And yet it isn’t enough, they still want more more more.
Soon a single person will have as much as the bottom 50% and it still won’t be enough
when will it be enough that we stop this?
Net wealth MIST be capped. Taxes could be a great tool for this, after a max level, everything above goes 100% to taxes. I don’t know at what level that cap should be, but it’s definitely less than billion, definitely less than 100 million, definitely less than 25 million.
There is no right to a crazy high net worth, and the only reason that people can is because we don’t cap it. So, cap it. World wide. There is no reason to have a netwoth of over 25 million. Have it all go to taxes so that governments get a huge monetary boost that can be used for free healthcare, free education, free infrastructure, hell, maybe even universal income
With that we also take the power away. No longer will we have to deal with absolute lucky idiots like Sam Altman or Elmo Musk whose sole reasons for being this shit ass rich are being lucky and a loooong list of lies.
But then we’d get back to authoritarian society where some random representative would have resources to usurp. Taxes will solve nothing. No, we’ve got to dismantle the whole concept of superpowers, accumulation, and capitalism. We have enough just to feed everyone and educate all who want to be educated.
But then we’d get back to authoritarian society where some random representative would have resources to usurp.
How does that follow yet dismantling all current systems wouldn’t cause the same problem?
The answer is taxes. It’s simple and effective without any revolution that would likely result in an authoritarian regime. It’s a lack of taxes which allows authoritarians to flourish because the money they centralize is power. Distribute the money and you distribute the power.
“Someday I’ll be one of those 8”
Those dumb cunts ruining my life and I hate it
trickle down economics. amirite?
You mean waking up in the morning being scared nr 9 will overtake you?
If that happens then they’ll have to sell all their cars with gullwing/scissor doors and buy a car with regular doors.
The world’s wealthiest eight men control net wealth of $426 billion, based on estimates from Forbes.
Took me until this sentence to realize this article was from 2017. Muskrat is getting close to that all by himself - I saw something the other day that had him around $350 billion.
I’m sure the numbers are much much worse than they were 8 years ago.
Elon musk has between $470B-$500B to his name, according to bloomberg and forbes. That would make him richer than the world’s wealthiest 8 men in 2017.
I am totally on board this is my pre face.
That is not cash though. That is accumulated paper assets. I know people with million dollar net worths on paper that are broke in reality. As in unable to pay their bills. Assets and liquidity are separate things.
While I understand the point of rampant enshittification and capitalism, I thought that needs some clarity.
Can’t those assets be sold for theoretically the amount of money they’re worth?
Not necessarily. I mean sort of. Yeah. However there arent always buyers, especially who will pay total asking price and or close to it. Some situation call for much lower pricing. It’s all about what the asset is and timing. It’s more of a theoretical value more so than anything. He could leverage credit against the asset amount but it’s dependent on a lot of factors.
Top 3 today are just shy of 1 trillion dollars…
This list doesn’t include hidden wealth does it? Like Putin for example.
Hasn’t the USD also decreased in value since then? Actually a good way to “make more billionaires”
Yes. Yes they are.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
In deed. At some point, say 100 million for arguments sake. Once you accumulate that much wealth, you are taxed at 100%. You may not own, or make, anything above that number through any means. Forced retirement would also be something to think about. Giving younger generations a chance to make a life for themselves as well.
Society as a whole, would flourish.
🌎 I vote BennyBoy for President! 🇺🇸
User name checks out ;)
Calling it “financial obesity” makes it sound innocuous or even good. Wealth hoarding is treason.
This is either slop from a refried prompt, or an act of Olympic calibre mental gymnastics.
Obesity is always a threat to the health of any system where the term is invoked. Its tolerance and normalisation is functionally suicidal.
You deserve the exact same fate as the billionaires in this comic.
“You say that obesity is unhealthy, so you deserve to be guillotined”
What the fuck
Like, how is stating that, whether false or true, anywhere on the level of systematically exploiting and ruining people at numbers these words will never reach? How are such words alone justification enough for murder?
Killing should never be done or advocated for lightly, if at all. Life is the most fundamental human right.
The human vampire dragons of the comic walk on corpses and broken lives and still can’t hoard enough. I’ll permit an argument that the scale at which they tread even the most fundamental rights of others forfeits their own fundamental rights.
But saying a few words is nowhere near the same level of travesty. We can argue whether they hurt the dignity of others (I don’t think they do) or are untrue (I don’t think they are), but to justify killing for them is unhinged. Please get your moral compass checked.
Calling it “financial obesity” makes it sound innocuous or even good. Wealth hoarding is treason.
So is obesity, to the body. It’s the perfect metaphor if people ignore it as innocuous.
