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I don't mind billionaires existing, but I absolutely mind them getting special treatment and getting away with crimes.
edit: if you're mad about this comment, I have to think you're just jealous of the rich assholes. If billionaires paid their fair share of taxes and were prosecuted for crimes, the world would be objectively a better place. Instead, I guess for some that's not enough, it's a fully socialist world or NOTHING.
No one is "mad" at your comment. People just think it's stupid to think inequality should exist
I never said fuck-all about what should exist. I said "I don't mind [with an important caveat]". Indicating that I'd prefer a step toward equality than a less realistic absolutist approach to it
There can be no billionaires without inequality. If you're ok with billionaires existing, you're ok with inequality.
Right. Absolutism is the only way.
Humanity will destroy itself because of this mind virus. All or nothing. Destroys lives at every level and it will lead to our extinction. But go ahead and embrace it. Because you're RIGHT, after all.
A genuine attempt at civil discussion:
What you're pointed at is that, unless the world's GDP suddenly skyrockets millions of percents, we can't make everyone a billionaire.
And if only select few can be billionaires, this is inequality.
Thereby, what is suggested is to redistribute money more evenly so that non-billionaires (i.e. pretty much everyone) could enjoy a better life, as opposed to few people buying their second golden toilet for the sake of it.
I'm not sure I follow. Thanks for seemingly being non-reactionary though.
If I could wave a magic wand, I'd first come up with some new form of socialism where maybe not everyone is 100% equal, but where literally everyone would get to live a fully comfortable life without fear of death or suffering. They'd get to take extended vacations and have fully paid healthcare. No starvation and no being limited to the shittiest food available. Maybe some people could have more than that, if they accomplished something to justify it.
Since I don't have that magic wand, I'd just settle for billionaires paying equal percentages of taxes and being jailed when they break the law.
Apparently, suggesting the latter, for a lot of these commenters, means that I am a huge capitalist who loves inequality. Because I couldn't possibly recognize that capitalism is both a huge piece of shit in practice but also does provide motivation to workers.
that capitalism [...] does provide motivation to workers
I wonder how all of those people in other civilisations survived which didn't had a capitalistic system.
In other words: I hope you're aware that capitalism is not the only way to motivate people to do stuff. As if people weren't interested in ensuring their survival or even progress.
Essentially, equality is directly proportional to the share of economy regular people enjoy, the only question is how equality affects the size of the economy itself.
In my opinion, billionaires should absolutely be taxed more, in percentage terms, and consideration should be taken to nationalization of industries further down the road.
Yup, agreed
I also hate that people don't want bad things instead of wanting bad things with a little less bad. Fucking absolutists.
By painting me as "wanting inequality" you have freed yourself from considering another perspective. You don't need to care about details like "basically no one on Lemmy would actually believe that" or "I've demonstrated that's false". Congratulations. Thought and actual conversation avoided. Me bad, you good.
You may not want inequality, but that's, by definition, what a world with billionaires has. Wether you want it or not.
Ok let's make it happen. What's your plan? I told you mine -- if the political will were there we could start today.
mind virus
uh oh
From the evil garbage can, I wish you happiness in your completely duelist attitude.
People just think it's stupid to think inequality should exist
This has to be some of the most naive text I've ever read.
Inequality will never not exist. Humans are not equally talented, equally diligent, equally intelligent, etc. They don't have equally-capable bodies, they don't have equal desires.
My coworker is lazy and chronically late, I'm not. You will never convince me or anyone with a functioning cerebrum that we deserve to be paid the same. And that's just one tiny example.
I'm talking about systemic inequality not your workplace drama.
Even if meritocracy wasn't a fairy tale, no one deserves to have more money than they could possibly spend in 10 lifetimes while others starve, regardless of how much you hate your dumbass coworker.
I'm talking about systemic inequality not your workplace drama.
So am I, goofball, hence the 'one tiny example' word choice and the fact that it was a tidbit at the very end of the comment. Sneaky, pathetic evasion attempt.
Time for some reality checks you seem to desperately need:
- The poor aren't poor because billionaires exist. There are far more billionaires in the world than there were 100 years ago, and yet, somehow, global poverty was several orders of magnitude worse back then.
- Net worth is a price tag, not cash money, and cash money is what the poor lack. As an example, if Amazon suddenly ceased to exist tomorrow, its $1 trillion plus of value would also vanish. Not a single poor person would get a single extra dollar in their wallet if that happened.
- The US spends about $1.2 trillion, with a T, every year on welfare programs and the like. The combined net worth of all US billionaires is $5.2 trillion. Even assuming for the sake of argument that we could wave a magic wand and convert, straight across, that net worth figure into cash money one to one, the implication that increasing a year's welfare benefits payouts by 4.3x, ONCE, would actually have any measurable effect on long-term poverty, is pitiably ignorant. Hell, the vast majority of poor multi-million lottery winners are broke again inside of a couple of years.
- No one, regardless of how wealthy they are or aren't, ought to give any amount of care to how much wealth you think they deserve to have.
Once again, it's abundantly clear that hurting the rich is a higher priority for than helping the poor, for those pushing these lines of rhetoric.
First, I'd like to say that I personally don't have a problem with someone wanting to be a billionaire or even being a billionaire. I have a problem with how they get there and what they do when they get there.
