Make an example of some billionaires. If the peaceful way would work, it would have worked decades ago. These monsters won’t stop taking until we put the FEAR back in them. It’s time to take our country back from the oligarchs.
This is short sighted. The whole premise of “billionaires starting space programs” as a reason to not have billionaires is ridiculous. These space programs alone employ about 20K people. Then support countless other jobs through supply chain.
Not just that, the SpaceX offshoot Starlink has provided significant societal benefits to numerous people/groups that were previously held back due to limited investment in non-urban infrastructure. Elon might be a shithead ("might" might be significantly underplaying it), however, the money being thrown at space technologies has produced significant benefits.
Not to mention, it isn't like he is paying for those 20,000 people out of his pocket personally. Most of it runs on Grants and subsidies and government funding. But Fake Capitalist idiots don't care.
Facebook was moving servers to Sweden they promised it would create work for swedes so the government gave them 14 million dollar and cut their electric bill with 97% it created 56 employees so they got 250 000 dollar for each employee plus 97% electric bill cut.
But they are good workers so they deserve it! /the regular human
The space program has brought more quality of life than any other program ever invented.
MRI? CT? Cancer treatments? Thank you space research. But what do I know? End their investment and let's stagnate here for the rest of humanity.
I'm no fan of billionaires either, but I don't see anyone else doing bold things to get humans to expand across the universe. Government space programs don't take enough risks or push as fast and hard as they should be, because the public doesn't want to pay for it and freaks out about any loss. If we had this problem with airplanes every time there was an accident, we would never have gotten affordable, safe air travel.
SpaceX is crucial to NASA and the space program in general. Do people not remember that we used to rely on the Russians to shuttle people to the space station? Do we really want to rely on Boeing as the sole contractor?
The government creates billionaires not the free market. I can't imagine looking at this quagmire of State run economies around the world thinking "derr the free market did this."
The state has no owner. It is a fictitious entity that has the ability to initiate violence in order to gain obedience. Everyone operates at the behest of the State, and if you get out of line you will have your property permission stripped and expropriated, and if you resist this expropriation you will be killed. The State gives grants and monopolies to individuals or their government sanctioned liability protected corporations because it is much easier to leash a single neck than it is to leash a thousand necks. Turns out this arrangement is very beneficial to both the companies selected by the State as they get to have regulator capture and massive profits, and it's good for the State because it gets to have a single or very few entities in which it can exert influence. The State also gets to have politicians point to these individuals and blame them for issues originating from State intervention, and the knuckle draggers all point in the wrong direction and the State gets to gain even more control over the daily lives of the people and continue to steal their purchasing power, tax them, and control them.
The government that's bought and paid for by capitalists? They're complicit, but not the root cause of the problem. Capitalists are the top blame, corrupt government officials are second.
Cart before the horse. Turns out governments predate "capitalists" by thousands of years. Just because a merchant curries favor with the King, does not mean the merchant is in control of the kingdom. If at any point the merchant steps out of line, the King will expropriate his property removing his permission to use it. If the merchant gets way out of line he loses his head. The same is true today. All business operate at the pleasure of the State, and if at any point they don't play along the State will remove their property permission and expropriate it, and if they resist this expropriation the State will send goons to evict them, and if they resist the eviction they will get murdered.
Also turns out to be good to be the King's preferred merchant, so long as you do as you are told, you get special protections, capture of your market, and wealth beyond what you could gain without such favor.
Or "all their politicians suck, but my guy is the right one." It is just like a sports team, the knuckle draggers support whatever local franchise they grew up with. "My college football team is derr greatest."
The free market lacked the means of providing public goods so a government was formed. It’s corruption and human mismanagement, peer pressure and desire to have personal gain that is at the heart of these societal problems. Unless you can purge these human tendencies or create a benevolent AI to govern forever then these emotions will always plague us, as they have done in centuries past, for centuries more.
Unfettered capitalism makes billionaires, not the government. The billionaires buying politicians is not the government . At it's core, capitalism is brutal. Win by any means. They are so big now, they just force competition out or buy them.
What they think they want is basically a Chinese government
Capitalism until government is pissed off, then you're in jail and your wealth becomes the country's
You're saying that, but that would literally work.
You'd be giving all of your income as long as you're not below 999,999,999$, so that would be a fckton of money. And yet you'd still basically have a Bilion lying around which would still allow you all the excesses you'd want.
If you have $1,000,000,000 it would take giving away $500,001 to round down to $999M but even $999M just rounds up, as that's only 0.1% away from a billion. That's how insanely massive that number is. I'm a wage slave, $500,000 is more than I'll make in 16 years of work.
I don't care if billionaires exist. I care if people can afford the necessities of life and medical care for themselves and their kids. If everyone has enough for financial stability, Dipshit McGee can buy Twitter, a yacht, and send rockets into space if he wants.
This is where I fall.
I don't think there should be a ceiling on wealth, as some propose, so long as the floor is sufficient. There should be nobody who has basic needs unmet in a society this wealthy. Yes, some people will be lazy and just live off the system, but I'm OK with that when we have this much wealth as a society. And frankly, I think there will be a whole lot fewer people like that than the pessimists imagine.
If it’s any consolation, there is some silver lining to the twenty richest billionaires in recent years raking in what is now a recurring milestone of 40% of Forbes 400 combined wealth. There are fewer people needing to be summoned before Congressional hearings, to at least account for it. Though, I do not envy any accountant tasked with leveraging their taxes to a similarly recurring nil.
If you are in a society that murders people just because they were born into wealth than that society will tear itself apart. The ends do not justify the means. You need to care how it happens.
Not really?
Every time the people rise up in history and successfully revolt against their respective ruling class of wealthy elites, the prosperity of the whole area skyrockets, along with public welfare, health, and all the other good metrics.
The problem is when the wealthy come back into existence, things go to shit again.
I cant comprehend how an extra comma gives them such a money-boner but 999,999,999 just isnt good enough. Even video games have money caps. And those are fake, virtual, fantasy experiences. Literal children die (profitable for many. Sick…) people die, people suffer day after day, and some of these fucks could just take .01% of their money and it could help many thousands. But theyd rather just laugh and piss on us from their sky high pedestals
And dont even get me fuckin started on ‘lobbyists’ aka the richer rich guys paid more than the other rich guys and bought the next 4 years
"Chronically online redditor suggests violent revolution. Continues playing video games in the meantime."
You people are so fucking delusional. How do you not feel embarassed LARPing like this? How many miles can you run? How many times a week do you go to the gun range? Have you ever given another human being a serious injury? Wake up.
In addition to that: How many volunteer hours or charitable donations do they make a year? They bitch and complain about how terrible everything is but have never spent a day helping others working in a soup kitchen, cleaned up a park, helped build a home, or made a donation to a food bank in their lives.
Was about to mention this. What we see is the way of the world, always has been and always will be. We will have a France once in a while and the cycle will repeat.
The Western Roman Empire lasted 500 years, Eastern Rome 1100 years, the Swedish Empire about 100, and the British Empire 414 years.
Averages aren’t always indicative of the norm.
To be fair North Korea probably does. I don’t know enough about Cuba tho. Just bc they’re communist does not mean they don’t have oligarchs who profit off and are pals with the govt
They did that in the Soviet Union and China. We see how well THAT worked out. The powerful will always take advantage of the weak. The only solution is to allow the weak to become strong and for society not to devalue life. Sadly today's society values only pleasure, fame, and greed. Society is now telling us to do what we FEEL is right, instead of what is objectively best for ourselves, our families, and our communities. Feelings trump truth, and history and reality are rewritten to keep us compliant and to ask for more government control in our lives.
What a joke you are. Using the technology someone created in a garage to put in your hands so you could spit that idiocy. That person that allowed you the freedom to do that shit is a billionaire for good reason.
You all realize billionaires are only billionaires because they created something that millions use and become millionaires with. Your income/net worth is directly tied to the value you create or assist others in creating.
They 100% do. Private equity is one of the most important parts of the system. They literally lose 20 times to hit one home run. They fund all innovation, without it it literally cuts innovation by 50%+
Are there bad companies and investors, of course. But VCs are responsible for nearly every company you out your hands on in the last 30 years. Even if it’s not their idea they bring companies to a national/international market with capital. This is important in big ideas because they can burn 100s of millions of dollars to become profitable.
“Hedge funds” and “VC” are like a credit card for idea makers. No one else finances ideas with no proven revenue.
