The difference is that the hoarder and cat lady don't own fortune magazine, and entire propaganda networks to normalize their crimes.

It's long past time we treat the egregious hoarding of wealth like the mental disorder that it is.

A cat lady, newspaper guy, and billionaire walk into a bar.

The cat lady orders a bloody mary. The newspaper guy orders a beer. The billionaire orders an underage child.

The bartender shoots him, everyone cheers.

There are a lot of things that are unacceptable only if you're poor. In fact, if a rich man hoarded a ton of old newspapers, he'd be called an "eccentric collector of vintage print media." A rich woman with 150 cats would be a "dedicated feline rescue worker."

A poor guy with a car up on blocks and a stockpile of rifles at his mobile home is "trailer trash," but put that car in a big garage and the guns in a case at a nice mansion and he's a "hunter and tinkerer." A poor farmer trying to stop a highway from being built through her field is "impeding progress," but if it's a rich woman's family estate, she's "fighting government overreach." Rich, blithering racist idiots with clear signs of dementia get elected to the Presidency, while Uncle Cletus gets escorted out of the town council meeting and his family is handed a flyer for a memory care facility when he says the same things.

Across the board, there's stuff that's normalized and accepted for the wealthy but dismissed and looked down on for the poor. It's not just that hoarding the money is itself accepted, but also that someone who hoards money will find that all of their other antisocial and concerning behavior is also acceptable in the eyes of the public

Money makes a very effective blindfold.

I could never understand this money-hoarding mindset. You could buy so many newspapers with all that!

You can keep raping children and getting away with it.

The money is secondary, there's literally a massive child rape ring running the world right now.

The hoarder is a bit concerning but ultimately harmless.

The cat lady is an animal welfare concern. But if she's genuinely trying to take good care of cats, she might be rehabilitated as a shelter worker.

The last one is probably beyond redemption, if they would even accept it.

I read a fun book once that proposed we should go off the gold standard and go onto the plutonium standard. Plutonium loses value as it decays, so you have incentive to spend it. If you keep it too long, you're likely to get cancer, so, again, incentive to spend it. And if you collect too much of it all together in one place, it goes kablooey, so there's one more factor limiting wealth hoarding.

Been saying the same for a long time.

One small correction though: it's not cash they're hoarding - it's wealth, both material and immaterial.

Hoarding wealth makes you a superstar and gives you influence and power. And that's what they're all about: forcing everyone else to acknowledge their importance. And if that's needed, they'll demonstrate their power of nuisance so that you can't ignore them.

The moral of this meme is to tax the people that horde cats.

I disagree. Someone with a lot of cats is crazy, not nuts. As in "crazy cat-lady". /s

Good idea. Maybe we get to 2 million and then we just jump to infinity and assume they have enough money to pay for anything they want. The money just magically appears. That way they don't have to worry about making more than 3 million dollars. Plus it means that anyone who makes 3 million dollars can compete with the others, thus making it fair.

That's because hoarding useless shit isn't the same as hording a universal way of payment?

They aren't going to stop themselves.

I see nothing wrong with the cat thing...

They don't actually hoard cash, it's more like stocks, so it's not so much hoarding a lot of them, but people assign great imaginary value to them.

(I think, I'm an engineer, not a money scientist)

The clear correct answer is to normalize all hoarding behaviors. We don't need more absurd social rules ty.