The question above was whether or not billionaires should exist, NOT how do we solve poverty or hunger or anything else.
I think you keep approaching this incorrectly. You simply equate the number of billionaires with the number of poor or something like that. That is not HOW billionaires cause poverty. Billionaires have influence over those who make laws. Laws that favor them and not us (us being the non-ultrawealthy). They also usually own or control major corporations which employ us. This gives them the ability to hold wages low. There are a myriad variety of other ways they influence who is poor and who is not and how we are treated. They also have a major influence over people's lives. As an example Jeff Bezos has billions of dollars yet there are many documented cases of employees at Amazon being so pressured to make him and the others at the top more money, that they can't even use the fricken bathroom. I believe this is a certain mentality that is shared amongst most, if not all, billionaires and it is despicable.
Do you think it was the average voter who thought it was a great idea to keep the federal minimum wage stagnant for a decade, as if inflation simply didn't exist? If you work full time for minimum wage, you will be very close to the federal poverty level. I don't think that's a fair way to treat a hard working, productive citizen of a wealthy country like the United States.
If you think welfare is a handout that isn't going to help, fine, then let's start at the top and remove the welfare that is so readily doled out to major corporations two third of which don't pay taxes. I personally won't complain too much about handing taxpayer money to taxpayers.
The middle class isn't sending jobs overseas. Poor people aren't giving illegal immigrants American jobs. Minimum wage earners, I'm guessing, don't have lobbyists. No one offered ME the opportunity to buy shares of Facebook during the IPO.
I personally don't suggest just marching into a billionaires home and ripping cash straight from their hands (not sure I would cry about it at this point, though). What I mean is, the system should be set up in such a way that is not so unfairly biased toward them. I mean if the system was fair, they wouldn't exist because they wouldn't be handed all of the wealth in the first place, but WE don't make those decisions. THEY do! If you own 80% of America, you should pay for 80% of America.
Most of the changes you are suggesting can't be legislated. What are you going to do about single parent households? Create a law forbidding divorce? Force people to remarry after a loved one dies. And exactly how would I put this massive amount of energy I'm using to create this post into helping someone on welfare? As if complaining online is so much energy you could somehow power a city off of it.
NO, they emphatically should NOT exist.
The question above was whether or not billionaires should exist, NOT how do we solve poverty or hunger or anything else.
And my point is that the former is a complete waste of time and energy, because a society with any size gap of wealth between the poorest and the wealthiest, but also a society with no one in poverty, is absolutely more desirable than a society with less or even no wealth gap, but which has people in poverty.
I think you keep approaching this incorrectly. You simply equate the number of billionaires with the number of poor or something like that. That is not HOW billionaires cause poverty.
But the fact that this demographic's growth in numbers is negatively correlated with the incidence of poverty, is a pretty big wrench in the assertion that their existence causes poverty.
You've assumed that billionaires cause poverty, but I'm a step before you. I'm not convinced their existence has a significant causal relationship with poverty, not least because of the above.
At the very least, the above fact needs to be contended with, before moving further. You need to explain, or at least hypothesize, how it can be true that billionaires' actions increase poverty, if as the number of billionaires goes up, poverty goes down.
I'm reminded of when anti-porn activists would claim in the earlier days of the Internet that the proliferation of Internet porn would cause rape and sexual assault to spike massively. There are still such activists out there, still making that same argument, despite the fact that all the data shows that as Internet porn became more widespread, the incidence of sexual crimes actually DEcreased. In fact, "plummeted" would be a fair description, imo.
Most of the changes you are suggesting can’t be legislated.
That's true. A top-down approach won't solve these problems, as they're largely cultural and self-perpetuating (find a girl who got pregnant at 15/16, and chances are good that her mother was under the age of 20 when she got pregnant with her daughter, as well). Education/awareness/outreach and similar, are the only real way to get there, but it needs to be a true, concerted, dedicated, continued effort, and right now, there's only pockets of it scattered around, far as I can tell.
As a grim example, in the 1960s, the Moynihan Report was put out by a guy who was essentially freaking out over the current incidence of 'fatherlessness' in the black population, and calling for action to be taken. Today, we know more than ever about how much worse off kids are (financially, to my point, but also in many other ways) who aren't raised in stable, two-parent homes are, and today, there isn't a single racial demographic in the US that doesn't have a higher rate of single parenthood than the black population did at the time of that Report. And yet, today, despite everything, even beginning to talk about these issues is political suicide, no one will even touch the topic.
What I'm trying to say is that we've got much bigger fish to fry, if the goal is reducing/eradicating poverty. And if indeed y'all care more about whether someone should be "allowed" to have a net worth beyond some arbitrary point, than that, then all I have to say is that you've lost the plot.
Should we not be equally dignified? Should someone be considered lesser than you for being late?
My coworker is lazy [...] I'm not.
And if we now think about why you see this as a bad thing, we can see how deeply brainwashed you were by our capitalistic, profit-driven, society.
Query: Is Wage Theft a crime?
I ask because I am unaware of any way to amass such grotesque levels of wealth without engaging in Wage Theft.
lf by wage theft you mean illegally withholding salaries, it is illegal but not punished nearly as it should be
If you mean wage theft as in taking of surplus value by the owning class, it's not but it should be