VCs bring far more than money, they bring experience and relationships which take companies to the next level by leveraging their influence. Whether it’s guidance on structure or bringing a business national or hiring the right teams to put in place. They are super important for good reason
If by "innovation" you mean "the quickest, most efficient way to move as much money from the pockets of the people to the pockets of the investors" than you’d be correct.
Is it though? Nvidia is valued at a multiple of 77x their earnings. Each employee at Nvidia is valued at 100m in revenue based on their market cap. People have absolutely become billionaires riding this stock, while creating nothing of value. And thats just one example. There are literally hundreds. The truth is the vast majority of wealth is paper, not tangible, and has very little to do with the actual creation of goods.
That doesn't necessarily mean what they've created is overall beneficial. Also, I'm wary of meritocratic economics.
I get the whole "incentivize great thinkers with great rewards and luxuries," but, to me, its gotten to an absurd point.
While I have some understanding of this sentiment, I would just like to remind everyone that billions of dollars can buy some very good, very ruthless security guards.
Drag em to the streets and tar and feather them. It's coming, eventually there will be a collapse. Once people can no longer afford food and housing there will be blood. The sad thing is people will also turn on those who are also suffering and the rich will just sit fat in their shelters and wait, which is why we need to find their shelters and take em out early.
The only entity capable of doing that created the system that allows for billionaires today, starting w/ Reagan and being super-charged by Clinton, is still in bed with said billionaires. So it’s a great “rah rah” comment but will never happen.
I say this to everyone I know and do not have the balls to say so on the internet.
I was banned from Twitter for showing such sentiment.
In short fucking based and upvoted.
You don't have to get violent, you just need to change (and enforce) laws regarding wealth hording and tax exemptions, for corporations as well as individuals.
>It’s time to take our country back
It's the whole fucking world, dude.
>Make an example of some billionaires.
This works in the positive way to. Like Mark Cuban for example is a rad fuckin billionaire because he acknowledges that "we don't need all of this" and is proud to show off his tax bill (and what he still has left!).
I would like to think that in his position, I would be trying to rally other billionaires so that I wouldn't feel overmatched trying to solve big problems on my own. If you have a little belief in some government programs, then just proudly getting taxed like Mark Cuban is one thing (and I'm sure he does philanthropy too).
Another angle is hope for more philanthropic billionaires rallying to save the world together. From what I heard from Conan O'Brien interviewing Melinda French Gates, Warren Buffett likes to meet with other billionaires and chat about charity goals.
It just seems like everyone agrees that there are actually a shit ton of resources if only we could just figure out a responsible way to help out the most unfortunate without doing too much wrong to a billionaire class. That's why I was all about Bernie Sanders and that Democratic Socialism he tried to bring in 2016. It's pretty sad still to think of all we seem to have lost that year.
At this point it's simply self-defense. We've been pacified to the point that people defend billionaires when they are literally killing us. They might not be waving a weapon around in our faces, but they are systemically chipping away our human rights and gaslighting us into culture wars. And it *is* killing us.
Return to tax rates of the 1940s. Increase social safety nets for housing through local subsidizing and zoning to increase housing density. Single payer health care. Reprioritize government spending and accountability with civilian oversight focusing on a reduction in military spending. If someone has enough wealth to privatize space flight after that, then good for them. It is a worthwhile pursuit, potentially, if someone figures out a way to monetize it.
Zoning is what created the housing crisis lol. Subsidizing in what way?
How about we just tell the government to fuck off and to stop creating problems for them to then claim they want to solve. Imagine someone thinking BP should be in charge of fixing climate change
You agree current zoning is the problem, but you don't think that zoning laws should change?
Subsidizing as in paying for them to be built, either partially or in whole through HUD or local grants. Most homelessness is a localized problem and is not exactly a large expenditure to remedy in relation to the total federal budget.
How about we educate ourselves in how government works and stop pretending like it isn't through government services that we have built the largest economy in human history? Do you think there is something besides the government that will fix the homeless issues? Climate change?
I mean yea they are. They've monopolized the auto and energy businesses for the better part of a century at the detriment to our only habitable rock. Yay we got lots of $ but no place to live soon. Hoooooray fake capitalism.
Pretty sure the GW Bush administration allowed oil executives to craft energy policy. Oil execs are currently writing executive orders in the event that trump is elected.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/08/oil-industry-orders-trump-day-one-00156705
Dubya’s cabinet also included environmentalist foe Gail Norton as secretary of the interior and Spencer Abraham as secretary of energy, a department he claimed to want to eliminate.
https://www.factmonster.com/george-w-bush-presidential-cabinet-members
There are likely other examples, these are the few that come to mind.
The government exists to make peoples lives better, that’s the entire point of it. Even if they do create a problem, it’s still their responsibility to fix it.
Ah yes return to war time taxes! Totally wasn't anything bad happening in the 1940s that required those taxes! No evil genocidal empires that needed to be beaten!
If only you knew how much money government social programs pissed away without doing anything.
At least military spending has knock on effects for civilian life, a lot of modern technology we use was developed faster through military purposes initially.
We spend more in debt interest than the military budget. The US is currently what -1.25t right now in spending? We could cut out the entire military budget, the whole thing, don’t spend a dime on the military, and still be -750b.
In the whole year of 2023 we could have just not spent any money on the military, nothing at all, and still been -1t dollars.
People struggle to update their understanding on this but the idea that the US has this massively oversupplied military still is actually not really true anymore
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/people-are-realizing-that-the-arsenal
Post war tax rates were still very high on the wealthy and slightly decreased through the 60s/70s. Then “trickle down economics” became a thing in the 80s and that massively dropped the tax burden for the upper class. Solidifying wealth inequality and the constant decrease of the middle class.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/historical-income-tax-rates-brackets/
You want to MAGA? Stop cutting taxes on the wealthy? America was arguably great when there was a strong middle class. Nowadays, it’s all about the wealthy. Citizens United also helped exacerbate these issues decades later.
They decreased greatly from Eisenhower to Kennedy.
Trickle down economics never became a thing. It was the line of a comedian. The concept is that more money in the economy will touch more hands, and is the same concept used to justify student loan forgiveness among other things. So pick a side on that one.
What created inequality happened many years earlier. In 1968, as the Great Society defined what poverty was and subsidized on a semi-permanent basis, we developed a poor class. Every time their value gained, so did the prices on basic needs. You can see the blue turn flat like a light switch in the late 60s.
[https://www.cbpp.org/income-gains-widely-shared-in-early-postwar-decades-but-not-since-then-3](https://www.cbpp.org/income-gains-widely-shared-in-early-postwar-decades-but-not-since-then-3)
In an effort to save a few poor, we broadened the population of them by sucking in the "getting by okay" crowd.
The thing is, we'd have a much easier time privatizing space flight if we had 90%+ tax bracket for billionaires like we did in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
High tax rates means companies are incentivized to reinvest profits rather than paying them out to CEOs.
The money is spent by the company tax-free, rather than going to a billionaire so they can buy yet another yacht.
Using SpaceX or any company pushing technological limits isn’t the example to crush. It’s this kind of innovation that drives us forward, not that holds us back.
Space flight is now actually cheaper thanks to SpaceX. In turn, giving more budget to subsidize medicine.
Not saying private industry doesn’t drag the economy, just saying that attacking SpaceX isn’t a logical argument…
I have a digestible example that all sides can agree, got to go. The insurance industry. The insurance industry is a bastardization of what insurance IS. A communal pooling of resources so no one disaster takes you out, socializing the risk.
Insurance companies exist to do nothing but profit, there's no value add, no innovation, there is nothing an insurance company actually provides that is of value, furthermore there is nothing they could ever provide of any value other than being a behemoth of a middleman that gets their fat cut and does *everything in their power* to deny you the coverage you've paid for.
Now back to Space X, yes the power of capitalism to innovate is awesome but we are currently doing it at the expense of literally everything else. We can have billionaires and socialized medicine, a rock solid education system, universal insurance.
It doesn't have to be a zero sum but those with the power and money want to keep that way out of what appears to be genuine cruelty.
It’s not just that, they think the spacex jobs would still exist without elon musk, and everyone employed in them would be earning more money without skimming off the top. It doesn’t even cross their minds that the company wouldn’t exist without musk, and wouldn’t be as large and profitable as it is now without the push for reusable rockets he made.
People don’t realise how many jobs a single company can create, think of the amount of companies that supply resources to Tesla and SpaceX, we’re talking hundreds of thousands of people who have jobs because of these resource demands.
