Can’t shake the feeling that swapping panels 1 and 3 would make more sense.
Clockwise from bottom left maybe
i think any order would work
3 2 1 then 4
That is the exact same thing…
the amount of billionaire taint licking in this post is depressingly high.
the hilarious thing about these apologists is that the majority of the 1% wouldn’t even piss on them if they were on fire. we are beneath them.
the hilarious thing about these apologists is that the majority of the 1% wouldn’t even piss on them if they were on fire. we are beneath them.
You’re 100% wrong and you should ask the burned and executed corpses of the original BLM organizers if they were beneath notice.
No, no, we can’t be mean to the rich, that will upset them 🥺
Yes, kill them, by taxing them out of existence.
This would be ideal but I’m skeptical that it’s actually possible. Bribes are cheaper than taxes, so I think they’d likely just prevent the taxes from happening by greasing the correct palms.
Well yeah, that’s exactly what’s happened for at least the past 50 years. In 1968 corporations were paying 53% of their profits in taxes, and billionaires were paying 94% around that time! Btw, if you’re making billions, paying 94% still leaves you richer than most…
Contrast that to today, where the system is so obviously broken during a time when Amazon is paying less in total taxes than a fry cook at McDonald’s.
It would need to be done with actually no loopholes, and meaningful enforcement of consequences for those who would try to cheat (perhaps the guillotine).
one big issue is everyone goes “you can’t tax stocks!” and then billionaires take a loan against the stocks with the unrealized gains as collateral. So we’d need to start classifying a loan as a realized gain of the collateral against this, with an exception for mortgages on primary domiciles, maybe also a “first million dollars are exempt,” calculated on the full debt of the borrower, not per loan. I can’t imagine anyone taking out more than $1M in debt against a properly they don’t live in is not the rich we need to be taxing.
Yeah. Virtually anything with an exception for the first million dollars will both lose almost no tax revenue (as a percentage), and never ever touch the rest of us temporarily embarrassed not-quite-yet-billionaires.
That’s an insightful point, and honestly taxing those loans as realized gains sounds entirely reasonable. It’s good for the lenders because of reduced risk, it’s good for the rich because it keeps them honest, and it’s good for the public because we gain increased tax revenue from those who can most afford it. Nice!
Contrast that to today, where the system is so obviously broken during a time when Amazon is paying less in total taxes than a fry cook at McDonald’s.
Wait…by percentage, or by dollar amount?
Mostly by percentage, but I wouldn’t be surprised for the other one.
Dollar amount for some markets and some years - big corps do accounting magic and end up net negative, which they can calculate against profits in another fiscal year under some circumstances, paying 0% tax
Don’t they already just avoid paying taxes by not having a salary and just using bank loans or something? So they have no actual money in the bank
I think people would be okay with taxing them away, as well. It could be fine to give an either-or option to each billionaire, even.
10% off (of their bodies)
they will just come up with another new deal to temporarily calm us down.
then work on better propaganda to keep us submissive in the meantime.
Who will do this? Trump? Kamala? Superman?
This is not the way…
Every healthy society requires a robust guillotine maintenance capability, ideally across all competencies.
I’m for giving them a choice. The guillotine or we take away their money and make them work a minimum pay position in one of their factories for the rest of their lives. I’m pretty sure they would take the guillotine after a week.
Billionaires use violence all the time to get what they want. Just because they hide behind layers of abstraction that they’ve set up, doesn’t mean they aren’t using violence.
Don’t tease me like this.
Why does the proletariat, the largest class, not simply eat the bougouise?
Actually doing this would not only be immoral but just treat the symptoms of the downfalls of capitalism, not the cause. We need legislative change that has a proper social safety net, not violence LARPing.
In a perfect world, that would be ideal. But for at least 50 years, capital has been buying the legislators and we’re backsliding even further from positive change. Without the threat, there’s no reason for them to let things change for the better for the rest of us.
This whole populism trend is concerning to me. I agree that some folks are more responsible than others for the problems we face today. Even so, singling out and blaming a small group of people for the problems we face, then punishing them with legislation, is not the most productive way forward. We need real, serious solutions. “Get rid of X” rarely, if ever, works.
