I mostly agree with your take. The ultra wealthy are entrapped by their own minds & machines of wealth that have tight demands.
But only within their minds. They could change their minds, donate or pay enough taxes that their billions would be distributed far and wide. Then they'd no longer be trapped.
Plenty of people make the choice to stop acquiring, stop increasing their wealth, and stop having more everything (kids, houses, cars, pets, hobbies, etc).
It's hard for those who have no choice, and those who've made different choices, to relate to the insatiable appetite of billionaires.
These people also have much more leverage to change the world in substantial, albeit often short lived ways. My family has been hurt by the DOGE cuts. Hopefully it's not a permanent injury. Yet it's very real.
They act just like drug addicts. More's the pity. They can change but they don't seem to understand that rock bottom is a tough place to be.
It is looking like we are venturing into harder times these new few years for various reasons, as such one has to wonder what things you are still clinging to that can be let go and what is still worth handing on to. Hopefully we don't have to make those choices but it is always handy to keep in mind.
They pay giant amounts of tax. The people not paying tax, or costing negative tax, are who you mean.
The 2021 ProPublica tax leak showed the 25 richest Americans paid a "true tax rate" of roughly 3.4% on their $401 billion in wealth growth between 2014 and 2018, because their wealth grew without triggering realization events.
But why not?
Whereas anyone on the "top N richest" list is a parasite on all the people who produce wealth.
They may or may not do much useful - government tends to grow regardless of output, because it doesn't need to earn its money. All you know for sure is a government employee pays no taxes, and so contributes nothing to anything like roads, public services, etc etc, and takes taxes away from the people who are net contributors.
To be clear, I don't pretend to have preferences. I'm idealistically libertarian, but I think that nukes have ruined the right to bear arms, propaganda has ruined free speech, and central banks have ruined currency. I'm a demoralist, I guess, to coin a term.
If it's not relevant then just give every government employee a million dollars a year raise, but on the condition that it's taxed at 100%. Then you've raised all the taxes you need and the private sector doesn't need taxing.
> billionaires are the biggest tax dodgers by far
Even if this is true (no evidence cited, of course) they still pay the most tax in terms of dollars, and their businesses generate far, far more tax downstream as well.
> stop trying to blame poor people and civil servants for your weird hangups
I'm not blaming them. I'm just judging them by your standard. Get a better standard, and don't call it my "weird hangup".
If you look at “net” like you want to, sure, they pay far more in tax dollars than pretty much anybody, but they are able to legally dodge paying tax on most of their wealth accumulation because if the way the IRS treats unrealized capital gains.
If we talk about US, your statement is outrageous hypocrisy.
Median income world-wide is less than 50 cents per hour. Average American person "who have no choice" could start working for like 30+ times more at any moment they want and choose any US government they want.
And how much money from this 30+ times more they have "donated or paid enough taxes" that their several dollars per hour "would be distributed far and wide"? Zero. So we are talking about insatiable appetite of Americans, not Billionaires. Because average American person has literally the same choice you are talking about, and literally choosing "having more everything" instead of "distribute far and wide".
In https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-hourly-earnings I could not find a single country even close to what you have said, except for Burundi at $0.6/hr. The rest are all $2 and up.
Do you think your average Billionaire do not struggles to pay for their 500m yacht or flock of supermodels and Hollywood stars?
> They can’t just go donate 99.999% of their wealth and still survive like billionaires could.
They totally can. An average American worker with 12 dollars salary in terms of excess cash is way closer to Elon Musk than to a tantalum mine worker in the Congo who earns 22 cents per hour.
Not 99.999% obviously, but they can easily pay 80%, 90%, 95%, or even 98% of their incomes as fair share to people, who really need it. But they choose not to. They choose to get more rent, more utilities, more food (even if they will literally die from that amount). Or even new iPhone, that has been created by those highly underpaid tantalum mine workers. From the point of view of the average human on planet Earth, average American just as much exploiter as any billionaire.
Not american but I'd presume food, protection from the elements and healthcare costs arefor the vast majority higher than what's left over even if they only afford themselves the minimum no?
