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Abolish Billionaires
- Glench 8y agoThe concentration of the vast majority of wealth in the hands of a small number of people is obviously an unbalanced and unjust system that can't continue to work.
- dazilcher 8y agoIt's been this way forever. What is the forcing function you believe will lead to a change now?
- lawrenceyan 8y agoAbolish billionaires. Okay, and then what? These ideas never seem to consider what the next steps are. Wealth and inequality will always exist no matter how hard you try to eradicate it. It is fortunately or unfortunately depending on your viewpoint, a fundamental part of the human condition. The only viable stable long-term solution is focusing on uplifting the masses from the bottom up such that, even the poorest classes of people can have a basic standard of living. This of course entails some kind of universal basic income, which will definitely be difficult to achieve, but it is far more realistically achievable than just "abolishing billionaires". Violent and angry rhetoric like that may feel good and be great for garnering support, but is a road that leads ultimately to ruin.
- empath75 8y agoFixing wealth inequality is a never ending process. You have to continuously transfer wealth downward, as wealth in a capitalist system has a kind of gravity such that it flows more to people who already have it. You don’t need to eliminate wealthy people or raise everyone into the middle class, you just need policies that constrain the extremes within reasonable limits — for the sake of societal stability if not of basic fairness.
- cwperkins 8y agoReal question: If I start a business and people love my product so much so that I become a billionaire. Am I a bad person?
- pnw_hazor 8y agoUnder current Democratic party norms: yes.
- happytoexplain 8y agoI find it hard to believe this curt post portrays your real intellectual opinion, as opposed to your emotional feelings. It just seems like shit stirring.
- pnw_hazor 8y agoIt is pretty clear that new wave Democrats (e.g., Justice Democrats, or the like) are more than willing to consider any billionaire immoral because they are billionaires. At least that is what their most prominent pols say.
- Rapzid 8y agoThat's... The opposite of clear. It's not Billionaires that are on trial, it's the system. Billionaires are the symptom. You may not agree with that, but that's what's going around.
- Gustomaximus 8y agoDo you really believe this? The democrats are on the whole not against billionaires, there is simply an increase in popularity to make billionaire pay more tax. Something closer to historical levels no less. Then people make comments like this and try and things into a storm in a teacup....I wonder if this is how they truly see the policy or its just cheap internet comments.
- 8y ago
- imgabe 8y agoThis is a very stupid idea that will no doubt get a lot of attention for the author by people who will explain in great detail how stupid it is. I wonder if that was the intent? There is zero chance of this ever happening. It is not worth the time to read about it. Edit: Seriously, this is populist clickbait drivel the Times is running so the broke millennial demographic can drool over revenge fantasies of smashing the bourgeoisie while the Times and their cadre of surveillance partners figure out how to get them to buy a Lexus. Ignore it.
- ryandvm 8y agoYou may be right, but I don't think you could have made a less persuasive argument.
- viivaux 8y agoGive it an hour - I guarantee there are worse ones to come.
- imgabe 8y agoI doubt anyone who doesn't immediately dismiss this as nonsense is capable of being persuaded by any kind of rational argument.
- happytoexplain 8y agoThis kind of black and white vitriol actively drives people away from what you're saying.
- imgabe 8y agoThis article is a troll. It is not a good faith argument. It's an attempt to gain attention by saying something outlandish. The proper response to a troll is to ignore it. There are real discussions to be had about how to best redistribute wealth to benefit society. This isn't it. Thy picked an arbitrary number and declared people with more money than that "bad" and "immoral". There is zero mention of what mechanism would be implemented to stop people from attaining more money than the arbitrary "bad person" number, so there is nothing to discuss in terms of whether this would be helpful.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- edoo 8y agoIn a just society the only way you can get rich is through voluntary interaction by adding value to world. In our society you can get rich through legislation, which has created the wealthy parasitic class that earns a living by preventing competition. To target all the rich is to loot and destroy your society. To target the wealthy parasitic class would be a revolution frankly.
- krupan 8y agoSince most governments are also billionaires, maybe we could abolish them too.
- edoo 8y agoI think the original success of the US was due to the paradoxical government we created. The entire purpose of the government was to protect people from the government.
- Gustomaximus 8y agoUmmm, country ≠ person... Also are billionaires going to allow people to vote who owns their wealth and allocates their spending every 4 years?
- leggomylibro 8y agoI don't know if calling it a 'revolution' is the best idea - it seems like they always end up devouring their children. Marxist 'eat the rich' types of revolutions are pretty recent, too - traditionally it seems like a frustrated upper middle class is what aristocrats and overreaching executives really have to fear. Also, I never miss a chance to trot out this quote: "Don't put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That's why they're called revolutions. People die, and nothing changes." - Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
- edoo 8y agoAs far as I understand it there has been a few legislative pincher moves since inception. The 17th amendment might qualify as one. It allowed for a populist instead of representative vote of our senators and basically created the modern situation of whomever spends the most campaign money wins. AKA special interest/lobby groups now rule. That is one of of the few small changes of course the country made that if reversed would probably be to the benefit of most. To revoke the 17th would be senators literally voting themselves out of work, hence it would never happen. A soviet style collapse is a revolution too, just forced and likely crummy.
- orasis 8y agoSo the billionaires are the ones causing all your problems?
- hylianwarrior 8y agoLiterally, yes.
- dazilcher 8y agoSo none of your problems are caused by anyone/anything other than billionaires. Literally. Good to know that millionaires are safe from your wrath.
