If the means of production are taken from the billionaires and given to the government, how long would their wealth last? Not sure handing the means of production to a government would be a viable solution as politicians and bureaucrats are humans and often very terrible humans at that, but I don't see how billionaires could continue to last very long once they no longer have control over anything other than a declining number of currency units.
The government won't be able to force Robot Inc. to do anything. Robot Inc. has control of the robots, and the government has control over words on paper.
Are robots immune to explosives, armor piercing rounds and EMP blasts in this scenario? Does the human military with all it's firepower cease to exist? Robot Inc is going to replace the US Armed Forces?
I guess the Tech Bro vision is that there just flat out won't be any interaction with money for the lower-classes anymore, because everything they need for living would be "free" (as in, provided by a set of perpetual "subscriptions" that don't require any direct compensation, but that tech companies can modify or even cancel at any point at their sole discretion)
You ignore human nature. I used to say "the brain is a transformer", not in the sense of how the current batch of AI transformers work, but in the sense of an mathematical transormation. The input gets transformed into human behavior. Human behavior is not something that exists independently of our environment and stimuli. And specifically: if nothing comes in, nothing comes back out (if you actually take away inputs, right up to the point that the brain stops controlling the body and you die, but you don't have to drive it nearly that far to just make sure nothing happens anymore).
Perhaps surprisingly, humans don't object to that. Our human intelligence works by subtracting what we can predict from the inputs and then focusing on the portion that remains.
So if AI either prevents interactions with humans or makes them more predictable, then human minds just ... stop. Literally. Humans won't do anything anymore.
UBI will either fail, or it will succeed and humans will just stop.
> Quite the opposite, capitalism even enforces useless work because it’s the main source of income.
If the work was really so useless, companies would love to become leaner (i.e. fire the employees who do useless work). It's rather the government who by its control freakery introduces lots of red tape for companies.
Nothing gets rid of capitalism. In the socialist world, various forms of status just replace basic currency. When goods are limited, there has to be some way to ration them. In the former Soviet Union, it was just high party officials who were rich in limited goods. Maybe they didn't have "money" or US-style "capital", but they had other things that took that role.
How are billionaires “hoarders”? They may be a lot of things, but to use hoarders is a gross misunderstanding of wealth, billionaires, how equities work and more.
Bezos does not have a castle filled with a scrooge mcduck moneypool. There are not castles filled with grain that could otherwise be used to feed the starving peasants.
Yeah but compared to the value they have in equities that are active companies, employing people, and generating value, these underground bunkers are small.
If you have money you generally don't want it to sit around and depreciate instead of investing into real-estate, private equity, etc. directly or indirectly.
That money is already in the hands of "millions more people". Invested money is efficiently and quickly converted into paychecks for ordinary people. That is the means by which investors hope to make a return on their investment.
Exactly. And guess what would happen if 1 million was divided between 100'000 people ? This would mean 10k per person and it's fair to say that at least half would spend (some of) it. Therefore, the velocity has increased.
A person having 200 billion is not spending a big percentage of their wealth nor using it. Yes it's not cash but it doesn't mean it's unusable.
I'm not against the ability to be rich; I'm against the ability to be that rich. The system isn't made to have such wealthy people. My country is one of the rare ones that has wealth tax and you just have to see where the progressive tax rate stops to see what I mean.
This would probably get me sent to an American prison.
>A person having 200 billion is not spending a big percentage of their wealth nor using it
How is it not being used? Walk me step by step where you think this money 'is'. It really seems like you're not understanding here, or maybe i'm just not understanding, so please go slow, explain EXACTLY where you think the money is and why it's not being used like you say.
If I have the equivalent of $100B in shares and keep them for a very long time, the $100B exchanged hands about 0 times. Therefore, the vast majority of the wealth did not move one bit (literally).
I don't know how you imagine that billionaires use their money but I think we have very different ideas.
JFC do you not know how the modern banking system works? Do you understand how market caps are calculated??? (surely not, why am I even asking).
Do you not know how the fucking STOCK MARKET works? Why are you having this discussion about things waaaay over your head?
The only "money" that is not moving is the company cash they store in a vault somewhere. If Amazon has 40 million dollars in the bank, it is exchanging hand MANY times. It's being loaned out by the bank. This is fucking basic stuff that's embarrassing for people not to know.
