to me, one of the weirdest things about our economy right now is the credential inflation
like my dad got a job as a mechanic when he graduated high school, and he was employed with a high school diploma to a full time job with a union, and had health insurance and benefits.
at this point, I have graduated from high school, have a Bachelor’s degree, have a Master’s Degree, have two years of experience working in my field, and am a due paying member of multiple professional organizations. And that qualifies me to compete in a two-stage interview process for a part time job that offers no health care.
This is what decades of stripping the working class of their rights looks like.
So you are saying 0% of the world should be billionaires?
Yes.
Why shouldn’t their be billionaires? That makes no sense.
Because the existence of billionaires is predicated on the exploitation of human labor and unsustainable environmental harm. That level of wealth hoarding is harmful to economies, as it reduces the amount of money in circulation. No one person, no family, could ever conceivably even SPEND a billion dollars anyway, and it is inherently immoral to accumulate wealth so narrowly while so much of the world lives in abject poverty.
Better then to create a wealth ceiling, a point at which all wealth over a certain point is taxed at or very near 100% to incentivize people to actually spend their money rather than hoard it, stimulating the economy and bettering the lives of far more people. Better even still to create and regulate economic systems that protect workers and the environment in a way that such extreme levels of wealth accumulation aren’t even feasible.
The problem with this is that it reduces the incentive to actually do fiscally well. What’s the point of starting a business if you can’t become wealthy?
There is a very real difference between “reasonably wealthy” and A BILLIONAIRE
No one is saying you shouldn’t have a nice house, we are saying that having multiple really, really ridiculously nice houses while your employees are either homeless or at serious risk of becoming homeless is immoral.
I’ll never understand why this concept is hard for people. I think it’s because they can’t actually fathom how much $1 Billion is.
Seriously.
Let’s say you have a badass job. A great job. You make $100 AN HOUR. You work 10 hours a day ($1000 A DAY), 5 days a week ($5000 a week!!!), every week ($20,000 A MONTH), thats $240,000 Every Year.
It would take you 4,167 years to make a billion dollars.
I actually saw a really good visual representation of how large a billion actually is in comparison to the poor, the middle class, the rich, and the wealthy… I am legit going to find it again and post a couple of the visuals:
What folks tend to think a chart like that would look like, verses…
A more accurate one to visualize just how big of a margin there is:
That dark green bar on the right is the 1%. Literally off the scale. A tax will hardly dent it, but it will mean the world to those who are considered the poor; fast food workers and struggling college students among them.
Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes. Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days. Look! The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you. The cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord Almighty. You have lived on earth in luxury and self-indulgence. You have fattened yourselves in the day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the innocent one, who was not opposing you.— James 5:1-6
People say “Oh you’re just bitter” every time I talk shit about the rich and you’re God damn right I’m bitter. We should all be.
It should leave a bad taste in your mouth that you work your ass off and give up so much of your time and labor to barely scrape by, and there’s a class of people so incomprehensibly removed from that reality. People that do absolutely nothing but piggy back off of your labor and spend wondrous amounts of time relaxing in luxury and getting to be with their families.
did you guys know that the robot genre of science fiction sprung up as a critique of the way in which industrialization reduced workers to taking up monotonous, unskilled factory jobs in order to earn profit, jobs which in turn alienated them from their own humanity? did you know that the theory of the alienation of the self under capitalistic mode of production is a core principle of marxism? did you know that robot itself comes from a czech playwright who, for a science fiction play, coined the word as a derivative of the czech term robota, meaning forced labor? did you know that the robot genre is rooted in anti-capitalist sentiment?