151–153 of 153 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
but you don't have the choice of living like a hunter-gatherer, because all good lands have been swallowed up by capitalist megacommunities
There's plenty of hunter-gatherers in Siberia or Amazon rainforest.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is misunderstanding how billionaires get their wealth. It's mainly from investments and equity, not income. Share of wealth is a better number to look at. The top 1% now own close to double what they did in 1980: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/top-1-share-of-net-person... The numbers for 0.1% and 0.001% are even more extreme: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/never-mind-1-percent-let...
I included ALL capital gains - realized and unrealized... Do the math. It's literally division. When you have 335M people in a wealthy nation - that's a large number already. Introduce a small amount of inequality - and the numbers will still be enormous. The US has MASSIVE inequality - the worst in the history of the world - surpassing the Belle Epoch in France before WWI. I'm not pretending the world nor the US is…
The US has far more poor than other countries with similar or even lower GDP per capita so it must be at least part of the reason many people are poor. Most rich nations produce enough that in principle there need be no genuine poverty (as in, inability to readily access necessities - having to make choices like buying food or obtaining medical care etc.). And one thing nobody's really noted is that a certain amount of poverty itself isn't necessarily a huge problem providing anyone who does find themselves in that situation can readily get out of it. I actually wonder if the world wouldn't be a better place if we all spent some percentage of our lives undergoing a degree of poverty. But financial mobility is at something of an all-time low in the US too as I understand it, meaning a lot of poverty is entrenched and intergenerational.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thought that 'billionaires' are the problem is missing the point. There are folks worth the better part of $1T. They are a bigger part of the problem, by several orders of magnitude. The systematic problems are, that the system is rigged so a tiny few skim from everything, leaving the absolute minimum they can get away with for the rest of us.
Look, I'm close to as far left as you can get. But this is leftist propaganda that makes no sense. I just disproved that ALL billionaires (including the centibillionaires) do not have a meaningful amount of money to distribute to the country (or the globe) in any reasonably fair way. Singling out the centibillionaires - Musk and Zuckerberg and Bezos and Gates and Buffet - doesn't make my point irrelevant. If you're o…