- Gustomaximus 8y agoAre you trying to position that unless something is the root of all your problems you cant address it? Also straw man. It's a cheap form of debate... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
- happytoexplain 8y agoThis sounds like sarcasm, but I think there are reasonable lines of argument that this is explicitly true.
- webwanderings 8y agoSolution is simple. The more money you have, the greater is your responsibility towards others (beings and nature). Taking things out by force (from anyone and anything) is never a solution, because everything is relative in this world, including your wealth.
- macawfish 8y agoThe existence of billionaires is about distribution of agency. Right now agency is distributed in an extreme and convoluted way. How can you have universal basic income without fixing the other end of the spectrum? The power to invest resources, to effect meaningful material change in our world, is being concentrated in the hands of very few.
- Gustomaximus 8y agoI feel this abolish billionaires movement needs some tweaking. History has many examples of people changing the world for the better and getting filthy rich doing so. If we start wealth taxing these people to limit their resources you are limiting their ability to push boundaries and hopefully advance society. Where I feel the issue sits is with dynastic wealth. Just because grandpa did something, great grandchildren 10 generations on shouldnt be expected it's their right to be sitting on massive trusts of assets. And I think this limits society if we let capital accumulate for a bunch of reasons but mainly 1) we become a divided society with little social mobility, 2)we lose innovation as people sit on assets and industries reduce competition. And poor people don't have the access to time or resource to innovate themself and 3) most importantly if we let small groups of elites run the country they stop caring about services that matter to most people. Things like schools and hospitals become cost lines to be reduced because they or their kids will never use the public system so that increasing teacher ratio, or longer waiting lists become less meaningful.
- IvyMike 8y agoThe rich should be the ones who are the most concerned with runaway wealth inequality, because the historical endpoint of that line usually isn't pretty for anyone. (But can be especially bad for the rich) https://aeon.co/essays/history-tells-us-where-the-wealth-gap-leads https://aeon.co/essays/history-tells-us-where-the-wealth-gap...
- macinjosh 8y agoIn 2019 the US federal budget is $4.407 trillion. [1] The combined wealth of America's top 400 billionaires in 2017 was 2.7 trillion. If the social democrats got their dream and took all of their money we could fund the government for only about seven months. When will D.C. and the American people realize that tax rates aren't the problem?! It's the spending stupid! Edit: Yep, keep downvoting facts people. That will surely save us. [1]: https://www.thebalance.com/current-u-s-federal-government-spending-3305763 https://www.thebalance.com/current-u-s-federal-government-sp... [2]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2018/sep/26/america-oligarchy-dominated-billionaires-big-money-series https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2018/sep/...
- wonder_er 8y agoPointing out how high the base-line level of incompetence of the government seems ineffective. I think the line of reasoning is something like this: > "The rich" are bad, we need the government to save us from them. The government is underfunded, so when it takes money from the rich, it'll be funded enough to become competent. The federal debt is $20 trillion. The 400 billionaires and their 2.7 trillion is about 15% of the debt we're in. Why does the government always get a free pass in... everything?
- happytoexplain 8y ago>I think the line of reasoning is something like this: "The rich" are bad, we need the government to save us from them. Isn't the argument that extreme wealth disparity is bad, and that government is one of the best and/or only vectors for affecting societal problems on such a massive scale? Your version sounds mangled on purpose to make half of the people in the discussion look bad.
- AstralStorm 8y agoWho else would enact this change? Bottom up does not have enough direct power. Billionaires won't banish themselves. The problem of government is that many members are rich to filthy rich themselves. Legislation is government too. About the only other force that could enact it is a widely accepted religion and there is none anymore.
- manigandham 8y agoPutting aside moral issues, taxes don't redistribute wealth. They just give it to the government. How is the government going to be suddenly better at managing money? What leadership controls this new spending? What makes them so much better? This is the day 2 stuff that never gets any thought, and yet is the critical piece of this theory.
- wav-part 8y agoCase in point: 2018 Federal taxes centralized $3.4T in the hands of 300 people.
- happytoexplain 8y agoI too would like to see this half of the proposal. Surely there must be educated writing out there somewhere about the less dramatic part of the story.
- macawfish 8y agoI'm ready to quit hacker news if we can't have substantive discussions.
- chewz 8y agoAs Lenin said - steal the stolen
- kobiguru 8y agoand in a few years, people started to starve to death.
- so_tired 8y agoCan we start maybe with the basic stuff? Tax profits and capital gains as much as we tax income. If there are 3 dominant companies dont allow 2 of them to merge. U know, the basic stuff.
- rbanffy 8y agoI don't think this should be flagged. Individual comments, yes, but the post itself, no. This is a discussion our society needs to have - we need to weight the pros and cons of allowing unlimited accumulation of wealth and power by individuals.
- sleepysysadmin 8y agoThere is an effort to push communism without calling it communism. When you ban the rich(or for that matter tax them so heavily they are no longer billionaires) and also raise minimum wage. Everyone ends up in the middle class. That's called communism. When you have equality of outcome, the 180 IQ software developer who is extremely successful gets the same pay as a 80 IQ. What's the incentive to work or do anything more than that 80 IQ person? ~10% of the population has an IQ below 80. If I don't get my Mclaren and private jet, why bust my ass? The problem with communism that you lose your purpose. Then you must have work camps; where you are forced to work. It's the only way for communism to work.