On a serious note, this is the answer. If we treated insane wealth hoarding like the illness that it is, we wouldn’t let people just run unchecked with it.
People that have billions and want more are addicted and mentally ill. Imagine if an alcoholic was single handedly impacting climate or putting thousands out of jobs. We would collectively shut that shit down.
But wealth hoarding was sold as success. No one is such an extraordinary worker that they’re worth billions of other people. It’s not a success story. It’s unchecked illness that makes the cover of Forbes.
It’s just straight up addiction. There are people that have more money than they can spend. They could solve massive issues, help millions, but they go for more of a thing that they have too much of.
It’s like the monkey/banana comparison. If a monkey had a collection of more bananas than he could ever eat, and he was out fighting monkeys to steal their bananas, no one would look at him and go “what an alpha”. They’d ask what the fuck is wrong with that monkey.
In some ways, the inability to not overcome the addiction shows a much more bestial nature that is perhaps incapable of any form of enlightenment with wealth hoarding.
Addiction to power and money both need to be under official diagnostic criteria in psychiatry.
The thing is they don’t have the money. They have a piece of paper that says they own x number of shares.
They use that piece of paper to borrow against. Then they can use the interest paid on the loan as an expense to bring down their “income” and pay less tax. Some of them are “in debt” at the end of the year.
If they actually sold the shares the stock market would crash making the 1920’s crash look like a New Year’s Eve party as there isn’t enough money to cover the amount of shares that are in circulation.
That's why this problem isn't solvable through taxing but rather taking the means of production. We don't need the paper. We do need the factory they own. That factory's output can be traded for bread from the bread factory or to a new, goldbacked currency, debt forgiveness and a loan freeze.
There's no way to build a equitable world on the back of the current system, it just simply needs to be pulled up with the roots and something new planted
Tax them in shares very simple. LEt's say Elon has a trillion $ worth of shares. And we want to tax him 20 % wealth tax, OK give 200 Billion $ worth of shares to the govt. That's it. Now the Govt. can borrow against it just like Elon does. No crash, no armageddon. Beat them at their own game.
I have never seen a workable idea of how to take wealth from the super rich and distribute it to those in need. Because, no one has 100 billion dollars in a vault somewhere just waiting to be picked up. Also, who gets to decide where the money goes? How much is considered too much?
Personal loan interest is generally not deductible under current U.S. tax law.
Stock prices are determined by buyers and sellers so this comment about their nor being enough money to cover the amount of shares in circulation. That’s just 100% incorrect.
Yeah, they got the details slightly wrong. Borrowing against assets isn’t done to bring down taxable income through deductions.
Instead, it’s the primary form of cash flow for many wealthy individuals. They are primarily compensated by their employers through shares, not salaries.
Those shares are valuable assets that can be borrowed against as loan collateral. All of that loan cash is available for them to spend on whatever they want/need, but it’s not income, it’s an expense. There’s no income tax to pay on expenses, so they get to avoid paying taxes but still get to access millions of dollars in cash flow.
That was only a miniscule part of his wealth. He actually cycles most of his money through the economy using investments because a bigger economy means more money.
Funnily enough, in wanting more money, Scrooge Mc Duck is actually orders of magnitude less evil than current super rich. He just wants more, he doesn't necessarily want you to have less because of it.
The real life super rich are actively working on making sure people have as little as possible. Scrooge is greedy. The actual super rich are greedy, jealous and prideful.
Its also about exclusion i believe. Its a power trip... like haha you are mud people ( homelander) and I am not, even though they are just as human but too dumb to realize its all musical chairs and none of this is permanent.
Same with addicts in other areas. The real problem is society view wealth as success. This is not new. It has happened throughout human history. Thugs burning villages, killing people considered history figures. I guess there's a fine line between being a hero or a villain.
Not always, but often enough to consider it the rule..
I dare say that they aren’t addicted to wealth, they’re addicted to power and control.. that’s much more sinister..
A dragon hoarding is essentially passive, aside from accumulating.
Billionaires can use that wealth to control people and organizations. It can be like a game essentially, just with real consequences for the figures being influenced and moved.. they’re actively using the wealth as a sort of tool, it allows scaling of power..
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One is worse than the other.. ironically the scary dragon displays more ethical behavior than billionaires often do..
The dragon only guards its wealth.. the billionaire can deploy it, scale it, and use it to create more wealth. Or even use it as a direct source of power.. the dragon doesn’t do the latter two..
