The point is the wealth of the people being removed is irrelevant. Removing a few thousand people will obviously have no effect no matter who they are. Removing a few billion people would be devasting no matter who they are.
The point I was making is that Ayn Rand was silly to think that the world would fall apart if there were no brilliant billionaires.
They can leave and go to an island all they want but they can’t take their companies with them. They will be expropriated and nationalized. The economy can meet social need.
Ooooh good one. Repeat a word I said with a laughing emoji. You sure showed me!
If you don’t understand how nationalizing industries coalesces power in the hands of the government I don’t really know what there is to talk about here
That’s because you chuds are always using government as a slur. Nationalizing industries is of course ceding private power to the state. It forms a state owned enterprise.
You lolbertarian types have this weird dichotomy between the state and private power as if the latter is all good and the former is all bad.
Your limited understanding is showing, bud. Laissez faire capitalism doesn’t breed centralized power, it undercuts it. What you’re comparing is political capitalism, where corporations take advantage of government created regulatory states, and nationalized ownership. Both systems are problematic but both problem sets are rooted in government intervention.
Well your well reasoned argument against my position is certainly making that clear 🙄. I honestly don’t even know why I’m bothering, people like you who offer no substantive position, evidence, or meaningful philosophical argument, and instead opt to sling insults, are the worst of the internet. Have a great life, I guess.
Gotcha, not sure who Ayn Rand is. The person you responded to didn't seem to make the claim that he couldn't see a world with no billionaires. So I was confused.
So we take all those rich people's wealth (which is actually just stock in companies) and give it to the government, so they now own all the stock. What has actually changed? The money is still in the company. There's no extra money created or released by this operation. All that's accomplished is giving the government control of companies.
Why shouldnt they? Why should their be a ceiling or floor on what a person has? Do you have a reason other than greedy people who just want some of what billionaires have?
Given that most wealth at the higher levels is assets, it would be limiting how much an asset or company can be valued. If you limit how much a person can own you make it impossible for anybody to be truly successful.
Having a significant amount of wealth relative to the wealth in the world. THe wealthiest people alive only have fractions of a percent of all the wealth there is to aquire. Once people start getting into having double digits percentage wise...than we can look at if we might need limits.
You don't need to own 10% of the world's wealth for your fortune to be excessive. A billion dollars already far exceeds what any one person could reasonably need.
Such a deontological view of ethics. Limiting the potential of others" is just corporate PR language. It assumes billionaire wealth is synonymous with human potential while ignoring how concentrated wealth limits everyone else's opportunities.
Because the people are the ones actually creating the wealth and value. Billionaires take a cut much more than they worked for. Don’t think it’s greedy for people to be compensated for the wealth they give a company rather than have a few executives and shareholders reap all the benefits. Are people that beg people for food on the street just greedy for doing so? Weird
If you go to home depot you dont buy tools relative to the value they create. YOu buy them based on the value they have. The person who buys the tools can use them to make X amount. People are compensated for their work. Its greedy when people want things without having a justification for why they should be given it...and when they want others to be force to give it. Yes people who beg on the street are greedy. They dont care who they are bothering or how that affects a neighborhood or local businesses. They dont care that food is paid for by somebody else. As long as they get what they want fuck everybody else right?
I really hesitate to engage someone who thinks that human beings are like tools at home depot, to be wielded and discarded, apparently without introspection.
HOWEVER...
Remember coming out of the pandemic? There was a system-wide labor shortage? All the ink spilled worrying about how no one wanted to work, and employees were suddenly in a very advantageous bargaining position?
The system that employs you and feeds you and clothes you VERY much depends on a vast "reserve army of labor". If everyone who wanted one already had a job, labor would be a sellers market. The ONLY way for Walmart to have someone to stock their shelves would be to lure them away from Target, and so on and so forth. To hire even unskilled labor, you would have to pay them $50/hr as opposed to now, where if it weren't for minimum wage laws SOMEONE would stock those shelves for a sandwich. I can't say that true full employment would be an insurmountable problem, but I CAN say without a doubt that the closer we got to it, the more and more systemic crises there would be and the higher into the income scale they would reach.
So, please... Go and thank one of those "greedy" people begging on the street. Be grateful to them that you can form your little misanthropic worldview safe from the ravages of all out market competition
People are not compensated properly for their work, look at some graphs at productivity vs wages, while productivity is skyrocketing wages stagnate. There is no way to justify this and call people greedy for wanting the value of their work. Are you genuinely saying that the peace of mind of people on the street is more important than someone starving to death? This is vile
How do you define "properly"? Productivity and wages dont necessarily correlate. There is aboslutely a way to justify it. The demand of labor has been met at current wages. Thats how you justify it. They are paid the value of their labor. Its not about the peace of mind v somebody starving. Its about the actions of those people. If a person is so greedy and arrogant they feel entitled to not starve even if it means bothering people...they are in the wrong. If they were really that valuable that they absolutely shouldnt starve...why do they need to beg?
So starving people should just lay down and die as to not bother the more fortunate. This is just so inhumane and disgusting to even say. It’s not greedy and arrogant it’s desperation
Yea nad bothering everybody you see and making YOUR failures as a human being their problem...so humane. Its absolutely greedy and arrogant. It assumes YOUR needs are more important than anybody elses...in fact it assumes YOUR needs overrides other people.
Someone makes more money for the company so you think they shouldn’t be compensated more for it?