Now onto stocks.
Let me explain really really simply: If I start a company and someone invests 10 million in the company, i'm. using that to hire some engineers and buy some servers, etc. The money is exchanging hands. My 'wealth' is now a billion dollars because I only gave up 1% of the company for that ten million. What money am I hoarding? That billion is literally created from nothing, there was no 'billion' before I took that investment. Do you understand something that basic?
Bill gates owns over 250,000 acres of land spread across like 15+ states, idk what to call that if not hoarding.
Don't pretend that because most of their wealth is termed as illiquid that it doesn't still count. It counts, they can access it and make use of their wealthy whenever they want. Rather than doing great good deeds, they are sitting on some cash and lots and lots of assets and their focus is on growing and expanding their wealth; that is hoarding.
His foundation runs agriculture research in places like rural Louisiana. He isn’t hoarding the property, rather he is putting it to use for the greater good.
His foundation also has farms as investments, but these are agribusinesses that are in operation, they aren’t being left to lie fallow.
They quite literally hoard the profit produced by the people that work for them. If they didn't, they wouldn't be billionaires. Pretending that because the wealth isn't in the form of a pool filled with gold coins that somehow makes it different is just misunderstanding wealth.
As far as feeding people, he could single handidly fund SNAP for a year and still have 100 billion plus.
Im sorry, hoarding the value generated by everyone working at amazon. If you want to come up with another arbitrary distinction without a difference, be my guest.
Exactly. A whole lot of people have been sold this idea that "taxing billionaires" is going to solve all their problems and provide endless spending for all the free things they want, but this is simply not the case. First off, the math, even the naive math that assumes that all billionaires' stock can be instantly liquidated at the current prices does not work. As individuals these people do have quite a lot, but there are not enough of them. The politicians constantly mention the same 5-6 individuals with net work measured in the hundreds of of billions, then list the number of billionaires, but the vast majority of these "billionaires" are single digit billionaires, with their net work held in an extremely illiquid investment such as private companies.
If you actually introduced your wet dream billionaire wealth tax that's going to pay for everything forever, all these people would be forced to go to the market at the same time and sell their assets while every other billionaire is also going to be in the same position at the same time, so who are they selling to? The market would crash (also incidentally impacting all your middle class retirement plans) destroying billions upon billions of dollars in wealth. But OK, let's say you get this money now, let's pretend you could get enough, and the government starts spending it on entitlement programs--what you have just done is convert investment into consumption. What do you expect to happen in this case? I'd expect surging inflation.
Society effectively consumes everything that we produce. If we want to consume more, we need to produce more. The government can put their finger on the scale as to what is produced and who consumes it, the government can put policies in place that lead to additional production via removing obstacles from productive activities, introducing obstacles to unproductive activities, making investments or subsidies, etc. but all of this is more complicated and messy, it needs to be done intelligently and carries risk of distorting market realities leading to unintended consequences. This is called "governing" and it's what politicians are supposed to be doing. Outsiders who want power but can't effectively govern are always trying to sell people on these "one weird trick" narratives of easy fixes to hard problems.
Bezos has, I believe, two jets and three yachts along with a number a large homes with large household staff. A lot for a person to be sure, but most of his wealth is unrealized investment in a company that delivers goods to hundreds of millions of people's homes and powers countless tech companies that are used by billions of people. Taking his boats and planes away is just not going to move the needle, it's not going to make groceries cheaper or reduce the price of college tuition or add housing stock (aside from a handful of luxury homes in a couple of neighborhoods around the wold) or add any new doctors to the medical field. Certainly taxes can be increased, but no one should expect this to make a real dent in the budget. We got into this situation by decades of taking the easy route, so of course people are looking for easy solutions.
This is the exact same kind of magical thinking that the right uses to convince people that their life would be oh so much better if they just kicked out all the immigrants. There is no magic bullet, most spending by the government is on the middle class, most consumption is by the middle class (this is even more dramatic if you measure this in real world physical goods terms rather than including "luxury" markup on spending by the upper middle class). This is a huge group, hundreds of millions, that collectively consumes an unfathomable amount of resources, and moving some numbers around on a few computers in downtown Manhattan is not going to change this.