There is nothing wrong with being fat. Saying that wealth hoarding is like being fat is calling it normal and good, even if one is too stupid to understand that simple fact.
Obesity isn’t just being chubby. It’s a morbid condition detrimental to joints, spine, liver, heart and other comorbidities. It places a strain both on healthcare systems and on accommodation efforts. It’s in everyone’s interest, including the patient’s, to remedy that issue and help them attain a less unhealthy weight.
You are right that the condition alone doesn’t diminish the worth of the afflicted as people. What makes the financial obesity of our comparison so despicable is that it stems from ravenous gluttony at the expense of others. I could see a point that this qualifier should be spelled out, even though I think it’s implicity clear to most participants from the general context of the discussion.
But obesity as a condition is neither normal nor good, neither for the patient nor for the system obliged to accommodate them.
Being obese is not shameful but it is not okay and should be adressed
You’re fat, aren’t you? That’s why you think there’s nothing wrong with blocking all your arteries & suffocating all your internal organs, because it happened so slowly that you’ve become accustomed to it. And you can’t stop eating because you’re insatiable.
Like insatiable billionaires hoarding wealth.
But don’t get confused now, because fatness is not wealth. Fatness is the opposite of wealth. Working hard to eat nutritiously & moderately & getting plenty of daily exercise for a fit hard body that looks great naked is the corporeal manifestation of wealth.
There is a difference between fat and obese.
I don’t care about the heads.
I just want to repurpose the assets.
It’s symbolic.
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” - Benito Mussolini
A private equity business owner just became willingly elected as prime minister of Canada. Mussolini and Hitler have been resurrected.
Only because the beady-eyed weaselly fuck on the other side is worse.
No one truly knows the way forward, just that where we are is a bad place. Someday, the framers of our time will have to figure something out. Hopefully they will hear us, and take the best ideas for that something.
Anyhow, I think we should outright create an artificial economic system. Our problems come from inherited wealth, stratified institutions, and rube-goldberg solutions to corruption and inequality.
I think that one replacement that would be gamechanging, would be to make getting an education into a paid job. The state and federal government pays students for their grades. If this income is sufficient, a student can focus solely on learning, instead of accruing debt and being distracted by part-time work. We get more people getting their learning completed, thus entering the job market with the ability needed.
Of course, we would have to address more issues. Such as ghost jobs, unreasonable hiring standards, decentivizing companies from replacing veteran workers with greenhorns for fiscal reasons, and so forth. We simultaneously have too many and too few job seekers, due to perverse incentives.
I think it isn’t companies that should be involved with hiring, instead they should send a request for a worker to the government, who posts the position with standardized requirements and reviews whether prospective employees have the required credentials. The government also tracks whether or not a job position is going unfilled by the company, and starts penalizing the corporation if a posted position consistently needs filling, employees churning, and so forth. This might help with the ghost job issue, and address issues of unfairness.
… They’re all in one room?
A guillotine is unnecessarily complicated.
… and also too humane.
In the words of some CEOs… “Execution is everything”
It’s just a matter of time before all that wealth flows down and everyone gets rich. Trust the system, it’s working as intended.
They don’t call it a “golden shower” for nothing!
Oh it’s supposed to be candy? I have a call to make.
Ohh let me see what flower that is…
And not one of them can walk down the street in any city he wants at any time.
Prisoners in their own chains.
Nor their kids.
It’s tragi comic.
If something like this ever did happen IRL, the vast majority of the world would cheer.
I mean, one got shot and killed, and there was celebration.
And the guy wasn’t even anywhere near being a billionaire.
Panels are in the wrong order. It should either be 3, 1, 2, 4 or 3, 2, 1, 4. These orders offer different feelings to the progression. Either way, you have to set the stage for the joke with 3.
And by killing those 8, the wealth would be distributed such that 8 people would own the same wealth as half the world.
At the “guillotine billionaires” stage, I wouldn’t assume that billionaire heirs would get their inheritance as usual.
If you’re going to go to the courts and the banks in order to overturn inheritance, why even guillotine billionaires in the first place?
Because billionaires who aren’t dead or in danger won’t just let it happen. Also, they aren’t exactly innocent for the state of things - most if not all of them engaged in vast amounts of unethical and often outright illegal behavior to attain their wealth. They have been actively working to make life shittier and deadlier for everyone else, and they deserve some justice for that, if only to discourage the next people who consider imitating them.
But you think they’ll just let killing them happen?
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It’s fun how people make this stupid “they’re not actually rich” argument while they buy politicians to fuck everyone over.
Most of that wealth is in properties, assets, stocks, etc
All of those can be sold in exchange for currency.
Only to other billionaires. The yacht moves between owners. It doesn’t turn into healthcare.
