I don’t know how many Marxist/Dem Socialists we have on FC, but there’s a convo I want to have (rather in person but):

It’s presented by Bernie/Zoran/etc that there needs to be zero billionaires because their wealth should be redistributed.

I heard someone else say “what if everyone was a billionaire?” 

I don’t think either are going to happen exactly (no billionaires vs all billionaires), but the decision sets if you make one or the other as the GOAL is fascinating, and I’d love to have that convo with people of many different viewpoints!

Under ideal conditions where everyone has opportunity to gain/lose money, I’d have no problem with billionaires.  But our current environment means that billionaires can (and do!) make the rules for loss and gain, so they can’t really be dethroned.

I think a sane solution to this is to limit the wealth of any one entity (person, company).  There are lots of issues with this solution, but I still think it’s for the best.

Startup artist seeking inspiration.  Champion of /bcard

What if the current environment is not static and there is the possibility of a different environment.

This conversation is not about now, it’s about where do we want to go:

Door A: make goal to redistribute wealth and likely live in a fixed pie society based on scarcity 

Door B: make goal to create a post-scarcity society where everyone has what they need and, for example, things just don’t cost too much so having more money doesn’t actually get you much more 

Depending on which door we choose, the decision set is very different. Even “limiting wealth” puts us in a decision tree that may “limit cures for cancer” or “limit space travel”

Right now, we are definitely still resource constrained and the cost to generate new energy is high. But people are working on fusion and fission solutions. 

Do we want policy that lets those projects move forward or policy that kills them off?

But let’s say we can generate, cheap, abundant energy in our backyards, which opens up so many doors.

Why does it matter that one person is still trying to accumulate trillions, if trillions and millions and thousands, pretty much buy the same thing.

Why would it matter if someone can go build/buy their own island if everyone has abundant food, shelter, etc.

This conversation is all about what policies do we create that will not allow people to limit access to cheap resources, which do have a race to the bottom (home flatscreen TVs for example).

This is about believing that it is possible to create this and doing policy that puts us on that track, rather than policy that limits for everyone.

I don’t believe that if everything was cheap the average person would actually get it cheap.  We may live in a post-scarcity society already and don’t know it because of artificial distribution constraints for the sake of profit.

Billionaires don’t become billionaires by not optimizing for wealth accumulation.  They aren’t going to stop accumulating wealth because we invent Star Trek replicators.  They will instead race to limit access so they can profit.