Replies (90)
You might want to read some rothbard or mises
Well articulated Sai, I enjoyed reading that, food for thought.
Let’s get a repost and spread that thing around.
This makes sense and rings true to me. Great post
"But Elon is a genius!"
Such hypocrisy when people who believe in "freedom money" fetishize someone who has amassed a shit bag of fiat.
You don’t know what money is, and every society that adopts this mentality and incorrect framing that production=extraction has destroyed its own wealth.
The western world has adopted this very ideology for the past 50 or more years and we are living through the results. It *always* results in the rich getting richer, the political bricking more powerful, and the poor getting screwed.
If you actually want to help the poor you’d reconsider your ideology with a sober investigation if it’s results.
If my son was to read this, he would correctly identify you as a socialist.
I'm not sure if there should or shouldn't be billionaires. Clearly if one looks very hard at all you can see that the most wealthy influence governments to their benefit. I'm not saying you're a leftist but based on this comment you are ripe for the picking by socialist dogma.
I wonder, do yo believe hierarchy is natural? There are many people better at managing wealth than me. Many that are worse. We are not all equal in skill or work ethic.
I'd bet most people on Nostr understand that Socialism doesn't work. That it leads to mass starvation and want. But to put a point on it, the deeper problem is one of arrogance. The idea that one can know how to make decisions at a macro level.
In the US and most of the world we think of as capitalist we have crony capitalism where the most wealthy rig the system in their favor. This is the problem. Not that some people have more than others. The rigging. That's the issue. I don't know how anyone could know what the correct allocation of global wealth could be but it would be terrifying if there was a government that tried to centrally plan that. It would be far worse than the world we live in today.
It was my take away from this (I may be completely wrong) that Sai was not saying production=extraction. I thought the example of the Italian textile owner was showing the opposite that production (and wealth generation) is easily possible without extraction. That reasonable pay for reasonable work everyone is better off. While most if not all billionaires are created through taking advantage of laws and regulations (that cuase unequal pay for work/productivity) created by those in power that are getting money/kickbacks directly from said billionaires, and not created through true free markets. Like I said that was my take away from it maybe I am completely off base.
Here's the funny thing about "Elon is a genius". The people that now hate him a few years ago would not shut up about how much of genius he was. Hero worship know no political bounds. Elon is smart. Good at growing companies. He's good at using the system. That said, I have never liked or trusted the guy. But, there are worse people in the world.
Why is it if a person makes a single statement about one specific event or fact, you feel entitled to label them?
You have no idea what I am or who I am. This feels like you’re defending social and economic injustice by attacking an independent thinker who takes issue with the 1% siphoning 79T from the lower 90% over 50 years…
Totally agree. I think Elon is a dick, but not evil. I have more of a problem with the hero worship bullshit. The only hero worthy of worship comes with lettuce, tomato, and spicy mustard.
Ha!
Thank you for replying.
You stated that one doesn't just become a billionaire by "earning" 1 billion dollars, hence it would be rightful to remove part of such wealth to give to the rest of the people.
That is socialist by definition, is it not?
While I agree that what many people call "capitalism" today, is mostly nothing like real capitalism, but in actuality it's "crony capitalism", which uses the monopolistic power and violence of the state to force taxation money into its own pockets, either directly or by sponsoring laws that grant unearned monopoly power to itself in the market, hence several large extremely rich companies are in fact just stealing money... one can very well legitimately earn to become a billionaire by being extremely successful at providing goods and services that people want, at a good quality and price. That is the wonder of truly free market.
This would happen at great benefit also of everyone else, as they will gladly spend their money to buy products and services that fully satisfy their needs.
This would also in turn benefit workers, who would be free to sell their time and work to the best buyer.
As it is now, each and every critique of "capitalism" that is going mainstream, is actually a critique of something that, without the state, simply would not exist.
Common sense my friend!
Oops, my bad comrade lol 😂
Agree. Well said.
Say word.
I do like your reply.
And I like the fact that you took the time to explain in simple words, how you feel and what you think.
It’s refreshing. I agree with a lot of what you said.
My one issue is, I didn’t suggest we take money from legitimate billionaires and give it away, my problem is the billionaires that did not provide actual goods and services and aquired the wealth through conspicuous means, loopholes and underhanded mechanisms that seem self indulgent and go against the simplest logic and moral constructs.
