the amount of billionaire taint licking in this post is depressingly high.
the hilarious thing about these apologists is that the majority of the 1% wouldn’t even piss on them if they were on fire. we are beneath them.
the hilarious thing about these apologists is that the majority of the 1% wouldn’t even piss on them if they were on fire. we are beneath them.
You’re 100% wrong and you should ask the burned and executed corpses of the original BLM organizers if they were beneath notice.
Can’t shake the feeling that swapping panels 1 and 3 would make more sense.
Clockwise from bottom left maybe
No, no, we can’t be mean to the rich, that will upset them 🥺
Yes, kill them, by taxing them out of existence.
This would be ideal but I’m skeptical that it’s actually possible. Bribes are cheaper than taxes, so I think they’d likely just prevent the taxes from happening by greasing the correct palms.
Well yeah, that’s exactly what’s happened for at least the past 50 years. In 1968 corporations were paying 53% of their profits in taxes, and billionaires were paying 94% around that time! Btw, if you’re making billions, paying 94% still leaves you richer than most…
Contrast that to today, where the system is so obviously broken during a time when Amazon is paying less in total taxes than a fry cook at McDonald’s.
It would need to be done with actually no loopholes, and meaningful enforcement of consequences for those who would try to cheat (perhaps the guillotine).
one big issue is everyone goes “you can’t tax stocks!” and then billionaires take a loan against the stocks with the unrealized gains as collateral. So we’d need to start classifying a loan as a realized gain of the collateral against this, with an exception for mortgages on primary domiciles, maybe also a “first million dollars are exempt,” calculated on the full debt of the borrower, not per loan. I can’t imagine anyone taking out more than $1M in debt against a properly they don’t live in is not the rich we need to be taxing.
That’s an insightful point, and honestly taxing those loans as realized gains sounds entirely reasonable. It’s good for the lenders because of reduced risk, it’s good for the rich because it keeps them honest, and it’s good for the public because we gain increased tax revenue from those who can most afford it. Nice!
Contrast that to today, where the system is so obviously broken during a time when Amazon is paying less in total taxes than a fry cook at McDonald’s.
Wait…by percentage, or by dollar amount?
Dollar amount for some markets and some years - big corps do accounting magic and end up net negative, which they can calculate against profits in another fiscal year under some circumstances, paying 0% tax
they will just come up with another new deal to temporarily calm us down.
then work on better propaganda to keep us submissive in the meantime.
10% off (of their bodies)
Who will do this? Trump? Kamala? Superman?
This is not the way…
Every healthy society requires a robust guillotine maintenance capability, ideally across all competencies.
I’m for giving them a choice. The guillotine or we take away their money and make them work a minimum pay position in one of their factories for the rest of their lives. I’m pretty sure they would take the guillotine after a week.
Billionaires use violence all the time to get what they want. Just because they hide behind layers of abstraction that they’ve set up, doesn’t mean they aren’t using violence.
Don’t tease me like this.
Why does the proletariat, the largest class, not simply eat the bougouise?
This whole populism trend is concerning to me. I agree that some folks are more responsible than others for the problems we face today. Even so, singling out and blaming a small group of people for the problems we face, then punishing them with legislation, is not the most productive way forward. We need real, serious solutions. “Get rid of X” rarely, if ever, works.
“rarely”: so you admit sometimes the solution is “get rid of X” ? Then why would “get rid of billionaires” not be a solution for you ? To be clear I’m not saying we should kill them or physically hurt them in any way, we can simply reappropriate their wealth turning them into non-billionaire, also making it illegal for anyone to be a billionaire in the future. Why would that not work in your opinion ?
What we need to think about is how this works practically. A billionaire isn’t someone with a billion dollars in their bank account: it’s someone with a 50% share in a business with a market cap of $2bn. How do we address that fairly?
Now I’d say that a business with a certain level of profitability owes something to its employees, such that very few businesses would reach that level of capitalisation.
I don’t see the issue, if we say 1 billion is too much (I would choose a lower maximum personally) if their wealth in any way or form is above the max, they have to sell a house or some asset, society in the form of the government (or whathever is in place) take the money to be used for public interest project. It’s really not that punishing, they would literally be the richest people, and they would still have plenty of money/asset to enjoy life. They don’t need more.
No, fuck X. Get rid of it.
You don’t need a mechanized execution machine to kill three people. You need it to kill the crowd of people.
And historically that’s what it was used for. It was used BY the rich AGAINST the poor.
This whole “kill the rich” thing is counterproductive and needs to stop. Advocating for murder has never been cool.
I respectfully disagree.
The ultra-rich aren’t shy about killing you or your loved ones if it makes them an extra million. There are exceptions, but they’re definitely not the rule.
