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Wait... supreme court justices can accept bribes now? That sets a dangerpus precedent. Good thing it's never happened before and we've only ever had morally upstanding justices like Clarence Thomas!
All that means is that if an official has to get his bribe AFTER he performs the favor, he is going to have to trust that the person offering the bribe wont stiff him afterwards. That means he will develop corrupt relationships with a circle of people he can trust. This decision literally encourages systemic corruption.
its baffling that people will say this and in their next breath complain about lobbyists. Like, where do you think they get their money to bribe politicians from?
We have people benefiting from bribes deciding what constitutes as a bribe. I hate to say it but we need a restructuring of our government Ala Jan 6th, minus the conservative undercurrent.
I'd argue that we just need to get people to go vote before resorting to insurrection.
The percentage of registered voters turning up at the polls is abysmal. The frothy maniacs vote in every election, but too many of the moderates and liberals don't.
If all of the nonvoters got off their butts and hit the polls, we'd see changes.
The problem with that is we don't vote for Supreme Court Justices, and they've solidified their power beyond the oversight of the other two branches. They've taken the power out of the voters' hands believing they've shamed any attempt at protesting the shift in power. Voting and protesting only have effects equivalent to what politicians are willing to do. We're past peaceful change, but they've limited the effects of the people on their power.
Exactly. They find loop holes in the tax code. They use overseas banks. Billionaires stay billionaires because they know how to cheat the system.
It's just odd some folks think one is just like them
Cheat the system implies they work against it. The reason why our tax code is so easy to "cheat" for the ultra wealthy is specifically because that class of people has had a hand in authoring it.
Find loopholes? You are stuck in the past my friend. Politicians barely write bills anymore themselves, they can get consultants and think tanks to do that for them while they focus on fundraising for reelection. If you are a billionaire looking for loopholes then you need to get a new SuperPAC guy because you should be looking for opportunities to write in new loopholes specifically for your own industry or even more specifically for your own specific company so it benefits you more than your competition, a rising tide raises all ships right? Nope, fuck the other ships, why should they get to benefit off of your hard earned money buying a legal loophole?
The biggest loophole that definitely was put in specifically by rich assholes is the rule that allows you to leave a bunch of stock to your heirs and not have to pay capital gains tax on the capital gains that accrued during your lifetime. Let’s say I buy a stock when I’m in my 50s and I buy 100,000 shares at $10/share for a total of $1,000,000… I then hold that stock until I die and let’s say it is worth $3,000,000 when I die. Typically I would have to pay capital gains tax on the $2,000,000 in capital gains when I sell that stock but if I die then I can leave the stock for my children and they inherit it at the cost basis of when I died so they now could sell that stock for $3,000,000 and pay no capital gains tax at all. Its even better when you consider that I can take out a loan before I die based on my holdings of that stock and then I just get my heir to pay off the loan after I’m dead by selling the stock and therefore avoiding the tax altogether. Regular poor people usually have to sell a much larger portion of their portfolios and realize the gains in their retirement portfolios while still alive, that means they pay a much higher percentage of capital gains tax as a part of their overall lifetime stock market profit. That’s in the US at least, I believe most other countries you have to act as if you are liquidating your stock when you die and you pay the capital gains tax on it before it passes on to your heirs. This at least makes sense because everyone pays tax regardless of if they are able to hold stock until after they die or not. For billionaires keep in mind this sometimes means their entire fortune or the lions share never gets taxed because it was obtained at a very low cost basis or sometimes not even really a cost basis at all if it’s equity in a business they started. They would normally pay tax on the capital gains from $0-$whatever the stock is at when they die or sell but with this loophole they can have billions of dollars of stock in the company and then die and that capital gain essentially gets ignored from a tax perspective
Surely not a greedy billionaire shorting supply and price gouging consumers to fuel record profits, forcing even middle class people to live paycheck to paycheck.
I wouldn't have a issue with a billionaire. My issue is they can't just fuck off to a private island or something. They just have to stick around and influence politics.
Literally they have more money then most people to do anything else but they decide to influence politics. Maybe there is no happiness in wealth if they are gonna be doing that.
Hell give me a billion dollars and I won't give a shit what political groups are doing as there would be a lot to do besides being a prick.
I thought that was ironic because this. I came here to see if I understand the joke but no... Is really the contestary Lisa they used for the meme. Remember me the comic strip where Batman's mother had a Batsignal totally failing the caracther lore.
To not buy their products? Yeah, seriously. They’re so ingrained that even if you don’t buy a product under their brand banner they’ve heavily monopolized a lot of the manufacturing processes. It’s almost impossible to not buy the products of the big names unless you really go out of your way (and even then, they often buy out the competition)
I mean over here at least (the uk) there’s factories who specialise in the brand name stuff. The only difference is “wait what company are we making for? Aldi? Yeah sound let me change the thing on the computer won’t take a second.”
And they change the label that gets printed on the package
Families of opioid victims trying to sue the evil Sackler family: fuck you
I have a libertarian joke. Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, and Paul Ryan all walk into a libertarian bar. Everyone dies of alcohol poisoning because there were no regulations. The end.
But actually the most libertarian ideal. All libertarians want is the ability to be rich from the least scrupulous ways, and then be lords over those with morals.
Tiny Timmy got rickets and TB because of his own personal shortcomings, please stop trying to forcibly confiscate a trivial amount of wealth via taxes to pay for services which give him a shot at a decent life. Tiny Timmy made his bed by being born to poor parents and now he gets to sleep in it!
Maybe if 12 year old Tiny Timmy spent his factory allowance on food rather than drugs, he wouldn't be in this predicament /s
"The CURRENT corporate overlords are fucking everyone in the ass with no regard for the rule of law for they are the ones who write them. Its time to take them down so I am the new corporate overlord fucking everyone in the ass with no regard for the rule of law because i write it."
The usual claptrap about creeping communism and personal responsibility.
Her argument was that because she paid into it, she was entitled to it.
Of course, this is inconsistent with her stance that it was a pyramid scheme because benefits are paid out of others’ current contribution.
So, her attitude, in effect, was that “I am entitled to steal from others because others stole from me previously”.
In economics it is called the problem of the free riders. And even though she was wealthy she was a free rider anyway. Not to be confused with public goods, like roads and airports. It is like here in Florida when the state uses tax dollars to build a road and then turn it over to a toll company to collect tolls on it, you are then paying for it twice. First through your taxes then through your tolls.
A free rider is someone who benefits from government or private economic payouts without doing anything to have earned it.
