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anticapital

My favourite one so far:

> No one ever makes a billion dollars.

> You TAKE a billion dollars.

Quite relevant to the vulture capitalists and their fans who frequent this site.

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You mean people give it to you? You can't get away with taking one billion dollars from others without their permission unless you are the government ;)

And the government has been making it easier to hit $1bn thanks to inflation.

This only makes sense from a naively individualist perspective. If no one ever made a billion dollars, so to speak, there would be no money at all.

> If no one ever made a billion dollars, so to speak, there would be no money at all.

Could you please elaborate?

The amount of money/value/richness in the world is not constant.

Suppose we all lived on an island in a completely stable economy valued somehow at 1 trillion dollars.

Then imagine that a dozen or so explorers went to another island and started a completely independent economy that (after some centuries) gets also valued at 1 trillion dollars.

The latter billion dollar was created at the meager cost of a boat and the life work of some people.

This is a horrible analogy for anything that ever happened, but it is something that could possibly happen.

It also makes sense from a marxist perspective. How billionaires/capitalists take the surplus value from manual labour and all that untrendy stuff.

It is not trendy, because labour is not something that exists by itself in a vacuum.

That is very true and something that capitalists often forget.

Yes. After a short episode of amnesia, they continue to create jobs which create the labour.

I'm not trying to be snarky now but you should read Marx, you won't become a crazy stalinist, pinky promise.

Let's say Marx is not the only one I've read when I was young and leave it at that.

Money just gets arbitarily created by banks. It is easy to "make money".

Maintaining a stable, accepted currency however, is quite hard and so is providing enough value for others, that they give you a billion dollars of a stable, accepted currency ...

You're assuming that the statement vacuously means "money is never made," which is not what it's getting at. The point is that nobody has ever become a billionaire without manipulating markets, exploiting employees, misleading investors, or otherwise abusing the fabric of society to squeeze wealth out of the rest of the world. The guy who invents the thing isn't the one who gets rich. It's his employer who profits off of it. It's not hard to make money, but it's impossible to make a billion dollars. You can only get that much by taking it.

Not sure what is special about billion dollars in your statement.

If no one ever made 10^100 dollars, there would be no money at all.

So ... there is no money?

The easiest way to make a million dollars is to start with two.

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