Dig deeper. If corporations weren’t give special legal powers and privileges and couldn’t capture governments and regulators they would never be as successful or dominant.
The root problem is that governments and regulatory agencies exist. Corporations literally wouldn’t exist as legal entities without governments and the billionaires at the helms wouldn’t exist either.
Michael Moore ... 😂😂🤣
This whole comment wreaks of Marxism.
Regulation and taxation is the problem.
The problem with social (sorry, nostr doesn't fix this) is that we can't explore nuance. My interpretation of OP's observation is that there's something unnatural about the discrepancy of wealth between a billionaire and a pleb. Yet comments go right to Marxist.
Dude had a great mullet.
What people do with their money is not of your business. What you are saying in that long message is just that you are envy. Naming poor people is just an excuse. You know, and all socialists know, that poor people will always exist. And it is natural that they will always exist, because in a world with scarce resources only the best adapted can get the most. It must be that way, or otherwise everything would degrade very fast and collapse.
IT IS AN ABSOLUTE MUST, I REPEAT, IT IS AN ABSOLUTE MUST, THAT UNADAPTED PEOPLE THAT DO NOT PROVIDE ANYTHING USEFUL TO SOCIETY PERISH. Just because you and me feel compassion, doesn't mean that is good for the society or the ecosystem. It is how this world works. It has always been that way. It will always be that way. If you try to interrupt this mechanism, collapse will happen. That is why all socialists countries collapse. And will always collapse. For ever.
And yes, you are socialist. You aptitude is socialism.
Note that you don't really criticize lobbying or the state. For you, a state that takes money from the rich to give it to you would be valid, which makes you a big, big socialist. You just want a substitution, instead the corporations to lobby the state, you want to be YOU lobbying it.
The only proper position from someone with morals would be pure anarchism. Which will imply, no doubts about it, pure free market, and unavoidably, a lot of very rich people, and a lot of poor people. Which is a good thing, as long as they are not mafia, which means they don't become political.
I guess my answer is very uncomfortable to you. But it is the truth, and you know it is, deep inside you.
Oh, I see, those would be called cantillionaires.
While they are actively violating personal liberties by abusing state power for their own benefit, they are are an emanation of the state.
As long as enough people will keep believing the superstition that what is illegitimate for an individual to do (expropriation, murder, compulsion) becomes legitimate and just if you are a politician, a soldier, or a judge, the state will maintain its status of religion and all of us will have to bear the consequences.
So I guess the meeting point is that, if your OP was actually referring to cantillionaires, then yes, they do violently extract wealth and we fully agree on the topic.
In this case I was wrong, and you are not, in fact, a socialist :-)
I mean, I don’t know what I am, or what am not. I don’t like labels, I don’t like a dual party system… I’m just a “Sai”.
I love things like, consensus.
Trustless systems. Immutable ledgers.
I love honesty. I like to see teamwork, I like to see when a person puts a degree of extra effort, sometimes for their selves, sometimes for others. Acts of selflessness, and kindness.
It seems pretty obvious to me that if we as the human race can stop bickering, and start having compassion for eachother, especially our young people, that we can achieve great things.
I believe that value FOR value is crucial, and we should be rewarded for virtuous acts. We should make art, make music, make love, and try to leave the world a little better than when came into it.
I know there’s evils in the world.
There are evil people, there are people with diminished capacities, both self inflicted and inherited, and our species could never be PERFECT on an Individual basis, but we can and should strive to do better as a species.
Sai, your heart is in the right place. Unfortunately your economic theory is not. Who gets to decide who are "legitimate billionaires"? You? Because that's an impossible task by definition. Each person has a set of values that will affect the decision.
Is Bezos a cantillonaire? Not by my definition, he has recreated the world's commerce and deserves his riches. But I've read that many of his warehouse employees need coupons to make ends meet. Unfair in any book.
The only solution: take the money printer away from politicians, and cantillonaires will go away. BTC doesn't fix it all, but does fix this.
Learn about “regulatory capture” and then take a look at your “deregulation” statement.
I say “statement” instead of “argument” due to the fact that you have no data or references n this note.
I also recommend that you take a look at what you are trying to achieve with your writing. If you want to rant, you did a good job. If you wanted to write a convincing article to sway people’s opinions, you failed miserably.
