The Owenites and other Utopian Socialists of old would rise from their graves, vindicated at long last for, against all odds, finally succeeding.
We’d have the flying cars we were fucking promised by the movies we grew up with.
More like China?
If only they could be more like Chuck Feeney.
In February 2011, Feeney became a signatory to The Giving Pledge. In his letter to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the founders of The Giving Pledge, Feeney wrote, “I cannot think of a more personally rewarding and appropriate use of wealth than to give while one is living—to personally devote oneself to meaningful efforts to improve the human condition. More importantly, today’s needs are so great and varied that intelligent philanthropic support and positive interventions can have greater value and impact today than if they are delayed when the needs are greater.” He gave away a final $7 million in late 2016, to the same recipient of his first charitable donations, Cornell University. Over the course of his life, he gave away more than $8 billion.
"Hahaha what a nerd. "
– Gates & Buffet, from Epstein Island, probably
@return2ozma Let’s say I’m a billionaire and I want to help the world.
Firstly declare that I have hoarded too much, and that it is about time to change from leadership to collective guidership.
The surplus values should not be hoarded with me, but shared among the workers.
There would be several focus forward, such as how to move towards moneyless and needs based economy.
I would use the framework of the oakframe to guide forward, and the machineframe to avoid pitfalls.
They can’t. Its not a matter of personal greed, its just how capitalism works, it creates immense wealth for a few on one end and mass immiseration for the masses on the other. Billionaires exist because of the system that creates them.
How am I supposed to enjoy that?
You wouldn’t see any billionaires.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a billionaire IRL.
Me neither. I have only personally known Millionaires. Both multimillionaires that I know fly totally under the radar by being completely humble, non flashy people.
If we’re counting property values, millionaires are a dime a dozen in some areas.
they don’t mingle with the dirty poors
The do this on purpose. Chelsea Fagan from The Financial Diet had a great video about this
The 600 series had rubber skin. We spotted them easy.
Generally, everything would just be plain better as their dragon hoards are actually spent, and they dont hoard GDP from the rest of us. But you’d probably see a public service boom wherever they invested, and you’d likely see a lot less people struggling with anything from bills to food to even entertainment.
Its not a dragon hoard, its the perceived value of their companies.
For sure wealth should be taxed, but OPs idea that it’s just unused billions sitting around is untrue. People shouldn’t belief in falsehoods. Also if you try to argue for wealth tax, and get something basic like this wrong, the argument is already lost.
Of course it isn’t just sitting around unused, it’s being reinvested to make more money. Billionaires typically put most of their net worth into assets and stocks and then live off of loans, just like the comic I posted alludes to. Just because they don’t have literal piles of cash sitting around doesn’t mean they aren’t absurdly wealthy.
And let’s be honest, if a billionaire wanted a Scrooge McDuck style gold pile they could have it arranged within a week at most.
That is a big factor, but they also have regular assets and personal imvestments
Society if billionaires actually helped the people
what’s the point of walking a robot dog? couldn’t it walk itself or just stay indoors?
Verisimilitude
What is the point of feeding a tamagotchi?
Maybe it’s walking the human?
To be honest, us getting a dog forces us to go for 3+ walks a day. It has made me lose some weight and lowered my BP, so I think your comment is accurate.
This is an interesting conundrum, actually. The big question at its core being:
Can you ever do enough good through philanthropy, so that it offsets the damage you had to do, in order to become a billionaire? Can even all the billionaires in the world do enough good with their money, to offset the damage done by a system, that allowed for them to become billionaires?
I, personally, don’t think it is possible.
To give an actual answer: I think, the world would definitely be better, but unless those billionaires collectively used all the power their money provides, to do away with money and the possibility of billionaires altogether, I don’t think it would amount to all that much.
I read a good post about this before, the summary was: a philanthropist billionaire helps causes specific to their discretion. While their rise to wealth has taken the toll from many victims, some dead directly because of it, their donations back may not even help the location they robbed it from.
You can picture United Health suddenly helping world hunger, it doesn’t bring back all the people who died miserably from denied claims, or those who are still alive but became permanently disabled by lack of care.
See also, 📺 Gino D’Acampo.
It’s a fair point but that’s such a smug way to say it
“Billionaire” means “person who can direct large amounts of the means-of-production”
The left wants to tax those people and put the MoP back under democratic control.
So if they used their control the way the People would it’d looklike socialism. But that’s a hypothetical because that’s not their self-interest.
We don’t have the supply to fill the demands to simply throw all billionaires money into solving every crisis. That is why wealth inequality is so vast. Dollars are a made up system. In its raw form it’s just paper. Backed by the govt. Where as it used to be backed by the gold standard which is why we hoard so much gold. That is a real tangible asset. Paper is just paper.
We don’t have the supply to fill the demands
What makes you say that? Making food and housing and medical care for everyone isn’t impossible
We certainly have the housing and buildings, I am doubtful we have the medical supplies and medical machines like MRI and others. Look at 2020 during covid where the medical workers did not have PPE and how the supply chain was/is still stressed. We also lack the natural resources where we can just throw money aka paper at problems and their gone forever.