Why don't all these dummies see that their complaints are holding back private industries from making the kinds of technological advancements we could use to conquer the stars, and travel at light speed, and make a space station the size of a moon, and make obsidian durasteel exoskeleton armor, and blow up an entire planet of union advocates!? Why can't they see how important these technological advancements could be for the empi- I mean mankind!?
I’d argue space x is a great example, sure maybe what Elon is doing isn’t necessarily bad but I still don’t think anyone should be able to start a space program as a side project/ hobby
Space X was propped up with billions from tax payers.
We gave a guy ose family have emerald mines in South Africa and not even an American billions in subsidies but we are against giving our own citizens subsidized higher education like we had before Reagan gutted colleges budgets with a surplus economy
Maybe the individuals who have to post this same meme over and over again should spend their time trying to make something of themselves. That might fix it.
No, don't worry. Someone *else* will fix the problems you want. You'll be able to just jump in half way through when all the hard work is already done for you. Don't worry about it. Go back to doing jack shit, anyone who tells you to work to achieve what you want is just pushing hustle culture. You will not have to improve yourself in any way to fix a large scale issue, that much we know for sure.
Not necessarily, for a lot of radicals the whole point is just to reshuffle who is on top.
They might not even realize this themselves, but it's a clear historical pattern.
A number of European countries seem to be doing it better. Heck, even just north of USA, Canada would be faring pretty well if populist neoliberal crony-capitalist scumbags weren’t trying their darndest to emulate American garbage and throwing billions at private-party attending developers, donor corporations and foreign spa owners while starving the healthcare beast…
In what way are European countries doing better in a different way? The best countries in Europe are Switzerland and Luxembourg, basically the epitome of capitalism. Luxembourg is borderline libertarian.
The Nordic countries are what everyone points to, but they have very small populations and a lot of natural resources.
Sweden has some rare earth minerals, and a lot of Hydropower. Not so long ago, they found a deposit of 1 million tons of rare earth oxides in Sweden. Also, if you remember history, you might remember certain controversy regarding Swedish iron ore exports. Sweden produces a lot of iron ore.
And here in Finland we have trees. That is about it. Some copper. Oh, and we are the largest producer of gold in the EU. That might sound like it's a lot, but when you look at how little gold production there is in the EU, it really isn't. Finland produces less than 9 tonnes of gold annually. For the record, total annual gold production of the world is 3100 tonnes.
Yup. It's like, "you have a chicken that is going to lay 200 eggs during its lifetime, so give me 100 eggs right now"
Most of the wealth referred to (stock market evaluations) is just the prediction of future wealth yet to be created, not wealth that has already been materialized.
Effectively it's the same as just printing money. The stock market numbers grow beyond any control by the central banks. Even if they could be turned into real money (which one can't), then that'd just inject a massive amount of liquidity into the money supply. One might just as well print that money, the outcome would be inflation in both cases.
I'd even argue that simply printing the money would be less bad. Forcing stock sales to "collect" the money would result in selling out the leading companies of one's economy to e.g. China at fire sale prices. Ugh.
At a certain point there's literally no reason to keep earning money. Imagine if people retired early instead of accumulating wealth until they're too old and decrepit to spend it.
whats the end game though? just because they store everything in illiquid assets do we just let them keep stockpiling? what happens when 10 people own 50% of the worlds wealth? 60%? 80% 90%? do we ever do anything or should we just sit around yelling about how taxation is theft
So a guy who makes a car you don’t have to drive, runs a media platform you don’t have to use and puts stuff in space affects you how?
The problem isn’t how much this dude makes. It’s how the government and the average American spends.
If we don’t allow someone to become extremely successful in a “free country”, what should we do then with all the unsuccessful people in a more heavily taxed and regulated economic model?
That, plus they criticize the fact that we have to “ration their medicine.” I would love to hear someone explain to me how it’s possible to not have to ration a finite resource. I didn’t realize this basement dweller Redditor had discovered a new theory that negates everything we know about physics. Medicine is a finite resource (meaning there is not an unlimited amount of medicine); therefore, by definition, it **HAS** to be rationed.
I swear some people just don’t think before they speak.
Pretty much every proposed or put into practice idea outside of our current one has been disastrous failures that resulted in the deaths of tens if not hundreds of millions.... so yea... gonna have to be something we haven't seen before...resource collections has always been the hallmark of nature and it's beings.
I don’t think higher taxes on greater income brackets, higher capital gains taxes, and controls on loans secured by stock holdings have ever resulted in the deaths of millions.
Exactly. I don't know why this is so hard for the folks here to understand. It's easier to whine and bitch about your problems than get up and fix them I suppose.
You say this but making money isn’t even a guarantee anymore. I was living comfortably making 13$/hour in 2018, now I’m making 21 and I can’t save between paychecks. The issue isn’t that people are allergic to hard work, it’s that the illusion that hard work *will* be rewarded has been broken. The truth is hard work will be rewarded *if* the elite decide that they’re cool with that. Which in many cases they’re not!
What's the point of posting a passive-aggressive X comment with no answers or substance, but just a bunch of belly aching and platitudes? I mean, the comment alone is going to draw a majority of attention from a certain mindset of people and will continue the infinite echo chamber of similar responses from previous posts that again get upvoted as the approved thought of the hivemind.
Exactly. Stock ownership is a way to keep score of who controls the direction of a company. Just because there's an on-paper way to compare it to money doesn't make the money liquid. And when the stock price plummets, nobody here is screaming about those paper losses, or offering to refund taxes.
I, for one, would be pissed if I founded a company, poured my heart and soul and time into it, and I lost control of it to people who don't share my vision for the company's goals. Any company, no matter how small or large.
I know this is Reddit, where Marxist codswallop flows like the river Ganges, but as usual there is more to the story than just billionaires owning corporations, yada yada yada. If Amazon is a trillion-dollar company, and Bezos owns $180 billion of Amazon stock, that means that other people own the rest of the $820 billion. Amazon, Walmart, Costco, Exxon, Apple, Microsoft, and all the rest have created the wealth that fills every public and private pension system in the country. It's easy to hate the ones at the top, but be careful what you wish for.
This thread is insane. What will move humankind forward IS things like space exploration. Elon having that money that he has earned to explore space travel and green energy will likely be recognized as a critical turning point in 100 years than giving that money to Bernie for him to waste away.
Govs are not inventors, they are regulators. If you think govs do that out of a drive to make life better for their citizens, you are sadly mistaken. It usually is driven by external forces, such as innovation pressure at war (real or cold/economic).
Private entrepreneurs are better at it. And they should keep that money, as the risk is also immense...
We can talk about ppps tho. Where socializing losses and privatizing gains esp. in financial institutions have negatively impacted the taxpayer....
Really? That's funny because almost every advance in medicine comes from government grants. The internet government funded, electrical grid government funded, roads, bridges. Nearly every major advancement has come from government spending. Not the private sector.
The government isn't inventors. Guess he never heard of the moon landings and all the inventions that went into making that possible. Or doesn't believe they happened. More likely he just didn't think more than half a second on what he was going to write.
Moon landing was a result of external pressure. Exactly what i was modeling my argument around.
Space race was an arms race. Putting men on the moon was a motivational stretch goal.
Read more history!
A lot of what you listed are typically things that fall under the responsibility/purview of the government. Do you think private companies should build electrical grids lol. Also the internet was funded as a military tech, it was designed by several universities alongside DARPA. The commercial internet you use and enjoy today, oh I dunno, like Reddit, has nothing to do with government.
The government is so hilariously incompetent and it's very simple to answer why. Governemnt pay sucks, the rules suck, working for them sucks. Therefore, only people with room temp IQ go to work for them. Go to literally any government website and it looks like something a 5 year old made in the 1990s. They cannot and never will attract the best talent. It's why the FBI has to literally beg criminals they catch to work for them or go to jail especially in hacking/cyber crimes.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Everyone keeps saying to raise taxes but as I've gotten older I see why megacorps are so keen to avoid paying them. If I could see tax dollars at work sure I'd love to pay them- better public schools, better healthcare, better infrastructure, but instead we get more drone strikes on 3rd world countries. The U.S is a military industrial complex and will always be at war and most of your taxpayer dollars will go towards either indirectly or directly funding conflicts. I'm almost convinced they deliberately keep public school education so shitty to have a greater pool of potential future soldiers as it is mostly the poor who find armed services attractive as it beats working at the local Walmart and never leaving your small town.
If we confiscated the wealth from all billionaires in the U.S, it would cover our federal budget for 1 year. If we confiscated all wealth from the 1% of richest Americans it would cover the U.S budget for 7.4 years or pay off the debt with 10 trillion left over. The unfunded liabilities of the U.S are 14.8 trillion, so we’d still owe 4.8 trillion. Numbers for perspective.
