The rich, who have disproportionately contributed to the current crisis can buy and relocate to safety, while the poor will be hit the hardest.
And when the judgement day come, you are going to deny everything you have paid them? That was the whole contract!
I get that we can't help but be dumb and consume and enable some entities to be so rich. But then we should not blame the rich!
No, the working class built the roads.
> infrastructure
No, the workers built the infrastructure.
> done research
No, the academics and researchers did that.
> improve QoL for everyone
Explain how Putin (Russia's riches man) improves the QoL of everyone. Explain how rich people like Epstein improves the QoL of everyone. Explain how Trump and Jared Kushner improves the QoL of everyone. Explain how the Koch family improves the QoL of everyone. Explain how Imelda Marcos, Pablo Escobar, Rupert Murdoch, Kim Jon Un, Bernie Madoff, Al Capone, Robert Mugabe, Silvio Berlusconi, Rodrigo Duerte, Peul Manafort, Viktor Bout, Hosni Mubarak, Mohammed bin Salman, Prince Andrew, Albert Thys ... Are these rich people improving the quality of life of everyone?
Are you serious? That is pretty naive!
>Explain how Putin (Russia's riches man)..
Look at the money in your pocket. Do you know how it got there? There is one and only one way to get it. Do some service for the society. Either you did it, or someone else who did gave it to you. Either way society owes you.
Same goes for the rich.
Strange. I only see working class people building roads here. Show me a picture of a billionaire building a road.
When roads are built for the common good, it’s only when government acts on behalf of the working class to compel taxpayers to fund it; it must coerce the billionaires to contribute under the implicit threat of force.
I’d love to believe that humans become generally more collectivist when they amass great wealth - and much credit to those who do - but they are much too few and far between for us to rely this as a society
The point is that the rich has become rich by serving the society enormously (It does not matter if someone become rich by serving ad, and thus not serving in the ideal sense, yet some member of the society paid them to do it). If every service needed (real or made up, does not matter) by common men were provided by government, then these billionaires would not have existed.
No one has the right to deny the rich, if they want to use what society owes them, to save themselves from catastrophe!
Your statement, as written, ignores that much wealth, power, privilege is inherited from ill-gotten gains like savage conquest, slavery, oppression, corruption, etc. and most great wealth is held by people who had extreme advantages from those endowments being born into those circumstances.
In most cases, it’s very hard to argue that society “owes them” anything.
I would say that debt would be much more appropriate for people like Nikola Tesla who wanted his inventions shared with the world at no cost, or the inventors of insulin who sold the patent for $1 to benefit the common good. Not for the telecom and pharma CEOs who become billionaires by extracting the maximum value from exploiting others’ ingenuity!
I am not sure you are getting it. If you have 100$ and I steal it from you, you can argue that I don't deserve the 100$ worth of work that I can buy from the society using it (you deserve it). But that is not the contract. The contract is anyone who has the 100$ is entitled for services that is 100$ worth from the society.
And society should not really concerned with who the actual owner is. Its end of the bargain is completed as soon as it does 100$ worth of work and accept the 100$ as payment.
So the billion $ a billionaire have means that society is indebted for that much amount to someone. And the burden to fulfill that commitment is on the society until that billion $ is exhausted from payment.
It’s not a particularly helpful paradigm for solving predicaments without excess violence and suffering, but the model makes sense insofar as it’s consistent
Money gives you purchasing power. Is that surprising?
The reason why Putin or Kim Jong Un is not dead a long time ago is that enough of the ruling upper middle class has been made dependent on their leaders and will work to ensure the safety of said leader.
”Your honour, but the girl didn’t resist very much, so she must bear part of the blame for what I did to her”.