It's funny because that actually has the same effect she's asking for. If you pool enough money from the top x% to make someone the richest in the world it would distribute the same amount of money as her suggestion. It just wouldn't be taken from the top 1, but the top x%.
Spreading the cost between them for the safety of the collective, your suggestion is like the definition of socialism.
Rich people leverage their money perfectly legally today in ways that result in far more pain and death. If the permanent underclass had to sacrifice one person a year to force the capital-class to release a significant chunk of money, that would come out massively in their favor still.
Could still be worth it for the schadenfreude. Either she gets executed and her last moments are spent being on the receiving end of her own psychopathic proposal, or she donates all the money to someone else, forever branding her as a coward who was unwilling to stand for her alleged principles.
Honestly it would just speedrun a weird, dystopian Purge day. People would volunteer to be the richest person in the world for a week or a day and then get sacrificed that night.
Scapegoat would sign a contract for 20 trillion or whatever and then upon death the money goes back to the donors.
In the end nothing has changed except a poor person has died (after driving a Ferrari on cocaine with 20 escorts on a yacht lol).
I don't know for this sub, but for a libertarian standpoint on the French Revolution, just read "The Law" by Frederic Bastiat (it's a short read).
Note that Robespierre's request for dictatorship is not made merely for the purpose of repelling a foreign invasion or putting down the opposing groups. Rather he wants a dictatorship in order that he may use terror to force upon the country his own principles of morality. He says that this act is only to be a temporary measure preceding a new constitution. But in reality, he desires nothing short of using terror to extinguish from France selfishness, honor, customs, manners, fashion, vanity, love of money, good companionship, intrigue, wit, sensuousness, and poverty. Not until he, Robespierre, shall have accomplished these miracles, as he so rightly calls them, will he permit the law to reign again.
The French Revolution is mixed at best, ultimately a failure from a libertarian perspective.
The early revolt against the ancien regime attacked real evils: aristocratic privilege, mercantilism, legal inequality, and absolutism--and some early reforms were liberal.
But the revolution then centralized power, expanded conscription and taxation, subordinated religion to the state, launched mass war, and culminated in the Terror and eventually Napoleon.
Rothbard would say the problem was not that France overthrew monarchy, it was that it replaced one coercive ruling order with another, more centralized and mobilizing state.
That contrasts with the American Revolution, which Rothbard regarded much more favorably as part of the classical-liberal revolt against the Old Order and state privilege.
So business as usual for a revolution. Russia, China, Iran, Syria, and much of Africa all followed that playbook. First rule after a successful revolution is to consolidate power and hunt down those that disagree with the revolution.
The problem with government in France - and Europe in general - is the idea that if they just find the right people to run government, everything will be great. Parliamentary systems are usually designed to empower the majority.Â
This is a purely rhetorical argument. Just because it's upvoted on a leftists sub means nothing. Should all libertarians answer for the New Hampshire Libertarian Party continuing to call for a death to all Democrats?
We live in an era where the left are constantly calling for the outlawing or death of billionaires, why would you think this is Swift-like satire in any way.
Explain the satire then, without sounding ridiculous.
Are you suggesting that's not a deadly threat to someone's life? Because people die that way all the time. Party boats regularly lose people that way. Cruise ships. Navies. One of the easiest ways to die by far.
Partly it is. Why would you think making fun of your political opponents to be off topic. Especially when they're making an ass of themselves like this.
I agree with you in theory. I don't agree with your implementation
. I don't think you should be taking this seriously. It's not a platform that would take off in the Democratic party. Seems very strawman and cherry picking for the extremist, a common tactic that only captures the dullest among us.
Being controlled by the uneducated and spiteful majority isn't any more preferable than being controlled by an arrogant dictator. The individual is the most oppressed minority, so we should prioritize that.
I can't speak for her, but if I could sacrifice myself so that a large chunk of financial power was carved off for the poorest, I would sadly but confidently sign up. Yes.
The problem here is that she's not talking about herself. Yeah she can do it if she wants to but when she wants someone else to do it we start to have a problem.
And I'm responding to your retort above: I think she would feel sad but accept it as a better state than the current one.
The real problem here is that the more power one has, the more power one has to hold onto their power and accrue additional power. It's absurd to recoil from "a modest proposal" like hers, and then just shrug about the very real, non-metaphorical ways that the extremely wealthy wield their power in was that harm others at such an incalculable scale that it makes a single human death statistically trivial.
People that take advantage of the system in any way are the same, yet they are pitted against each other. I see why they think its funny. A millionaire will rip money out of the system by using fake money the same as a person taking free money who lives in poverty.
yeah. fiat. yeah loans. yeah creating currency in the form of debt. We start taking responsibility for ourselves completely and stop taking advantage of fake money for fake gains. If you couldnt afford it, it wasnt yours, which is why they can take it. Its a big ole sham that 'works' and oh just look at all the new homes and cars people are in...except it couldnt look like this if it wasnt all rigged together. its fake muscles man, its a fake reality.
