With elections that monied interests can no longer purchase and disproportionately propagandize with their essentially limitless power/capital.
They have politicians work against the people, then buy enough ad propaganda to convince people that was a good decision in their interests without that, politicians would rise and fall moreso on what they do in office.
We are the weird ones in the developed world for allowing unlimited private money to pollute our politics, elections, and even buy sitting politicians though legalized political bribery superpacs. It got this way because of the influence of the wealth class being allowed in the first place using that in to expand its own power and ability to bribe, culminating in Citizens United.
I think our eventual collapse will be tied directly to that SCOTUS decision.
Which is why the absurdity of letting someone accumulate a billion dollar plus discrepancy is so glaring.
There won’t be because the game is already rigged, over, captured, and hoplesss, but there needs to be a maximum net worth at which point the winners of the economy’s excess wealth is siphoned away to benefit the society that provided the conditions for that success in the first place. YOU WON! Now go enjoy having enough wealth to live 100 embarrassingly gluttonous lifetimes while we use the excess millions and billions to build Schools you can send your kids to and roads you can drive your collection of multimillion dollar supercars on. I know, I know, that would be eviiil and crueeel. A real victimization amirite? /s
Why is it a tragedy if the maximum wealth one person can hold is half a billion? Or better 100 million? They won’t want to keep “excelling” and working? Awesome, makes room for people without that kind of money to succeed.
There’s a damn good reason in game design why you NEED to have drains and hard limits and maximums in any multiplayer economy. The game would fucking break or leave players miserable. But not here irl where there are actual stakes. Nope.
I love how so many of them demand love and acclaim for claiming they will give their money away… when they die.
You want me to sing your praises because you won’t use the money you made exploiting countless laborers and lobbying government to benefit yourself above society to anoint a handful of nepo babies to wield that power after you as some part of a new nepo dynasty? Gee thanks?
Its like a serial killer promising not to train his children in the family business. Its not doing good, just doing slightly less bad. Except billionaires cause damage on a far greater scale.
I mean when wealth reaches levels beyond material comfort, needs, and wants, when it becomes easy to warp society. Billionaire’s lifestyles doesn’t change AT ALL between 1 billion and 2, its about expanding power. That is what capital becomes at those levels.
Politicians swoon over you for “donations” (bribes), you begin to see regulations over the industry you exploit your profit from as amendable through lobbyists you can hire to represent your interests over society. Meanwhile that billionaire’s factory workers, customers concerned with product safety, our shared commons, and our communal environment have no advocates with such massive influence to counter them, when the needs of the many shouldn’t just balance the needs of the interests of the wealthy few at the top, they should far outweigh them. As it is, its the other way around. The billionaires have the resources to take care of themselves and protect themselves, most of society does not.
No one should have enough wealth to have more influence over society than your single vote allows. If you want more power, that should come by selling your ideas to society that votes on them by putting you into a political office, with ALL of the rules and accountability that comes with that office.
The White House and Senate often invites the billionaires of industries to be the authority on how those industries should be regulated, and it’s perverse. The Foxes advising on hen house security.
Say what you will about Sauron of Mordor, but at the end of the day he was just acting in rational self-interest, making big moves, was all in on expansion and growth, and no one can argue he was a hell of a job creator.
Then some jobless tree hugger from a commune in the woods killed him AND destroyed his private property just because Sauron wanted to develop that land and put those communists to work. Damn eco-terrorists sabotaging progress.
Fair, though I more meant the people who are effective asexuals because they were taught to be ashamed of sexuality in general and deny any sexual desire they have with vigorous effort to feel “pure.”
That’s a whole lot different than someone who just doesn’t really have those impulses. The former is an act and they have my pity because of how such people are usually raised/abused to be in a constant state of conflict and hatred of their own impulses, the latter is a completely valid identity.
As humanity has found yet another way to pass the buck, it’ll be interesting to see the diminishing returns of LLMs as they begin to feed more and more on derivative content made by LLMs.
I take pity on Japan as the only nation on Earth to fully internalize grind culture as their source of existential meaning to an even more toxic degree than the United States.
If they didn’t exist, I probably would deem such a thing unsustainably improbable, but there it is.
To be clear, I’m not referring to places where the poor are exploited to work even longer hours at more physically brutal jobs for basic survival, I’m talking about self proclaimed “developed” nations whose citizens are indoctrinated to proudly jump into the productivity volcano as some kind of honor/life’s purpose/sense of identity in itself, and who wouldn’t have it any other way.
Just as with climate change, they’ll just keep shifting back and forth between “but there’s nothing wrong” to “it’s too expensive to implement this solution” to “Just give us a few years, we’ll come up with something better” in order to derail the argument because the point is to maintain the status quo.
The poorer the poorest are, the richer the wealth class feels by comparison. Inequality, separating the capital society generates from said society into the owner class’s private accounts, is the entire point of capitalism.
Why would capitalists want to mitigate the central social ill they literally engineered for their explicit, sole benefit?