this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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This is probably a slightly misguided idea to go after them as bad people because as soon as they do do something "good" you leave the door open for people to think that perhaps on balance they're not so bad after all.
The problem of billionaires being billionaires is itself the chief complaint people should have. It doesn't matter if they're Mr Rogers and Santa Claus combined, because they can choose to be so entirely at will and can be selfish assholes too entirely at will. They can also be other things entirely, given they are actually human beings after all they can try to act on best intentions, but like all humans, with great ignorance or with flawed thinking. When you or I do that the consequences can be terrible, but mostly, we'd be unable to come close to the scale of impact these demi gods can leave in their wake, not to mention the "original sins" that allowed them to become billionaires in the first place leaving a legacy of nasty indirect consequences for society at large.
There's actually a lot of examples of billionaires philanthropy and as you likely expected to point out when people mentioned that, some of those acts hide less pure intention, but undoubtedly they probably really did do some good and that itself is enough to completely undermine your whole point that they never do anything good. The issue is that, with the sheer vast quantity of concentrated wealth and power they can wield, the society that supports them is bereft of a real voice in how it's resources are used. So much of the fruits of our labour end up closed off in private coffers and it undermines public institutions like democratic governments because while we may theoretically have a say in what they do, we legally have no say at all in how a billionaire spends his bucks (and I say his intentionally). They might say we oughtn't since it's their money and no one typically has a say in what the rest of us do with our money but as with most things, there's a point of extreme where this logic becomes perverse.
Can we as a society organize and innovate without billionaires? Even China changed their economy to make them possible.
Right now, writers are on strike. Hollywood workers could invest their time, make movies, and get paid afterwards. But instead, it takes people with money to do the funding.
How should big sums of money be managed? Bureaucrats work to a certain extend but hardly innovate. Which structure could ask a million people to invest a thousand dollars each and offer ethical profits?
China needed them because they wanted money from the west. If they hadn't we would have done a cold war to them long ago and they might not have been strong enough to handle it. Because they had some billionairs we took it easy on them for a while and now they are strong enough to resist our coup attempts. So it wasn't that the oligarchs class is good for anything. They just needed to be part of our system for self defence.
Billionaires don't innovate, it's the engineers/scientists/workers in their payroll.
Engineers, scientists and workers need an environment that allows them to innovate. How can we create such an environment without billionaires? Somebody mentioned kickstarter. What is missing that small investors make billionaires irrelevant?
It boils down to abolishing private ownership of the means of production. The fruits of labour of society must belong to society, not just a handful of people that have been inheriting wealth generation after generation.
Does it have to be exclusive? Society right now can own means of production. Cooperatives, joined-stock cooperations or foundations could be used to hold ownership and the fruits of labor could be shared.
If the majority is not willing to organize labor right now, who could take over the role of billionaires without abusing their position of power?
The billionaires abuse their power. The problem of an abusive manager being totally solved is an irrational height to set the bar at.
Why are billionaires not acceptable if abusive managers are acceptable?
Billionaires already represent societal detriments by the very nature of the absurd concentration of wealth into the hands of an individual.
Also billionaires tend not to personally manage things, which may be to save time for doing more abuse (see Elon)
What you are looking for is a "manager", which doesn't need to be a billionaire and, in fact, usually is not.
Who selects and controls the managers? Who motivates people to invest their income to pay the managers?
A million people have to pool $1000 each to create the equivalent of a billionaire. It could be possible yet it doesn't happen.
The trick is that billionaires cannot consume their entire wealth. Thus the economy has free money that looks for opportunities.
I hate stumbling upon libertarians.
Taxes. Next question.
This is hopelessly naive. Most of what they do with all that extra money is incestuous money laundering and regulatory capture. There's no reason to give unaccountable individuals such an absurd level of societal power when it's not like they "innovated" their wealth from thin air. Take it from the people they otherwise would take it from via, for example, a tax system and you can produce something accountable that can be changed freely by society and won't buy twitter to force us to read its tweets.
Society already pays many taxes and changing the spending doesn't happen freely by society.
Politics have their own disadvantages and billionaires are a complementary way to allocate resources.
That society can be locked into Twitter shows that taxes shouldn't be the only source of capital. Every democracy could have created a Twitter clone many years ago as basic infrastructure.
Like Norway's wealth fund, many countries could have invested in companies to generate profits and reduce taxes. Instead there are deficits. Politicians rely on society for sustainability whereas billionaires have to identify and improve sustainable forms of income.
If neither politicians nor billionaires should invest, what would be a good way to identify the people who should?
Much of what those taxes are currently spent on is utter bullshit for oligarchs
[citation needed]
China facilitated conditions for the creation of such clones quite well. America's cultural imperialism had already dominated Europe anyway and neocolonial infrastructure pushes many third world countries towards western services being synonymous with the internet itself. The market solution is for the dominant power to snowball, with all the problems that entails.
This is a joke. Aside from the politicians being bought out by those self-same billionaires, the latter are infamous for making things worse long term (or just in totality) in order to maximize quarterly profits, again see Twitter. They burn money on bribing politicians and institutions and drain society of wealth with various forms of tax fraud while paying hardly a cent for all the infrastructure that they use in wild disproportion to a normal citizen.
My point is that it should not be oriented around one person's executive decisions: Stop looking for a good king. It should be decided democratically or, at the most republican, by a representative who the laws are oriented around preventing the corruption of (no lobbying, PACs of any kind, "campaign donations" from anything but a private citizen, no "gifts" at all, no revolving door employment, no "speaking fees") who also is subject to a vote of no confidence or some equivalent procedure that allows the citizenry to terminate his term early (and put him on trial, if needed) if they find him to not be acting as he represented that he would. But all of this is to say it the representative should have as little personal agency as possible in day-to-day affairs, merely acting as a laborer performing tasks according to the lines the public wants him to without needing to have the entire citizenry be up-to-date on everything all the time (as they would need to be in a pure democracy).
Even if you manage to establish a clean democracy once, how do you prevent it from being corrupted?
The Lemmy migration shows you how small the number of active citizens is.
The world has enough places that citizens could organize in the way you describe, despite billionaire opposition. The problem is that humans are not wired that way. We rely on the self interest of sad people who seek solace in their empires to build our civilization.
Happy people would spend their time with other happy humans. Nobody really likes the noisance of business. You believe that you can find people who do the work of billionaires without the freedom. I think you won't find them and you won't find the ones to control them.
Maybe, but they've used their power to set the system up that way, and heavily propagandized against socialized alternatives
If you had free counter-propaganda resources, how would you structure a socialist alternative and what would you tell the population?
Kickstarter
By giving them to me.
Let's imagine that this is not a joke. What do you need to get going besides the money?
Let's not.