1135
I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me!
(sh.itjust.works)
Artist: @gryzlock_comics
Can't shake the feeling that swapping panels 1 and 3 would make more sense.
Clockwise from bottom left maybe
i think any order would work
3 2 1 then 4
That is the exact same thing...
No, no, we can’t be mean to the rich, that will upset them 🥺
Yes, kill them, by taxing them out of existence.
This would be ideal but I'm skeptical that it's actually possible. Bribes are cheaper than taxes, so I think they'd likely just prevent the taxes from happening by greasing the correct palms.
Well yeah, that’s exactly what’s happened for at least the past 50 years. In 1968 corporations were paying 53% of their profits in taxes, and billionaires were paying 94% around that time! Btw, if you’re making billions, paying 94% still leaves you richer than most…
Contrast that to today, where the system is so obviously broken during a time when Amazon is paying less in total taxes than a fry cook at McDonald’s.
It would need to be done with actually no loopholes, and meaningful enforcement of consequences for those who would try to cheat (perhaps the guillotine).
one big issue is everyone goes "you can't tax stocks!" and then billionaires take a loan against the stocks with the unrealized gains as collateral. So we'd need to start classifying a loan as a realized gain of the collateral against this, with an exception for mortgages on primary domiciles, maybe also a "first million dollars are exempt," calculated on the full debt of the borrower, not per loan. I can't imagine anyone taking out more than $1M in debt against a properly they don't live in is not the rich we need to be taxing.
Yeah. Virtually anything with an exception for the first million dollars will both lose almost no tax revenue (as a percentage), and never ever touch the rest of us temporarily embarrassed not-quite-yet-billionaires.
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Don't they already just avoid paying taxes by not having a salary and just using bank loans or something? So they have no actual money in the bank
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I support this idea. Invite most of the world's nations' leaders, too. I think the Met-gala attendees and G20 summit attendees might be a good starting point all-in-all. Then seize the means of production etc., you know how it goes.
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Every healthy society requires a robust guillotine maintenance capability, ideally across all competencies.
I'm for giving them a choice. The guillotine or we take away their money and make them work a minimum pay position in one of their factories for the rest of their lives. I'm pretty sure they would take the guillotine after a week.
This whole "kill the rich" thing is counterproductive and needs to stop. Advocating for murder has never been cool.
I respectfully disagree.
The ultra-rich aren't shy about killing you or your loved ones if it makes them an extra million. There are exceptions, but they're definitely not the rule.
Tit for tat. We're absolutely in a class war and the owner class has been winning for three or four consecutive decades. The inequality in society was lower during the French revolution than it is now. Hell, the pay Scrooge gave out in the old tale was more than minimum wage is today adjusted for inflation.
I'm not saying we need violence, but I am saying we need the threat of violence for these kind of people to do their part. No one needs a billion dollars, let alone a trillion.
I also respectfully disagree. Tit for tat, taken to its logical conclusion, eradicates all life on the planet; if that's your goal, fine, you can make that argument, but that's ultimately a separate discussion. There were literal slaves and serfs around the time of the French Revolution---now you could make an argument that "wage slaves" or whatever exist in the first world, but that is pure abstraction when compared to the absolute widespread human suffering in France during the late 1700s. You would have to be entirely disconnected from reality to think that people, en masse, have it worse in first world countries than they did in France during the 1700s; that's a "log off" moment, for sure. If you want to expand the scope to the world at large, then, yeah, there is some fucked up stuff going on, and people (millionaires, billionaires, &c. &c.) do hoard wealth, but murdering them is not the solution; that won't even do anything to their accumulated wealthy, as most of it is tied up in corporate assets; instead, harsh regulation needs to be enacted on the system that allows these people to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth. instead, we have these very surface level takes that are just like "kill the billionaires", which solves nothing—frankly, its stupid. Now, if you want to alter the claim to "the threat of violence is needed," then I would be more inclined to agree; however, individually murdering certain billionaires is not productive; I don't know about you, but I don't want to match whatever vitriolic bullshit eye for an eye sentiment that these billionaires might have, and maybe that's an idealistic take and naive, but it feels right.
have it worse in first world countries than they did in France during the 1700s
In absolute terms? Definitely not. The lowliest "unskilled" worker today has vastly more amenities than even a 17th century nobleman could even dream of.
In relative terms, however? The ultra-rich robbed you, me and every single other person on this planet. And to this you may retort that you do not care about wealth and are content with what you have. I would applaud such an answer, but it would be besides the point. What we've been systematically robbed of, is our time. Years, decades that could be spent enjoying your lives with our loved ones, instead spent slaving away at a desk or in a factory only to make the few who have everything even more. That, to me, is absolutely unforgivable, especially since I've long since past my physical prime and am still being robbed of this time against my will.
Now, if you want to alter the claim to “the threat of violence is needed,” then I would be more inclined to agree; however, individually murdering certain billionaires is not productive;
Again, I disagree. There are about ~2700 billionaires on earth out of ~8 billion people. Killing half of them and having that wealth redistributed would solve more problems than it would create. But if I do that, I'm thinking like said billionaires.