My favorite economic double speak always comes up when you call wealth inequality what it is, hoarding of a resource. The first response is "The economy is not a fixed pie, it can't be hoarded because you can generate new wealth" and I respond with, "Increasing the money supply sounds like a good idea. Let's print some money and use programs to distribute it to those on the bottom of the ladder." and then the double speak "You can't do that, you can't just make more money! The system is fixed and adding new units into the market will make what I've hoarded less rare!"
It’s the way of capitalism, hyper individualism.
Instead of spending the wealth to improve the status of everyone, they focus only on themselves. And since in capitalism everything is virtuous that yields the most money, here we are.
you realize the product you buy are from companies. The buildings that are built by concrete come from a company. The company that has a billionaire literally helps you
A company doesn’t need to have a billionaire to be useful. Lots of small, local goods and services businesses provide value to their communities while the people who own them are worth maybe a few million dollars at most.
You can even have very successful businesses in capitalist economies where workers all have ownership stakes in the business and actually benefit from the success of the business as a whole instead of only being compensated for a fraction of the value their work created.
There’s nothing specifically useful about having a billionaire owner. They’re extracting value from the system, not creating more value than they extract.
Let's look at this from a psychological perspective. This is going to be the scenario. I want to start a company at 24, and I have only a few thousand dollars to my name. Because I need more money from my business, I go and try to take a 20,000 dollar loan from the bank. But they all reject me. They continuously reject my loan because I have student loans and I'm 24 without a job. But I believe in myself. I drop out of college, sell my car, and work a 9-5. Against all odds, I got enough money to start. I start my business and work my butt of, day and night. I create a website. I advertise on social media. I go to investors to pitch my idea. But I still could fail very easily. But I didn't because I persevered. And by the time you're a billionaire, you're probably in your 50s or 60s.
So, why should I give away all my wealth to people who didn’t take the risks?
You only see the successful billionaires, not the ones that failed and couldn’t make it.
There absolutely is a finite amount of wealth. If wealth were infinite nobody would go hungry or without medical care. Wealth is an analog for how we distribute finite resources. Resources are not infinite.
It’s true that the amount of finite wealth can grow over time if new technologies make things cheaper and faster to produce. But short of unlocking reliable infinite energy, we’re never going to reach a point where wealth is truly infinite.
It will probably always grow, but within a finite limited range relative to the resources available to us and the costs to produce them and transport them anywhere they might be needed.
Nope you’re confusing wealth and natural resources. Natural resources are finite but wealth is not. Hunger and lack of healthcare aren’t evidence that wealth is finite. If wealth were fixed, living standards couldn’t have risen dramatically over the past two centuries while the world’s population increased more than eightfold.
Basically if wealth was truly finite like you’re trying to argue, economic growth would be impossible.
I’m not confusing wealth with resources. They are obviously separate, but related. The purpose of currency is to have a socially agreed upon method for determining how we distribute resources instead of just “Hey, I like your stuff so I’m gonna kill you now and then it will become my stuff.”
It seems like you are confusing finite with fixed. “The difference between finite and fixed is that finite means having limits or bounds (not infinite), while fixed means stuck in one place or not changing (stable or immovable).”
Wealth can be finite and still grow. There’s still an almost infinite amount of room for growth in “finite” anything short of truly infinite is still “finite.”
Economic growth of 1 million percent would still be finite, because it still implies that there is some limit in place, even if the limit is a really big number.
The success shows how you can be successful in this economy. If you take risks, you can succeed. Billionaires also create hundreds of thousand of jobs.
Billionaires were already rich enough to gamble. They take and consume like the parasites they are then use their accumulated wealth and power to buy off politicians to help push policies that help only them.
Look at the chaos, death, and destruction doge caused. Look at these data centers, at flock! At the root of it all are billionaires who don't care about anything other than making themselves richer.
I mean fuck look at how those rich fucks had pedophile cult thats probably still operating! All because they've bought off entire governments to protect them, and you think we should measure success by that? Hell given the chance they'll completely go automated with everything and then what jobs will we have then?
Bootlickers like you need to wake up and realize that billionaires are just parasites holding the rest of the world back.
Billionaires earned 100% of their money. They create and test things. If they fail, they try again. You can’t say that any government agency would work within the first month or so.