“rarely”: so you admit sometimes the solution is “get rid of X” ? Then why would “get rid of billionaires” not be a solution for you ? To be clear I’m not saying we should kill them or physically hurt them in any way, we can simply reappropriate their wealth turning them into non-billionaire, also making it illegal for anyone to be a billionaire in the future. Why would that not work in your opinion ?
What we need to think about is how this works practically. A billionaire isn’t someone with a billion dollars in their bank account: it’s someone with a 50% share in a business with a market cap of $2bn. How do we address that fairly?
Now I’d say that a business with a certain level of profitability owes something to its employees, such that very few businesses would reach that level of capitalisation.
I don’t see the issue, if we say 1 billion is too much (I would choose a lower maximum personally) if their wealth in any way or form is above the max, they have to sell a house or some asset, society in the form of the government (or whathever is in place) take the money to be used for public interest project. It’s really not that punishing, they would literally be the richest people, and they would still have plenty of money/asset to enjoy life. They don’t need more.
No, fuck X. Get rid of it.
You don’t need a mechanized execution machine to kill three people. You need it to kill the crowd of people.
And historically that’s what it was used for. It was used BY the rich AGAINST the poor.
It was pretty much just one of the options used for death penalty from what I understand. Then there’s the revolution bit but otherwise it was a state execution method used as late as 1977.
This whole “kill the rich” thing is counterproductive and needs to stop. Advocating for murder has never been cool.
I respectfully disagree.
The ultra-rich aren’t shy about killing you or your loved ones if it makes them an extra million. There are exceptions, but they’re definitely not the rule.
Tit for tat. We’re absolutely in a class war and the owner class has been winning for three or four consecutive decades. The inequality in society was lower during the French revolution than it is now. Hell, the pay Scrooge gave out in the old tale was more than minimum wage is today adjusted for inflation.
I’m not saying we need violence, but I am saying we need the threat of violence for these kind of people to do their part. No one needs a billion dollars, let alone a trillion.
I also respectfully disagree. Tit for tat, taken to its logical conclusion, eradicates all life on the planet; if that’s your goal, fine, you can make that argument, but that’s ultimately a separate discussion. There were literal slaves and serfs around the time of the French Revolution—now you could make an argument that “wage slaves” or whatever exist in the first world, but that is pure abstraction when compared to the absolute widespread human suffering in France during the late 1700s. You would have to be entirely disconnected from reality to think that people, en masse, have it worse in first world countries than they did in France during the 1700s; that’s a “log off” moment, for sure. If you want to expand the scope to the world at large, then, yeah, there is some fucked up stuff going on, and people (millionaires, billionaires, &c. &c.) do hoard wealth, but murdering them is not the solution; that won’t even do anything to their accumulated wealth, as most of it is tied up in corporate assets; instead, harsh regulation needs to be enacted on the system that allows these people to accumulate obscene amounts of wealth. But instead, we have these very surface level takes that are just like “kill the billionaires”, which solves nothing and actually makes our side look insane, which hurts our cause—frankly, its stupid. Now, if you want to alter the claim to “the threat of violence is needed,” then I would be more inclined to agree; however, individually murdering certain billionaires is not productive; I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to match whatever vitriolic bullshit eye for an eye sentiment that these billionaires might have, and maybe that’s an idealistic take and naive, but it feels right.
have it worse in first world countries than they did in France during the 1700s
In absolute terms? Definitely not. The lowliest “unskilled” worker today has vastly more amenities than even a 17th century nobleman could even dream of.
In relative terms, however? The ultra-rich robbed you, me and every single other person on this planet. And to this you may retort that you do not care about wealth and are content with what you have. I would applaud such an answer, but it would be besides the point. What we’ve been systematically robbed of, is our time. Years, decades that could be spent enjoying your lives with our loved ones, instead spent slaving away at a desk or in a factory only to make the few who have everything even more. That, to me, is absolutely unforgivable, especially since I’ve long since past my physical prime and am still being robbed of this time against my will.