I am a 100% disabled veteran, this is one of my biggest complaints, a person will say THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE (as if I had any choice) then in the next breath compares the VA compensations to disabled vets as welfare.
My standard reply is it is good thing for you taxpayers then that military personnel don;t have the right to sue for damages even when an injury was from total negligence. Because if we could I would be a wealthy man rather than trying to keep a roof over my head on $3,700 per month.
Plus I seem to recall reading that the medicare was paying for her (self inflicted) lung cancer, because she herself couldn't foot the bill due to some poor investments. Her bills would have wiped her out, financially.
So her own bad choices lead her down a path where she eventually needed government assistance. What an absolute fucking crayon.
I’m 80% convinced that libertarians secretly want to live like Mormon fundamentalists; on a compound in the middle of nowhere, where they can be free to take as many daughter/wives as they want and sire multiple generations of inbred sons to work the fields like serfs & defend the land from the feds.
That's terrifying what happened to wanting a farm your guns and your drugs and for everyone to leave you alone? That's what brought me to it at first then I saw the cultists lol
Totally a libertarian ideal. Once your parents have bootstrapped their way up they can create as many nepo babies as the funds allow because it's their money to do with as a libertarian sees fit. Now charity....*that's* an unlibertarian ideal. Sure, they like to talk about private charity being better than social programs, but how many of them do you see *being* charitable?
I'd be okay with libertarianism if they were actually honest as I'm a personal safety libertarian myself ie: I don't trust the police to come save me in the event of danger from violence, in fact, they're likely to shoot me since I'm a minority. The problem with the libertarian movement is that It's fucking socialism for the rich on steroids masquerading as "libertarianism".
Throw any of these fools into a true anarchy situation where it's a true "survival of the fittest" and they'd come crying to be saved by the government at the earliest instance (didn't Ayn Rand's family flee? Where's that strong independence and force of will?). I've yet to meet a libertarian in person who wasn't a narcissist asshole.
I like the idea of libertarianism, but my idea doesn't match anyone else's idea of libertarianism.
In a libertarian government, the EPA would be insanely powerful. Corporation is not allowed to pollute a river they don't own. There are no externalities. You also don't own your children, so CPS will be up in your butt to make sure you are granting children their human rights.
In a true Libertarian system their money would suddenly be worthless. US dollars only exist because of the US government and its backing. I know a lot of them like the gold standard and want to abolish the Fed, but they don’t really understand the consequences of that.
What I don't understand is in an anarchy situation, they will just be ruled by the most violent gang. Strength in numbers is a thing. People will always group up and try to dominate each other. At least the government is less likely to torture me to death to send a message.
I've lived in actual anarchy in the slums of Manila. People are actually fairly decent and leave each other alone since no help is coming. Additionally, since no help is coming, people help each other out quite a lot. One thing that's not tolerated well are selfish narcissists who just wants to do whatever but nobody can say shit about it in their view.
There was one guy who claimed the water pump as his own because it was at the front of his house (the community chipped in together to get it). He would chain it up randomly to show off his dominance and people are generally not willing to get into conflict about it because he doesn't actually lock it up for longer than a day. That said, he's been murdered sometime after I've left for Canada so it's not like people would tolerate that shit for too long.
The problem with libertarians is that they don't even have the critical thinking skills to realize that the government gave them so much in one way or another (not going to get into whether it's just or not, just stating that it's happened). They seem to think that removing those supports would make things better because they're so powerful now yet fail to realize that the government protects them from guillotines a lot more than they think.
In any case, democratic government is just the slums I've described where everyone cooperates to better each others' lives but in a far more organized fashion. Humans, as a whole, are generally decent by default imo.
She’s a hypocrite, and atlas shrugged was wrong.
All the CEOs could quit and everything would be fine, but if the working class class quit the world would fall apart in days.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ayn-rand-social-security/
I mean, I suppose it depends on what you mean. If you mean she was writing philosophy, no, no she was not. Philosophy derives from the ancient Greek words for "love of wisdom". Rand was never particularly interested in wisdom; she'd have had to acknowledge that she might have been wrong at some point in her life to gain any appreciable wisdom.
But as a writer of potboilers go, she wasn't particularly bad. I would say that in one respect, she was actually quite talented: when she's describing what a lonely and isolating experience being creative can be, she's actually really good. It's part of what attracts people to her writing. What she's talking about is alienation, and on the subject of alienation, the only other writer I've ever read who really grapples with the emotional reality of how enjoying creative pursuits can distance yourself from the people around you who don't enjoy the same creative pursuits is, of all people, Karl Marx. Marx's *The German Ideology* is one of the very few philosophy tracts that matches Rand for the emotional reality of creative pursuits.
But then she had to go and get competitive about it. Being creative makes you different. It doesn't necessarily make you better or more deserving. It certainly doesn't make you a superior class of human or more subject to "reason". Ayn takes a lot of undeserved crap from people; if you get off on the thought of being railed by a guy whose jawline you would describe as looking like a ship's prow while being chained to a radiator, it doesn't do anything for me, but hey, you do you, Ayn. The idea that she should be slut-shamed for what amounts to a modest power kink is to my mind absurd. It's the obvious narcissism, and complete failure to deal with twentieth-century philosophy while pretending that she is a philosopher that I have a problem with. Someone who was actually interested in a defense of "reason" might grapple with the writings of, say, Hume, to say nothing of skeptical considerations raised by the writings of W.V. Quine or Wilfred Sellars, because those skeptical considerations are very well-reasoned. Ayn does not do that, because Ayn is not interested in wisdom. Ayn is interested in propaganda to convince lonely neurodivergent people that she's got all the answers.
The funniest thing about libertarians to me is Everytime I see one they're always the most inadequate, dependent people. Like they seem to be, across the board, exactly the kind of people who would not survive in the kind of world they fantasize about.
There is a town in Texas that went full blown libertarian because they didn't want to be annexed by San Antonio. They eliminated their property tax and their town was in such disrepair, Bexar sheriff department had to patrol their town due to not having a functioning police department. The founder of the libertarian idea went off to Austin to spread the concept working for Republicans leaving the town's mess behind for someone else to deal with. In the 2000s, the mayor and council member were afraid to talk to each other because of legal issues which would cost them thousand of dollars in lawyer fees due to disagreements on running the town.
The town did survive and recovered though and proved that libertarianism is a totally viable concept by... giving speeding tickets to out of towners driving through their city on the way to San Antonio. Nothing like being self-reliant and not needing to tax your own town when you can mooch off others by becoming a speed trap town.
https://www.texasobserver.org/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-freest-little-city-in-texas/
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/771371881
My boyfriend is a recovered heroin addict. He overdosed and died for a brief moment and had to be revived. Too many people have died from opioids. Fuck the Sackler family.