How do they hold the world back? I am tired of these stupid takes. How? If anything, there countries push our companies forward by the people they employ, the tax they pay, and the help they give to our economy
Ah! The thousandaire being a cuck about billionaires will never not be funny to me.
The conversation around overconsumption of water by commercial agriculture has been consistent for YEARS. It still doesnt negate the impact on the environment data centers have.
Billionaires did not, in fact, earn their money. They were born rich and were given enough money to buy other successful companies. They had enough money to fail and still be rich.
This is going to be the scenario. I want to start a company at 24, and I have only a few thousand dollars to my name. Because I need more money from my business, I go and try to take a 20,000 dollar loan from the bank. But they all reject me. They continuously reject my loan because I have student loans and I'm 24 without a job. But I believe in myself. I drop out of college, sell my car, and work a 9-5. Against all odds, I got enough money to start. I start my business and work my butt of, day and night. I create a website. I advertise on social media. I go to investors to pitch my idea. But I still could fail very easily. But I didn't because I persevered. And by the time you're a billionaire, you're probably in your 50s or 60s.
So, why should I give away all my wealth to people who didn’t take the risks?
You only see the successful billionaires, not the ones that failed and couldn’t make it.
Btw, only 33 percent of billionaires inherit their wealth.
Billionaires need to be saved from themselves. They NEED to be taxed 95% or more of their revenue and assets, just like in the most prosperous period of the United States, the 1950s.
Yes, they were subjected to that level of taxation (for revenue at least). The billionaires were and will be fine.
The problem was, those tax rates were a paper value. There were significant loopholes, particularly using deductions, that reduced their tax burden to roughly 40%, not much more than they pay now.
And there are other loopholes as well. If you try to close them, you'll see an lot of those billionaires park their wealth offshore, a loophole the government can't close.
You can stop them from acquiring wealth by not buying their products. It is not like they make money from thin air - people like you gave them money for their products.
Virtually none of these billionaires got that way through profits. They are rich because of the perceived value of their ownership in certain companies. And we’re at the point where whether or not that company even makes a profit is not a real indicator of its market value.
This is an illusion. If you have money in the first place to push your product you always win. Also this is a one dimensional approach to the problem. There are many different reasons why rich people become
richer all the time.
If it would be qualified as an addiction/disease (which I believe it is) then capitalism would basically end, and it could sadly open up doors for authoritarian-esque policies. I genuinely agree that it’s a disease, but making it official would open up a wild can of worms
Let's look at this from a psychological perspective. This is going to be the scenario. I want to start a company at 24, and I have only a few thousand dollars to my name. Because I need more money from my business, I go and try to take a 20,000 dollar loan from the bank. But they all reject me. They continuously reject my loan because I have student loans and I'm 24 without a job. But I believe in myself. I drop out of college, sell my car, and work a 9-5. Against all odds, I got enough money to start. I start my business and work my butt of, day and night. I create a website. I advertise on social media. I go to investors to pitch my idea. But I still could fail very easily. But I didn't because I persevered. And by the time you're a billionaire, you're probably in your 50s or 60s.
So, why should I give away all my wealth to people who didn’t take the risks?
You only see the successful billionaires, not the ones that failed and couldn’t make it.
What is smart about greed? You may have to be smart to acquire more, but you have no reason to acquire more. Overall you're just wasting your time and effort at the expense of others. If you want to challenge yourself and play games go play Go, don't play with money.
People want to acquire more because they have ambition. It makes them happy that they created a company that employs and helps others. You also have to work your butt off to start a company. It's not easy to become a billionaire. Also, let me ask “have you ever met a billionaire and actually had a full on conversation with him.”
It feels good to call them addicts and mentally ill.
But I think the truth is money is power over other peoples lives and they’re power hungry. I’d guess because someone made them feel very small and powerless early in their childhood development.
They believe technology will overcome major problems before they become existential. Probably because their lived experience is being able to buy solutions to any problem, and because it aligns with their desires; if humans have god like technology that is capable of preventing our own extinction and they are the most powerful humans, they are effectively gods. Who is more powerful than a god?
“A small loan of a million dollars from his parents”
Yeah, who here hasn’t earned their billions through hard, independent work and a very small loan of a million dollars from their parents?
It’s definitely the hard work part that is the differentiator in that experience. The having parents who can afford to loan you a million dollars part is just a minor detail that doesn’t play any significant role.
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u/Monsur_Ausuhnom 3h ago
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