It means the social contract has been broken beyond repair. Wealth hording, inequality, the power balance, lobbying, mega-corporations, data harvesting to profit from us even further, working until death for pennies while other profit from our labour. We are slaves to a system that has the illusion of comfort and freedom, when in reality, a small subset of the population control it all and are actively clamping down on what little freedom and comfort we actually had.
The 2008 financial collapse lifted the curtain to most, and it became glaringly obvious just how transparent and artificial the entire concept of economy actually is.
These days I see it as a shorthand, a metaphor for dismantling the system of resource hoarding so that we can more equitably distribute it - let the world consume what the elite have hoarded.
It's also sort of a joke that reduces them to use value.
I’m all in on wealth redistribution. But it’s not a simple as, “spread it all around”. We’d still be broke, just with bigger bank account numbers and a loaf of bread would be astronomical.
Old friend of mine was appalled when he found out that the US burns worn out currency. (Mike wasn’t that bright.) Said the government should hand that back out.
Allright Mike, can we agree that the government could give all of us a million dollars, like, today?
Of course they could!
Agreed. You know I charge $20 to mow a lawn? (this was early 90’s) What if I suddenly had a million dollars? Hell I want with $20?! Nah. Now I want $20,000 to mow your yard.
Mike honestly didn’t get it. To him, a cheeseburger would always cost $.85 and $15 would get you an 1/8th bag, no matter what.
Reality is, we could skim some hella money off these fuckers. And I don’t just mean billionaires, and I don’t just mean the 1%. We could hit the .01% and the .001% for serious social good. But we can’t take it all and splat it around.
Dad used to say, “If making money was easy, everybody would do it.” And then it wouldn’t be money anymore. (I’m sad I had to follow up with that last sentence, but some people here aren’t going to get it.)
While I’m ranting (sorry OP, you gave me a jumping off point), Robert Heinlein had a great collection of essays, in addition to his science fiction. Him and his wife Virginia decided to travel the world. But they didn’t want the northern hemisphere tourist crap, they went all in on the southern bits.
One way he gauged local economies was, “How long does a laborer have to work to earn a loaf of bread?” Think on that. Very eye opening. His take on the Soviet Union was wild as well!
One of my favorite stories in those essays was when they went to Ecuador (70s? 80s?). He would always ask the cab driver to take them to the poorest part of town, really gauge how the economy was working. They end up in a nice little neighborhood. Tiny, tiny houses, but very neat and clean, flower boxes in all the windows, nice streets, all that.
Heinlein got a little bent. “I asked you to take us to the poorest part of town!” Cabbie, “Oh no senior, these are the poorest people! They are on government assistance and are very ashamed.”
Notice I didn't say money, I said resources. And I'm thinking in global terms.
I'm not saying, say, American government take cash of American billionaires and give it to different Americans.
I'm saying, who controls water, who controls oil, who controls farmland. Who pressures nations with threats if they try to be food self sufficient. Who steals. Who orders and finances killings. There is enough here on terra for everyone, but it's being misused and hoarded.
It means uniting as a people to force them to answer for their crimes against humanity, using the assumption that their mortal life is the only opportunity for punishment.
Tangential story time. I play a lot of video games, mmo’s being the norm. A few years ago one came out that I was hooked on not just as a game but also a social platform. I met many people on there and knew them better than I know some of my friends.
One of them set a goal for herself. She wanted a billion in game currency, and it was possible. She spent several months and enough real world money to end up in some fairly deep debt, but I only heard that from others who were closer.
Being outside of her unguarded group, she randomly asked me what I would do of I had a billion currency in the game. I thought about it for a few minutes and responded “I’d probably quit the game”. Confused, she asked me why.
It’s a pretty simple concept, if I had accumulated that level of wealth in game, that meant one of two things had occured: either I had nothing left to spend the currency on, or the inflation had gotten so bad that only the wealthiest players could participate.
That mindset doesn’t work with the rich. They can do and get whatever they want with their wealth, but they’re more focused on getting a big number more than actually just enjoying it freely and openly.
Eating the rich is decimating the concept of a high score financially. Fostering altruism and attempting to make the world a better place for all. The absolute wealth some people in this world have could do so much good if it weren’t being hoarded.
Taxing the rich is a hard fight with so many loopholes and outs that it will take forever. Changing the mindset is basically impossible as well, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try every available means.
I played Borderlands with my brother online once. He was ahead of me but we wanted to have fun together so we tried to play together.