Now, if you want to alter the claim to “the threat of violence is needed,” then I would be more inclined to agree; however, individually murdering certain billionaires is not productive;
Again, I disagree. There are about ~2700 billionaires on earth out of ~8 billion people. Killing half of them and having that wealth redistributed would solve more problems than it would create. But if I do that, I’m thinking like said billionaires.
Which is the only way to fight them. If you try the moral and legal route, you won’t stand a chance because you’ll be fighting within systems and rulesets they have created to give themselves every (unfair) benefit.
Sometimes the disgruntled worker who shanks the boss is the hero we need.
Very idealistic to think that the redistribution of all that money wouldn’t just cause mass inflation! Also, mot of the money is tied up in companies. They don’t just have the money lying around. There would be no one to buy all these assets. I get the sentiment, that they make money from the work of their employees. At some point companies become to big to fail but when someone is starting a business the personal risks and investment someone takes to grow a company also should be respected.
We don’t produce nearly enough for everyone to be get fully all the things they rely on while barely anyone works. Thats not how the economy would end up working. We need a social safety net, so no complete free market which is toxic but as much as I dislike some billionaires your proposal is just not realistic and fantizises violence without accomplishing anything
“killing half the billionaires and redistributing their wealth”
Are we on the same planet right now? How are you going to do that? And if you kill them, how are you to ensure their wealth is redistributed properly, not just funneled back into their corporate shell company or their equally immoral families? The measure you’re proposing here requires a total overhaul of the system that is more unrealistic than a measured overhaul into more overall socialist systems of general wealth redistribution. I get that billionaires do harm to the planet and I get that that makes you, me, angry. but what you’re proposing here is just straight up murder and it’s unrealistic; It’s even more unrealistic than, say, everybody voting for a socialist and the systems entirely overhauled except you are adding extra steps of just killing all the billionaires on top of it. What I’m ultimately concerned about is the left going online and just saying kill billionaires while sitting in front of their computers doing literally nothing, making all of us look like psychopaths thus hurting our cause due to clear and obvious LARPing.
but it’s obvious to me that I’m not going to change your mind. you can sit around and LARP on Lemmy all day, if you want, that’s fine. Ultimately, in an hour, I won’t care that we even had his conversation. I’m not going to change your mind, so this is going to be my last post regarding this subject, because I’m not going to change anybody’s mind on a far left leaning Lemmy community. I’m sorry I even posted my opinion.
I just wanted to say thank you for voicing a clear, coherent rebuttal of the knee-jerk, emotional “kill 'em” reactions we see so much. You’re right that most who post that sort of thing are LARPing, and I really hope it’s just a way to let off steam, but I worry that someone might try to carry out the threat, and do incalculable harm to the left in the process.
Despite the downvotes, you are correct.
It’s asinine to even consider that a billionaire doesn’t have a will, let alone how awful it is to threaten a life.
They’d just be dealing with a younger, more entitled billionaire, who now wants to get revenge on the people that murdered their parent or benefactor. See Lachlan Murdoch, Charles Koch, any of the Waltons, etc. for example.
You’re being empathic towards people who have no empathy for you.
How is recognizing the financial failsafes of billionaires empathetic? I’m employing logic.
Did you miss the entire point of my comment because I also condemned taking a life?
People are killed daily not so indirectly by billionaires. Overpriced medicine, Military industry, Unhealthy products, Monopolization of water and other resources and land, poisoning ground water with industrial waste, unsafe work conditions, the list is endless.
There is almost no billionaire that isnt responsible for someones death and in a moral world they would be in prison. So morals are already completely out of the window.
Not every billionaire built their life doing something unethical. Killing them wouldn’t make you any better. People also fuel monopolies out of convenience even if they have a choice to act ethical. We should strive for legislative change. The billionaire might be the owner of parts of a company, but we as a society use the services for our daily lives. What economic system that actually works also supports free ideas, innovation and the willingness to perform other than something based on capitalism (Communism never worked and doesn’t reward it properly). Treating symptoms won’t treat the cause. We need legislative change.
