Money, money, money. The artificial middle-man of questionable value that we kill each other over. This is getting embarrassing already. Universal basic income. No-one should lack food, warmth and shelter nowadays, at the very least. Watch progress take off when everyone has a full belly and hope.
this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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Even if you could, you shouldn't want to.
This is the problem that needs to be fixed. As long as we embrace greed we will be ruled by it.
Power. The more you have, the others have less. You are more special with each billion extra.
I just don’t get the point. Felon and bozos have more money than they’ll EVER be able to spend. What is the point of hoarding even more? It makes no sense. I just don’t get it
I think at a certain point it becomes about power and money is just a way they measure it
The hoarding becomes the point. It's a form of psychosis.
This woman for president, enough is enough!
If you pay any of your employees a non-living wage you're not "earning" your billions. You hire someone you're expecting them to show up, but also be well rested, hydrated, clothed, physically healthy, mentally fit, and motivated. They can't be all of those things if you're not compensating them well enough and providing them the flexibility life demands. If your employees depend on government services just so they can show up to work then it's the taxpayers that are padding your pocket, not your own "hard work".
How about Taylor Swift? By all accounts she pays her employees very well. I realize as with any rule there will be exceptions, and I'd say there are a few. Very few.
She's not Mother Teresa, but not an absolute monster either, and just barely a billionaire. Most of that billion is intangible assets, she doesn't literally have $1 billion in her bank account.
It's hard to hate or speak against someone like that when they're so insulated and it's not clear how much class consciousness they even have. At the same time, someone like that could obviously do more.
Most of Taylor Swift's wealth comes from the record label, not her employees' labor. UMG certainly is a mega corporation that monopolizes the industry and is valued at tens of billions of dollars currently.
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It's big that she said this. It's a big political risk.
It's common knowledge here, but certainly not everywhere it needs to be.
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Here's the relevant quote from the article:
“You can’t earn a billion dollars,” Ocasio‑Cortez said. “You just can’t earn that. You can get market power. You can break rules. You can do all sorts of things. You can abuse labor laws. You can pay people less than what they’re worth. But you can’t earn that.”
The word "billionaire" exists because "slave owner" had a negative connotation.
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About the only billionaires that I might excuse are artists, who take a blank page, or a black canvas, and write song, or a book, or create some work of art out of their thin air, using only the ideas in their head. If they can create something out of their head, and get enough people pay them for it, then they deserve the money.
The problem is, in order to transfer than money from the fan to the artist, especially in massive amounts, it usually takes some gargantuan corporation that does all the exploiting on the part of the artist.
So while the artist wasn't exploitive in the creation of his art, his distribution company that collected the money for him, certainly was.
IMO, I think that artists, like any other person, should have wealth and income limits imposed on them. No one should be rich enough to buy influence, and artists would be especially dangerous if they had mogul money and the ability to popularize ideas through their works. JK Rowling, Ronald Reagan, Kanye West, Alex Jones, and others come to mind.
The answer isn't to make artists rich, but rather to eliminate poverty and provide a baseline of living that allows anybody to succeed at life.
Valid.
No one deserves to be a billionaire. Most artists are not wealthy in their lifetime. In fact, most art is never even sold. It is so strange that we are so addicted to money that saying an artist deserves billions makes sense to people.
I didn't say that artists deserve to be billionaires. I said that if an artist writes a song, and enough people buy that song to make him a billionaire, at he hasn't done it by exploiting thousands of workers, and keeping profits that should have been shared with those workers. He got rich because people were willing to buy his ideas.
However, I also acknowledged while his side of the process may be exploitation-free, the side that actually distributes that song in the marketplace is NOT exploitation-free.
I'm not excusing any billionaires, I'm just saying there's a big difference between wealthy artists, and people whose business was conceived with exploitation baked into the business plan from the start.
Most actors and singers aren't successful just because they have talent, it's because they have the right connections in Hollywood.
This. And nearly no artist makes big money on art unless a.) they die first or b.) it's some BS "modern art" paint splattered on a page made for the explicit purpose of being purchased by a bazillion are and "donated" to a museum so they can make a huge tax write off. (Read: used to dodge taxes)
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How many artists are actually billionaires? It's a lot of difference from being a millionare
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Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
Sure you can. You just have to figure out a way to live for 10,000 years.
I couldn't access the site with protonvpn but removepaywalls fixed it.
You can't move up that high financially and be a honest person. Some people do get lucky by having a great idea or business model at the right time. What keeps them there is they can look around at others struggling and justify "I deserve this more." Than continue to exploit as much as they can to keep it.
i think notch is the epitome of "getting lucky". He made a game he loved, MS bought it for billions and now he's sitting pretty doing whatever the fuck he wants.
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