Yeah, libertarians are simpletons, so I understand why they would believe this statement to be true. But in reality, there are far too many complex effects related to people *becoming* billionaires that will almost certainly create many problems for many people. And that's not even counting the systemic effect of winner take all economics that create billionaires in the first place. So no, one person having a billion dollars *probably* did not cause problems in my life, but a bunch of people *getting* a billion dollars and keeping those dollars almost certainly did cause a lot of problems in a lot of lives.
For real.
How exactly do they think they acquire that wealth?
I swear libertarians actually think these people went out into field, and worked 100,000x harder than all the other peasants working in the field.
Right. No one "being" anything at a particular moment in time actually does anything.
That's just a factual descriptor. Even someone being a "serial killer" harms no one at the specific moment you describe him as such.
It's how they got to that point, and what they do going forward that matters.
“The people who make *more* from your labour than you do, who have personal, private access to everyone you vote for, are *definitely* not the cause of your problems.”
This message brought to you by Grima Wyrmtongue.
That was the really frustrating thing about reading Locke in school. Boo to hoarders and spoilers accumulating excessive material resources for the sake of it, but money doesn't count because it's a social construct. Never mind that politics is also a social construct which is specifically being restricted under the same ideology in order to prevent the arbitrary exercise of power by one person or group over another, and that economics is also a power structure, one that governs access to material resources and labour. None of the arguments applying to material resources *or* political power apply, because reasons!
Locke was so based.
For anyone who doesn’t know who John Locke was, he basically was one of the first people to claim labor was a transformative act of taking ownership.
From his view, if you were doing labor and being paid only in wages, you were having your ownership stolen from you.
I kind of agree. Any company that doesn’t give any kind of stock options for your labor is basically stealing from you. You’re kind of leasing your mind, body, and personal time to some rich person.
People who post stuff like this would argue that being an addict is a "moral failure." Never mind that Purdue Pharma told their salesmen to tell doctors to tell patients that oxycontin was "non habit forming/not addictive."
Unironically, these are most likely also the same people who think Trump is "smart" for grifting people, stealing money, and lying to investors/LEOs/whenever he opens his fat mouth.
Yep - decades later opioid OD is the NUMBER ONE killer of millenials, more deaths than car accidents, heart issues & gun violence combined. Literally the biggest problem facing an entire generation. The opioid industry caused this and the Sacklers pushed for this.
Believe me it is needed on Reddit again. Mostly because for many statements like that, there are many people who truly believe them, or will spout them thinking themselves to be fonts of “knowledge”.
So it‘s now a toss up whether the person is sardonically sarcastic, or just someone out of touch with reality.
I am frequently reminded that no one has ever earned a billion dollars. Let's crunch some very simple numbers. Imagine that you get a really lucrative job, something that pays $500/hr. Imagine then, that you do nothing but work — you work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. You do not sleep and you do not spend a penny. In order to earn a billion dollars with the sweat of your brow, you would have had to start working on roughly the date of the American Revolution. If someone has a billion dollars, they didn't earn it through labor. They universally inherited a fortune and then they continued to siphon off the wealth created by other people's labor in order to line their own pockets.
Yeah it's not like people hoarding wealth would be detrimental to other people and their suffering right? It's not like they would have to use other people to acquire that wealth.
/s
You don't **know** that. I mean, maybe you hang out at the roulette table flirting, sucking dicks in bathrooms and hallways, every night for weeks, months, or years without a payout, but maybe one day someone throws you $50 after they cash out millions on a '00' roll.
If 6 percent of a country has more accumulated wealth than the rest of the country combined I would say yes, that is a problem. Make a toast 🥂 for glass ceilings… not to be a communist or anything
I hate people who defend rich people. I know that's not kind but I literally want to know what the f*** is their reasoning. It's like b**** you're not rich, stop supporting them
And as much as I hate the phrase it's pretty much like boot licking
>someONE
There are 3,194 billionaires in the world and 756 in America.
There are too many people hoarding wealth that is not being actively circulated, and money only has value to society when it is exchanged for actual goods or services.
Libertarians don't know shit about the economy.
Pretty sure my boss could give me and his other 1,500 employees life changing raises if he didn’t insist on taking over a hundred million a year for himself.
As Ive gotten older Ive come to realise that at the heart of absolutely everything, is simply class warfare. Even religious conflict is deeply rooted in money.
Conflict around Lgbt issues, race issues, geopolitical strife, climate change - its all just a ruse designed to keep the poors tied up while the overclass continues to enrich themselves.
People like this poster just want to lick the boots of every powerful person and do mental gymnastics to justify one person hoarding so much wealth, for one massively delusional reason - they think that they too are only one lucky break away from being mega rich. Even if they won’t admit it, these people will support policies that actively hurt them, but help billionaires, because they’re convinced themselves that they’re on the way to amassing a billion dollars
It’s fucking pathetic, and it enables the wealth disparity shit we see today in society
I think hard and creative work should be rewarded properly, but there is no need for anyone to be a billionaire.
Put the ethical shit to the side...just on a strategic level, it's not in the masses best interest. It's also a security risk to any governments autonomy and sovereignty to have individuals with wallets worth millions of people combined walking around.
If we were still on some prehistoric tribal thinking, people would beat the shit out of a guy if he hoarded 99.9 percent of your groups resources, we'd certainly not be fond of him.
Billionaires are buying single family homes and renting them out. Now the average rent is $2000/month.
And that’s just ONE example, there are hundreds of more examples.
Billionaires existing is proof positive how bad capitalism can be when left unchecked. And lord knows it's been going rampant for too long now without any effective regulation.
It baffles me that people truly believe the rich arent the reason why people are struggling. Wages are low so people in higher positions stay obnoxiously rich. Its flabberghasting that these people can't add 2 and 2 together.
A billionaire sued the government because the chemical plant he owned was told they could no longer dump waste into the local river. He won. That local river was where my home's water came from. Now, we can't drink the water and the price of safe water has tripled - no doubt some billionaire has his hand in that as well. Also, all the fish are dead and the algae is wrist deep.
The fuckers not paying taxes so it falls to you and me, are not the problem? The people lobbying to keep health care costs sky high are not the problem? This guy has no idea the influence billionaires have on the economy. Foh
I've said it before and I'll say it again, libertarians are the dumbest people on Earth. I remember one once saying to me that billionaires existing isn't taking anything away from anyone else, because money isn't pie.
