I worked in a school with a pretty good amount of students whose families had probably not entered the country legally.

I had a student who would be out at the end of the day. Like, yeah, lots of kids are zonked out by the last hour, and the fake sleep to watch silent TikToks was ever popular.

But this girl was out. The bell would ring and I’d try to wake her up. Like starting with a “hey the bell just rang, time to go home.” Gently nudging her to get no response. This was routine.

She worked a full time job at night. She didn’t get to sleep. She worked at night, she went to high school during the day.

There have been times that I’ve had to work three jobs to survive as an adult, and I’ve worked my share of fifteen+ hour shifts with no OT because who needs labor laws?

But that girl had to work harder to survive than any billionaire I’ve met could even conceive of (and I fucked a billionaire for quite a while). She was a child. She should have been tired because she had stayed up all night playing video games or talking to her friends - she should not have been tired because she had to have a full time job to survive as a teenager in high school.

six billionaires saw this post, apparently

It's sad that even the idea of a very high tax rate for even the top 0.1% is off the table. I really like the suggestion of capping net worth at $999 million and the government gets the rest.

Being a billionaire is moral failing

We need to wipe them from existence.

Let every nation have a maximum wealth cap. 1000x the median national household income. Anything else is taxed at 100%. This cap in the US would be about $80 million today.

But if you're somehow in flagrant violation of this limit? If your wealth is the equivalent of over one billion 2025 dollars? Unless you quickly earn a multi-billion fortune and immediate give it away or spend it, having a net worth over $1 billion will be a felony. It will be a capital offense. Oh you're secretly billionaire, having hid your vast illegal fortune from the IRS? You are guilty of trying to amass a geopolitically-significant level of wealth. We're going to treat this as seriously as we would someone who attempts to build their own personal nuclear weapons. Really, you are guilty of a form of treason. Except instead of aiding a foreign nation, you were trying to become a threat to your nation yourself. And the traditional penalty for treason will be applied.

This is the world we could have. We could, if we wanted it badly enough, simply make being a billionaire a capital offense. Force them to give away or spend most everything they have. Either way, given or spent, wealth is distributed enough so that no individual can threaten the nation through their own personal wealth.

It is time we wiped billionaires off the face of the Earth. No individual should ever be allowed to become so wealthy that they become a threat to nation states.

Which is why the capitalist argument is never that they physically performed enough labour to earn that amount. The argument is that they took risks that paid off in that amount.

They shouldn't exist and people should stop glorifying them. This goes for the ceo of valve too.

I will post this every time.

Billionaires have an unhealthy concentration of power, but they don't have a billion on their bank account. They own companies that are worth that much. They also aren't necessarily assholes.

Germany has many medium sized companies. They mostly treat their employees really well. Good pay, guaranteed jobs for their kids, etc. Many for sure are worth over a billion. And they are privately owned, so the owners are billionaires or close to it. So what is supposed to happen to those companies ownerships? Would it really be better if they are publicly owned?

I've come around to think that a wealth tax is necessary, but it's for sure complicated.

They certainly do more ketamine though.