The govt. Balances our money system based on supply and demand well they try like all govts. The earths resources are finite and we have consumed them at such an accelerated rate that even now we have supply chain issues on certain rare earth metals and all other natural resources. The war in Ukraine aside from Nato and russia being so close is actually over trillions of dollars worth of rare earth metals and natural resouces. Which Russia needs to revitalize their economy. Also why Trump wants to settle a deal beneficial to the US, trump doesn’t care about the war he wants access to the mineral deposits.
I also think that we likely have the food supply currently, in the future not so much due to climate change. We all see the impacts daily which will continue to worsen, and eventually water will be scarce causing migration of people as the globe shifts it’s weather events to different locations. We won’t lack water it’ll just be too uneconomical to transport it to where it’s needed due to weight and our archaic fuel sources.
The food isn’t the hard part right now. It’s transportation of goods to locales like deep into Africa as an example so we would have to consolidate people to reach everyone most effeciently. Then we can solve the issues you speak of.
Look at 2020 during covid where the medical workers did not have PPE and how the supply chain was/is still stressed
I think these are more logistical and planning problems than fundamental lack of supply. The mask shortage was resolved by increasing production afaik. There is a large discrepancy between countries in the ratio between quality of health outcomes and expense of healthcare per person; even if it turns out to be a supply problem to get the most advanced available medicine to everyone, it is certainly possible to get the most impactful medical services to everyone.
We also lack the natural resources where we can just throw money aka paper at problems and their gone forever.
This is probably true though, spending by itself might not be enough, just I think that’s more because of dysfunction than natural resources.
It really isn’t, but as long as those resources are distributed through a market, there are problems even if you add money. Say the billionaires truly are incorruptible angels and put all their money to providing food and shelter, the not-yet-billionaires in the market suddenly have incentives to raise prices, withhold food to the market while prices are rising as a speculative gambit, stuff like that.
That’s one of the mechanisms through which the system itself, that produces billionaires, makes it at least hard or - imo - even impossible to truly undo the damage it does to create such billionaires, even when you have those billions. Another example is corruption: As soon as you put a lot of money into an issue, it creates an incentive there to funnel money away in secret, to provide false solutions that don’t solve anything, to scam, etc. A friend of mine worked on projects providing water infrastructure in countries in Africa from philanthropic and international aid funds, and he did get often frustrated telling how some projects simply vanish halfway through, because someone down the line had basically run off with the money (not that the projects were wholly useless, either, but they failed to fundamentally solve things by just throwing money at them). Someone like Bill Gates, as another example, has been unironically doing a lot of good as a philanthropist, but all his money still wasn’t able to truly tackle the root causes of the problems in the countries where he supports healthcare and such things - and inevitably, some of the funds he provided were used on glamour projects or ineffectual, nice-sounding strategies, or ended up in outright corruption. And at the same time, the question remains, what the system that made him a billionaire caused in damages to begin with.
That’s why I still think you can’t really tackle all these problems without doing away with a market structure, exchange value, capital accumulation, etc. - i.e., why I remain a dirty commie, instead of just arguing for redistribution (redistribution and more social-democratic, beneficial investment is still good, but you gotta always aim for the abolition of private property and capital accumulation as an end goal, imo).
Oh, and I just realised my ramble kind of missed OP’s point, which is also important: All the money caught up in the three-digit multi-billionaires net worth? It’s not representative of true goods and labour, it is what Marx would have called “dead” capital. As soon as it is used for anything but as financial capital, it can drive inflation massively, which connects to part of my first point.
EDIT: Another example that just came to my mind for how this can impact things - Mansa Musa and the stories surrounding his lavish spending during his Hajj, basically crashing the local economies. So, even pre-capitalist systems had to deal with these dynamics.
There are near 800 billionaires in the USA. Assuming all only have $1 billion dollars and it is all invested, applying the “4% rule” gives a sustainable $40 million each per year. With $10 million to personally spend, that gives $24 billion a year for charity and public works.
I failed to find a list of the costs to solve various issues. Homelessness could be solved in a couple years.
The numbers provided are just a starting place. Many problems are extremely expensive. Actually working to solve them would help.
problems arent solved by making up more paper. problems are solved by doing and properly allocating the resources we already have ie not on the whims of billionaires or on the restrictions of money.
we could certainly tackle the worlds problems without printing a single extra penny, if only we eliminated the parasites stopping us and propping up the fake paper system in the first place.
But if you go by net worth Elon alone has like 350-400 billion. Zuckerberg, Buffet, Gates all have many billions. I see where you’re coming from but they could really help society, like curing hunger levels of help and the worst part is… They’d still be filthy rich. So as far as quality of life, it wouldn’t even cost them anything.
So as far as quality of life, it wouldn’t even cost them anything.
That was my point.
Well it was a GREAT point.
Gates and his ex were helping. They have pledged to spend half their wealth on various humanitary things. They were trying to convince other billionaires to follow suit also. Looks like musk and bezos didn’t get the memo
It’s not enough to put him on my favorable list. Have you used Microsoft lately?
No, all my systems are Linux. Work is W11 and I have to keep deleting ai.exe and aimgr.exe from the vfs MS office16 folders or the AI takes most of my processor for no reason and my applications run like molasses.