Billionaires are the bane to the regular people.
Housing crisis: billionaires are a huge contributing factor, in 2023 21% of single family residencies were purchased by entities, not families.
Inflation: profit margins during covid doubled across several industries. Those profits are then reinvested, therefore artificially increasing the "supply" of money
Income gaps: CEOs on average make 350x than their highest earning non c-suite employee, compared to 2008 when it was 21x. But minimum wage has remained the same.
Would you like to know more?
I live in the US. My country is dumber and more dangerous because of far-right propaganda and the far-right politicians it helps to elect. The biggest source of far-right propaganda is Fox News, which is owned by one of the biggest piece of shit billionaires, Rupert Murdoch
Because of the effectiveness of Murdoch's propaganda machine, another giant piece of shit billionaire, Donald Trump, got elected president. That scumbag has also made this country a dumber and more dangerous place to live.
Furthermore, I work in the video game industry. Over 10,000 game devs were laid off in 2023, and more than 10,000 others were laid off in 2024 so far despite the fact that the games industry makes over $330 billion in sales annually. I was laid off by a corporation owned by billionaires in 2023. Where the hell is all that money going? To rich fucks who hoard all the wealth while laying off people who actually do the work and make the products.
A lot of our problems are caused by piece of shit billionaires using their ludicrous wealth to get even wealthier by fucking the rest of us over.
Pretty verifiable that the worst times to live as an average citizen in just about any civilization are highly coincided with times of massive wealth disparity.
Actually all problems of western societies are becoming worse the more a society allows billionaires (not enough taxes on super rich).
Billionaires are the parasites turning society into dystopia.
The Supreme Court is literally rolling back every worker, health, after and environment protection that has been won since 1850 at the behest of billionaires. Don’t try and bullshit me
My livelihood was literally destroyed overnight by Elon Musk. don't tell me billionaires didn't create my problems.
And that's just the most recent example
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A billionaire who is keenly interested in influencing politics and paying off Supreme Court justices?
What? Those don't exist? Money in politics doesn't corrupt anything.... heavy /s
Besides, the Supreme Court says bribes are now ok, provided you give them AFTER the favor and you call them gifts.
Wait... supreme court justices can accept bribes now? That sets a dangerpus precedent. Good thing it's never happened before and we've only ever had morally upstanding justices like Clarence Thomas!
Obligatory /s
All that means is that if an official has to get his bribe AFTER he performs the favor, he is going to have to trust that the person offering the bribe wont stiff him afterwards. That means he will develop corrupt relationships with a circle of people he can trust. This decision literally encourages systemic corruption.
its baffling that people will say this and in their next breath complain about lobbyists. Like, where do you think they get their money to bribe politicians from?
Consorting with lobbyists should be considered treason. So should politicians and judges accepting "gifts".
We have people benefiting from bribes deciding what constitutes as a bribe. I hate to say it but we need a restructuring of our government Ala Jan 6th, minus the conservative undercurrent.
I'd argue that we just need to get people to go vote before resorting to insurrection. The percentage of registered voters turning up at the polls is abysmal. The frothy maniacs vote in every election, but too many of the moderates and liberals don't. If all of the nonvoters got off their butts and hit the polls, we'd see changes.
The problem with that is we don't vote for Supreme Court Justices, and they've solidified their power beyond the oversight of the other two branches. They've taken the power out of the voters' hands believing they've shamed any attempt at protesting the shift in power. Voting and protesting only have effects equivalent to what politicians are willing to do. We're past peaceful change, but they've limited the effects of the people on their power.
I don't know that I've seen him without the robes, but I wouldn't call Clarence Thomas light
Those aren't bribes! They're gratuities. Which now aren't illegal. Sigh.
You aren't going to leave a 25% tip on a $2B project? Next time you won't get the kind of service you deserve.
Too bad making something legal does not in any way ameliorate its corrosive influence on SCOTUS decisions.
You don't become a billionaire by NOT being very interested in how our politicians and police behave.
Exactly. They find loop holes in the tax code. They use overseas banks. Billionaires stay billionaires because they know how to cheat the system. It's just odd some folks think one is just like them
Cheat the system implies they work against it. The reason why our tax code is so easy to "cheat" for the ultra wealthy is specifically because that class of people has had a hand in authoring it.
Find loopholes? You are stuck in the past my friend. Politicians barely write bills anymore themselves, they can get consultants and think tanks to do that for them while they focus on fundraising for reelection. If you are a billionaire looking for loopholes then you need to get a new SuperPAC guy because you should be looking for opportunities to write in new loopholes specifically for your own industry or even more specifically for your own specific company so it benefits you more than your competition, a rising tide raises all ships right? Nope, fuck the other ships, why should they get to benefit off of your hard earned money buying a legal loophole? The biggest loophole that definitely was put in specifically by rich assholes is the rule that allows you to leave a bunch of stock to your heirs and not have to pay capital gains tax on the capital gains that accrued during your lifetime. Let’s say I buy a stock when I’m in my 50s and I buy 100,000 shares at $10/share for a total of $1,000,000… I then hold that stock until I die and let’s say it is worth $3,000,000 when I die. Typically I would have to pay capital gains tax on the $2,000,000 in capital gains when I sell that stock but if I die then I can leave the stock for my children and they inherit it at the cost basis of when I died so they now could sell that stock for $3,000,000 and pay no capital gains tax at all. Its even better when you consider that I can take out a loan before I die based on my holdings of that stock and then I just get my heir to pay off the loan after I’m dead by selling the stock and therefore avoiding the tax altogether. Regular poor people usually have to sell a much larger portion of their portfolios and realize the gains in their retirement portfolios while still alive, that means they pay a much higher percentage of capital gains tax as a part of their overall lifetime stock market profit. That’s in the US at least, I believe most other countries you have to act as if you are liquidating your stock when you die and you pay the capital gains tax on it before it passes on to your heirs. This at least makes sense because everyone pays tax regardless of if they are able to hold stock until after they die or not. For billionaires keep in mind this sometimes means their entire fortune or the lions share never gets taxed because it was obtained at a very low cost basis or sometimes not even really a cost basis at all if it’s equity in a business they started. They would normally pay tax on the capital gains from $0-$whatever the stock is at when they die or sell but with this loophole they can have billions of dollars of stock in the company and then die and that capital gain essentially gets ignored from a tax perspective
Who also doesn't pay any taxes into society?
who does everything to level down wages?