Which is the only way to fight them. If you try the moral and legal route, you won't stand a chance because you'll be fighting withing system and rulesets they have created to give themselves every (unfair) benefit.
Sometimes the disgruntled worker who shanks the boss is the hero we need.
"killing half the billionaires and redistributing their wealth"
Are we on the same planet right now? How are you going to do that? And if you kill them, how are you to ensure their wealth is redistributed properly, not just funneled back into their corporate shell company or their equally immoral families? The measure you're proposing here requires a total overhaul of the system that is more unrealistic than a measured overhaul into more overall socialist systems of general wealth redistribution. I get that billionaires do harm to the planet and I get that that makes you, me, angry. but what you're proposing here is just straight up murder and it's unrealistic; It's even more unrealistic than, say, everybody voting for a socialist and the systems entirely overhauled except you are adding extra steps of just killing all the billionaires on top of it. What I'm ultimately concerned about is the left going online and just saying kill billionaires while sitting in front of their computers doing literally nothing, making all of us look like psychopaths thus hurting our cause due to clear and obvious LARPing.
but it's obvious to me that I'm not going to change your mind. you can sit around and LARP on Lemmy all day, if you want, that's fine. Ultimately, in an hour, I won't care that we even had his conversation. I'm not going to change your mind, so this is going to be my last post regarding this subject, because I'm not going to change anybody's mind on a far left leaning Lemmy community. I'm sorry I even posted my opinion.
I just wanted to say thank you for voicing a clear, coherent rebuttal of the knee-jerk, emotional "kill 'em" reactions we see so much. You're right that most who post that sort of thing are LARPing, and I really hope it's just a way to let off steam, but I worry that someone might try to carry out the threat, and do incalculable harm to the left in the process.
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Despite the downvotes, you are correct.
It’s asinine to even consider that a billionaire doesn’t have a will, let alone how awful it is to threaten a life.
They’d just be dealing with a younger, more entitled billionaire, who now wants to get revenge on the people that murdered their parent or benefactor. See Lachlan Murdoch, Charles Koch, any of the Waltons, etc.
You're being empathic towards people who have no empathy for you.
How is recognizing the financial failsafes of billionaires empathetic? I’m using logic.
Did you miss the entire point of my comment because I also condemned taking a life?
People are killed daily not so indirectly by billionaires. Overpriced medicine, Military industry, Unhealthy products, Monopolization of water and other resources and land, poisoning ground water with industrial waste, unsafe work conditions, the list is endless.
There is almost no billionaire that isnt responsible for someones death and in a moral world they would be in prison. So morals are already completely out of the window.
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If you were a slave and I was your master, would killing me be murder?
...yes? But, as all people and legal systems agree, there are times when murder is legal and endorsed.
Such as in wartime. And this is war, but most people are far too blind to see this.
Are you a literal slave? If you play with meaning, you can turn everyone into a slave and kill everyone. Is that what you want?
Are you a vegetarian? Just curious.
vegan, actually.
There ya go. Carry on then.
I respect life? sorry?
I prefer "eat the rich" as a metaphor for seizing their assets, not a literal endorsement of cannibalism. I'm actually surprised how many people literally mean "kill the rich". Are you guys actual sociopaths?
I’m actually surprised (not really) how many people can come this close to getting it, but still be so desperate to follow their rules, that you manage to convince yourself billionaires will just freely and willingly give over those assets and all of the power that comes with them one day once we've asked nicely enough.. 🙄
I don't think asset seizure going to be easy, but it's going to be significantly more effective and safer for everyone than staging a new French Revolution.
If you're truly advocating for murder on the internet (are you?), I don't think there's any point in trying to change your mind. I'm not "this close" to getting it — I already got it and rejected it.
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Nah, some of us just see that they buy the elections so that we can't vote for change. And they buy the judges so we can't sue for change. And they buy the media so we can't speak for change. So now we're exploring the extremely distasteful option because all other avenues for change have been blocked
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Billionaires use violence all the time to get what they want. Just because they hide behind layers of abstraction that they've set up, doesn't mean they aren't using violence.
Don't tease me like this.
You don't need a mechanized execution machine to kill three people. You need it to kill the crowd of people.
And historically that's what it was used for. It was used BY the rich AGAINST the poor.
It was pretty much just one of the options used for death penalty from what I understand. Then there's the revolution bit but otherwise it was a state execution method used as late as 1977.
Why does the proletariat, the largest class, not simply eat the bougouise?
Actually doing this would not only be immoral but just treat the symptoms of the downfalls of capitalism, not the cause. We need legislative change that has a proper social safety net, not violence LARPing.
In a perfect world, that would be ideal. But for at least 50 years, capital has been buying the legislators and we're backsliding even further from positive change. Without the threat, there's no reason for them to let things change for the better for the rest of us.
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this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2024
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