If you were a slave and I was your master, would killing me be murder?
…yes? But, as all people and legal systems agree, there are times when murder is legal and endorsed.
Such as in wartime. And this is war, but most people are far too blind to see this.
Are you a literal slave? If you play with meaning, you can turn everyone into a slave and kill everyone. Is that what you want?
Are you a vegetarian? Just curious.
vegan, actually.
There ya go. Carry on then.
I respect life? sorry?
They intended to “gotcha” but you dodged.
I prefer “eat the rich” as a metaphor for seizing their assets, not a literal endorsement of cannibalism. I’m actually surprised how many people literally mean “kill the rich”. Are you guys actual sociopaths?
I’m actually surprised (not really) how many people can come this close to getting it, but still be so desperate to follow the rules they’ve set (E: where they can directly and indirectly kill millions a year for profit with impunity, but we’re not allowed to even say nasty things about them, never mind plan to fight back against them, without being considered dangerous terrorists), that you manage to convince yourself billionaires will just freely and willingly give over those assets and all of the power that comes with them one day once we’ve asked nicely enough… 🙄
I don’t think asset seizure going to be easy, but it’s going to be significantly more effective and safer for everyone than staging a new French Revolution.
If you’re truly advocating for murder on the internet (are you?), I don’t think there’s any point in trying to change your mind. I’m not “this close” to getting it — I already got it and rejected it.
OK why don’t you go kill some billionaires then, instead of just fantasizing about it on the internet? Good luck and godspeed.
I suspect this happens far more than you think. They just have amazing security details.
Nah, some of us just see that they buy the elections so that we can’t vote for change. And they buy the judges so we can’t sue for change. And they buy the media so we can’t speak for change. So now we’re exploring the extremely distasteful option because all other avenues for change have been blocked
Lots of folks here are 100% for violence against anyone they disagree with.
Yeah, I’ve been finding myself arguing with zealots more and more on Lemmy. This is really not a healthy community. I hope it’s some form of keyboard warrior syndrome and not the way these people behave in the real world.
almost tempted to make an alt account and then post a thread in the politics community titled something like, “planning to k*ll B!ll g@tes; any help would be appreciated” (i would work on the title to make it believable, of course). but you know what would happen; i would get banned. because this whole “k!ll the rich” thing is performative, i.e. misguided virtue signalling. and it’s all very very immature.
I’ll take some of your money then, I’m sure you won’t mind considering how well-off you are (and how blind you are to those of us less fortunate). Oh, you don’t want me to do that? If only there was some system, some measure of equality, some safety from poverty, a safety net for those that got dealt a shit hand and are juuuuust treading water… while fuckwads buy their second Bugatti this month.
So for now, off with their heads. A few rolling away and they will come up with something real quick.
Nah man. I know cool.
Whoever made this needs help, murder is not good
Slaying dragons is self defense and defense of others, not murder.
Please don’t slander dragons by associating them with the filthy rich human cretins
I kind of agree with this type of objection. But note that the instrument of death is a guillotine. That hearkens back to a time of radical societal change, the French Revolution.
Additionally guillotines were seen as a more humane method of execution than the hangings and manual beheading of pre-Enlightenment France.
But also note that 99% of the victims of the guillotine during the French revolution were innocent commoners, most of the nobility escaped abroad long before the reign of terror started, and the final victim of the terror was the guy who had been in charge of it.
It’s called political satire.
I can imagine you’re a fucking blast at parties.
Seems like the people in the comments are rather fond of the idea
It’s hard to tell. Satire is usually funny. #justaprankbro
have you thought that maybe this joke wasn’t for you?
#dontquityourdayjob
There’s an air of truth to that in that, I want them to be tortured first. Don’t build the wood pyres so high at the start. Make sure the fire slowly creeps up to their vital organs. We should also flash scenes of violence and poverty caused by their actions into their retinas as they boil into greedy little pools of charred carbon.
To answer the question you’re thinking, like a baby, every night. Zero issues.
Billionaires murder millions.