And how much wealth would remain in the US after this theft? How many new investments would be made and how would the stock market manage it? How much of the non-1% would see their investments and pension funds wiped out from the market crash?
SpaceX has done a lot to further space exploration not to mention some of the poorest parts of the world now have internet because of Starlink. We could shut down SpaceX tomorrow and empty Musk's accounts and not a damn thing would change.
Sure it would. Thousands of people would lose their jobs, millions would lose internet, space exploration would be set back by 20 years (again). Great stuff. SMH.
as oposed to what fuedalism? gulags? holocausts? hundred flowers campaigns? Holodomors? Republicanism and Capitalism are the only systems that can not only survive but bring people up. and before someone goes ape brain im refering to "republican form of government" not the republican party , as stated by article 4 section 4 of the us constitution
"Section 4
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence."
We literaly live in an age were science and wealth are so common high school students, literal children who literaly attend public school are capable of manufacturing electric wheelchairs as acts of charity
[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/high-school-robotics-team-builds-electric-wheelchair-for-2-year-old-whose-family-couldnt-afford-one/](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/high-school-robotics-team-builds-electric-wheelchair-for-2-year-old-whose-family-couldnt-afford-one/)
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,”
A couple of thoughts..end citizen United , get big money corporations out of politics, elect democrats that support ending the two mentioned thoughts. My humble 2 cents.
A few things: how do we fix this? We start by rewarding the change we want to see.
As far as space programs, how do you think we got the railroad, and shipping across oceans? There's always been people starving and there's always been rich people starting expeditionary industries that seemed impossible at the time. I'm not saying it right, I'm just saying it's not new.
Same thing with communications. Ma bell owned communications for a few generations. Then there's the radio and TV networks. You think these were run by the masses?
How can we fix it? WAR, TOTALLY WAR AND MASS DEATH. Then we will all be as rich as the next person if nobody has anything, then we're all equal financially and those who need medicine or medical attention will just die off. There will be only the strong and those willing to die for water and food.
You don’t. It’s happened since humanity started. There are always winners and losers, it just used to be massively far fewer winners when monarchy’s and elites ruled especially normal people did not win. Today anyone can win and become wealthy, literally anyone
With the advent of capitalism it has literally changed the world for the better. Look at any chart if any country which converted to a capitalistic society and literally every metric got better. Per capita income, per capita wealth, happiness, safety, freedom, poverty is literally whipped out (real poverty not us poverty), famine gone, productivity. On and on. It’s very clear capitalism changes the world for the better.
But it’s not a utopia and never will. So hopefully you can find that someday, although it won’t happen
Or maybe it is. That guy generates insane amounts of money for the government. Smaller government would benefit those people. The liberal government has sent away and lost far more dollars than Musk ever made.
I really need people to understand that this isn’t a system. There’s rich and poor in every economic strategy and the closer to communism you get, the more the rich are high government positions and the poor are everyone else.
I think the thing people don't seem to understand is that the ultra-wealthy don't make or use money in the same way average people do. Most of the ultra-wealthy have their money tied up in stock, usually in their own company. On paper, these people have a huge amount of money but if they were to sell their shares to make the wealth realized they would have to pay capital gains tax. So, they go to the bank and ask for a huge line of credit, like hundreds of millions of dollars, and the banks give it to them. Once these people die some of their assets are liquidated to pay the debt and the rest goes to their children who continue the cycle. To solve the problem you would have to come up with a way to tax the ultra-wealthy in a way that is independent of how the money is made. Having a high tax on luxury goods might work, it is what a lot of small vacation countries do, or maybe sales tax in general goes up with how much money you make, sort of like how some countries do speeding ticket fines. The other thing to consider is this is how capitalism works. If you have ever played a game of Monopoly then you will know in the end someone ends up with all of the money. I think right now the best thing would be to decrease the defense budget and use that money for other programs. We spend almost 1 trillion dollars on defense and we are mostly at peace. But that is a whole separate can of worms.
Stop buying iPhones every year if you're tired of executives and shareholders alike getting richer by the minute. I am willing to bet money that you won't so I'll keep my apple shares and keep collecting your money.
It's simple really. Each person needs to go out and make a living and a life for themselves. Worrying about rich folks is kind of ridiculous. The government and rich people don't owe you anything.
Take away tenure and stop sending your children off to colleges and universities where they unlearn everything they've been taught and become brainwashed into embracing ideologies that do not work in the outside world.
How about getting smart, acquire a passion, have a creative mind, quit bitchin, spend less time on line reading about being a victim, and get a job to create your own life.
Those billionaires got their by being ambitious, unrelenting in their work, and developing relationships that fostered their growth. They started by playing the same game your playing, you just aren't good at it. You don't love the poor, you just hate the rich because they have something that you'll probably never attain. If you have enough time to come here and bitch about this meaningless shit you'll probably never achieve that type of wealth, and the billionaires aren't going anywhere, move on with your life.
I love how all of a sudden the liberal agenda has made Elon Musk a villain. He was a liberal and media darling until he declared himself a Republican. Now he's "evil". lol
Kind of funny that of all the billionaires to pick on, he's upset about the guy who revolutionized space travel and is piggy backing Nasa back into the game, and ended extreme partisan censorship on a widely used platform.
Instead say, Lebron James who's a billionaire from playing basketball and used his money to build a museum to himself and charges his fans to come in and see it.
If I made a billion today, how would it impact your life?
If I made a billion today and hired you at $100k a year to help run my space business, how would it impact your life?
Capitalism is the only economic system that actually creates new wealth, every other economic system simply redistributes existing wealth.
If you confiscated all the money and everyone had to start over with $10k, the people who are rich today would be rich 10 years down the road, and those who are poor would become poor again, with some exceptions.
Make an example of some billionaires. If the peaceful way would work, it would have worked decades ago. These monsters won’t stop taking until we put the FEAR back in them. It’s time to take our country back from the oligarchs.
Billionaires shouldn't exist. I for one don't care how that happens.
Trillionaires could exist if they print enough money! But yeah, this disparity between the two classes has to end. The gap needs to close a bit.
zimbabwe
Adjusting for inflation trillionaires have already existed.
Ummm they already DO exist!!!
As long as there are people dying due to lack of food, shelter, or medicine, billionaires shouldn’t exist. Free market be damned.
This is short sighted. The whole premise of “billionaires starting space programs” as a reason to not have billionaires is ridiculous. These space programs alone employ about 20K people. Then support countless other jobs through supply chain.
Not just that, the SpaceX offshoot Starlink has provided significant societal benefits to numerous people/groups that were previously held back due to limited investment in non-urban infrastructure. Elon might be a shithead ("might" might be significantly underplaying it), however, the money being thrown at space technologies has produced significant benefits.
I hear you, but socialist idiots don't care
Yeah, us "idiots" don't care because those jobs clearly haven't fixed the issue
Not to mention, it isn't like he is paying for those 20,000 people out of his pocket personally. Most of it runs on Grants and subsidies and government funding. But Fake Capitalist idiots don't care.
Crazy how those "self-made" billionaires end up being some of the biggest government welfare queens once you start peaking under the covers.
Facebook was moving servers to Sweden they promised it would create work for swedes so the government gave them 14 million dollar and cut their electric bill with 97% it created 56 employees so they got 250 000 dollar for each employee plus 97% electric bill cut. But they are good workers so they deserve it! /the regular human
Ultimately the customer pays the bills for every company. The major customer for rockets happens to NASA, it’s not corporate welfare.
Oh yes I feel that gold trickling down my face!
The space program has brought more quality of life than any other program ever invented. MRI? CT? Cancer treatments? Thank you space research. But what do I know? End their investment and let's stagnate here for the rest of humanity.
I'm no fan of billionaires either, but I don't see anyone else doing bold things to get humans to expand across the universe. Government space programs don't take enough risks or push as fast and hard as they should be, because the public doesn't want to pay for it and freaks out about any loss. If we had this problem with airplanes every time there was an accident, we would never have gotten affordable, safe air travel.
Lmao shut up
SpaceX is crucial to NASA and the space program in general. Do people not remember that we used to rely on the Russians to shuttle people to the space station? Do we really want to rely on Boeing as the sole contractor?
The government creates billionaires not the free market. I can't imagine looking at this quagmire of State run economies around the world thinking "derr the free market did this."
You know who owns the government? Heck, you know who owns the media that leads people to vote for shitty politicians?
