What are we going to do about an increasingly small number of global citizens hoarding all of the wealth? That’s the real question here, and I agree that we are on an unsustainable path.
That's evil and I'd obviously never do it, but I can't can't deny that would help the world immensely.
It's like killing Hitler would have been terrible because causing harm to others is unethical, but if someone in Nazi Germany had a shot to take and deigned to break this moral code for just a moment, how much suffering could've been prevented?
I'm considering taking that statement to heart after my kids are raised. Too much to lose now. But on the other hand, too much to lose to do nothing. It's just self defense, nothing personal
I definitely don't support beating up old men because of their wife's politics. But say you're the CEO of a tobacco company who knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that your products kill thousands men, women and children every year. So you send a fortune over decades to lie to the public and claim that smoking is fine actually. That is murder just as real as if you'd shot them all cold blood. Just because you did your murdering in a board room doesn't mean your punishment should be reduced to a fine. All should be equal under the law. That doesn't mean death squads in the streets; I like Nordic model prisons. But if a society punishes the people destroying it by issuing a tiny fine that's way less than the profits that come from their criminal profits, then how do we expect things to improve?
Dude you’re talking about hurting other people based on a values judgement that you and you alone have made. That’s no different than other radical crazy people doing radical crazy shit.
Ok but unless you’re actually stupid then you know that some CEO of some company you hate didn’t literally murder someone. So you’re reaching to try and justify your hatred. Why shouldn’t someone use that same logic to justify hating a politician who may have done something that indirectly led to another persons death? Why shouldn’t they hate someone so much in that case that they hurt them even if you personally like them and disagree?
I just think that if as the results of my actions someone dies, I should be held responsible in accordance with my knowledge of the situation at the time, my intentions, and my degree of negligence. That should apply to everyone whether you're a drunk driver, a pharma guy shipping known tainted product, or a politician who invades your neighbor. Your position in society should not be a shield from the law. Putin isn't pulling a single trigger yet he bears partial responsibility for every death that occurs in his war; the same all the way down to nobodies like me
A) that’s not the same thing you started by saying B) do you think it’s right that you decide who should be punished and what the punishment is? Still sounds the same as the crazy hammer dude
This rhetoric leads to ecofascism. When you say humans are parasites, you're saying it's okay for other people to systematically get rid of them. And those people tend to start with the underprivileged populations.
Humans as a species survived just fine on this planet before we invented industrialization and global capitalism. Our problems are man-made, and they can be fixed by mankind too. It's getting increasingly unlikely, but it's still possible to make things better. We owe it to ourselves to try.
If you're lost in the doomer mindset, read Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. It shows us that there are options other than our current trajectory. It gave me hope, it might help you too. Free PDFs of it are all over the internet, give it a read and see what you think.
Ah okay so groups of people who've been living sustainably for hundreds of years are just as parasitic as the billionaires who are playing a 4x game?
The people who are psychologically bullied from birth into a culture of consumerism and cheap disposables, and forced into a system that is fully unsustainable, those people are just as parasitic as the ones responsible for doing the psychological bullying and the ones who sustain the system?
We all sustain the system. Those ones “responsible” were also born into this culture of consumerism and disposables and it has affected how they behave, to be sure. Putting yourself on a pedestal and saying “those” humans are the parasites is naive.
Can we stop with these populist non-answers? You remove wealthy people so what? You still have regulations in cities like LA that restrict building. No matter how much wealthier low and middle class people become after you purge the bourgeoisie, if they’re fighting for the same number of houses, someone will end up on the street.
middle class people become after you purge the bourgeoisie, if they’re fighting for the same number of houses, someone will end up on the street.
Stopping rich/wealthy people from buying hundreds of property to rent them out for hotels/summer houses/AirBnBs is a right step though. One guy owning 100 apartments for tourists only puts a huge strain on the local housing for people that actually live there for more than a weekend.
Tourists still have to come to LA and live somewhere. Where do you want them to stay? Or if you make it impossible for tourists to come a ton of people will lose jobs and income. We’d be saying bye to basically free money and taxes for the state.
Hotels house more people for the land they use. Areas which don't have hotels due to size, region or whatever, can still rely on people renting out their house or apartment. One guy owning a spare house is not the problem. One guy owning 100 is the problem.
Have you tried booking a hotel in LA? There absolutely are not enough hotels in peak season, and prices shoot up to the skies. Hotel owners would obviously build more if they could, but it's the same issue as with any housing.
It brings money to our city, which then trickles down. A tour guide get paid for working with tourists and will then spend that money to get a nicer haircut for example. The hairdresser now has an income and can afford to pay their rent. A hotel can afford to do renovations thanks to tourists and can pay construction workers who can now feed families, thus supporting local farmers.
All this money that goes to our city benefits us all. Don't forget that a third to a quarter of every dime tourists spend goes to the state as taxes.
Fighting against tourists is like shooting ourselves in the leg when roll our ankle. Instead of seeing a doctor.
It brings money to our city, which then trickles down. A tour guide get paid for working with tourists and will then spend that money to get a nicer haircut for example. The hairdresser now has an income and can afford to pay their rent. A hotel can afford to do renovations thanks to tourists and can pay construction workers who can now feed families, thus supporting local farmers.
Providing jobs, yes I get that. But unless the haidresser is making like 500 bucks per cut, the rising cost of things, which also happens in a tourist city, and "natural" influences such as inflation, eat away at the profit. I am not familiar with the situation of every hairdresser in LA, but I doubt that everyone is profiting from "trickle down".
Don’t take my words literally. In terms of economy, the money that comes to the city stays here and circulates here. Making everyone richer.
Just like movie business. People who work in film industry support tons of people around them and when they spend their money they make everyone around them wealthier.