I like how you think this is a realistic scenario.
If you ever scoffed at the word ‘ableism’ observe it here being used as a weapon
The classic lemmy response:
“its not about the murder it’s symbolic of revolution”
“um it’s satire”
“murder is good sometimes”
all in reply to one comment
I’m sure in a future thread we’ll get a comment saying something like:
“No one on Lemmy is saying we should murder billionaires”
I am absolutely saying that, feel free to quote me.
Killing billionaires is both immoral and won’t solve the problem. We need to kill the capitalist system that allows people to become billionaires.
Do you think billionaires operate in a moral fashion? That their journey was one paved to the top by the ethical treatment of others?
Perhaps we need a new morality because I find that operating inside of prescribed moral bounds is shooting yourself in the foot when making this particular kind of argument.
You operate morally, they use every dirty trick in the book, including killing you.
Just because some of them indirectly kill people doesn’t make it moral to kill them. Maybe if it actually would make the world better, you could have a utilitarian argument for it, but as long as you just kill individual billionaires and not creating a new socialist system they’ll just be replaced by new billionaires. As I said, regardless of whether it’s moral to kill them, it won’t help.
All of them indirectly kill people. It’s impossible to be a billionaire and a moral person, as a moral person would spend that wealth to improve the lives of others. You can say that “oh but this billionaire runs a charity!”, but how much of their own wealth do they give to it? Would a moral billionaire rely on the money of others to make change in the world? Would they still be a billionaire if they truly wanted change?
Just to be clear, you don’t need to convince me there are no moral billionaires.
Maybe if it actually would make the world better, you >could have a utilitarian argument
I have no doubt it would make the world better if you kill them and distribute their money (in minecraft) to I don’t know social housing, public hospitals and schools (not claiming they will be used with %100 efficiency or %100 ethically but will be orders of magnitudes better than what billionaires are doing with them in maybe all cases). If it turns out to be a billionaire whose businesses we are currently addicted to (not gonna name names but you know), then there will be a period of inconvenience but we will get over it and adapt.
Obviously redistributing their wealth would be good. Killing them doesn’t automatically give you their wealth to redistribute, and redistributing without killing them is also a possibility you seem to be ignoring.
What if we don’t kill them, but just rob them instead?
- The moderate lemming
🤣
yes fair point. I am also ok to give them the following choices:
1- live in a poor country with minimum wage with no opportunity to change jobs and a wealth cap (your annual earnings from other sources should be comparable to annual earnings of a minimal wage job). I have the feeling that after a couple months they will commit suicide. for billionaires directly affiliated with arms companies, this should be a country which was recently a war zone.
2- trial by combat. no wait that is game of thrones got confused.
This extra punishment’s purpose should be to act as a deterrant
It will absolutely solve the problem,.
People dont want to die > People stop doing things that make others want to kill them > Success
It might have many unintended negative and positive consequences but you wont have any more billionaires very quickly if people literally killed anyone as soon as they amassed more than 1 billion dollars.
It would basically result in a voluntary 100% tax of anything over 1 billion because they dont want to die.
Sadly it will never happen because too many people would die in the process of getting there by the hands of people easily influenced by the billionaires money. (i.e. Police, Private Military, etc) But just a few martyrs would go a long way already and USAmericans have lots of guns.
All of this ofcourse only In Minecraft TM
Got it death penalty for all crimes
Well no, the answer should be prison, but the system is obviously corrupt because they are not in prison. If the system doesnt imprison criminals then sometimes the systems need to be circumvented.
It will absolutely solve the problem,.
People dont want to die > People stop doing things that make others want to kill them > Success
Edit if y’all don’t see how I’m being sarcastic, and this reply is about how the death penalty does not deter crime, I don’t know what to tell ya.
You can’t change the system while they own it and you can’t jail them when they own the prisons as well as the ones that should be putting them there.
What do you suggest?
Well, non violent seizing of the means via unionizing and community action via grassroots electorate driven by transparent mutual aid.