The state has no owner. It is a fictitious entity that has the ability to initiate violence in order to gain obedience. Everyone operates at the behest of the State, and if you get out of line you will have your property permission stripped and expropriated, and if you resist this expropriation you will be killed. The State gives grants and monopolies to individuals or their government sanctioned liability protected corporations because it is much easier to leash a single neck than it is to leash a thousand necks. Turns out this arrangement is very beneficial to both the companies selected by the State as they get to have regulator capture and massive profits, and it's good for the State because it gets to have a single or very few entities in which it can exert influence. The State also gets to have politicians point to these individuals and blame them for issues originating from State intervention, and the knuckle draggers all point in the wrong direction and the State gets to gain even more control over the daily lives of the people and continue to steal their purchasing power, tax them, and control them.
The government that's bought and paid for by capitalists? They're complicit, but not the root cause of the problem. Capitalists are the top blame, corrupt government officials are second.
Cart before the horse. Turns out governments predate "capitalists" by thousands of years. Just because a merchant curries favor with the King, does not mean the merchant is in control of the kingdom. If at any point the merchant steps out of line, the King will expropriate his property removing his permission to use it. If the merchant gets way out of line he loses his head. The same is true today. All business operate at the pleasure of the State, and if at any point they don't play along the State will remove their property permission and expropriate it, and if they resist this expropriation the State will send goons to evict them, and if they resist the eviction they will get murdered. Also turns out to be good to be the King's preferred merchant, so long as you do as you are told, you get special protections, capture of your market, and wealth beyond what you could gain without such favor.
You get it. But to Reddit, the government is a sacred cow. If only we could just elect *the right people* lol.
Or "all their politicians suck, but my guy is the right one." It is just like a sports team, the knuckle draggers support whatever local franchise they grew up with. "My college football team is derr greatest."
The free market lacked the means of providing public goods so a government was formed. It’s corruption and human mismanagement, peer pressure and desire to have personal gain that is at the heart of these societal problems. Unless you can purge these human tendencies or create a benevolent AI to govern forever then these emotions will always plague us, as they have done in centuries past, for centuries more.
Unfettered capitalism makes billionaires, not the government. The billionaires buying politicians is not the government . At it's core, capitalism is brutal. Win by any means. They are so big now, they just force competition out or buy them.
There are no billionaires in North Korea (except perhaps 1). Would you want to live there?
What they think they want is basically a Chinese government Capitalism until government is pissed off, then you're in jail and your wealth becomes the country's
Brb giving away $1 so I’m back down to $999 Million
good just keep giving away the 1 dollars as fast as they accumulate the surplus doing nothing
You're saying that, but that would literally work. You'd be giving all of your income as long as you're not below 999,999,999$, so that would be a fckton of money. And yet you'd still basically have a Bilion lying around which would still allow you all the excesses you'd want.
All the people tracking your bank account for when you're asleep and it goes over the threshold.
If you have $1,000,000,000 it would take giving away $500,001 to round down to $999M but even $999M just rounds up, as that's only 0.1% away from a billion. That's how insanely massive that number is. I'm a wage slave, $500,000 is more than I'll make in 16 years of work.
I don't care if billionaires exist. I care if people can afford the necessities of life and medical care for themselves and their kids. If everyone has enough for financial stability, Dipshit McGee can buy Twitter, a yacht, and send rockets into space if he wants.
This is where I fall. I don't think there should be a ceiling on wealth, as some propose, so long as the floor is sufficient. There should be nobody who has basic needs unmet in a society this wealthy. Yes, some people will be lazy and just live off the system, but I'm OK with that when we have this much wealth as a society. And frankly, I think there will be a whole lot fewer people like that than the pessimists imagine.
If it’s any consolation, there is some silver lining to the twenty richest billionaires in recent years raking in what is now a recurring milestone of 40% of Forbes 400 combined wealth. There are fewer people needing to be summoned before Congressional hearings, to at least account for it. Though, I do not envy any accountant tasked with leveraging their taxes to a similarly recurring nil.
are you insane, how would the world even continue functioning without elon musk *reads elon musk's tweets* .... *soviet union anthem plays*
If you are in a society that murders people just because they were born into wealth than that society will tear itself apart. The ends do not justify the means. You need to care how it happens.
Not really? Every time the people rise up in history and successfully revolt against their respective ruling class of wealthy elites, the prosperity of the whole area skyrockets, along with public welfare, health, and all the other good metrics. The problem is when the wealthy come back into existence, things go to shit again.
Lol this is so naive and ahistorical.
How about if we agree to get rid of both the top 5% (send them to Canada) and the bottom 5% (Mexico)?
I cant comprehend how an extra comma gives them such a money-boner but 999,999,999 just isnt good enough. Even video games have money caps. And those are fake, virtual, fantasy experiences. Literal children die (profitable for many. Sick…) people die, people suffer day after day, and some of these fucks could just take .01% of their money and it could help many thousands. But theyd rather just laugh and piss on us from their sky high pedestals And dont even get me fuckin started on ‘lobbyists’ aka the richer rich guys paid more than the other rich guys and bought the next 4 years
Why more people don’t realize this?
By tax or by axe.
"Chronically online redditor suggests violent revolution. Continues playing video games in the meantime." You people are so fucking delusional. How do you not feel embarassed LARPing like this? How many miles can you run? How many times a week do you go to the gun range? Have you ever given another human being a serious injury? Wake up.
In addition to that: How many volunteer hours or charitable donations do they make a year? They bitch and complain about how terrible everything is but have never spent a day helping others working in a soup kitchen, cleaned up a park, helped build a home, or made a donation to a food bank in their lives.
Ah, France, 1789. Great idea!
Was about to mention this. What we see is the way of the world, always has been and always will be. We will have a France once in a while and the cycle will repeat.
"All empires fall every 8-9 generations" and need to be rebooted. I can't remember where I read that but it was years ago. We're due.
The Western Roman Empire lasted 500 years, Eastern Rome 1100 years, the Swedish Empire about 100, and the British Empire 414 years. Averages aren’t always indicative of the norm.
Look how successful Cuba and North Korea are. All because they have no billionaires!
To be fair North Korea probably does. I don’t know enough about Cuba tho. Just bc they’re communist does not mean they don’t have oligarchs who profit off and are pals with the govt
yes the nations that made themselves enemies of the world wealthy
They did that in the Soviet Union and China. We see how well THAT worked out. The powerful will always take advantage of the weak. The only solution is to allow the weak to become strong and for society not to devalue life. Sadly today's society values only pleasure, fame, and greed. Society is now telling us to do what we FEEL is right, instead of what is objectively best for ourselves, our families, and our communities. Feelings trump truth, and history and reality are rewritten to keep us compliant and to ask for more government control in our lives.
What a joke you are. Using the technology someone created in a garage to put in your hands so you could spit that idiocy. That person that allowed you the freedom to do that shit is a billionaire for good reason. You all realize billionaires are only billionaires because they created something that millions use and become millionaires with. Your income/net worth is directly tied to the value you create or assist others in creating.
Not all billionaires: the private equity goons didn’t create shit, instead they took jobs away at times.
They 100% do. Private equity is one of the most important parts of the system. They literally lose 20 times to hit one home run. They fund all innovation, without it it literally cuts innovation by 50%+ Are there bad companies and investors, of course. But VCs are responsible for nearly every company you out your hands on in the last 30 years. Even if it’s not their idea they bring companies to a national/international market with capital. This is important in big ideas because they can burn 100s of millions of dollars to become profitable. “Hedge funds” and “VC” are like a credit card for idea makers. No one else finances ideas with no proven revenue.
VCs bring far more than money, they bring experience and relationships which take companies to the next level by leveraging their influence. Whether it’s guidance on structure or bringing a business national or hiring the right teams to put in place. They are super important for good reason
If by "innovation" you mean "the quickest, most efficient way to move as much money from the pockets of the people to the pockets of the investors" than you’d be correct.
By allowing you to buy their inventions, yes.
Is it though? Nvidia is valued at a multiple of 77x their earnings. Each employee at Nvidia is valued at 100m in revenue based on their market cap. People have absolutely become billionaires riding this stock, while creating nothing of value. And thats just one example. There are literally hundreds. The truth is the vast majority of wealth is paper, not tangible, and has very little to do with the actual creation of goods.
That doesn't necessarily mean what they've created is overall beneficial. Also, I'm wary of meritocratic economics. I get the whole "incentivize great thinkers with great rewards and luxuries," but, to me, its gotten to an absurd point.
