• trailing9@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Can we as a society organize and innovate without billionaires? Even China changed their economy to make them possible.

    Right now, writers are on strike. Hollywood workers could invest their time, make movies, and get paid afterwards. But instead, it takes people with money to do the funding.

    How should big sums of money be managed? Bureaucrats work to a certain extend but hardly innovate. Which structure could ask a million people to invest a thousand dollars each and offer ethical profits?

    • UnicodeHamSic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      China needed them because they wanted money from the west. If they hadn’t we would have done a cold war to them long ago and they might not have been strong enough to handle it. Because they had some billionairs we took it easy on them for a while and now they are strong enough to resist our coup attempts. So it wasn’t that the oligarchs class is good for anything. They just needed to be part of our system for self defence.

      • trailing9@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Engineers, scientists and workers need an environment that allows them to innovate. How can we create such an environment without billionaires? Somebody mentioned kickstarter. What is missing that small investors make billionaires irrelevant?

        • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          It boils down to abolishing private ownership of the means of production. The fruits of labour of society must belong to society, not just a handful of people that have been inheriting wealth generation after generation.

          • trailing9@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Does it have to be exclusive? Society right now can own means of production. Cooperatives, joined-stock cooperations or foundations could be used to hold ownership and the fruits of labor could be shared.

            If the majority is not willing to organize labor right now, who could take over the role of billionaires without abusing their position of power?

            • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              who could take over the role of billionaires without abusing their position of power?

              The billionaires abuse their power. The problem of an abusive manager being totally solved is an irrational height to set the bar at.

                • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  Billionaires already represent societal detriments by the very nature of the absurd concentration of wealth into the hands of an individual.

                  Also billionaires tend not to personally manage things, which may be to save time for doing more abuse (see Elon)

          • trailing9@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Who selects and controls the managers? Who motivates people to invest their income to pay the managers?

            A million people have to pool $1000 each to create the equivalent of a billionaire. It could be possible yet it doesn’t happen.

            The trick is that billionaires cannot consume their entire wealth. Thus the economy has free money that looks for opportunities.

            • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              I hate stumbling upon libertarians.

              Taxes. Next question.

              The trick is that billionaires cannot consume their entire wealth. Thus the economy has free money that looks for opportunities.

              This is hopelessly naive. Most of what they do with all that extra money is incestuous money laundering and regulatory capture. There’s no reason to give unaccountable individuals such an absurd level of societal power when it’s not like they “innovated” their wealth from thin air. Take it from the people they otherwise would take it from via, for example, a tax system and you can produce something accountable that can be changed freely by society and won’t buy twitter to force us to read its tweets.

              • trailing9@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                Society already pays many taxes and changing the spending doesn’t happen freely by society.

                Politics have their own disadvantages and billionaires are a complementary way to allocate resources.

                That society can be locked into Twitter shows that taxes shouldn’t be the only source of capital. Every democracy could have created a Twitter clone many years ago as basic infrastructure.

                Like Norway’s wealth fund, many countries could have invested in companies to generate profits and reduce taxes. Instead there are deficits. Politicians rely on society for sustainability whereas billionaires have to identify and improve sustainable forms of income.

                If neither politicians nor billionaires should invest, what would be a good way to identify the people who should?

                • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  Society already pays many taxes and changing the spending doesn’t happen freely by society.

                  Much of what those taxes are currently spent on is utter bullshit for oligarchs

                  billionaires are a complementary way to allocate resources.

                  [citation needed]

                  That society can be locked into Twitter shows that taxes shouldn’t be the only source of capital. Every democracy could have created a Twitter clone many years ago as basic infrastructure.

                  China facilitated conditions for the creation of such clones quite well. America’s cultural imperialism had already dominated Europe anyway and neocolonial infrastructure pushes many third world countries towards western services being synonymous with the internet itself. The market solution is for the dominant power to snowball, with all the problems that entails.

                  Politicians rely on society for sustainability whereas billionaires have to identify and improve sustainable forms of income.

                  This is a joke. Aside from the politicians being bought out by those self-same billionaires, the latter are infamous for making things worse long term (or just in totality) in order to maximize quarterly profits, again see Twitter. They burn money on bribing politicians and institutions and drain society of wealth with various forms of tax fraud while paying hardly a cent for all the infrastructure that they use in wild disproportion to a normal citizen.

                  If neither politicians nor billionaires should invest, what would be a good way to identify the people who should?

                  My point is that it should not be oriented around one person’s executive decisions: Stop looking for a good king. It should be decided democratically or, at the most republican, by a representative who the laws are oriented around preventing the corruption of (no lobbying, PACs of any kind, “campaign donations” from anything but a private citizen, no “gifts” at all, no revolving door employment, no “speaking fees”) who also is subject to a vote of no confidence or some equivalent procedure that allows the citizenry to terminate his term early (and put him on trial, if needed) if they find him to not be acting as he represented that he would. But all of this is to say it the representative should have as little personal agency as possible in day-to-day affairs, merely acting as a laborer performing tasks according to the lines the public wants him to without needing to have the entire citizenry be up-to-date on everything all the time (as they would need to be in a pure democracy).

                  • trailing9@lemmy.ml
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                    1 year ago

                    Even if you manage to establish a clean democracy once, how do you prevent it from being corrupted?

                    The Lemmy migration shows you how small the number of active citizens is.

                    The world has enough places that citizens could organize in the way you describe, despite billionaire opposition. The problem is that humans are not wired that way. We rely on the self interest of sad people who seek solace in their empires to build our civilization.

                    Happy people would spend their time with other happy humans. Nobody really likes the noisance of business. You believe that you can find people who do the work of billionaires without the freedom. I think you won’t find them and you won’t find the ones to control them.

      • trailing9@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        If you had free counter-propaganda resources, how would you structure a socialist alternative and what would you tell the population?