That’s why we need to tax billionaires into oblivion. The solution isn’t to make them immortal in the hopes that this somehow makes them benevolent, it’s to ensure nobody has that kind of power in the first place.

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specialist an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Yup.

Repeated radical cashectomies, until wealth inequity is decidedly pro-democracy.

Alas, from the little I've read about both reform (new legislation) and revolution (new constitution), the wealthy elite squirm thru, never truly losing their power advantage. (Probably because any new agenda still needs to be capitalized.)

eg The Nordic model worked pretty well for a while. But weren't durable enough. Allowing the Wormtongues to undermine it all, one millimeter at a time. Opening the door for another cycle of revanchism.

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elcritch 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Military coups don’t often get led by generals or top brass. It’s usually colonels or mid ranked officers who lead coups.

Similarly the concern over billionaires are overplayed. They’ve got too much skin in the current game to destroy the current game.

Nope it’s the millionaires. It’s the underemployed educated elite. Those are folks who will destroy a country for their own marginal gain.

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svachalek 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

1 in 6 households in the US are millionaires. And they're nearly a mutually exclusive group with the underemployed and educated. These are very large groups of ordinary people who are very much not running the ship right now.

There's a billionaire in the White House who's hosting billionaire guests on the regular, there was a line of billionaires behind him at the inauguration, and a temporary trillionaire living in the White House for a while and shredding every agency that had power to regulate him.

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BLKNSLVR an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Only billionaires can afford to pay to have their entire reality replaced with fantasy.

Nitpick: At a certain level of millions, below a billion, this is also true, however. But it makes for a longer / worse soundbite.

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wat10000 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Extreme wealth decouples people from the game, especially in the modern world. You think the richest of the rich will suffer when it's time for the US to pay the piper? Of course they won't. It's all a game to them. Of course they're not going to lead a coup. They already run things, why would they need to?

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GolfPopper an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Nope it’s the millionaires. It’s the underemployed educated elite.

Wrong. The billionaires want the public focused on the low-end millionaires, who largely have no more control over policy than the poorest pensioner or laborer, while the billionaire-class and their willing enablers destroy the society and environment to their own benefit.

It's just a different spin on the ages-old strategy of dividing the non-ruling-class and pitting them against each other. The one thing the billionaires want to avoid is a unified public coming for their wealth and influence.

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themaninthedark 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' " - Steinbeck

	▲	BLKNSLVR an hour ago \| parent [-]
		"I supported this revolution, should I not get more than those who did nothing?!"

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an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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