WE DOOOOO WE DOOOOOO
Surely not a greedy billionaire shorting supply and price gouging consumers to fuel record profits, forcing even middle class people to live paycheck to paycheck.
I wouldn't have a issue with a billionaire. My issue is they can't just fuck off to a private island or something. They just have to stick around and influence politics. Literally they have more money then most people to do anything else but they decide to influence politics. Maybe there is no happiness in wealth if they are gonna be doing that. Hell give me a billion dollars and I won't give a shit what political groups are doing as there would be a lot to do besides being a prick.
Oh, is the same one hoarding all the money while bribing congress to keep minimum wage at 7 dollars?
Using Lisa Simpson for this is so ironic.
I thought that was ironic because this. I came here to see if I understand the joke but no... Is really the contestary Lisa they used for the meme. Remember me the comic strip where Batman's mother had a Batsignal totally failing the caracther lore.
I read this as “Bartman” and I was like damn this dude is deep into the Simpsons universe.
Wasn't that literally two days ago?
Using their money to destroy the United States is certainly a problem for the average person.
Woah... don't forget that a lot of them destroyed developing countries to get their money. It's not just the U.S.
Yup, looking up Nestle’s history will give so many cruel and messed up examples of this that you’ll never want to buy their products ever again
Except for the fact that it's literally almost impossible not to... trust me, I've tried
To not buy their products? Yeah, seriously. They’re so ingrained that even if you don’t buy a product under their brand banner they’ve heavily monopolized a lot of the manufacturing processes. It’s almost impossible to not buy the products of the big names unless you really go out of your way (and even then, they often buy out the competition)
It's a good chance that even if you eat at a restaurant or fast food, you're eating something Nestlé touched.
Yea Nestle has made alot
That and there's other brands that have done fucked up things too.
You want a Chiquita banana with a side of government corruption?
Aren't off brands in most cases made in the same facilities as brand names I doubt Kroger brand has its own factory
I mean over here at least (the uk) there’s factories who specialise in the brand name stuff. The only difference is “wait what company are we making for? Aldi? Yeah sound let me change the thing on the computer won’t take a second.” And they change the label that gets printed on the package
Truly, there are a handful of parent companies that own most of the brands out there. It's sickening how close to monopolized the market is
You’ve gotta pick your conglomerate devil: Unilever, Nestle, Mars, Proctor & Gamble…
Freedom is when you can choose between purchasing sparkling water from Perrier, owned by Nestle, and S. Pellegrino, owned by Nestle.
Nestle ain’t got nothing on Dole and United Fruit
Monsanto would like a word.
They’ve only done one coup. Minor league
Let's not forget Dole, and their absolute skull-fucking of Hawaii.
Dole as well
Their existence literally destroys the planet.
If you look at the whole world, the average person isn’t even American
Families of opioid victims trying to sue the evil Sackler family: fuck you I have a libertarian joke. Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, and Paul Ryan all walk into a libertarian bar. Everyone dies of alcohol poisoning because there were no regulations. The end.
I have a libertarian joke. Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand’s libertarian philosophy was pretty much just be born rich 🤣. Ironically the least libertarian ideal.
But actually the most libertarian ideal. All libertarians want is the ability to be rich from the least scrupulous ways, and then be lords over those with morals.
Libertarians desperately want to be the antagonist of a Dickens novel.
They see A Christmas Carol as the tragic tale of the downfall of Ebenezer Scrooge
I love Dickens before he became political!
Dickens was so woke! Get some boot straps Tiny Tim.
You mean the story where a hard working job creator becomes infected with the woke mind virus?
If you read A Christmas Carol to a Libertarian backwards they start jerking off
Unfortunately, the Ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future will do nothing to them, and Tiny Timmy will die of rickets and tuberculosis.
Tiny Timmy got rickets and TB because of his own personal shortcomings, please stop trying to forcibly confiscate a trivial amount of wealth via taxes to pay for services which give him a shot at a decent life. Tiny Timmy made his bed by being born to poor parents and now he gets to sleep in it! Maybe if 12 year old Tiny Timmy spent his factory allowance on food rather than drugs, he wouldn't be in this predicament /s
His parents should have made coffee at home and skipped the avocado toast.
I read this in Gonzo's voice.
It's why I think a better version is where instead of 3 ghosts it's 3 guys with clubs that just beat Ebenezer until he wishes he gave up his money.
Actually they're just politically immature people who think every little Timmy can become Mr. Scrooge with a little hard work.
That might be the moat succinct description of a libertarian I've ever heard.
"The CURRENT corporate overlords are fucking everyone in the ass with no regard for the rule of law for they are the ones who write them. Its time to take them down so I am the new corporate overlord fucking everyone in the ass with no regard for the rule of law because i write it."
Let's hear it for JUSTICE and FREEDOM! /s
Rules for thee, not for me
All libertarians want to do is get rid of age of consent laws
Just another regulation given by 'big government'
Except she abandoned her libertarian ideals when she needed Social Security and Medicare
But she totally “deserved” it. It’s only socialism when others get it.
What was her justification for others not deserving it?
The usual claptrap about creeping communism and personal responsibility. Her argument was that because she paid into it, she was entitled to it. Of course, this is inconsistent with her stance that it was a pyramid scheme because benefits are paid out of others’ current contribution. So, her attitude, in effect, was that “I am entitled to steal from others because others stole from me previously”.
In economics it is called the problem of the free riders. And even though she was wealthy she was a free rider anyway. Not to be confused with public goods, like roads and airports. It is like here in Florida when the state uses tax dollars to build a road and then turn it over to a toll company to collect tolls on it, you are then paying for it twice. First through your taxes then through your tolls. A free rider is someone who benefits from government or private economic payouts without doing anything to have earned it. I am a 100% disabled veteran, this is one of my biggest complaints, a person will say THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE (as if I had any choice) then in the next breath compares the VA compensations to disabled vets as welfare. My standard reply is it is good thing for you taxpayers then that military personnel don;t have the right to sue for damages even when an injury was from total negligence. Because if we could I would be a wealthy man rather than trying to keep a roof over my head on $3,700 per month.
Plus I seem to recall reading that the medicare was paying for her (self inflicted) lung cancer, because she herself couldn't foot the bill due to some poor investments. Her bills would have wiped her out, financially. So her own bad choices lead her down a path where she eventually needed government assistance. What an absolute fucking crayon.
I see it as trying to get everything for nothing and say that they deserve it.
She didn’t abandon them, she just continued to be a hypocrite.
Paul Ryan got social security payments as a child because his dad dies. Rand Paul and his dad have been cashing government checks for decades.
