this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025

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also the climate, war, natural disaster and dictatorships but still (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 112 points 5 days ago (3 children)

The thing about billionaires it that they could just stop. It's not a skin colour, it's not an ethnicity or even a religion.

If they wanted to they could redistribute the wealth. They could use their power to close the political doors they exploit.

Wouldn't even have to check themselves out, wouldn't even have to adopt some monastic lifestyle. But they would rather live in a world where they have lifetimes of obscene luxury at the expense of others. At a certain point you have to ask if causing suffering is part of their fun.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Anyone that would stop would've done so well before they got to the point of obscene wealth. Billionaires can only stop hypothetically - the only way to get them to actually stop is through force.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Yeah its essentially a mental illness once they get to the billionaire stage.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

They're just addicted to money!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago

I'm willing to allow that someone could have a change of heart after acquiring wealth, or can control of such wealth through inheritance.

I don't really care how such a realignment of thinking is achieved though. Be it force, visitation by three spirits, whatever. I guess my point is that as they have the capability to change but don't, which should inform our actions.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

Not if there's a bigger billionaire.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

https://youtu.be/VJFZodY9jp0

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 days ago

Yes, billionaires could end poverty. But they never did and never will.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 days ago

They're not wrong. They could all choose to take dirt naps

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 days ago (2 children)

There is a finite amount of wealth....

Billionaires have to take it from everyone else to accumulate it. And then taking that money out of circulation hurts but so does them "investing" because it drives the price of everything up.

Especially for stuff like real estate where they make money buying but also investing in mortgage debt. The wealthy are incentiviced to drive prices skyhigh, but it's unsustainable and huge crashes become more and more frequent. Everytime people get squeezed and some loss everything, and the wealthy gobble up even more.

As Trevor Moore once said:

It's purely business

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMHCw3RqulY

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 days ago (2 children)

No, it's not a zero-sum game.

That being said, they do exploit us.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago

they turn it into a zero sum game by forcing it to be. it's really perverse…

[–] [email protected] -4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

They can print more dollars causing inflation...

But the wealth it represents is finite.

It is literally impossible to "create" wealth because someone has to pay.

Even finding a pound of gold in your backyard, for you to exchange that for money, someone has to pay you that money.

All you did by finding a pound of good was reduce the price of gold by a negligible amount.

So like I said:

There is a finite amount of wealth…

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Well no, it is possible to create wealth, because money is a proxy for resources, and it is possible to bring more resources into the system or to convert less valuable things into more valuable ones. There is still a finite amount of wealth, because there is only a finite amount of stuff in the system at any one time, but it isn't a zero sum either, because the actions of those in the system can change the total amount of stuff to go around within it.

[+] [email protected] -6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

and it is possible to bring more resources into the syste

That lowers the value of the resource.

or to convert less valuable things into more valuable ones.

And when you sell that to people, they're giving you wealth. Usually via currency. They didn't magically make it either, it came from their employer who pays them. If not used to purchase your item, it would be spent, invested, or hoarded.

There is no wealth creation, it's a myth. To accumulate some, you have to take it from someone, even if that's thru something conventional like earning wages.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

If I bring in more resources and lower the price, then suddenly people can have more stuff with the same amount of money. How is that not creating wealth? Do you think there exists the same amount of wealth in the world now as there was when currency was invented? That seems obviously untrue, since even if you had literally all the money in the world back then, you wouldn't have been able to buy as much with it as you could if you had all the money in the world now.

For that matter, if it were literally impossible to create wealth, people should have had a lot more in the past, due to that wealth being distributed among fewer people. If you go further, you would have to question how wealth exists at all: the concept didn't exist before people, so if people cannot create wealth, where did it all come from?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

There is a finite amount of wealth....

I wonder about that, actually. I think it's quite likely that there is a literally finite amount of wealth, but a functionally infinite amount of wealth; that there is no actual scarcity. Our world produces enough to shelter, feed, and hydrate each of the eight billion humans on the planet. We have to throw away food, waste water, and leave perfectly livable homes empty in order to maintain the illusion of scarcity, all so that billionaires can maintain their hoards.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago (1 children)

there is a literally finite amount of wealth, but a functionally infinite amount of wealth;

I think the distinction is currency/wealth.

What I'm saying is:

there is a literally finite amount of wealth, but a functionally infinite amount of currency

People not understanding the difference and inflation is what has allowed billionaires to accumulate so much. If you had 50k saved for retirement, you'd notice if one day you had 45k, but everyone just accepts it when that 50k has the purchasing power of 45k.

Inflation is needed to prop up our economic system, if it wasn't for that people wouldn't be driven to invest in stocks for retirement, and while the commoners make some money over inflation rates. Crashes like what is happening now routinely wipes that out.

The whole thing is a game of three card Monty, people are distracted by everything moving around and they don't realize it's not a game of skill, it's a grift.

The dealer may loose sometimes, and a person who knows when to walk away may make some money.

But at the end of every day the dealer leaves with more money than they showed up with.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

No, I mean wealth, not just currency.

I think that the world has a functionally infinite amount of wealth because (that is to say, if) it can comfortably support every single person. If we allow it to do that, it can still provide a goal to achieve and something to strive for. If we provide the basics for everyone, the particularly wealthy would still have enough to buy literally anything they want at any time.

For all practical purposes, that's functionally infinite wealth. If you were in charge of an electrical grid, and you were putting more electricity into the system than the people drawing from the grid could use, it wouldn't matter that your production was technically finite. You wouldn't need any more, because no one could use any more. If you tried to produce more, it would just start to break things.

The insistence of a zero-sum game, then, is solely there to allow for hoards to exist.

But actually, I think we're both saying about the same thing here. Inflation is, as you say, a fiction that preserves investment. It is a grift; or, at least, it has been used as an instrument of grift by corporations and individuals that have optimized their function to its whims.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I think that the world has a functionally infinite amount of wealth because (that is to say, if) it can comfortably support every single person

Well, probably the best way to explain that the amount of wealth that exist is the amount it takes for a person to live comfortably, and another way would be the value of the labor that person would produce.

That's why billionaires want everyone to have more kids, it's the only way wealth could be created, more humans to be exploited.

I dunno, I still feel like our intentions are the same.

charge of an electrical grid, and you were putting more electricity into the system than the people drawing from the grid could use, it wouldn’t matter that your production was technically finite. You wouldn’t need any more, because no one could use any more.

And in a just society this would result in things like moving from a 7 to 6 day work week, then down to 5.

As technology allows an individual to be more productive, the result should be they work less.

Instead we're working the same hours we did 100 years ago...

This results in unemployment as there isn't enough work for everyone, and the people at the top accumulate the savings in wages. So they always fight the reduction of personal labor.

But all we need to do to fix it is give people longer weekends, which would be an incredibly popular campaign platform

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago

...smaug was good for business...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 days ago

Well they could

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 days ago

last I checked insustrial scale human halving was extremely unpopular with the populace and generally violates several laws.