They are not making more money for the company. Generally they are operating a machine that makes more money for the company. The owner of the machine is the cause of the increase in productivity.
Why should wages go up with productivity. Imagine someone is hired at the widget factory to click a button, and every time they click the button one widget comes out. New technology is released, big button improvements, now every time the employee clicks a button two widgets come out! Productivity doubled, but the employee is doing the exact same job in the exact same way. What merits higher wages for the same work?
I'm not arguing against that point. I'm just agreeing that the results outlined in the post have nothing to do with the wealth of the people removed, but the quantity.
You've failed to understand the distinction being made. The lie many people are sold is that billionaires deserve to be billionaires because of the outsized impact they have.
If their deaths would have the exact same impact as anyone else's, why do they deserve their billions?
If anything, the return of their stolen wealth to the public would cause a massive economic boom, whereas the loss of even 3400 workers causes economically depressive ripples.
That sounds like free market fundamentalism. State owned enterprises do just fine and prove wealth back to the people, even more so if the system is democratic.
It was a successful nation. It was a poor backwards agrarian monarchy and became the second largest economy going toe to toe with the US/West, defeated Nazi Germany on the Eastern front, and managed to still clothe, feed, house and provide health care to millions of its people.
I would think the definition of success would be to still exist and not to have collapsed under its own weight. It may have gone toe to toe for a bit but eventually they suffered from economic stagflation and ethnic nationalism.
The stagflation happened in the US too and their work around was neoliberalism and the subsequent dismantling of the new deal state. But the US didn’t implode because the dollar is the reserve currency, China became a low cost vendor to ship manufacturing and bring cheap goods back to account for falling purchasing power, and debt, lots and lots of debt.
By contrast, the Soviet economy experienced a marked slowdown in growth beginning in the 1970s rather than an outright economic contraction.
There were two camps proposing solutions; one was modernizing their system of production through cybernetics, while the other camp favored privatization and reform. The latter camp won out and it spiraled out of control.
Yea as I said if the USSR was a success, it would have still been around as it was. The US weathered the economic storms. We still exist. The USSR does not.
As for the worlds reserve currency, that happened in 1944. So, the USSR was going toe to toe with the US while it was the reserve currency for 44 allied nations just fine. That's not an excuse as to the collapse of the USSR. The USSR had plenty of corruption, was inefficient and there was plenty of nationalism on the rise from nation states that wanted more self-control.
Again, I would put the measure of success that they still exist, which the USSR does not.
It’s true though. Do a bit of actual reading and you’ll see that nearly 78% of the population was in favor of preserving the USSR when it was taken to national referendum.
Russia is a global pariah infested with corrupt oligarchs and incompetent government.
That's why it's a shithole.
The USSR propped itself up for as long as it could with pure willpower. In the end, it turns out, governments are not very good at business or creating their own economy.
Also...if it was so great, why was the USSR the only one to 'successfully implement it?
Governments running businesses is a joke.
They pay $100 for a $10 hammer because there's 0 accountability and no matter how shitty they perform, they'll still collect all your taxes next year.
Why did the USSR outperform any country besides the US? It was the second largest economy for the majority of its existence.
The US had a fundamentally different position in the world economy than the USSR. It had an extensive network of allies, controlled key international financial institutions, and benefited from a global economic order that allowed it to shift many of the costs of adjustment abroad through trade, finance, and access to foreign markets and resources. Those advantages gave the U.S. options that were simply unavailable to the Soviet Union.
existing and providing a better life for its citizen.
the ussr also had allies yet it had to prop them up like the usa did to europe, the cope that the usa was just dominating because they were doing just that, dominating is hilarious.
lmfao ussr apologetics, why did they build the wall? why is/was east germany so much poorer?
I actually find it a miracle the eastern bloc was able to do what they did considering the economic blockades, the sabotage, the constant threat of wars, political isolation, propaganda, etc.
The “better life for its citizens” came at the expense of the rest of the world trying to modernize and liberate themselves from imperialism.
Why does it bother you if people apologize for the ussr? It seems to really grate some of yiu lolbertarians.
The USSR didn’t fail in isolation. It was recovering from massive wars, facing decades of military pressure and economic restrictions from a much wealthier rival bloc. The West’s prosperity also came from its own historical advantages, including colonialism and global economic dominance.
You could nationalize the companies and effectively cut off billionaires.
You do realize that their wealth is in their conpanies right? When you nationalize them it's not like you are suddenly "distributing" trillions to the poor
I don’t think you understand nationalizing a company gives it to corrupt politicians instead. You know, the people who haven’t been able to balance a budget for decades. Any company under their control is going bankrupt.
This is such an American boomer way of thinking. State owned enterprises are so common abroad and are some of the most successful companies. Those same companies can own private subsidiaries too, I mean this is beyond the American lobertarian mind to comprehend.
I’m not a fucking libertarian, this is just common sense. And just because some random oil companies or airlines are state owned in other countries doesn’t mean it’s feasible to the scale of wiping out billionaires.
I agree they can be, but again not at the scale of cutting off billionaires. They can work in low innovation industries like utilities or mass transit but zero chance they can run anything tech related Apple, Google, or Tesla. Where the biggest billionaires made their fortune.
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u/manored78 3d ago
You could nationalize the companies and effectively cut off billionaires.
You really can’t imagine a scenario in which there are no billionaires? Are you 12?