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Not one of them.
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
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I'm fine with Billionaires existing, once every one else is well fed, housed and educated, with ample access to health care and recreation, cared for in retirement.
The problem is that we are really bad at estimating how big a billion is. It is a staggering amount of wealth that can only be obtained by exploiting others. There should be no place for that in society even if all those things are solved.
Here's a video that really drives the point across of how big a billion is: https://youtu.be/8YUWDrLazCg
I've had good luck with giving people a comparison to Jesus working.
Let's say Jesus worked as a carpenter from the day of his birth to today, making $50 an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year (he's a hard working dude!), that's 17,739,264 hours of labor. Surely he must have billions of dollars working that hard for that much money over the last 2,024 years.
Not even $887 million. Still far short of a single billion. I guarantee 99.9% of people don't make $50/hr, and absolutely nobody works 24/7/365 for thousands of years, and if that alone doesn't tell you that billionaires shouldn't exist, nothing will.
Finally a use for Jesus i can get behind!
Exactly, the reason billionaires exist is that everyone else is paying too much for everything. Billionaires exist at the expense of everyone else, all of them, even if you think they're offering you a good product, if they're billionaires it means you're paying more than that product is worth.
The problem is that we're so used to overpaying for everything that we're unable to evaluate the real value of our money so we're always buying stuff thinking we're getting our money's worth when we're not! We're getting our money's worth only if we consider that it's worth it to enrich people that make more in a day than we make in our life!
Billionaires are the ones keeping those things from happening. They own politics.
wont happen, only way to get what we want is through a classless society. we lived through millionaires and things were okay but with their millions they could secure billions: money is power and while what you say is a better outcome for our current time its not a sustainable one for the future.
If you understand that every additional unit of wealth a billionaire possesses has emerged into existence via the labor of another person that they didn't get paid for, then you'd see that billionaires and those other things are likely mutually exclusive. And if you think - okay, what if it costs little to do all those things and billionaires still get to pocket enough labor output to be billionaires? I'd ask - in such a case, why not work significantly less time instead of working 40 hours weeks and donating the extra output so someone can be a billionaire?
There doesn't necessarily need to be a hard limit on how rich you can be but there should absolutely be a limit on how poor you can be.
Now, I'm pretty sure that once we feed, clothe, educate, and provide for the general welfare of the entire populace to a humane level that it will be significantly more difficult, if not impossible, to become a billionaire, but really that's just as it should be. It should be borderline fucking inconceivable.