It seems society always goes down the shitter over and over following the same path. People rise to wealth and power extracted on the repression of the masses, massive disparity, ignorance exemplified, xenophobia and blaming minorities for any possible issue, laws signed with golden pens but becoming more meaningless when they’re only enforced to protect the wealthy…. Then some sort of collapse, fragmentation, and/or dystopia usually in conjunction with war, purges, and killing in the name of tribalism.
History seems to rewind the cassette and record right over the top with the same old song.
Not if we can solve the billionaire problem
It’s not a billionaire problem. It’s a SOCIOPATH problem. The kind of people that come up with terms like “human capital” aren’t the ones sitting on the board of directors or in the C-suite. They’re the “consultant” types whose entire job consists of selling other people their opinions. Take for example Irving Fisher, who is credited with the term “human capital.” Know what else he was into? Motherfucking eugenics, because of course he was.
That’s the real problem, and it’s one that exists across every socioeconomic class. The asshole will always win because everyone just wants to shuffle them off to be Someone Else’s Problem. Eventually said asshole will attain a position well above their actual capacity for value and their lack of mental acuity will appeal to similarly ill-tempered douchebags, creating a cultlike following.
Figure out how to solve the sociopath problem.
The billionaire problem is easy. Bring back the 90% margin and add another 99% one to those earning over, say, a billion in a year.
This, of course, for a given value of “easy.”
Yup, this aligns closely with my own impression of what needs doing. I’d only add to this that people need to be aware how billionaire wealth works. Nearly nobody receives just a billion in their bank account every year. Billionaires’ wealth is stored in investments (normally a company they’ve founded, or bought, owning loads of shares, which then blow up to create unbelievable wealth). But this isn’t liquid, accessible money. Billionaires use this wealth to borrow against, which banks happily do, knowing that it’s safe to do so, considering the billionaire’s leverage. This is one mechanism by which billionaires avoid paying taxes, for example. Here, things become tricky: How do you take this power away from the billionaire? How do you tax share ownership? There are some approaches, but I’m not sure any of them have ever been tried. If you just force the billionaire to sell 90% of their shares above 1,000,000,000 in value, the share price will plummet immediately. That doesn’t really work. You could prohibit borrowing against value held in shares, but you’d somehow need to limit this to ultra-rich people. Or you somehow devalue shares held beyond 1,000,000,000, so that this isn’t actually wealth the billionaire can use (to buy elections, or media companies). But then what’s the point of having 299 billion worth of shares just sitting there doing nothing (in Elon’s case, for example). It’s a surprisingly difficult problem to solve. You could split the shares across many people. So any shares above 1,000,000,000 in value have to be divided evenly across the workforce of your company or something.
This is all theoretical though, because most billionaires would happily murder every last human being with their bare hands before giving up 0.0000000000001% of their wealth.
While I wholeheartedly agree, we need to “solve the concentration of power in the hands of the few problem”. Even if you simply said all the stocks and shares of current billionaires can’t have money lent against them (or however you want to address this without taking half the economy with it), there will just be a new class of psychopathic narcissists to take the place of the current ones. I feel without some kind of set of laws which enforces continuous dilution of power by somehow spreading it across more people and randomising who is allowed to influence what (which can only really be done with computers or AI) these cycles will repeat themselves ad infinitum.
I’ve never heard this particular suggestion, of using computer randomization to define who gets influence. I don’t have a well-defined stance on much; I just wanted to say this is interesting.
It’s called sortition. It was practiced in ancient Greece.