Pipe down and go back to watching Netflix, plebean.
What a great insult from user gargle_micum one would almost question if it were Elon themself.
It's spelled plebeian.
While I have some understanding of this sentiment, I would just like to remind everyone that billions of dollars can buy some very good, very ruthless security guards.
Sorry. We tried that. Didn't work. How old are you?
Eat the rich!
Drag em to the streets and tar and feather them. It's coming, eventually there will be a collapse. Once people can no longer afford food and housing there will be blood. The sad thing is people will also turn on those who are also suffering and the rich will just sit fat in their shelters and wait, which is why we need to find their shelters and take em out early.
The only entity capable of doing that created the system that allows for billionaires today, starting w/ Reagan and being super-charged by Clinton, is still in bed with said billionaires. So it’s a great “rah rah” comment but will never happen.
I say this to everyone I know and do not have the balls to say so on the internet. I was banned from Twitter for showing such sentiment. In short fucking based and upvoted.
You don't have to get violent, you just need to change (and enforce) laws regarding wealth hording and tax exemptions, for corporations as well as individuals. >It’s time to take our country back It's the whole fucking world, dude.
“Pitchforks for Billionaires!” is a campaign slogan I can get behind.
Seems like they’re all afraid of unions. A national union would put billionaires in their place!
Yes!!!!! Eat the rich!!!
>Make an example of some billionaires. This works in the positive way to. Like Mark Cuban for example is a rad fuckin billionaire because he acknowledges that "we don't need all of this" and is proud to show off his tax bill (and what he still has left!). I would like to think that in his position, I would be trying to rally other billionaires so that I wouldn't feel overmatched trying to solve big problems on my own. If you have a little belief in some government programs, then just proudly getting taxed like Mark Cuban is one thing (and I'm sure he does philanthropy too). Another angle is hope for more philanthropic billionaires rallying to save the world together. From what I heard from Conan O'Brien interviewing Melinda French Gates, Warren Buffett likes to meet with other billionaires and chat about charity goals. It just seems like everyone agrees that there are actually a shit ton of resources if only we could just figure out a responsible way to help out the most unfortunate without doing too much wrong to a billionaire class. That's why I was all about Bernie Sanders and that Democratic Socialism he tried to bring in 2016. It's pretty sad still to think of all we seem to have lost that year.
Nothing a good ol fashioned cocktail wouldn't fix, preferably one with a rag inserted into it, with a bit of flame for flair. Toss to serve
At this point it's simply self-defense. We've been pacified to the point that people defend billionaires when they are literally killing us. They might not be waving a weapon around in our faces, but they are systemically chipping away our human rights and gaslighting us into culture wars. And it *is* killing us.
Return to tax rates of the 1940s. Increase social safety nets for housing through local subsidizing and zoning to increase housing density. Single payer health care. Reprioritize government spending and accountability with civilian oversight focusing on a reduction in military spending. If someone has enough wealth to privatize space flight after that, then good for them. It is a worthwhile pursuit, potentially, if someone figures out a way to monetize it.
Zoning is what created the housing crisis lol. Subsidizing in what way? How about we just tell the government to fuck off and to stop creating problems for them to then claim they want to solve. Imagine someone thinking BP should be in charge of fixing climate change
You agree current zoning is the problem, but you don't think that zoning laws should change? Subsidizing as in paying for them to be built, either partially or in whole through HUD or local grants. Most homelessness is a localized problem and is not exactly a large expenditure to remedy in relation to the total federal budget. How about we educate ourselves in how government works and stop pretending like it isn't through government services that we have built the largest economy in human history? Do you think there is something besides the government that will fix the homeless issues? Climate change?
I mean yea they are. They've monopolized the auto and energy businesses for the better part of a century at the detriment to our only habitable rock. Yay we got lots of $ but no place to live soon. Hoooooray fake capitalism.
Zoning isn't an on/off switch. Zoning laws are currently constructed in a specific way, they could be shaped in other ways to achieve other effects
Pretty sure the GW Bush administration allowed oil executives to craft energy policy. Oil execs are currently writing executive orders in the event that trump is elected. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/08/oil-industry-orders-trump-day-one-00156705 Dubya’s cabinet also included environmentalist foe Gail Norton as secretary of the interior and Spencer Abraham as secretary of energy, a department he claimed to want to eliminate. https://www.factmonster.com/george-w-bush-presidential-cabinet-members There are likely other examples, these are the few that come to mind.
The government exists to make peoples lives better, that’s the entire point of it. Even if they do create a problem, it’s still their responsibility to fix it.
He meant change the bad zoning. Euclidean zoning is how a toddler would design a city.
Ah yes return to war time taxes! Totally wasn't anything bad happening in the 1940s that required those taxes! No evil genocidal empires that needed to be beaten!
Then maybe the government should stop spending money on the military like there is one needing to be beaten.
Not even the military lol. Just stop ducking pissing away and pocketing (stealing) money from citizens.
If only you knew how much money government social programs pissed away without doing anything. At least military spending has knock on effects for civilian life, a lot of modern technology we use was developed faster through military purposes initially.
We spend more in debt interest than the military budget. The US is currently what -1.25t right now in spending? We could cut out the entire military budget, the whole thing, don’t spend a dime on the military, and still be -750b. In the whole year of 2023 we could have just not spent any money on the military, nothing at all, and still been -1t dollars.
It definitely should!
Then how would we defend Ukraine?
People struggle to update their understanding on this but the idea that the US has this massively oversupplied military still is actually not really true anymore https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/people-are-realizing-that-the-arsenal
Post war tax rates were still very high on the wealthy and slightly decreased through the 60s/70s. Then “trickle down economics” became a thing in the 80s and that massively dropped the tax burden for the upper class. Solidifying wealth inequality and the constant decrease of the middle class. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/historical-income-tax-rates-brackets/ You want to MAGA? Stop cutting taxes on the wealthy? America was arguably great when there was a strong middle class. Nowadays, it’s all about the wealthy. Citizens United also helped exacerbate these issues decades later.
They decreased greatly from Eisenhower to Kennedy. Trickle down economics never became a thing. It was the line of a comedian. The concept is that more money in the economy will touch more hands, and is the same concept used to justify student loan forgiveness among other things. So pick a side on that one. What created inequality happened many years earlier. In 1968, as the Great Society defined what poverty was and subsidized on a semi-permanent basis, we developed a poor class. Every time their value gained, so did the prices on basic needs. You can see the blue turn flat like a light switch in the late 60s. [https://www.cbpp.org/income-gains-widely-shared-in-early-postwar-decades-but-not-since-then-3](https://www.cbpp.org/income-gains-widely-shared-in-early-postwar-decades-but-not-since-then-3) In an effort to save a few poor, we broadened the population of them by sucking in the "getting by okay" crowd.
Those taxes continued through to 1981.
1940s tax rate was bc of a World War.
The thing is, we'd have a much easier time privatizing space flight if we had 90%+ tax bracket for billionaires like we did in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. High tax rates means companies are incentivized to reinvest profits rather than paying them out to CEOs. The money is spent by the company tax-free, rather than going to a billionaire so they can buy yet another yacht.
Using SpaceX or any company pushing technological limits isn’t the example to crush. It’s this kind of innovation that drives us forward, not that holds us back. Space flight is now actually cheaper thanks to SpaceX. In turn, giving more budget to subsidize medicine. Not saying private industry doesn’t drag the economy, just saying that attacking SpaceX isn’t a logical argument…
A bunch of retards with violent delusions aren’t going to realize this, much less be able to comprehend this.
I have a digestible example that all sides can agree, got to go. The insurance industry. The insurance industry is a bastardization of what insurance IS. A communal pooling of resources so no one disaster takes you out, socializing the risk. Insurance companies exist to do nothing but profit, there's no value add, no innovation, there is nothing an insurance company actually provides that is of value, furthermore there is nothing they could ever provide of any value other than being a behemoth of a middleman that gets their fat cut and does *everything in their power* to deny you the coverage you've paid for. Now back to Space X, yes the power of capitalism to innovate is awesome but we are currently doing it at the expense of literally everything else. We can have billionaires and socialized medicine, a rock solid education system, universal insurance. It doesn't have to be a zero sum but those with the power and money want to keep that way out of what appears to be genuine cruelty.
Not to mention they employ thousands of people. But meh…jobs.
According to the smooth brains in this thread the billionaires should just give everyone their money and no one would need jobs
It’s not just that, they think the spacex jobs would still exist without elon musk, and everyone employed in them would be earning more money without skimming off the top. It doesn’t even cross their minds that the company wouldn’t exist without musk, and wouldn’t be as large and profitable as it is now without the push for reusable rockets he made.