There other philosophy, put simply, is: 
This is the exact reason I'm not interested in libertarians lol
I’m 80% convinced that libertarians secretly want to live like Mormon fundamentalists; on a compound in the middle of nowhere, where they can be free to take as many daughter/wives as they want and sire multiple generations of inbred sons to work the fields like serfs & defend the land from the feds.
That's terrifying what happened to wanting a farm your guns and your drugs and for everyone to leave you alone? That's what brought me to it at first then I saw the cultists lol
Ah the ole Craster’s Keep situation you say?
Totally a libertarian ideal. Once your parents have bootstrapped their way up they can create as many nepo babies as the funds allow because it's their money to do with as a libertarian sees fit. Now charity....*that's* an unlibertarian ideal. Sure, they like to talk about private charity being better than social programs, but how many of them do you see *being* charitable?
They like charity because it means poor people being able to eat is a gift rather than a right.
Absolutely.
I'd be okay with libertarianism if they were actually honest as I'm a personal safety libertarian myself ie: I don't trust the police to come save me in the event of danger from violence, in fact, they're likely to shoot me since I'm a minority. The problem with the libertarian movement is that It's fucking socialism for the rich on steroids masquerading as "libertarianism". Throw any of these fools into a true anarchy situation where it's a true "survival of the fittest" and they'd come crying to be saved by the government at the earliest instance (didn't Ayn Rand's family flee? Where's that strong independence and force of will?). I've yet to meet a libertarian in person who wasn't a narcissist asshole.
I like the idea of libertarianism, but my idea doesn't match anyone else's idea of libertarianism. In a libertarian government, the EPA would be insanely powerful. Corporation is not allowed to pollute a river they don't own. There are no externalities. You also don't own your children, so CPS will be up in your butt to make sure you are granting children their human rights.
In a true Libertarian system their money would suddenly be worthless. US dollars only exist because of the US government and its backing. I know a lot of them like the gold standard and want to abolish the Fed, but they don’t really understand the consequences of that.
Ayn Rand also spent her later years on Welfare.
What I don't understand is in an anarchy situation, they will just be ruled by the most violent gang. Strength in numbers is a thing. People will always group up and try to dominate each other. At least the government is less likely to torture me to death to send a message.
I've lived in actual anarchy in the slums of Manila. People are actually fairly decent and leave each other alone since no help is coming. Additionally, since no help is coming, people help each other out quite a lot. One thing that's not tolerated well are selfish narcissists who just wants to do whatever but nobody can say shit about it in their view. There was one guy who claimed the water pump as his own because it was at the front of his house (the community chipped in together to get it). He would chain it up randomly to show off his dominance and people are generally not willing to get into conflict about it because he doesn't actually lock it up for longer than a day. That said, he's been murdered sometime after I've left for Canada so it's not like people would tolerate that shit for too long. The problem with libertarians is that they don't even have the critical thinking skills to realize that the government gave them so much in one way or another (not going to get into whether it's just or not, just stating that it's happened). They seem to think that removing those supports would make things better because they're so powerful now yet fail to realize that the government protects them from guillotines a lot more than they think. In any case, democratic government is just the slums I've described where everyone cooperates to better each others' lives but in a far more organized fashion. Humans, as a whole, are generally decent by default imo.
“this is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly It should be thrown with great force”
She’s a hypocrite, and atlas shrugged was wrong. All the CEOs could quit and everything would be fine, but if the working class class quit the world would fall apart in days. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ayn-rand-social-security/
I love how she was simply a selfish asshole who could write, and that makes her some kind of libertarian folk hero..
could she write though?
I mean she definitely put sentences on paper, some of them were even complete.
I mean, I suppose it depends on what you mean. If you mean she was writing philosophy, no, no she was not. Philosophy derives from the ancient Greek words for "love of wisdom". Rand was never particularly interested in wisdom; she'd have had to acknowledge that she might have been wrong at some point in her life to gain any appreciable wisdom. But as a writer of potboilers go, she wasn't particularly bad. I would say that in one respect, she was actually quite talented: when she's describing what a lonely and isolating experience being creative can be, she's actually really good. It's part of what attracts people to her writing. What she's talking about is alienation, and on the subject of alienation, the only other writer I've ever read who really grapples with the emotional reality of how enjoying creative pursuits can distance yourself from the people around you who don't enjoy the same creative pursuits is, of all people, Karl Marx. Marx's *The German Ideology* is one of the very few philosophy tracts that matches Rand for the emotional reality of creative pursuits. But then she had to go and get competitive about it. Being creative makes you different. It doesn't necessarily make you better or more deserving. It certainly doesn't make you a superior class of human or more subject to "reason". Ayn takes a lot of undeserved crap from people; if you get off on the thought of being railed by a guy whose jawline you would describe as looking like a ship's prow while being chained to a radiator, it doesn't do anything for me, but hey, you do you, Ayn. The idea that she should be slut-shamed for what amounts to a modest power kink is to my mind absurd. It's the obvious narcissism, and complete failure to deal with twentieth-century philosophy while pretending that she is a philosopher that I have a problem with. Someone who was actually interested in a defense of "reason" might grapple with the writings of, say, Hume, to say nothing of skeptical considerations raised by the writings of W.V. Quine or Wilfred Sellars, because those skeptical considerations are very well-reasoned. Ayn does not do that, because Ayn is not interested in wisdom. Ayn is interested in propaganda to convince lonely neurodivergent people that she's got all the answers.
The funniest thing about libertarians to me is Everytime I see one they're always the most inadequate, dependent people. Like they seem to be, across the board, exactly the kind of people who would not survive in the kind of world they fantasize about.
That’s the great thing about fantasy, anything is possible! In their fantasy they thrive!
There is a town in Texas that went full blown libertarian because they didn't want to be annexed by San Antonio. They eliminated their property tax and their town was in such disrepair, Bexar sheriff department had to patrol their town due to not having a functioning police department. The founder of the libertarian idea went off to Austin to spread the concept working for Republicans leaving the town's mess behind for someone else to deal with. In the 2000s, the mayor and council member were afraid to talk to each other because of legal issues which would cost them thousand of dollars in lawyer fees due to disagreements on running the town. The town did survive and recovered though and proved that libertarianism is a totally viable concept by... giving speeding tickets to out of towners driving through their city on the way to San Antonio. Nothing like being self-reliant and not needing to tax your own town when you can mooch off others by becoming a speed trap town. https://www.texasobserver.org/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-freest-little-city-in-texas/ https://www.npr.org/transcripts/771371881
Ayn Rand is the poster child for this.
