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I'll be flamed or downvoted or both, but food for thought: After a long time (most of my adult life) as a small-l libertarian believing in the rationality of f
by titzer 8y ago
I'll be flamed or downvoted or both, but food for thought:
After a long time (most of my adult life) as a small-l libertarian believing in the rationality of free markets, the rule of the invisible hand, and heck, the sheer morality of profitability, after seeing what wreckage that has brought to societal institutions, the internet, the environment, and generally speaking, what growthism has done to our ability to plan long-term as a species, as nations, societies, and what selfishness and greed has led us all to, I have gradually come to the conclusion that the world should institute an overall personal wealth cap that specifically targets the people at the top. Concretely, I think that no human should be allowed to have personal assets of more than $~100 million in any way, shape or form.
Yeah, I know, it's unworkable. Unfair! Impossible to enforce! It won't fix our financial mess! It'll suppress growth and innovation! How do you expect people to motivate themselves if they can't make a billion dollars!?
Well I'll humbly submit that anybody who feels driven to earn a billion dollars--that's enough greenbacks that if you thumbed through them, one a second every second of every single day of every day of the year, it'd take you 30 years just to count them--has a severe mental illness called greed. A billion dollars is 100 lifetimes of living 100 years at $100,000/yr living standard. It's just insane to think that we're OK with this because they "earned it". Horseshit. Jeff Bezos's $150 billion is 15,000 lifetimes worth.
Billionaires are accidents. They are artifacts of hierarchy that we endure, cowed, because we don't have stomach to see how empty our souls are and do something about it. No billionaire has ever earned 100 lifetimes of wealth.
- guru4consulting 8y agoTo put the 15,000 lifetimes in perspective... there has been 7,500 generations of humans since the emergence of Homosapiens. Civilization started only 500 generations ago..