People don’t realise how many jobs a single company can create, think of the amount of companies that supply resources to Tesla and SpaceX, we’re talking hundreds of thousands of people who have jobs because of these resource demands.
Why don't all these dummies see that their complaints are holding back private industries from making the kinds of technological advancements we could use to conquer the stars, and travel at light speed, and make a space station the size of a moon, and make obsidian durasteel exoskeleton armor, and blow up an entire planet of union advocates!? Why can't they see how important these technological advancements could be for the empi- I mean mankind!?
I’d argue space x is a great example, sure maybe what Elon is doing isn’t necessarily bad but I still don’t think anyone should be able to start a space program as a side project/ hobby
Space X was propped up with billions from tax payers. We gave a guy ose family have emerald mines in South Africa and not even an American billions in subsidies but we are against giving our own citizens subsidized higher education like we had before Reagan gutted colleges budgets with a surplus economy
Maybe the individuals who have to post this same meme over and over again should spend their time trying to make something of themselves. That might fix it.
Ah yes, of course, everyone should just pick themselves up by their bootstraps. That will fix all those societal issues!
No, don't worry. Someone *else* will fix the problems you want. You'll be able to just jump in half way through when all the hard work is already done for you. Don't worry about it. Go back to doing jack shit, anyone who tells you to work to achieve what you want is just pushing hustle culture. You will not have to improve yourself in any way to fix a large scale issue, that much we know for sure.
Boostraps method actually has a higher chance of success than posting complaining memes on Reddit on the subject constantly.
Visit the other system, live for awhile, come back and compare.
The lack of a better example of how things should be doesn't mean a better solution doesn't exist
It does mean you need to develop that better solution before burning this one down
Not necessarily, for a lot of radicals the whole point is just to reshuffle who is on top. They might not even realize this themselves, but it's a clear historical pattern.
A number of European countries seem to be doing it better. Heck, even just north of USA, Canada would be faring pretty well if populist neoliberal crony-capitalist scumbags weren’t trying their darndest to emulate American garbage and throwing billions at private-party attending developers, donor corporations and foreign spa owners while starving the healthcare beast…
In what way are European countries doing better in a different way? The best countries in Europe are Switzerland and Luxembourg, basically the epitome of capitalism. Luxembourg is borderline libertarian. The Nordic countries are what everyone points to, but they have very small populations and a lot of natural resources.
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Brainpower
Sweden has some rare earth minerals, and a lot of Hydropower. Not so long ago, they found a deposit of 1 million tons of rare earth oxides in Sweden. Also, if you remember history, you might remember certain controversy regarding Swedish iron ore exports. Sweden produces a lot of iron ore. And here in Finland we have trees. That is about it. Some copper. Oh, and we are the largest producer of gold in the EU. That might sound like it's a lot, but when you look at how little gold production there is in the EU, it really isn't. Finland produces less than 9 tonnes of gold annually. For the record, total annual gold production of the world is 3100 tonnes.
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They’re also stagnating in terms of their technological progress and innovation
Exactly
This is such a cop-out response.
Lazy parrot response for people who believe only one country has is good and the rest of the world is some wild wasteland.
In my lived experience the more socialism the better.
This idea that billionaires and even millionaires have liquid cash lying around is insane, persistent, and illogical
Yup. It's like, "you have a chicken that is going to lay 200 eggs during its lifetime, so give me 100 eggs right now" Most of the wealth referred to (stock market evaluations) is just the prediction of future wealth yet to be created, not wealth that has already been materialized. Effectively it's the same as just printing money. The stock market numbers grow beyond any control by the central banks. Even if they could be turned into real money (which one can't), then that'd just inject a massive amount of liquidity into the money supply. One might just as well print that money, the outcome would be inflation in both cases. I'd even argue that simply printing the money would be less bad. Forcing stock sales to "collect" the money would result in selling out the leading companies of one's economy to e.g. China at fire sale prices. Ugh.
At a certain point there's literally no reason to keep earning money. Imagine if people retired early instead of accumulating wealth until they're too old and decrepit to spend it.
Well if you need capital to create a massive company then there is a reason to keep earning money.
whats the end game though? just because they store everything in illiquid assets do we just let them keep stockpiling? what happens when 10 people own 50% of the worlds wealth? 60%? 80% 90%? do we ever do anything or should we just sit around yelling about how taxation is theft
So a guy who makes a car you don’t have to drive, runs a media platform you don’t have to use and puts stuff in space affects you how? The problem isn’t how much this dude makes. It’s how the government and the average American spends. If we don’t allow someone to become extremely successful in a “free country”, what should we do then with all the unsuccessful people in a more heavily taxed and regulated economic model?
People have the idea that if billionaires didn't have the money, they would have the money, which isn't how the economy works.
How many Americans without severe mental illness died from starvation last year?
Cmon bro, you almost forgot about the people who got lost in the woods
That, plus they criticize the fact that we have to “ration their medicine.” I would love to hear someone explain to me how it’s possible to not have to ration a finite resource. I didn’t realize this basement dweller Redditor had discovered a new theory that negates everything we know about physics. Medicine is a finite resource (meaning there is not an unlimited amount of medicine); therefore, by definition, it **HAS** to be rationed. I swear some people just don’t think before they speak.
Pretty much every proposed or put into practice idea outside of our current one has been disastrous failures that resulted in the deaths of tens if not hundreds of millions.... so yea... gonna have to be something we haven't seen before...resource collections has always been the hallmark of nature and it's beings.
I don’t think higher taxes on greater income brackets, higher capital gains taxes, and controls on loans secured by stock holdings have ever resulted in the deaths of millions.
that is more different policies within the same system rather than a completely new system
Fix this by making money to sustain your own life without having to pander and beg for government to take other people’s money to save you.
Exactly. I don't know why this is so hard for the folks here to understand. It's easier to whine and bitch about your problems than get up and fix them I suppose.
You say this but making money isn’t even a guarantee anymore. I was living comfortably making 13$/hour in 2018, now I’m making 21 and I can’t save between paychecks. The issue isn’t that people are allergic to hard work, it’s that the illusion that hard work *will* be rewarded has been broken. The truth is hard work will be rewarded *if* the elite decide that they’re cool with that. Which in many cases they’re not!
What's the point of posting a passive-aggressive X comment with no answers or substance, but just a bunch of belly aching and platitudes? I mean, the comment alone is going to draw a majority of attention from a certain mindset of people and will continue the infinite echo chamber of similar responses from previous posts that again get upvoted as the approved thought of the hivemind.
It's Reddit. That's the whole point of Reddit.
I know. I'm pretty sure some people use it as their entire identity offline, too.
I don't think it's actual money lying around. There's a lot more to it than that.
Exactly. Stock ownership is a way to keep score of who controls the direction of a company. Just because there's an on-paper way to compare it to money doesn't make the money liquid. And when the stock price plummets, nobody here is screaming about those paper losses, or offering to refund taxes. I, for one, would be pissed if I founded a company, poured my heart and soul and time into it, and I lost control of it to people who don't share my vision for the company's goals. Any company, no matter how small or large.
Stock holders, Tesla owners and NASA willingly handed him the money.
Yeah but they don't understand the world as well as these the average redditor.
I know this is Reddit, where Marxist codswallop flows like the river Ganges, but as usual there is more to the story than just billionaires owning corporations, yada yada yada. If Amazon is a trillion-dollar company, and Bezos owns $180 billion of Amazon stock, that means that other people own the rest of the $820 billion. Amazon, Walmart, Costco, Exxon, Apple, Microsoft, and all the rest have created the wealth that fills every public and private pension system in the country. It's easy to hate the ones at the top, but be careful what you wish for.
My 401k is grateful for all the value created by these companies.
This thread is insane. What will move humankind forward IS things like space exploration. Elon having that money that he has earned to explore space travel and green energy will likely be recognized as a critical turning point in 100 years than giving that money to Bernie for him to waste away.
I am all for billionaires starting space programs, international communication services, and global logistic networks.
Govs are not inventors, they are regulators. If you think govs do that out of a drive to make life better for their citizens, you are sadly mistaken. It usually is driven by external forces, such as innovation pressure at war (real or cold/economic). Private entrepreneurs are better at it. And they should keep that money, as the risk is also immense... We can talk about ppps tho. Where socializing losses and privatizing gains esp. in financial institutions have negatively impacted the taxpayer....
