Empathy (piefed-media.feddit.online)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/comicstrips@lemmy.world
 
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[–] 256 points 10 months ago (32 children)

The fundamental problem of all civilization is not hanging billionaires.

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  • [–] 91 points 10 months ago* (24 children)

    We don't have to hang them, just put a wealth tax on them before they become billionaires.
    But for anyone who has a billion I think it's OK to take it all, because nobody should be so selfish so they have more than a billion.

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  • [–] 23 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    The problem is hierarchies. The entire point of feudalism was to create a caste system where the ruler of each segment won't be touched by the people below them. That's exactly what modern society by and large looks like.

    Until everyone's equal, no one is. Hierarchical systems are antithetical to peace and equality.

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  • [–] 37 points 10 months ago (13 children)

    I'd really rather hang them though...

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  • [–] 23 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    Its certainly simpler, though hardly a solution. There's always more billionaires unless you change the system that created them.

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  • [–] 11 points 10 months ago* (2 children)

    Tax.
    Its not complicated. It might take a few goes to get it just right but what we have now is pathetic.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I agree, but also..There are famously ways to avoid taxes. You need a backup plan when taxation doesn't work. And remember, once someone becomes trully wealthy, they're above the law.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    I'm fundamentally against death penalty, but in the case of Billionaires I believe we can and must do without whatever genetic or psicological traits they carry. We simply can't afford that level of selfishness to survive as a species.

    They'd rather poison the earth and make it uninhabitable than being constrained in any way or form.

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  • [+] -6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    It's the same kind of "simple solution", i.e. eradication of your enemies which the radical right Nazi fucks love so much. I hope that's some food for thought, but you don't seem particularly hungry for that.

    That signature American bloodthirst seems to be up your alley though.

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    That signature American bloodthirst

    Ah, yes, because it was clearly Americans that perpetrated the French and Bolshevik revolutions

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago

    The thing is that we already have a lot of billionaires. We do not to get rid of those before preventing more being created, because they are not going to give up being billionaires voluntarily.

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  • [–] 10 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    More and more I'm thinking we really need a wealth tax. Not because the government needs the money - the government literally makes their own money, they can create as much of it as they want - but because I think a cap on wealth is necessary for social cohesion. Plus, once people get over a certain level of wealth, the chances of it seriously negatively affecting them psychologically seem to go up considerably. Many, if not most, billionaires are just weird, creepy, disturbed wackos. I don't think it's good for them or for society.

    I certainly wouldn't be opposed to capping individual wealth at $999 million. Another option might be to set the maximum at a percentage of GDP, maybe something like 0.01% of GDP. I think that would put the cap at just over $3 billion. That's still an astronomical amount of money, and there would still be billionaires but not the mega, stupid billionaires.

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  • [–] 17 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    a cap on wealth is necessary for social cohesion.

    Billionaires are undermining democracy, which already is a huge problem and against the values of a country that wants to be democratic.
    Yes most billionaires end up wackos, which makes it even worse that they have so much power.
    IMO you can add an extra zero to the decimal places to make it 300 million. 1 billion is IMO already to much.
    But I wouldn't make it a hard limit, just incrementally bigger tax percentage the higher you get.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    I wouldn't make it a hard limit, just incrementally bigger tax percentage the higher you get

    That's a fun idea. Like yeah it's possible for you to become the first trillionaire, but you'll be getting taxed at 99.999%. It almost encourages innovation, in a way, because now billionaires have to figure out how to keep all that money despite incredible taxation. Only the people with truly novel, math-bending ways of generating value would be able to be that wealthy (or perhaps more likely, just people exploiting loopholes I haven't thought of...)

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  • [–] 9 points 10 months ago

    More and more I'm thinking we really need a wealth tax. Not because the government needs the money - the government literally makes their own money, they can create as much of it as they want - but because I think a cap on wealth is necessary for social cohesion.

    This is literally what the inheritance tax is for, so there's precedent.

    Of course, they piss and moan about that too, but I don't give a shit and neither should anyone else.

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  • [–] 38 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    We have so much stigma around being poor. I would probably cry myself to death out of joy if I woke up in a world where people felt shame for hoarding wealth.

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  • [–] 13 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    There was this British yt speaking about the societal changes and she said "rich people invented homelessness and they've been mad about it ever since". Back in the medieval Times, humility was a virtue and priests made vows of poverty.

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