I was on a mission to get the best gun for my current level. He was kind enough to just drop a gun that was as good or better for my level than what I was seeking. I no longer had to do that quest.
In fact, he dropped all the best guns he had through all the levels. I no longer had to do any extra quests.
I quit the game. It was suddenly boring. It was the need for the next new thing that had been making it exciting, and now that was gone.
I think about that sometimes for rich people. Why does it never get boring?
The decision making in the economy is too centralized. Not only does that reward corrupting the system and is arguably immoral, the wisdom of the crowd only works when there is a crowd making those decisions. eg. coops, smaller businesses + more competition/lower barriers to entry
It means the rich and powerful need to be reminded that they should live in very real and visceral fear of inciting the ire of the peasantry with their corruption, manipulation of systems, and hording of wealth.
and it means us proletariat should be less passive and far more willing to embrace enforcing that fear, by any means necessary.
Much like in the French revolution but much worse, people want to kill and then eat anyone they decide has too much money. Because of course, the definition of “rich” will wildly vary based on how much the angry crowd wants someone turned into burgers.
Tax incentives to convert privately owned companies into worker owned cooperatives,
Income tax set at brackets of the 20th, 40th, 60th, 80th, 95th, and 99th percentiles of income, with the rates nominally calculated based on the shares of wealth controlled by each percentile, and with additional rate hikes for every time a persons income passes a multiple of the median income of those below the 20th percentile of incomes,
Anyone in the 99th percentile of incomes are banned from public office for ten years starting when they stop earning in that bracket, I call this one the “You’re doing fine, now shut up.”, rule,
Minimum wage calculated state by state as the minimum amount for the quarterly median rent of that state to not exceed 35% of that wage,
Wage based on the week, a nominal rate for up to 32 hours of work, with work between 32 and 48 hours of work receiving an additional sum of the nominal rate times 2.5, with any work between 48 and 64 hours being compensated at that sum times an additional 2.5, and any work beyond 64 hours just being completely illegal altogether, as in the manager goes to jail immediately and the shop is turned into a worker owned co-op by force if it happens too many times. Overtime should be what you do because it’s an emergency, not because you’re too fucking cheap to hire the actually necessary labor,
Price hikes of all kinds are limited to a max of the federal interest rate in terms of percent increase,
Serious increases in non-habitation taxes for properties safe to be used as housing,
Businesses cannot use physical office space without having a minimum percentage of essential labor roles staffing that office, essential meaning “this job cannot possibly in any way be done without us being on site.”
Service industry workers are protected by law and verbally harassing them is a felony,
Elections are funded entirely publicly, in fact if you accept a private donation of any sort you’re ejected from the election, as in even if you win the ballot is instead treated as if the second place runner up won,
Hunt down any and every person responsible for the current advertising eco-system and sentence the lot of them to be publicly hanged for a number of counts of criminal harassment equal to the number of televized and online advertisements aired from the date of birth of the oldest among them,
Post office and library banking and post office and library polling places,
One congressman for every 50k residents of a state, and 27 senators to every state, more elected offices means more people in government, which necessarily means less rich folks as a share of government,
Abolish the office of president, hand the powers of government to the House of Representatives and the powers of State to the Senate, and give them both the ability to veto the other by a margin equal to how much a given act by either house passed by, with a Veto Overturn either being a 2/3rds vote, or a 5% increase on the veto margin, whichever is higher, basically this is just neutering the house most commonly filled with the political elites of the nation, ergo some of the richest of the nation, while still having that ability to block legislation from the house if its something ludicrous that pretty clearly violates a large cross section of the states’ interests, also the senate has to pass those margins with qualified majorities, meaning it doesn’t count unless the senators voting to veto something represent over half the country’s population, no cornfield courts in this country,
You’ve got some serious takes there, but why so soft on landleeches?
If you do not live at a residential address you don’t get to own it. Zero corporate ownership of residential properties, the individual person or family who owns your apartment building has to actually provide labor involved in the running of the building (maintenance or leasing) but cannot take a monthly pay greater than 2.5x the lowest-cost unit in the building.
I’d agree except that there’s plenty of not rich people who have second homes for a variety of reasons, that’s why I believe in a growing penalty for non-habitation, puts on the screws at the point where you’re actually just being a commodifier instead of being some kind of seasonal resident who jets between two or even three primary homes for work or because you’ve got a bit of nomad in ya.
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