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Easily solved, remove the power centers and then the billionaires will have no power to buy or influence with their money.
by meta_gunslinger 5mo ago
Easily solved, remove the power centers and then the billionaires will have no power to buy or influence with their money.
- ceejayoz 5mo agoDefine "easily" for us, please.
- meta_gunslinger 5mo agoDon't hand over power to politicians, bureaucrats and NGOs. It's not rocket science to need further explanation.
- ceejayoz 5mo agoI thought you said it was easy?
- blanched 5mo agoPoliticians, by definition, have power. How do you easily remove or withhold it?
- meta_gunslinger 5mo agoIt's the degree of power they hold, not a binary. A politican in Switzerland has much less power than a politician in China. When your power is to determine which day the recycling truck is dropping-by, hardly anyone wants to coerce that power. But when it is e.g printing money the calculus is massively different.
- ceejayoz 5mo ago> When your power is to determine which day the recycling truck is dropping-by, hardly anyone wants to coerce that power. I take it you've never encountered a homeowner's association.
- idle_zealot 5mo ago"Don't want to be ruled by billionaires, peasants? Have you tried dismantling your government so they can't buy it? That will surely save you."
- meta_gunslinger 5mo agoIsn’t that what Anarchists and Marxists peddle to the peasants?
- idle_zealot 5mo agoA Marxist peddles restructuring of the government to better represent the people. Notable attempts at that replaced existing governments with autocracies that promptly killed the Marxists and Anarchists among them, which is not what you were talking about, I don't think. What kind of revolutionary wants only to tear down their government and not replace it? Anarcho-primitivists, I guess?
- wat10000 5mo agoI know, that's why I want to tax them, to remove their power. Of course, you probably mean to remove their power centers without removing their money. But that doesn't make any sense. Money is power. You can't remove the power from a billionaire and leave them a billionaire.
- mrguyorama 5mo agoThere's no such thing as "Power centers". Money is that power. You cannot have billionaires and them not be immensely, structurally powerful. That's the entire point of capitalism, that resources, including labor, be directed by those with capital. Believing you can have a single human being in control of a non-negligible percentage of all resources of a country, and they wont somehow be actually powerful or influential is moronic. Taking the power away from billionaires literally IS taking their money.
- meta_gunslinger 5mo ago“Money is that power.” That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. Power is power. Members of the Communist Party in the USSR were as wealthy as their subjects, their power differential was enormous.
- wat10000 5mo agoNot all power is money, but money is power.