Tit for tat. We’re absolutely in a class war and the owner class has been winning for three or four consecutive decades. The inequality in society was lower during the French revolution than it is now. Hell, the pay Scrooge gave out in the old tale was more than minimum wage is today adjusted for inflation.
I’m not saying we need violence, but I am saying we need the threat of violence for these kind of people to do their part. No one needs a billion dollars, let alone a trillion.
I also respectfully disagree. Tit for tat, taken to its logical conclusion, eradicates all life on the planet; if that’s your goal, fine, you can make that argument, but that’s ultimately a separate discussion. There were literal slaves and serfs around the time of the French Revolution—now you could make an argument that “wage slaves” or whatever exist in the first world, but that is pure abstraction when compared to the absolute widespread human suffering in France during the late 1700s. You would have to be entirely disconnected from reality to think that people, en masse, have it worse in first world countries than they did in France during the 1700s; that’s a “log off” moment, for sure. If you want to expand the scope to the world at large, then, yeah, there is some fucked up stuff going on, and people (millionaires, billionaires, &c. &c.) do hoard wealth, but murdering them is not the solution; that won’t even do anything to their accumulated wealth, as most of it is tied up in corporate assets; instead, harsh regulation needs to be enacted on the system that allows these people to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth. But instead, we have these very surface level takes that are just like “kill the billionaires”, which solves nothing and actually makes our side look insane, which hurts our cause—frankly, its stupid. Now, if you want to alter the claim to “the threat of violence is needed,” then I would be more inclined to agree; however, individually murdering certain billionaires is not productive; I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to match whatever vitriolic bullshit eye for an eye sentiment that these billionaires might have, and maybe that’s an idealistic take and naive, but it feels right.
have it worse in first world countries than they did in France during the 1700s
In absolute terms? Definitely not. The lowliest “unskilled” worker today has vastly more amenities than even a 17th century nobleman could even dream of.
In relative terms, however? The ultra-rich robbed you, me and every single other person on this planet. And to this you may retort that you do not care about wealth and are content with what you have. I would applaud such an answer, but it would be besides the point. What we’ve been systematically robbed of, is our time. Years, decades that could be spent enjoying your lives with our loved ones, instead spent slaving away at a desk or in a factory only to make the few who have everything even more. That, to me, is absolutely unforgivable, especially since I’ve long since past my physical prime and am still being robbed of this time against my will.
Now, if you want to alter the claim to “the threat of violence is needed,” then I would be more inclined to agree; however, individually murdering certain billionaires is not productive;
Again, I disagree. There are about ~2700 billionaires on earth out of ~8 billion people. Killing half of them and having that wealth redistributed would solve more problems than it would create. But if I do that, I’m thinking like said billionaires.
Which is the only way to fight them. If you try the moral and legal route, you won’t stand a chance because you’ll be fighting within systems and rulesets they have created to give themselves every (unfair) benefit.
Sometimes the disgruntled worker who shanks the boss is the hero we need.
“killing half the billionaires and redistributing their wealth”
Are we on the same planet right now? How are you going to do that? And if you kill them, how are you to ensure their wealth is redistributed properly, not just funneled back into their corporate shell company or their equally immoral families? The measure you’re proposing here requires a total overhaul of the system that is more unrealistic than a measured overhaul into more overall socialist systems of general wealth redistribution. I get that billionaires do harm to the planet and I get that that makes you, me, angry. but what you’re proposing here is just straight up murder and it’s unrealistic; It’s even more unrealistic than, say, everybody voting for a socialist and the systems entirely overhauled except you are adding extra steps of just killing all the billionaires on top of it. What I’m ultimately concerned about is the left going online and just saying kill billionaires while sitting in front of their computers doing literally nothing, making all of us look like psychopaths thus hurting our cause due to clear and obvious LARPing.
but it’s obvious to me that I’m not going to change your mind. you can sit around and LARP on Lemmy all day, if you want, that’s fine. Ultimately, in an hour, I won’t care that we even had his conversation. I’m not going to change your mind, so this is going to be my last post regarding this subject, because I’m not going to change anybody’s mind on a far left leaning Lemmy community. I’m sorry I even posted my opinion.
Despite the downvotes, you are correct.
It’s asinine to even consider that a billionaire doesn’t have a will, let alone how awful it is to threaten a life.
They’d just be dealing with a younger, more entitled billionaire, who now wants to get revenge on the people that murdered their parent or benefactor. See Lachlan Murdoch, Charles Koch, any of the Waltons, etc. for example.
I’ll take some of your money then, I’m sure you won’t mind considering how well-off you are (and how blind you are to those of us less fortunate). Oh, you don’t want me to do that? If only there was some system, some measure of equality, some safety from poverty, a safety net for those that got dealt a shit hand and are juuuuust treading water… while fuckwads buy their second Bugatti this month.
So for now, off with their heads. A few rolling away and they will come up with something real quick.
Nah man. I know cool.