But once you sign on to get the executions starting, you better hope you’re in the “in group” all along. Else the violence will eventually come for you (not you you, hypothetical anyone)
And back to my point, the death penalty will just make them crafty, it won’t stop greed.
Okay so once you’ve non violently seized the means, and they come to violently take them back, then what?
Rust my bolts and call me the tin man, 'cause I’m standing next to the biggest strawman of the century, and he still has no brain. Dorothy’s probably on her way any second.
Sarcasm my dude.
Death penalty doesn’t reduce crime.
What I’m calling out is that the comment laid out the blueprint for authoritarian extrajudicial killings, they just don’t get it.
And that’s fair. I think, though, that they were pointing out that the violence in that case would be mob violence from the hypothetical revolution, not actually at the behest of an authoritarian ruler. The death penalty is not involved. They seemed to be arguing that, at some point, the measurable and visible harm a person or small number of people does or do to the world by their continued practices, combines with the risk of them using their power and influence to escape from justice should any real attempt be made to force them to reconcile with their crimes, and that this inability to enforce justice without death, combined with the inherent injustice of doing nothing, could be the fomenting factor for mob violence against such tyrants.
And billionaires are going to, what, just let us kill the system they run and are the primary beneficiaries of? Get your tongue out of the taint and look at the dying planet you’re on that they’re making.
The problem is that the billionaires perpetuate the system that supports them, and they effectively have all the power.
And hoarding money that would provide housing, food, and medicine while people are dying or barely living paycheck to paycheck for the lack of those things isn’t immoral? Lick the boot harder. They might give you a fucking dîme.
What? No, why would you assume those things about me. There are no ethical billionaires.
Hey, it doesn’t all have to be work, work, work. Some fun is in order too.
Oh OK we’ll just do that then
The problem is coming up with a solution to give us the advances (Tesla successfully made electric cars desirable, inspiring other companies to make them too, before Musk went and showed everyone how shit he is; SpaceX are the cheapest launch provider) but prevents the person who owns the company from owning the wealth it produces, and inspires those people to try
Neither Tesla nor SpaceX would exist either if Musk had not been able to take a large share of the sale of PayPal
The obvious way is preventing them from passing ownership and assets to their children, so let one person be ultra wealthy but not their successors (to keep from owning companies, government could sell off whatever shares it acquired) but good luck getting that sort of law up with billions of dollars against you
Now this guy worry about what’s immoral. How about hoarding wealth off the backs of labor, is that immoral?
Of course. However killing billionaires is still immoral if there are peaceful solutions to redistributing the wealth, and useless if the act of killing them doesn’t magically redistribute the wealth fairly (it doesn’t)
What’s your larger point? Why hedge with “killing billionairs is immoral” instead of just saying what you really mean.
What do you think I really mean? Killing anyone, including billionaires, is unethical. Maybe it could be justified in a utilitarian sense if it was guaranteed to lead to wealth redistribution and there was no other way, but even that isn’t the case.
Do you understand why people use of the phrase “eat the rich” or their threats to bring out guillotines? Do you understand the historic relevance and the iconography. To me, if you did, there would be no reason to make the misguided statement, “that’s immoral.” Other than to create subterfuge.
if there are peaceful solutions to redistributing the wealth
But that’s the whole point, there aren’t any.
The whole idea of being able to tax them fairly and properly is merely a pacifier so the people think they have a chance. And while they hope something might change, the rich actually use their power, money and influence to rig the system in a way that ensure they’ll never have to pay their fair share.
There’s no peaceful solution to the unethical and violent accumulation of wealth
Okay point to a success doing it your way.
Have you read the Jakarta Method?
No, but neither ways have succeeded, we still live in capitalist system. I’d prefer to try a method that doesn’t involve unnecessary killing and suffering.
i need you to answer the question I asked instead of spouting off about things you could easily know better about if you did some investigation into the topic.
but neither ways have succeeded
And you’re 100% wrong on this point. The other way has proven to work again and again. But only ever after your way fails and kills a shitload of innocent people. Just to say it explicitly: Every single violent revolution that has ever occurred on this earth began as a peaceful protest that was forced to become violent to protect themselves.