I recommend you read the first few pages of Softwar by Jason Lowery. Analyze how he uses historical figures and real world examples to capture the reader’s attention while simultaneously creating an emotional connection to the outcome.
Whoa. The sweat seems real.
The references were contained in the link to the RAND research that was released.
Secondly, I don’t give a shit about people’s opinions, nor is my intention to sway them. I only care about facts.
Here’s the article if you care to look.
Lastly, yes I will look into your suggested material and thank you for attempting to contribute to my understanding.
Thanks for a kind reply.
On the question of who gets to decide? I don’t have that answer.
I do however suggest we take a hard look at the ones we know ( with factual evidence ) should definitely NOT BE.
Did I make any sense, with “not be” statement?
Sorry if I was abrasive, and thank you for the compliment.
Yeah, these are not reference’s. This is a news report on a study that may or may not be flawed. The news report may be misleading. Only with careful examination of the application of the scientific method, discussion and thought does the intelligent reader accept the outcome of a study to be accurate and often comes away with more questions than the study answers. News reports on studies are often twisted to match the reporter’s opinion.
I’m not picking on you. I don’t disagree with all of your opinions. I’m trying to help you improve. For example: The CEO of the RAND Corporation, Michael D. Rich, has received total compensation ranging from approximately $1,022,057 to $1,210,794 in recent years.
ProPublica
Rand Corporation - Nonprofit Explorer - ProPublica
Since 2013, the IRS has released data culled from millions of nonprofit tax filings. Use this database to find organizations and see details like t...
Non Profit Data
Rand Corporation — Non Profit Data
See how I stated a fact and followed it with two, generally trusted sources? This is how you gain the readers trust and set the stage for educating them.
That's exactly what I got out of the original post.
You’re joking, right?
Hi Sai 🤟🏴☠️😉 nice to meet you 🤝
Power concentrates where the system allows it to. The real question isn’t whether billionaires should exist, but why we’ve built a system that rewards hoarding over contribution. If wealth is power, then who should wield it and to what end?
Feeling this for sure.
🤟🏴☠️😉
Money can't solve global hunger. Money is not a reasource and cannot fill in for the lack of ressources. It could deviate current ressources allocation towards an other goal but there will always be opportunity costs. If you send more ressources for task A, there will be less ressources available for task B. World hunger could be solved by making people better at collecting ressources and be more efficient with them. Money alone dosen't do that.
Global hunger could also be solved by ten people. Literally.
The thing here and a mistake I see a lot of people make is that these people don't have a billion dollars per-se, most of the times this is mistaken for the "value" of their assets.
This does not mean that there are not predatory people taking advantage of the system with greed. It's more like these people with huge NWs come as a product of the assets they hold in most of the cases shares or commodities.
But ask yourself, who owns this system, who devaluates the cash or numbers in the screen that normal people has and deals with day by day, and who seeks real coverage from this devaluation bc in the end the money is worthless. At this rate of inflation we all might become billionaires some day. 😵💫
I agree, I like your mind leathermint
Thousandaires should not exist. You don’t need a thousand dollars to live
The government should take it from you and give me $500 every time I run out of money
I guess Blue Sky people found out about Nostr after all.
View quoted note →There are 58 million millionaires on the planet
There are 3,028 billionaires
Yeah I mean that’s an oversimplification. Plenty of people are having things they collected stolen from them.
"Not left, not right" but speaking like a true socialist.
Agreed about the scarcity of food being independent from the money supply, but there’s also massive food waste in developed countries and in the US in particular. In that sense, the problem is still allocative and not totally about scarcity. If we really cared about hunger, we’d also make marginal investment into food (forego other scarce resource production).
I wonder what happens to the world's power dynamic if USA destroyed their billionaires but China and others let theirs take over markets that our billionaires controlled.
That would probably be a very long talk over several bourbons.
Thank you for not assaulting me just for stirring the pot.
Preciate ya.
You can’t just slap labels on a person, you’re not Trump.
That’s just a jab. I’m sorry you think I’m a socialist. 🤷♂️
Yea I saw that 3028 figure in a repost last night slumming on mastadon.
Who was the guy talking about that yesterday? It was a damn good post, ima look for it…
lol Ic wut udid thur…
I actually luld good one
😭😭😭
Why are there so many richer people than meeeeee!!