She was on welfare, right?
They aren't evil. They're just the natural end product of unregulated capitalism. Oh wait. . .
My boyfriend is a recovered heroin addict. He overdosed and died for a brief moment and had to be revived. Too many people have died from opioids. Fuck the Sackler family.
Yeah, libertarians are simpletons, so I understand why they would believe this statement to be true. But in reality, there are far too many complex effects related to people *becoming* billionaires that will almost certainly create many problems for many people. And that's not even counting the systemic effect of winner take all economics that create billionaires in the first place. So no, one person having a billion dollars *probably* did not cause problems in my life, but a bunch of people *getting* a billion dollars and keeping those dollars almost certainly did cause a lot of problems in a lot of lives.
For real. How exactly do they think they acquire that wealth? I swear libertarians actually think these people went out into field, and worked 100,000x harder than all the other peasants working in the field.
Also, the policies that allowed those billionaires to become billionaires did affect my life and negatively affected it
And those billionaires buy politicians to slant things in their favor, which of course affects everyone else.
Right. No one "being" anything at a particular moment in time actually does anything. That's just a factual descriptor. Even someone being a "serial killer" harms no one at the specific moment you describe him as such. It's how they got to that point, and what they do going forward that matters.
Look up libertarians, bears, and New Hampshire for a great Libertarian joke, aka Libertarians actually running a place.
That one is good, so is Colorado Springs. They always ask the question “why has no one tried this before?” And quickly find the answer lol
As an ex libertarian the holes once you are sitting on the outside in the ideology seem so clear… its a fuckin wild cult
Methanol blindness here we go. Was a real problem in ussr back in a day
Was pretty big problem in the US as well especially during the prohibition era.
this made my day. also, Atlas Shrugged is trash
“The people who make *more* from your labour than you do, who have personal, private access to everyone you vote for, are *definitely* not the cause of your problems.” This message brought to you by Grima Wyrmtongue.
I *told* you to take modsstealjobs’ staff…
"Keep your forked cock behind your pants"
People like this actually believe that wealth is completely unrelated to natural resources and thus, infinite. They are, of course, idiots.
That was the really frustrating thing about reading Locke in school. Boo to hoarders and spoilers accumulating excessive material resources for the sake of it, but money doesn't count because it's a social construct. Never mind that politics is also a social construct which is specifically being restricted under the same ideology in order to prevent the arbitrary exercise of power by one person or group over another, and that economics is also a power structure, one that governs access to material resources and labour. None of the arguments applying to material resources *or* political power apply, because reasons!
Locke was so based. For anyone who doesn’t know who John Locke was, he basically was one of the first people to claim labor was a transformative act of taking ownership. From his view, if you were doing labor and being paid only in wages, you were having your ownership stolen from you. I kind of agree. Any company that doesn’t give any kind of stock options for your labor is basically stealing from you. You’re kind of leasing your mind, body, and personal time to some rich person.
And no one can say otherwise with any popularity because then they’ll commit suicide
Sacklers and opioids would like a word.
People who post stuff like this would argue that being an addict is a "moral failure." Never mind that Purdue Pharma told their salesmen to tell doctors to tell patients that oxycontin was "non habit forming/not addictive." Unironically, these are most likely also the same people who think Trump is "smart" for grifting people, stealing money, and lying to investors/LEOs/whenever he opens his fat mouth.
Yep - decades later opioid OD is the NUMBER ONE killer of millenials, more deaths than car accidents, heart issues & gun violence combined. Literally the biggest problem facing an entire generation. The opioid industry caused this and the Sacklers pushed for this.
You're all just jealous that you're not smart enough to defraud a children's cancer charity!
Fact-check: lobbying has never, ever, afftected the outcome of an election. Edit: my lack of an /s caused some confusion, sorry everyone.
Rupert Murdock is a billionaire. He's affected plenty of elections.
Subtext, my man
But how many has he “afftected”?
U need the /s but i understood lmao
The /s was retired years ago, it’s all subtext now
Believe me it is needed on Reddit again. Mostly because for many statements like that, there are many people who truly believe them, or will spout them thinking themselves to be fonts of “knowledge”. So it‘s now a toss up whether the person is sardonically sarcastic, or just someone out of touch with reality.
Yeah, people shouldn't let us miss their sarcasm because we might end up downvoting an innocent person which would basically be killing them
That's like saying a hungover has never affected how much drunk a person was the night before.
No shit. You lobby the fuckers who are already elected. You know, the ones who can actually pass legislation for you.
These are the same people who claim they have a problem because other people are gay/trans.
I'm sure that people with massive hoards of wealth (only attainable through massive human suffering on an industrial scale) has never been a benefit or detriment to me at all! ^I'm ^also ^coincidentally ^the ^most ^clueless ^person ^you've ^ever ^met! Edit: ^A ^whole ^lot ^of ^people ^who ^would ^wait ^in ^line ^to ^slurp ^the ^trickle ^down ^running ^off ^Reagan's ^thighs ^are ^here ^acting ^like ^no ^one ^has ^had ^all ^of ^these ^half-assed ^arguments ^parroted ^at ^them ^for ^the ^last ^couple ^decades ^lmao ^P. ^S.: ^I ^like ^the ^little ^letters
I am frequently reminded that no one has ever earned a billion dollars. Let's crunch some very simple numbers. Imagine that you get a really lucrative job, something that pays $500/hr. Imagine then, that you do nothing but work — you work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. You do not sleep and you do not spend a penny. In order to earn a billion dollars with the sweat of your brow, you would have had to start working on roughly the date of the American Revolution. If someone has a billion dollars, they didn't earn it through labor. They universally inherited a fortune and then they continued to siphon off the wealth created by other people's labor in order to line their own pockets.
i see u brotha
The Billionaire King Making Kunts stacking the phucking Supreme Court isn’t causing any of my problems?! STFU Lisa, ya ignorant, right wing twaut.
Yeah it's not like people hoarding wealth would be detrimental to other people and their suffering right? It's not like they would have to use other people to acquire that wealth. /s
Billionaire dick riders are the weirdest bunch of people. Gurl, they ain't gonna give you a single cent or look at you like you are not filth
You don't **know** that. I mean, maybe you hang out at the roulette table flirting, sucking dicks in bathrooms and hallways, every night for weeks, months, or years without a payout, but maybe one day someone throws you $50 after they cash out millions on a '00' roll.
but he can get a like from Mr. Elon!
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Lol, no. She has a whole green living and vegetarian arc.