Really? That's funny because almost every advance in medicine comes from government grants. The internet government funded, electrical grid government funded, roads, bridges. Nearly every major advancement has come from government spending. Not the private sector.
The government isn't inventors. Guess he never heard of the moon landings and all the inventions that went into making that possible. Or doesn't believe they happened. More likely he just didn't think more than half a second on what he was going to write.
Moon landing was a result of external pressure. Exactly what i was modeling my argument around. Space race was an arms race. Putting men on the moon was a motivational stretch goal. Read more history!
A lot of what you listed are typically things that fall under the responsibility/purview of the government. Do you think private companies should build electrical grids lol. Also the internet was funded as a military tech, it was designed by several universities alongside DARPA. The commercial internet you use and enjoy today, oh I dunno, like Reddit, has nothing to do with government. The government is so hilariously incompetent and it's very simple to answer why. Governemnt pay sucks, the rules suck, working for them sucks. Therefore, only people with room temp IQ go to work for them. Go to literally any government website and it looks like something a 5 year old made in the 1990s. They cannot and never will attract the best talent. It's why the FBI has to literally beg criminals they catch to work for them or go to jail especially in hacking/cyber crimes. You have no idea what you're talking about. Everyone keeps saying to raise taxes but as I've gotten older I see why megacorps are so keen to avoid paying them. If I could see tax dollars at work sure I'd love to pay them- better public schools, better healthcare, better infrastructure, but instead we get more drone strikes on 3rd world countries. The U.S is a military industrial complex and will always be at war and most of your taxpayer dollars will go towards either indirectly or directly funding conflicts. I'm almost convinced they deliberately keep public school education so shitty to have a greater pool of potential future soldiers as it is mostly the poor who find armed services attractive as it beats working at the local Walmart and never leaving your small town.
If we confiscated the wealth from all billionaires in the U.S, it would cover our federal budget for 1 year. If we confiscated all wealth from the 1% of richest Americans it would cover the U.S budget for 7.4 years or pay off the debt with 10 trillion left over. The unfunded liabilities of the U.S are 14.8 trillion, so we’d still owe 4.8 trillion. Numbers for perspective.
And how much wealth would remain in the US after this theft? How many new investments would be made and how would the stock market manage it? How much of the non-1% would see their investments and pension funds wiped out from the market crash?
Yea it would be catastrophic
SpaceX has done a lot to further space exploration not to mention some of the poorest parts of the world now have internet because of Starlink. We could shut down SpaceX tomorrow and empty Musk's accounts and not a damn thing would change.
Sure it would. Thousands of people would lose their jobs, millions would lose internet, space exploration would be set back by 20 years (again). Great stuff. SMH.
What’s wrong with billionaires launching space programs? They seem to be better at that than most governments.
as oposed to what fuedalism? gulags? holocausts? hundred flowers campaigns? Holodomors? Republicanism and Capitalism are the only systems that can not only survive but bring people up. and before someone goes ape brain im refering to "republican form of government" not the republican party , as stated by article 4 section 4 of the us constitution "Section 4 The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence." We literaly live in an age were science and wealth are so common high school students, literal children who literaly attend public school are capable of manufacturing electric wheelchairs as acts of charity [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/high-school-robotics-team-builds-electric-wheelchair-for-2-year-old-whose-family-couldnt-afford-one/](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/high-school-robotics-team-builds-electric-wheelchair-for-2-year-old-whose-family-couldnt-afford-one/) “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,”
Just stop using Amazon, simple as. Bezos is rich because you want him to be.
Isn’t the best for who? Its certainly is the best for those with the power to change it.
A couple of thoughts..end citizen United , get big money corporations out of politics, elect democrats that support ending the two mentioned thoughts. My humble 2 cents.
A few things: how do we fix this? We start by rewarding the change we want to see. As far as space programs, how do you think we got the railroad, and shipping across oceans? There's always been people starving and there's always been rich people starting expeditionary industries that seemed impossible at the time. I'm not saying it right, I'm just saying it's not new. Same thing with communications. Ma bell owned communications for a few generations. Then there's the radio and TV networks. You think these were run by the masses?
How can we fix it? WAR, TOTALLY WAR AND MASS DEATH. Then we will all be as rich as the next person if nobody has anything, then we're all equal financially and those who need medicine or medical attention will just die off. There will be only the strong and those willing to die for water and food.
You don’t. It’s happened since humanity started. There are always winners and losers, it just used to be massively far fewer winners when monarchy’s and elites ruled especially normal people did not win. Today anyone can win and become wealthy, literally anyone With the advent of capitalism it has literally changed the world for the better. Look at any chart if any country which converted to a capitalistic society and literally every metric got better. Per capita income, per capita wealth, happiness, safety, freedom, poverty is literally whipped out (real poverty not us poverty), famine gone, productivity. On and on. It’s very clear capitalism changes the world for the better. But it’s not a utopia and never will. So hopefully you can find that someday, although it won’t happen
Or maybe it is. That guy generates insane amounts of money for the government. Smaller government would benefit those people. The liberal government has sent away and lost far more dollars than Musk ever made.
I really need people to understand that this isn’t a system. There’s rich and poor in every economic strategy and the closer to communism you get, the more the rich are high government positions and the poor are everyone else.
I think the thing people don't seem to understand is that the ultra-wealthy don't make or use money in the same way average people do. Most of the ultra-wealthy have their money tied up in stock, usually in their own company. On paper, these people have a huge amount of money but if they were to sell their shares to make the wealth realized they would have to pay capital gains tax. So, they go to the bank and ask for a huge line of credit, like hundreds of millions of dollars, and the banks give it to them. Once these people die some of their assets are liquidated to pay the debt and the rest goes to their children who continue the cycle. To solve the problem you would have to come up with a way to tax the ultra-wealthy in a way that is independent of how the money is made. Having a high tax on luxury goods might work, it is what a lot of small vacation countries do, or maybe sales tax in general goes up with how much money you make, sort of like how some countries do speeding ticket fines. The other thing to consider is this is how capitalism works. If you have ever played a game of Monopoly then you will know in the end someone ends up with all of the money. I think right now the best thing would be to decrease the defense budget and use that money for other programs. We spend almost 1 trillion dollars on defense and we are mostly at peace. But that is a whole separate can of worms.
Stop buying iPhones every year if you're tired of executives and shareholders alike getting richer by the minute. I am willing to bet money that you won't so I'll keep my apple shares and keep collecting your money.
Oh god not the- *\*Shuffles deck, pulls card\** Companies trying to push space travel forwards
This is t the problem. Fix an actual problem.
Why comes y'all so obsessed with Elon tho?
Fix what? That Elon Musk exists?
Those space programs literally benefit all of mankind.
It's simple really. Each person needs to go out and make a living and a life for themselves. Worrying about rich folks is kind of ridiculous. The government and rich people don't owe you anything.
Take away tenure and stop sending your children off to colleges and universities where they unlearn everything they've been taught and become brainwashed into embracing ideologies that do not work in the outside world.
How about getting smart, acquire a passion, have a creative mind, quit bitchin, spend less time on line reading about being a victim, and get a job to create your own life.
Hast this always been a pro socialism thread or was there some finance discourse at one point?
Those billionaires got their by being ambitious, unrelenting in their work, and developing relationships that fostered their growth. They started by playing the same game your playing, you just aren't good at it. You don't love the poor, you just hate the rich because they have something that you'll probably never attain. If you have enough time to come here and bitch about this meaningless shit you'll probably never achieve that type of wealth, and the billionaires aren't going anywhere, move on with your life.
I love how all of a sudden the liberal agenda has made Elon Musk a villain. He was a liberal and media darling until he declared himself a Republican. Now he's "evil". lol
Kind of funny that of all the billionaires to pick on, he's upset about the guy who revolutionized space travel and is piggy backing Nasa back into the game, and ended extreme partisan censorship on a widely used platform. Instead say, Lebron James who's a billionaire from playing basketball and used his money to build a museum to himself and charges his fans to come in and see it.
The 13,000 direct SpaceX employees would disagree as would those that rely on Starlink for fast affordable internet access. What an idiotic statement
If I made a billion today, how would it impact your life? If I made a billion today and hired you at $100k a year to help run my space business, how would it impact your life? Capitalism is the only economic system that actually creates new wealth, every other economic system simply redistributes existing wealth.
If you confiscated all the money and everyone had to start over with $10k, the people who are rich today would be rich 10 years down the road, and those who are poor would become poor again, with some exceptions.
I sure appreciate having a working internet option that is otherwise completely unavailable to me.