives, save for retirement, go on vacations, etc.
Then - now here's the crazy part - we make a law requiring that everyone in the country needs to be paid at least that much money. It would be like a "Floor Wage," or, like, a "Minimum Salary."
If the increase in the cost of doing business didn't eliminate billionaires altogether, I bet people would at least stop giving a shit about billionaires and their gold piles because the rest of us aren't living in debt while they build yachts for their yachts.
The police are thier private security force...
Where's the button I can press to project this comment onto the moon
What can you realistically steal that isn't worth peanuts to them? You could take a car or some jewelry or maybe destroy a building, but their massive hoards are mostly in these intangible things called shares. It only exists on record and it only has value to those who are similarly greedy.
Their life, on the other hand... 🤔
New rule, billionaires must maintain a horde of gold and jewels worth at least 100 million at all times. If it gets stolen they have to make a new one. Anyone can try to steal it, but the billionaires can set lethal traps.
I suspect the most evil rich assholes would set up explosive traps on everything shiny, so that as soon as you pull it or whatever, it blows up. To add insult to injury, you'll also have to hear a sermon about how greed is bad and evil.
ironic, isnt it?
That's way easier, just throw stuff at anything you want to take
Bring in the guilotines!
Sometimes I think it'd be funny if there were a single billionaire on Lemmy watching us make fun of them. Google says there are like 2600 billionaires in the world. I imagine that's pretty unlikely, tho.
But hey - if there are zero billionaires on lemmy, that means we have ourselves a billionaire-free zone!
You wonder if Zuckerbot 9000 uses Threads? 🤔
He won't know we're talking shit if everyone defederates. 😌
Promise you cuckerberg is full of himself enough he's anywhere there are naysayers.
Even if they aren't on lemmy you can bet they follow some anti-capitalist group somewhere, whether it be on reddit or mastodon or somewhere else. It's definitely a strategy for some rich people to keep an eye on their enemies and what the population say about them
You know, it's kind of like this with land. Laws around Adverse Possession (Squatter's Rights) are basically the legal framework for taking possession of land when someone has so much land or are so absentee that you can use it without them noticing. Generally, if you you can use their land openly and they don't challenge you, after a set period it's yours.
Don't know how this would work with money, but it's interesting that you can legally take someone's property if they have too much to manage it properly and you need it.
The rich seem to love buying up as much land as possible, so I propose throwing them into volcanos.
If I was a billionaire I would be down with this challenge but, just like a dragon, expect failure to be fatal. That said, if you succeed I think the rewards should also be great.
If you live in places with lax stand your ground (castle as well I think?) Laws then you can totally do this
How about instead of anarchist cosplay where we all pretend that we're going to petrol bomb billionaire estates, we push for people with excessive incomes to be taxed at a much higher threshold?
The fact that there are billionaires just shows that the system is hilariously flawed. Billionaires would rather you sit around and make memes about them than actually push for some fucking change...
Fantastic idea! Let's just change the laws! Oh wait, the billionaires already own congress :/
The system is flawed and is working as intended.
Instead of anarchist cosplay, everyone should be learning about actual anarchist theory and praxis.
I'm sorry but this is bullshit.
So a person who has 200 million to their name is not worth "stealing" from? Billionaires? Just billionaires?
Sorry but anyone who has more than about 10 times the median income has already passed a point at which I can buy that their life's work was so hard that their wealth is justified. (Personally I would set this factor even lower).
I mean, I haven't looked at all the data and whatnot but I imagine there are people who have millions of dollars that earned it honestly, 200 million is a lot but again I bet there are non horrible people that have that much
The reason people use 1 billion as an example is there is no good way to earn that much money, no one has ethically earned 1 billion dollars in any example I've ever seen at least, so it's a good baseline
I see what you mean. And I want to point out that I agree: not all millionaires/billionaires/rich people are bad or evil people.
there are people who have millions of dollars that earned it honestly
I also understand what you mean here. This comes down to how you define honestly or ethically. Why I kind of disagree or have a problem with this is the following:
Let's take a person with 200 million Euros in wealth. Let's say they earned it with their work. They are 68 years old and started working at 18. Makes 50 years of labor. Let's break down this 200 million in 50 years:
It equals 4 million in 1 year.
Or 333.333€ per month.
Or (counting with 4.33 weeks per month) 76.982€ per week.
Or (counting with a 40 hour workload per week) a wage of 1924€ per hour.
This calculation does not include taxes, insurances, any kind of expenses like rent or food. This would just mean every cent ever earned went into the bank account.
