Ask Lemmy

A billion dollars is a hard sum of money to wrap your head around. There is basically no ethical way to make a billion dollars. If you have a billion dollars it’s because you’ve stiffed a lot of people a lot of the value they created and kept it for yourself.

Forbes did the math once and determined that Smaug, a dragon embodied by greed and selfishness, is worth $62 billion. There are 17 people richer than him.

Smaug was shot in the heart and it was a morally good act.

Tax them. Kill them. Whatever order

We should probably deal with them sooner rather than later

Asking this on lemmy is like asking a pack of wolves if they enjoy the taste of lamb. You already know the answer you’re going to get…

Billionaires shouldn't exist; no one needs that much money. They should be taxed until there are no more billionaires.

I'm hungry.

I think they're bad for the economy. Money has to circulate. Every time a billionaire throws another million on the pile, they make things worse for everyone else.

Tax them.

Billionaires are a crime against humanity.

It's why we invented the gulliotine

If you invest in the sp500, you'll have something around 8% return per year. This is highly variable year by year, of course, but in the long run, that's what you can expect to average out. You can do better than the sp500, but generally not without accepting higher risk.

With those returns, you will double your money every 9 years. Roughly. It's going to vary by decade. 2000-2010 was flat, while 2010-2020 was unusually good.

If you max out a 401k, HSA, and IRA on this strategy from a young age, you should have millions for retirement. If you're a millennial or younger, you're going to need a million or two (at least) to have a reasonable retirement.

How do you turn that into a billion? Doubling every 9 years won't do it in your lifetime. Not unless you started life as a millionaire and never withdrew a dime until you were 90. Starting with $1000 and doubling every year for 20 years, consistently, would do it.

How do you double your money consistently for 20 years? Either extreme luck or doing something extremely shady. Probably both.

In other words, they are not the genius captains of industry that right-libertarians want you to believe. They got lucky or are deeply unethical or both, and they do not deserve your respect. Most likely, they deserve your disdain. Every one of them.

It's not so much the money, the wealth in itself, that bothers me about them, it's the mind boggling absolutely insane amount of power having that much wealth is capable of.

They literally buy elections, they buy media outlets, by their actions they buy the direction entire countries take. They use their money to fund the actions of others that work on their behalf. They can create a literal army of individuals to work for them towards whatever end they wish to achieve. That's entirely way too much power for an individual or a family to have. Just imagine living next to someone who has a 500,000 strong army of militants just hanging out. Maybe theyre good, maybe they want to turn your neighborhood into a warzone for kicks, either way you would have no means to stop them.

Just look at smoething like the "tea party" movement in the US. Grassroots? No, try Koch brothers funded with the intent to install Koch approved representatives into the government.

In the words of the next post on my feed: Boil ‘em, mash ‘em, stick ‘em in a stew

Look at this visualization of how much money Jeff Bezos has, and then tell me that it is reasonable and justifiable.

https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

They would serve a greater use to humanity as compost

Billionaires shouldn't exist.
There should be a hard upper limit on wealth somewhere around the $100 million mark.
An amount where you can still invest your money risk-free at ~1% above inflation and live a life of plenty without lifting a finger, forever.
Any property, company, or thing in general worth more than $100 million should never be owned by one person alone.

Asking this question on lemmy is like going to a Linux comm and asking if it's a good idea to switch from windows to Linux. You're preaching (asking?) to the choir.

That said, eat the fucking rich.

1. I think wealth should be capped at a few million or tens of millions. Too much wealth hoarding keeps money out of circulation at the consumer spending level, which is bad for the economy in general, especially lower income people.
2. Without knowing anything about a person and how they became a billionaire, I have no opinion on them individually. Jumping to conclusions about someone based on the group they belong to (like say, a black guy walking down the street) is bigoted thinking, no matter who the target is.

Billionaires as individuals are just humans with all the good and the bad coming from that fact. Acting against them as individuals is pointless. We need to establish a system where becoming a billionaire is impossible in the first place.

Depose.

Wealth tax that goes directly to funding a billionaire audit program. It should create a self-perpetuating cycle that means IRS audits for all of them every year.

It billionaires exist then there is a problem in the system. Billionaires are a bug, not a feature.

Ideally they'd be taxed into no longer being billionaires.

Realistically we probably need to violently remind them who holds the actual power before this becomes a reality.

Psychopaths

They need sanctions proportional to their wealth. And checks and balances. The less they can play the system, the better.

I don't eat meat, so I'm not that into eating them. I'd advocate for composting instead

Tax, kill, eat. In that order.

They are subsidized by our government. Truly. The broken system created Elon Musk and now the broken system allowed him to buy a presidency for $134 million. Cheap, for him.

How? That is how much the system has devalued American labor since 1981.

Used to think: wow they've got a lot of money. Untill I grew up and realised it's not money they've got, it's estimated net worth. It's hard to turn that into cash.

If they got there by making a company that other people now value a lot: impressive.

If it's a royal family member/inheritance/..., less impressive.

Overall: don't think about it often.

Hoarding that wealth does nothing to improve society.

Cap real wealth at 200 million EUR, any more wealth accumulated needs to be shunted to a global poverty fund.

However, the wealth earned should still be recorded as having been earned by the person, this will give the person the recognizion they crave, a highscore list to give them incentive to keep going.

This is obviously impossible to do as wealth is not a tangible concept these days.

they're by definition a cancer in society

Fuck em. Instantaneous lead poisoning.

If a monkey hoarded more bananas then it could ever eat in its life, to the detriment of other monkeys around it, those other monkeys would kill it, and if they didn't, scientists would, to see what was wrong in its brain.

We need way less of them or way more of them. The wealth gap needs to be closed and I don't care which direction.

I don’t have an opinion on billionaires specifically. I don’t care if they take home a billion dollars. What I do care about is the ratio of top earner income with median income. It should never exceed 10-30%

Bait used to be believable

Give them an award saying "Yay, you won capitalism!" then force them to retire and enjoy the rest of their life without ruining any more people's lives.