The problem with a yacht is that it exists
I like how are talking about yachts like that’s some significant portion of their wealth and not all the land these people own. Not to mention their investments into residential housing.
You picked the frivolous thing instead of the very tangible useful things they horde
A yacht could transfer from a single owner’s luxury item to a public owned means of production though.
Instead of a billionaire taking it out a handful of times a year for intimidation parties (because of the implication) it could instead be used to generate wealth for the public purse by being used daily for cruises or a multitude of other things.
Doctors Without Borders use large boats as mobile hospitals to go to places most in need, if you’re really determined it must be used for healthcare I’m sure some renovation to an existing super yacht is cheaper and easier than building a boat from scratch.
Yeah you can rent it for recreational use, no, it can’t be repurposed into anything else, they kinda suck as boats
You’re still making the best of a bad situation though. You’d rather the original resources were available. Seizing “wealth” won’t get you the full book value.
Who the fuck cares if we don’t get ‘full book value’ or ‘making the best of a bad situation’ when the implied alternative is not doing anything.
How about we do something? Given how badly the situation has gone, taking that wealth back and making the best use we can with what they’ve wasted money on is one of the best paths forward
That’s not an argument against removing billionaires though, right? You’d rather want to stop the spread of cancer instead of bemoaning the fact that we got sick at all. The best we can do is reposes their frivolously purchased assets and recycle them as much as it’s reasonable, and cast away what remains. It’s not all yachts, some of that wealth is locked in empty flats/houses, and giving those back to community would be very beneficial without needing to transform those assets further.
Bullshit.
“Stocks” are “ownership of the means of production”.
You absolutely can feed yourself on your share of “the means of production”.
You can run companies without billionaires. Nationalize them, or turn them into worker-owned cooperatives. Or even just sell them to investor groups, if we aren’t going full marxist.
You can of course just force them against their will to liquidate 99% of their assets, and then oversee redistribution collectively, maybe by some previously agreed upon framework for that, or maybe pledge it toward some government coffer, nationalize it, many different options.
And that would be a whole hell of a lot more kind than what Lenin or Mao did.
What is most important is the reformation of the workplaces, the business’s structure and ownership itself into democratic entities in and of themselves, as opposed to little business dictatorships/oligarchies, this way, going forward, proceeds of a productive enterprise are at least not as easily siphoned into new giant private collections of wealth, held by some other person or group or class.
Outlaw private corporations beyond some small headcount size, mandate they are instead worker run co-ops that adhere to some bare minimum standard of representation for all employees.
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Compromise: we’ll just take the factors of production, and they can keep their stocks and dollars.
then don’t stop. just keep going.
this must be what Reagan meant by “trickle down economics”
Trickle down
“It’s a trickle…of blood!!” *da-dum!*
Where do you draw the line for inherited wealth without qualifying for execution, what is the grace period, and how do you enforce it unilaterally without exceptions?
Or is the plan that you and your friends make the decisions case by case and are yourselves also exceptions?
No exceptions. It’s not hard to become less wealthy. The only allowance I’d offer is a warning 90 days in advance that continued retention of their obscene wealth will become a capital offense. They can unload their excess in that time frame and keep their heads.
The most important question is “how do you enforce it?” Does the roaming mob meet up daily to check everybody’s bank records? Or do you pass a law about it democratically, and if it’s that then why did you ever need to execute anybody in the first place?
How is it enforced? A bounty system would work. 10% of any funds collected or forfeited.
No body will be executed. They’ll all figure out how to pry open their wallets and portfolios within the 90-day amnesty window.
I tell you what, when you legalize such a bounty system on all tangible wealth over a billion then I will admit it might work.
But if you could do that, why would you not just tax the rich?
We gather the top 8 and tell them #9 is being promoted to #1, either through a wealth tax, or a head tax.
Repeat at least annually.
So a return to monarchy.
At that point we should just utilize democracy to tax them.
EDIT: I misread that as the #9 getting the wealth of the previous 8.
How about the highest number gets to do the deed. Lowman gets to take out highman.
Edit: *Lowman on the totem
I mean, Musk has how many kids? That definitely dilutes things. If you include the mothers, none of them would make it to 1 billion if evenly distributed.
Yeah I hate the 1% but you have to be extremely naive to think that just killing them is the answer when all of the mechanisms that led to their existence are intact.
Even if you killed the top 10 richest people every month you’d still have insane wealth consolidation, just with different family members on the chopping block each month.
The French revolution ended in utter chaos because they had no plan beyond killing the crown.
Yeah I hate the 1% but you have to be extremely naive to think that just killing them is the answer when all of the mechanisms that led to their existence are intact.
Ah, but who paid for those mechanisms to exist?
