this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted, clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts: 1
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I'm not sure that I agree. While I would support something like outlawing billionaires or at the very least, a tax bracket that claws back significant chunks of what they are draining from society, there are vast nuances to these issues beyond "the billionaires want it that way." When you say "everything from ... can all be rendered down", I think it's pretty important to recognize how much detail and nuance is lost in that rendering down.
Billionaires and the accumulation of wealth are just stand ins for the accumulation of power in a capitalistic society. When power is removed, it creates a vacuum. Who fills it? In the ideal, I know most of us would say "the people" but this is an insanely complex balancing beam to maintain without some group of assholes finding a new, non-capital way to extract and centralize that power.
None of this is to say that eliminating the notion of a billionaire is a bad idea. I'm with you all that the very idea of a billionaire is heinous and impossible without vast exploitation. I just do not think that issue being solved would be even close to some panacea for all of the world's problems. There would just be twists in the existing problems and fun new ones.
I don't agree with that argument.
You're right from the point of view that removing those with immense power from their billionaire wealth will be replaced by someone or another group. It's our natural human condition to always want to be in control and there will always be those among us that will want more power and more control than others.
Removing the ability of any one person accumulating enormous amounts of wealth just levels the playing field. If those with a higher need to want more power don't have the ability to control an entire sector, an entire region, an entire community or even an entire nation than others will have the ability to challenge them and regulate their power and control.
As it is now, when we allow individuals to gain enormous amounts of power, no one has the ability to challenge them. When those with enormous power decide to affect governments, industries, society or finance, there is very little any one can do to challenge them. Sure we can band together and take billionaires to court ... but it comes down to how much money you have ... the ability to challenge power means you need money and whoever has the most money has the most power. It isn't a justice system that treats everyone fairly, it's a legal system that favors those with the most money.
Outlawing billionaires won't create a utopia, it won't remove our conflicts we have with each other. What it would do is level the playing field and distribute power among many other people who would all challenge one another as to what they can or can't do. It would create a more democratic system where power would be spread to more people.
Once we create that distribution of power, we could then spend our energies solving the problems we have with each other and our world, rather than in spending all our time trying to defend finances.
As it is now, democratic power is impossible because power is only centered on those who have the most money.
I think you two are speaking about different steps in this hypothetical transition. You are talking about the long term goal, the other person was talking about the transition from now to the long term scenario. There is very real danger that the power vacuum left by the x-billionaires could be gobbled up by a small group of people. This cannot be dismissed even if we all agree on the end goal.
Secondary critique, set the wealth cap in relation to some other moving metric. I think a multiple of minimum wage would be great, give incentive for the wealthy to increase minimum wage to achieve a higher cap.