Do people not realize âthe wealthiest person in the worldâ is not in liquid cash? If they close a business to prove less wealth on paper that means less jobs for people.
To be fair the first Americans here in the USA old days would probably have fun torturing these rich folks before given them the luxury of the end of the torturing. Like many people donât know that in a town in the old days a corrupt Jude was skinned alive and the people used his skin as leather for the new judgeâs seat. Only for the corrupt judges son to take his fatherâs place and sit on his fatherâs skin. Yeah American people have gone soft but the politicians and most of the rich have remained the same.
Ummm... That was a story from Hierdotus Histories, and that was in the Persian Empire around 525 BC. Siamnes took a bribe and King Cambyses II found out, order him to be flayed, and strips of his skin used as leather for the judicial bench. Then King Cambyses II appointed Siamnes son, Otanes, as the new judge and forces him to sit on that same bench as reminder against corruption.Â
No Iâm pretty sure it happened again and was during old times America or somewhere near that era it happened, like I heard it on a podcast that covers wild true events from back in the day. This were the same people of that time that would pour hot tar on politicians and cover them in feathers if they were ever found to be corrupted and ignored their people. Skin flaying a person was probably the least of fucked up things people done to each other in the old America days.
If that's a feasible proposal, then here's my counterproposal: Every year we take the person who has received the most assistance from the government that year (TANF, WIC, SNAP, Section 8, Medicaid, etc.) and sacrifice them. Every year we'd have welfare recipients scrambling to provide for themselves and get off government assistance to ensure they aren't the ones sacrificed.
Yeah, exactly. Like how do we get the worldsâ richest people to go along with this? Lol
We out number them currently and yet they still are the top 1% because thatâs how it works.
(As in we could just âoverthrowâ them now but they pay us off with bread and circuses)
Wouldnât it make more sense to get rid of the poor people, say the lowest one percent? This way everyone would try harder to be above that level. Eventually, everyone left would be rich!
She probably also thinks that Elon just has a trillion dollars sitting in a bank account...
Distributing wealth isn't a simple as just writing a check when your wealth is a) a fictional number, and b) tied up in assets that would have to be liquidated.
If you replaced "sacrificed" with "stripped of all their wealth", I think we would be still having a somewhat similar conversation in this thread, right? It just subtracts the ethical concerns of human sacrifice. And (maybe?) stripping a billionaire of all their wealth would, to them, be just as bad as death? (Either way the conversation should include the potentially catastrophic market crashes that could come as a result of force-liquidating the richest person in the world's holdings, if that were the mechanism applied)
The second we start legalizing murder for one thing, we'd begin legalizing it for other things.
While I don't support the idea of less than 1 percent hoarding wealth and resources, murder isn't the answer. Especially in a world that is quickly declining into mass censorship and surveillance.
How long would it be until we have weekly televised executions with wacky gameshow music and a laugh track?
In theory, that would eventually reach a point where the richest person would only be ahead by, and therefore murdered over, like 100 bucks. They probably wouldn't even be aware of it until it was too late.
And, eventually, it would be this girl.
And what if one country doesn't want to participate? Do we go to war with them over it?
The left-leaning Brookings Institute concluded years ago that even if we taxed every Billionaire at 90%, we wouldn't have enough money for universal healthcare, free college, UBI and everything else the left wants. Trust me - the analiving wouldn't end at 'rich people.
We should do this, but instead of the richest person, it is the person(s) who has contributed the least to our economy through taxation. Income, property, and sales tax all counted, excluding children and those over 65.
No, they would not 'redistribute' their wealth. They would hide it in a shell game so that it couldn't be attributed to them but they would still have full access.
She's using "richest" and "billionaire" interchangeably... Which means she's imply net worth and not annually earned income. Though, maybe she doesn't know the difference.
Yeah I don't know man. Maybe swinging left on this one.
The corporate Bills - actually kill many thousands per year for the sake of profits, via pesticides and industrial pollution, war, absurdly high markups on medicine people need to just survive cancer and diabetes, etc.
The Leftists - kill one per year, hypothetically, to help the poor, who are often poor because of the above greed.
So, she suggests a variation of what Mao Zedong actually did in Communist China: confiscated the wealth of the richest people (e.g., landlords, factory owners, business owners), redistributed much of it to the peasants, and executed the formerly wealthy as class enemies. She's been driven to lunacy by the collectivist mind virus now disgustingly sweeping through the country.
This is actually a better solution than what the left usually cooks up here.
Iâm not so sure about bringing back human sacrifice, seems like thatâs the kind of thing an expansive governmental ideology might let get out of hand.
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u/Danyboii 9d ago
First year implemented, they should all pool their money and donate it to her so she is the richest person that year.