Preface:
Sorry for the wall of text.
It’s all just drunken rants, and I doubt any of it is meaningful.
If everyone on earth worth more than $5 million were suddenly killed and all their money/assets were redistributed to the public, you know what would happen?
THE WORLD WOULD BE A MUCH BETTER PLACE
Yes. Unfortunately such measures are blocked by both science and functional governments.
There is no way to place such stringent limits on anything. “Owning more than 2 dildos” is a silly law, because anything is a dildo if you are brave enough.
“Owning more that 5m is assets means you get killed” is a silly law, because a massive financial upheaval (suddenly having your dildo collection massively appreciate is value) would mean so many people killed or having to be revived (ie, when your £10m collection of dildos suddenly is valued at £2m… Very distressing).
I think it’s more of a “you have won capitalism” tax.
10m per person + 2m per child. Or something like that.
That’s the cap. Beyond that is taxed at 99%.
Earn 100million? You keep 1 million.
Higher taxes on extra homes and actual luxury goods and services (private jets etc).
Have an EAT: Essentials Added Tax of 0% (or remove taxes on things like tampons, deodorant, toothpaste & brushes, body soap & shampoos, toilet paper, condoms… Things that promote hygiene). Have a SAT (survival added tax) of like 5% on fresh veg, bread, meat, eggs and milk (things required to live). And have VAT (value added tax) of like 10% on things that ADD VALUE to the essential survival things (bread, ready meals, cookies etc). Then have an LAT (luxury added tax) of 20% on fancy things. And have an FAT (fatality added tax) of 50% on things like cigarettes, alcohol, fast food, sugar, processed foods… All the modern bullshit. Then an EAT (existential-threat added tax) for things like petrol, diesel, natural gas, methane, ethane etc.
did they just figure this out now? Because the other 8+ billion of us have known this for years, and have been screaming about how this is a really terrible thing. The entire population of earth has never been in agreement about anything before
Well, it takes actual studies and scientific proof to enact meaningful change.
While the billionaires can just pay for that change via lobbying.
Politicians are not specialists on anything. So they rely on specialist. And billionaires can serve up “specialists” in the right place at the right time to get their own opinion valued more than common sense and general opinion.
Billionaires can own entire “impartial councils”, they can (do?) own the news cycle, they can saturate media with their opinion to the point that “scientists confirm Y, but public opinion goes against Y”.
See the whole climate change denial and greenwashing, I think there is the same going on with “open source” Vs actual open source, the whole “AI is the future, AGI is here, don’t lose the AI war” bullshit. Next up will be water, we are getting to the point where it’s all about water (but probably not for citizens).
And yet, the requirements to refute all the bullshit require SO much more work and investment than is required to generate the bullshit.
I don’t know what the solution is. When companies are “worth” more than countries, there is no way a country can compete. Even sectors of a country (IE “local councils”).
They just get bought out. And all these bought-and-paid-for (previously) trusted sources become untrustworthy, but the evidence lags the actions making them untrustworthy… Of course society slowly gets dragged down to the worst of it.
Maybe that’s the takeaway:
Nobody can predict everything. So the established and trustworthy things get corrupted faster than the corruption can be revealed in an indisputable way.
There is no way to prevent the corruption, it can’t be predicted.