😭😭😭
I know, I’ll say all rich people are thieves 😁😁
That will make me feel better for sitting on the coach all day on welfare
🤣🤣🤣🤣
Worse than high school dude
Such a cool note though
Yeah... Lots of assumptions here.
Mostly fueled by jealousy, envy, and rage.
Combined with a very unhealthy misunderstanding of how the world works.
Money is a tool. People will use it however they please. There are many ways to accumulate and maintain wealth. There are good billionares, there are bad billionares, there are neutral billionares. Just like there are good poor people, bad poor people, and neutral poor people. With every shade of morality colors in between.
You are attacking the tool (total accumulation of wealth) rather than the root cause of suffering. Which is widespread immorality and the lack of stoic virtues in modern society.
Fix the foundation. Change minds. Then people both rich and poor can positively change the world.
Dude, I liked your entire reply. I’m not full of rage or envious and I’m damn sure not jealous.
I do well for myself, and I have a sizable handful of very wealthy friends, and I have no issues with them. It’s not even really about the money man you hit the nail on the head. It’s about the suffering and the immorality of it.
There is a zero percent chance that you are rich
I am rich
You clearly don’t know anything about being rich, what it takes
Have fun being poor and whining about it
😂
Or you could get educated, work hard, etc, etc
Who knows
Is this twitter wtf?
😄
Just getting a little excited sorry
I’ll dail it back
Musk said, being a billionaire means finding a new way to organize people. So yes offshoring and other evil things makes people billionaires.
We do want winners and losers so people are inspired to work hard.
A billion dollars is a lot of money though.
It's hard to imagine why anyone needs a billion dollars.
Fully agree
Omfg. Yo change that shit to EAT the rich. Please…. For me
It’s not letting me zap you dude
Hope you don't mind, but I'm copying this and sharing it elsewhere. Don't worry, I won't attempt to pass it off as my own though.
The credit isn’t mine alone.
I had a partner in this heinous crime.
I must have TDS.
You're not the only one.
As far as I can tell TDS = thinking clearly
A lot of MAGA has the real TDS (Trump Devotion Syndrome)
Ayyyyyyy.
You said it. Lmao.
There’s some idiot out there trying to make it a real thing.
You are not allowed to disrespect the God !!!!!
Yeah but this is nostr, I'll disrespect him all day, nothing anyone can do about it.
Fixed it!
Kk ty ty
The beauty, of the protocol
You dumb fuck. No one HAS a billion dollars. These ridiculous values are ABSTRACT.
Socialist thieves will be executed in the revolution. You cannot have what is mine. Come and take it.
It's an unrecognized mental illness because money is the god of so many people, including the ones that define mental illnesses.
Scary thought.
Still you don't need billionaires, you can use crowdfunding. Billionaires are a plague
#EatTheRich
1 billion = 1.000 million
Approx 8 million houses in the US are valued 1 million or higher.
One person just has to have 1.000 of these houses, which would be just 0.0006% of the total home supply of the US to be a billionaire.
So my point being, you just can’t grasp large numbers!
100y ago the same person wouldn’t be called billionaire but millionaire (they would be valued approx 10-20 million) but due to inflation the dollar got devalued.
Another example: ones business model just has to be so broad and efficient that it could serve 1 billion customers, and for what ever value they generate, they would get 1$ from each… boom billionaire.
The world economy has changed so much over the past 20 years and people serve not just millions of people ( like old railroads for example) but billions all over the globe.
Your grief isn’t billionaires, it’s corruption, inflation and degeneracy!
Are you referring to X? I hope not, that place is full of censorship, just ask folks in Turkey (just one example).
Did he buy to 'dial back censorship' or get more reach for himself? I'd argue the later but either way, I don't use his webpage because it sucks. Even my Fediverse instance has more uptime and I'm skint.
Didnt you steal the shit you have to begin with?
What the fuck did I steal, you racist cunt?
I’m racist?? 🤣
Tell me you're not Elon Musk without saying you're not Elon Musk lol
I’d like to possess enough wealth to pursue my dream of bringing free energy to the human race.
Aren’t you Azov?
No? Dude ancap we’ve talked on chat man. Chillax it’s Sai dude lol
Would you tell the commies they’re gay