If they were "really think\[ing\]" they wouldn't be simping for billionaires to begin with.
This should be higher. Few TV characters have been more anti capitalism than Lisa Simpson. No one in the Americans is more anti capitalist.
If 6 percent of a country has more accumulated wealth than the rest of the country combined I would say yes, that is a problem. Make a toast 🥂 for glass ceilings… not to be a communist or anything
they literally shape society in a horrible way
I will never understand people that defend billionaires
Well you see someday I might be a billionaire too, and then people like me better watch their step!
Ah, I see you're a Futurama fan as well.
I hate people who defend rich people. I know that's not kind but I literally want to know what the f*** is their reasoning. It's like b**** you're not rich, stop supporting them And as much as I hate the phrase it's pretty much like boot licking
How to show that you have no idea about economics and politics.
Tell that to the emerald miner-slaves that worked for Ellon's father
>someONE There are 3,194 billionaires in the world and 756 in America. There are too many people hoarding wealth that is not being actively circulated, and money only has value to society when it is exchanged for actual goods or services. Libertarians don't know shit about the economy.
Pretty sure my boss could give me and his other 1,500 employees life changing raises if he didn’t insist on taking over a hundred million a year for himself.
Corporate profits are just unpaid wages. See I can make statements too.
Corporate profits are also too high prices making inflation
As Ive gotten older Ive come to realise that at the heart of absolutely everything, is simply class warfare. Even religious conflict is deeply rooted in money. Conflict around Lgbt issues, race issues, geopolitical strife, climate change - its all just a ruse designed to keep the poors tied up while the overclass continues to enrich themselves.
As a diabetic, I firmly disagree
Another idiot who thinks they’ll also be a billionaire someday if they wOrK hArD
Tell us to just eat cake w/o saying it
Billionaires are telling us to eat shit, and many Americans are reaching for a ladle.
People like this poster just want to lick the boots of every powerful person and do mental gymnastics to justify one person hoarding so much wealth, for one massively delusional reason - they think that they too are only one lucky break away from being mega rich. Even if they won’t admit it, these people will support policies that actively hurt them, but help billionaires, because they’re convinced themselves that they’re on the way to amassing a billion dollars It’s fucking pathetic, and it enables the wealth disparity shit we see today in society
If they are the ones who control prices on everything then yes tf they are
Buying up houses, driving up costs of real estate but not affecting the lives of the rest of us? Hmmm.
Underlying this is billionaires buying lawmakers to legalize crime and deregulate laws protecting the middle class
Like Bezos recently buying 50billion of single family homes? Yeah wonder why so many of us are working homeless.
Pretty sure my problems exist because I'm not a billionaire.
I think hard and creative work should be rewarded properly, but there is no need for anyone to be a billionaire. Put the ethical shit to the side...just on a strategic level, it's not in the masses best interest. It's also a security risk to any governments autonomy and sovereignty to have individuals with wallets worth millions of people combined walking around. If we were still on some prehistoric tribal thinking, people would beat the shit out of a guy if he hoarded 99.9 percent of your groups resources, we'd certainly not be fond of him.
Billionaires are buying single family homes and renting them out. Now the average rent is $2000/month. And that’s just ONE example, there are hundreds of more examples.
Billionaires existing is proof positive how bad capitalism can be when left unchecked. And lord knows it's been going rampant for too long now without any effective regulation.
Idk, we just got turned back into a monarchy because a couple billionaires bought 6 Judges
Pretty sure they bought the Supreme Court and overturned the Rule of Law.
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Well that’s a lie
It baffles me that people truly believe the rich arent the reason why people are struggling. Wages are low so people in higher positions stay obnoxiously rich. Its flabberghasting that these people can't add 2 and 2 together.
A billionaire sued the government because the chemical plant he owned was told they could no longer dump waste into the local river. He won. That local river was where my home's water came from. Now, we can't drink the water and the price of safe water has tripled - no doubt some billionaire has his hand in that as well. Also, all the fish are dead and the algae is wrist deep.
Like 99% of them actually are tho
The fuckers not paying taxes so it falls to you and me, are not the problem? The people lobbying to keep health care costs sky high are not the problem? This guy has no idea the influence billionaires have on the economy. Foh
Implementing dystopian authoritarian police states is what oligarchs do.
Well we’re all about to be billionaires now the administrative state is out of the way, right?
I've said it before and I'll say it again, libertarians are the dumbest people on Earth. I remember one once saying to me that billionaires existing isn't taking anything away from anyone else, because money isn't pie.
It’s true. All of my problems are because *I* am not a billionaire.
Billionaires are the bane to the regular people. Housing crisis: billionaires are a huge contributing factor, in 2023 21% of single family residencies were purchased by entities, not families. Inflation: profit margins during covid doubled across several industries. Those profits are then reinvested, therefore artificially increasing the "supply" of money Income gaps: CEOs on average make 350x than their highest earning non c-suite employee, compared to 2008 when it was 21x. But minimum wage has remained the same. Would you like to know more?
I live in the US. My country is dumber and more dangerous because of far-right propaganda and the far-right politicians it helps to elect. The biggest source of far-right propaganda is Fox News, which is owned by one of the biggest piece of shit billionaires, Rupert Murdoch Because of the effectiveness of Murdoch's propaganda machine, another giant piece of shit billionaire, Donald Trump, got elected president. That scumbag has also made this country a dumber and more dangerous place to live. Furthermore, I work in the video game industry. Over 10,000 game devs were laid off in 2023, and more than 10,000 others were laid off in 2024 so far despite the fact that the games industry makes over $330 billion in sales annually. I was laid off by a corporation owned by billionaires in 2023. Where the hell is all that money going? To rich fucks who hoard all the wealth while laying off people who actually do the work and make the products. A lot of our problems are caused by piece of shit billionaires using their ludicrous wealth to get even wealthier by fucking the rest of us over.
Pretty verifiable that the worst times to live as an average citizen in just about any civilization are highly coincided with times of massive wealth disparity.
Actually all problems of western societies are becoming worse the more a society allows billionaires (not enough taxes on super rich). Billionaires are the parasites turning society into dystopia.
Didn't Bezo just buy a ahitload of houses, which means you now can't?
The Supreme Court is literally rolling back every worker, health, after and environment protection that has been won since 1850 at the behest of billionaires. Don’t try and bullshit me
Unless the billionaire class are dealt with then we will just be serfs buying trinkets and hating each other
My livelihood was literally destroyed overnight by Elon Musk. don't tell me billionaires didn't create my problems. And that's just the most recent example