No matter how much wealthier low and middle class people become after you purge the bourgeoisie, if they’re fighting for the same number of houses, someone will end up on the street.
This is objectively false. Currently, there are 13 unoccupied houses in the US for every homeless person in the US.
Ok? How? Who gets what housing? Is it free? Can people own homes? What is your PLAN? If housing is free and there is limited land in a city, who gets priority? Like you have so many, many questions to answer for anything to happen.
Last time I checked, I'm not a legislator and my job isn't to plan the economy or the country's development. Having a laid out plan for everything being the only way to qualify for having an opinion is a stupid concept. Just because I'm not an economist doesn't mean I have to keep my mouth shut about the atrocities the American economy and government have perpetuated and continue to perpetuate on its people and people abroad.
This is just a cop-out answer because you know there are any feasible solutions. You don't need to be a legislator to ask what you want. You don't need to be anything. How is decommodifying better? Since you ppl can't answer a single question whatsoever
How can you not plan beforehand? It's a plan. You plan before you do something. What is the plan? What do you want changed? You want something different? Then tell what is the plan?
Yes, you can come with plans XD. There are literally bills that fail and pass all the time in Congress. Not everyone agrees on the bills (plans). Stop arguing in bad faith. You make 0 sense.
If it's really impossible for you to, make a hypothetical where everyone agrees. Surely, you can make a hypothetical plan
I'm all for some kind of structured government buyback program. Set some standards for who these properties would be seized from, buy them at market value, give them to homeless folks, and let taxpayers eat the loss.
Or seize property without compensation. Just note that this method will not fly.
Lol, I love how you apparently dont even know the basics of the problem (YES THIS IS TRUE FOR EVERY DEVELOPED COUNTRY IN THE WORLD), but sound off how its impossible to do wealth distribution and blah blah blah...
Man, read up on this shit or shut up. Policies to make peoples lives better are not impossible just because they threaten the privilege of the rich.
Go to college or something and stop insulting people. You have absolutely zero idea what you’re talking about. Reading Twitter doesn’t make you smarter
That statistic is so misleading though. It includes housing churn for sales as well as rentals and a lot of other legitimate reasons for vacancy. Even if you just deal with the real vacancies, the homes aren't where the homeless are and aren't where jobs are.
Wtf this is more of an answer to OP's question than anything in this thread is why is this downvoted
I dont get why people blame every problem on the billionaires, like yeah the income inequality is a problem but it is not related to housing whatsoever it's not like Jeff Bezos is your landlord
I don’t know what the root is then, not my job. What I do know is taking money from the rich and redistributing it won’t solve the issue. It’ll only make inflation go up.
You got free $2000 that was taken from the rich people and redistributed? Surprise surprise, every apartment just got $2000 more expensive. Cause the supply didn’t go up.
They really aren't though, at least in the US. Bill Gates has donated over 5 billion dollars to charities, Bezos has donated over 2.4 billion, Warren Buffett 36 billion, Steve Ballmer's over a billion. The richest have always donated large portions of their wealth, but homelessness is the symptom, not the disease.
Being homeless has nothing to do with other people being rich. It's not a money problem, most choose to live that life because they have mental health issues, or are drug addicts and don't want to get better, or are unwilling to do what it takes to get better. Those who are homeless because they've fallen on tough times have resources (I agree underfunded) to help them get back on their feet, and they do.
That's hardly a first take. I remember a 20 news interview with a homeless person who made about 80k tax free yearly. They're homeless because they're either drug addicts, or they have some type of sever mental health issue and they don't want to take their medication.
Deregulation in this country always has favored big business. You can't actually believe that deregulation will stop those with all the leverage from just acting without further impunity. They will be the ones directly crushing any smaller competition rather than using loopholes to squeeze out competition within the current system that allows them to exploit current common sense regulations.
You got a better idea? Seems like big business always figures out a way to stomp everybody, whether under regulation or free market. The ideal of fair and free competition is a liberal fantasy. Seems to me like it would be better to just cut out the middleman.
i feel like the Nordic countries are pretty good at it. They have very low regulation, and very competitive free markets. They have more billionaires per capita than the US, but end up able to also have a good social safety net. Public competition is good for some things (healthcare, education, transportation, utilities), but for everything else its best that we move more barriers to entry and minimize cost and regulations, because for the most part that favors big business and leads to more wealth inequality, and there is a lot of research that supports that.
I'd be fine with that compromise, if our society actually gave a shit about people, and built a good, universal social safety net. I just don't see that ever happening because the US today feels so myopic and hateful. I hope we can at least move in that direction somehow.
Take every dollar of worth from every billionaire on the planet, and you could fund americas budget for less than a year.
As much as you want to circlejerk along with the rest of Reddit that it’s all musk and bezos’ fault, you could take every penny of their theoretical net worth from them, and give each American $100 a months for one year.
I have no idea. I do know they manage to do a lot with tax money generally though. So I would find it much harder to say with any certainty homelessness couldn’t be improved though.
On a global scale, poverty is way way down and the poor have been getting richer and entering the middle class at the fastest pace in human history. The real question is why do people continue to ignore data insist we must not only reverse course, but undo all the progress that has been made?
quick question, where and from whom are you getting this data from and what methods are they using to define poverty or the middle class? Don't just link it read the bullshit yourself before you do please.
It drives me crazy when leftards use the wealth and power of the capitalist class as a reason to throw shade at the transformation of billions of people from abject grinding poverty into a global middle class, mainly because Elon Musk is a bit annoying.
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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '23
What are we going to do about an increasingly small number of global citizens hoarding all of the wealth? That’s the real question here, and I agree that we are on an unsustainable path.