I can't speak for others, but this doesn't match my thinking at all.

I want to heavily tax the ultra rich because money is power, and vast inequality in power is undemocratic and just plain dangerous.

I don't really care if somebody buys ten massive yachts. It's annoying and seems wasteful but it's not worth too much of my attention.

But it's another matter if somebody buys politicians, laws, social change. The issue with someone like Elon Musk isn't that he owns a private jet, or even that he owns a rocket company, it's that he bought his way to taking an axe to major parts of our government by pouring unimaginable amounts of money into buying a presidential election.

It's not about grabbing stuff, it's about preventing people from accumulating too much power. The ultra-wealthy should be heavily taxed for the same reason the President shouldn't be given unlimited power to do whatever they want.

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meta_gunslinger 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Easily solved, remove the power centers and then the billionaires will have no power to buy or influence with their money.

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mrguyorama 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's no such thing as "Power centers".

Money is that power.

You cannot have billionaires and them not be immensely, structurally powerful.

That's the entire point of capitalism, that resources, including labor, be directed by those with capital.

Believing you can have a single human being in control of a non-negligible percentage of all resources of a country, and they wont somehow be actually powerful or influential is moronic.

Taking the power away from billionaires literally IS taking their money.

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meta_gunslinger 2 hours ago | parent [-]

“Money is that power.”

That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever read. Power is power. Members of the Communist Party in the USSR were as wealthy as their subjects, their power differential was enormous.

	▲	wat10000 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not all power is money, but money is power.

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ceejayoz 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Define "easily" for us, please.

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meta_gunslinger 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Don't hand over power to politicians, bureaucrats and NGOs. It's not rocket science to need further explanation.

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blanched 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Politicians, by definition, have power. How do you easily remove or withhold it?

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meta_gunslinger 5 hours ago | parent [-]

It's the degree of power they hold, not a binary. A politican in Switzerland has much less power than a politician in China.

When your power is to determine which day the recycling truck is dropping-by, hardly anyone wants to coerce that power. But when it is e.g printing money the calculus is massively different.

	▲	ceejayoz 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> When your power is to determine which day the recycling truck is dropping-by, hardly anyone wants to coerce that power. I take it you've never encountered a homeowner's association.

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ceejayoz 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I thought you said it was easy?

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wat10000 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I know, that's why I want to tax them, to remove their power.

Of course, you probably mean to remove their power centers without removing their money. But that doesn't make any sense. Money is power. You can't remove the power from a billionaire and leave them a billionaire.

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idle_zealot 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"Don't want to be ruled by billionaires, peasants? Have you tried dismantling your government so they can't buy it? That will surely save you."

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meta_gunslinger 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn’t that what Anarchists and Marxists peddle to the peasants?

	▲	idle_zealot an hour ago \| parent [-]
		A Marxist peddles restructuring of the government to better represent the people. Notable attempts at that replaced existing governments with autocracies that promptly killed the Marxists and Anarchists among them, which is not what you were talking about, I don't think. What kind of revolutionary wants only to tear down their government and not replace it? Anarcho-primitivists, I guess?