It’s not a perfect fix, but it’s a fix of some kind.
Worked out for the French eventually, and one could say Napoleon was mostly bad for the rest of Europe rather than all of France.
I wouldn’t call the reign of terror, the Thermidorian Reaction or ultimate rise of capitalism “working out”.
The entire system we have now came into place because they had no plan and just let the merchan class become the new royals.
As opposed to what they had? They could be the UK right now.
just killing them is the answer
No, but very satisfying.
I guarantee Musk has an estate planned by very expensive lawyers and bankers. The vast majority of his loved ones won’t recieve jack squat.
They have to have more than one heir at any time though right? So like that can’t be true unless they own enough wealth that even when split and taxed their primary heir’s still have too much.
In that case I agree, rinse and repeat. No one should own more than something like 20 million in wealth.
Theres this thing called estate planning where you decide how and when your wealth gets used after you die.
It doesn’t automagically get dispersed, it’s given to a chosen heir or select few at most.
I’m familiar with estates. I’d love to see or read any data you have on “a chosen heir or select few at most” being the only possible (or even overwhelming majority) outcome. That doesn’t make any logical sense and isn’t how it’s historically worked in the past from my knowledge.
I have no doubt the majority of cases show wealth being paid out to more than one heir on average and that the dilution, although obviously not enough to combat wealth inequality, is still some amount of dilution.
Yeah, it’s not enough to simply kill the wealthy.
Sure, it will upset the market. Certain people in certain positions may change their mind about certain things. Perhaps some will rightfully fear the masses. But ultimately it’s all temporary so long as the system that allows for such individuals to appear still exists.
Scare them like we scared the last power-mad authoritarians. Publically and painfully parade the suffering of the oppressor, condemn them to death, and then pointedly scan the crowd for any more that want to express their undying loyalty to the fuher.
Worked for 80yrs last time. Bet if we record a few select billionaires getting drawn and quartered by their own delivery vans and electric vehicles might push it to a century.
Step 1: Kill billionaires and Trump to prevent them from stopping a new system being established.
Step 2: Establish the new system.
Planning to make a plan is not a plan, really.
“and in that system I will be the billionaire”
I would argue killing them was always an unnecessary extra step that we could just skip over.
Shucks, I thought the blood coming out would magically irrigate every bank account and solve all unfairness.
#8 Michael Bloomberg: $40 billion
#7 Larry Ellison: $43.6 billion
#6 Mark Zuckerberg: $44.6 billion
#5 Jeff Bezos: $45.2 billion
#4 Carlos Slim Helu: $50 billion
#3 Warren Buffett: $60.8 billion
#2 Amancio Ortega: $67 billion
#1 Bill Gates: $75 billion
I don’t even buy these are the richest men bc I’m sure the richest men in the world would: A. never be named in a magazine list like this without suing, B. Likely have more wealth and assets that are unreported than they do reported. Also, didn’t Peter Thiel recently become a trillionaire?
Regardless, I do just want to point out what most of the richest men in the world have in common, is a strong belief in natural heirarchies and social darwinism.
This list is supposed to exemplify survival of the fittest, or those “chosen by God” to rule over the rest of us…? I can’t even imagine how sickly the men on the real list would look.
The masses wouldn’t be able to function without them guiding the way and making the rules…
Does this look like a list of men put together by God or nature? As in, survival of the fittest rules where nature allowed this or God considered every human being on earth before selecting who he ordained worthy of steering the reigns of society, and this list was the final result?
#1 Bill Gates: $75 billion
musk just reached 500B - is this list from the 90s?
It seems to leave out autocratic leaders of countries with equivalent wealth and greater power, such as Prince Bonesaw and Vlad Putler.
Also, both allegedly religious men presumably chosen by God to lead their people. Sawing people apart or poisoning their tea when they speak against you is just God’s will.
I guess when the argument is convenient, it pivots to their brute strength and willingness to do things most people find unspeakable being what allowed them to gain/maintain power. Putin at least got his his hands dirty for the KGB before he came into power, and grew up poor. But, if it came down to him actually maintaining power in a battle that relied only on brute strength would he actually be the victor?
I kinda doubt he or the Saudi royal prince would last 5 minutes if either had to face the general public, in order to defend their titles, without intervention of loyalists rushing to protect and defend them.
I wonder how much the loon that runs Turkmenistan has just in gold toilets?
Ortega, Blomberg, Ellison, Slim and Buffett are all going to croak within 20 years and I’m being very generous there. They are all in their 80’s.
That leaves Zuckass, Bezos, and Gates. Bezos has a good 40 years left and Gates 30 years…again being generous by hitting 100 years old. That leaves us with the one and only Zuckass. All hail the ruler!