Where I live the absolute bottom segment of housing is proportionally more expensive and the price inflexible because smaller or shitier quite frankly doens't exist or is illegal.
Obviously no. What a hypocrisy and shifting of blame. "The minimum" you'd get if you are working for less than 20 cents per hour. When you are working for several dollars per hour, you are drowning in luxury comparing to the rest of the world and refusing to pay your fair share to other people, whose work you are appropriating.
> Where I live the absolute bottom segment of housing
That is the same as talking about "absolute bottom segment of housing in which billionaires are living". I mean, duh. Your bottom segment of housing (food, protection from the elements, healthcare) is literally a function of your bottom segment of income, it is not the "minimum".
Obviously yes. Your effort to equate the ability to scale down of billionaires to people who struggle to afford a shoebox appartment and lifesaving procedures if they were to fall ill is ghoulish. "
A lot of those a bit above the minimum do indeed spend more on what were historically luxuries because those luxuries now cost a fraction of their historical price whilst housing and such has typically gotten more expensive.
>That is the same as talking about "absolute bottom segment of housing in which billionaires are living".
It is not in any way shape or form the same because billionaires can go lower.
> it is not the "minimum".
The alternative is no housing (or often moving in with parents) so i'd argue it is. i'll remind you that a tent on the sidewalk isn't exactly legal everywhere.
On a broader timescale, we can take a look at the fact that goods which were designed to be affordable and mass-produced have been elevated to refined luxury goods, like the Herman-Miller Eames, as an indicator that material standards have fallen very far. Not the least of which because of an ever-dwindling labor share of capital (beginning in the 1970s), which silently impoverishes working households and degrades their comfort while being completely invisible to an uncareful eye on paper.
Much of the major boons of comfort were established prior to the transition to shareholder capitalism. Things like e-commerce, IoT, online banking, these are for the birds. Meaningful advances are things like HVAC and refrigeration, ubiquitous motorized transport, electrical lighting.
> We clearly need ... sharks
Non-violent (peaceful, loud, signs) protesting does little to nothing. Historically speaking, what does work is violence, and a lot of it.
Even in the USA, our own labor battles were effectively wars, with the US military fighting against the people. It's where the Pinkertons were created. And it was bloody as hell, until FDR had some sense in making the NLRB to *curb the violence* with peaceful grievances.
When those in power forget the peaceful paths were a compromise, don't be too surprised when violence rears its ugly head.
This is how you get healthcare CEOs gunned down, or ol Scam Altman's house firebombed, or city council person get their house shot up after voting for a data center, or Flocks (YC17) getting destroyed en masse.
I'm just sitting here. And it definitely is getting worse and worse, for everyone. And some people, when you corner them, do unimaginable things.
There is a threshold beyond which change can only come about via violence. I don’t wish to speculate how far away from that threshold we currently find ourselves. I think we’re closer now than we were 10 years ago.
Unconditionally embracing nonviolence is not, properly, a goal. Nonviolence is a strategy. It must be conditional on its effectiveness.
Would you go further back in time and risk the Korean War or the World Wars and the Great Depression? A time when electricity was new and you might very well be using an outhouse as your toilet? When modern sanitation and health laws were in their infancy and debilitating diseases like polio ran rampant?
Would you go back further?
I for one, despite a lot of the issues with today can’t really find a different period of time I would prefer my life to span. I can absolutely identify parts of different times I would prefer to now, but I can’t see myself giving up everything I would need to to actually live in that period of time, and deal with the strife and struggles of the period at the same time.
The premise sort of gives it away, doesn’t it? If you don’t know how things turn out you can’t say how you’d respond. Everyone is a product of their time. Some people are miserable, some are resilient.
And I know plenty of people that would take that kind of life. They would do it today if it didn't completely isolate themselves from society. But atlest in pre-modern times you could trade some random grain or booze for some other goods and pay your taxes with it. But today neither walmart nor the IRS will accept handspun yarn or a sack grain in lieu of money.