I live in Germany. The average wage of a nurse (according to google) is around 21€ per hour. The average wage of a construction worker (according to google) is around 22€. Before taxes. Before expenses. Now, how exactly is the work of our millionaire worth 91 times more than the work of these people?
Now obviously this 200 million weren't just saved up. The person probably invested. Probably we are talking about a CEO here who created a company and he has put his earnings into ETFs or something. And you can argue about the societal value of creating jobs and there like. But 1924€ an hour (again, no expenses here) would be still needed to accumulate this wealth. This money comes from somewhere. From your client, from your workers who you pay 21€/hour (if at all), from resources like wood, yarn, beans, that you buy for cheaper than you sell them. How much of taking from others is ethical and honest and fair?
I live jn Germany. Maybe things go a bit different here. We have taxes and some social security. And I also understand that this is an innate problem or, neutrally put, feature of capitalism. Is there a good way to fix it? Is it exploitative, how much exploitation can we live with, where do we draw the line for "ethical"? Are investments ethical? (You give someone money to use and if he is successful, you get a share although you did nothing. Their employees did.) I'm not even sure how such a dissection would go and whether there is a neutral way to approach this and reach consensus. Anything more than a gut feeling of justice and injustice.
But for my personal gut, no person works so hard as to deserve 1924€ an hour - hell not even 190€ an hour - if people who work jobs that are essential make 21€ with no real chance of pumping up these numbers by staying in their vitally important job. No labor, no matter how qualified you are, should qualify you to possess these kinds of resources.
No one has single handedly grown and harvested the wood they used to make some furniture with machines they built from their own metal and sold them for a price that made them end up with this kind of money. And as soon as you outsource any kind of labor and there is a difference between what you get to keep and what your colleague gets to keep, we are in a position of inequality.
When the factor is so grotesquely high and your employees are dependent on having to work to survive while you are not, I would argue it isn't fair.
Millionaires and billionaires aren't rich because they are bad or dishonest people. They just used the system to their advantage. There is no fault in that. But man do I wish we had something better at hand.
I will end this way too long response with also pointing a finger at inheritance. Why does one person deserve to inherit thousands or millions or even billions from their parents, mostly with ridiculous taxation, while another is being denied this kind of liftoff because of their upbringing? I am not the one who chose my parents. Have immigrant parents worked less hard to survive and do I not deserve anything as a gift because they never became rich? Why do I deserve to get a shitton of money for being born to the right parents? At the same time, parents often work to improve their kids' life. So what? Take all the inheritance away, redistribute it? Is that fair? Is it fair that people can inherit houses from their parents while others will never be able to afford a small apartment even?
Wealth sucks.
is there game that encourages people to steal from billionaire
Hitman has you killing billionaires and militia leaders.
If you want something crusty, brutal and nihilistic, try Cruelty Squad. In that game, everyone is evil, morality is dead, death is only temporary and money rules everything. So go gas a cruise ship to get a single target and don't feel bad for the other passengers who got liquified in the process, they were probably running crypto scams or diddling kids. Just harvest whatever organs are left and sell 'em for cash. You are a flesh automaton animated by neurotransmitters.
If you want pure thievery, try the Thief series. The original games, not the new one.
What about Cyberpunk 2077? Can you climb up the megacorp's buildings and blast the CEOs?
Unfortunately not as much as you would like. There's plenty of chances to blast corpo rats, but CEOs and whatnot? Nah. Ironically, in many endings, you accidentally reinforce the issues as people take advantage of your actions for power plays.
sad Reanu Keeves noises
Yep, it tries to do the whole anticapitalist thing, but also not being a leftist power fantasy. It's still possible to walk away with an extremely liberal message of "unchecked Capitalism bad, but checked capitalism good." Still a good game, though.
Watch Dogs series (sorta)
But I like the idea. Would make a good RPG scenario.
I wonder how much actual cash those billionaires have. Probably not that much more than millionaires (like one order of magnitude more, not three-four). All those billions are actually assets they own, not money.
A good portion of them have things like yachts or supercars, which can be looted
Or sunk into the sea.
Then they would pollute even more.
Nah, sell them to an other billionaire ... and steal it again!
It is like an infinite money glitch.
Fire them from the ballistas
who's teaming up with me, i wanna build a trebuchet.
I know where there are several already built all over the place in PA. They may even let you borrow one of you ask nicely and promise to have it back in time for Pumpkin Chuckin.
This is slander against dragons, I will not stand for this.
WE GOT BALLISTAE FOR YOU TOO, BUDDY
And if that fails, we'll hurl trebuchetted rocks until one hits!
I'm pretty sure this is part of the real rules anyway, not this altered set we all pretend to be playing by