• Wilco@lemmy.zip
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    3 hours ago

    He is right.

    Imagine a “billionaire” in the wild: An animal sitting on a vast horde of food that it could never eat while others starved around it … yea, it would not last long.

    Imagine a “billionaire” in a living body. A corporate money making entity would basically be a cancer that had to be removed to save the life of the patient.

  • Et Al@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    Once you go beyond $100,000,000, there is no measurable difference in lifestyle. However, power accumulates. That amount of power shouldn’t be in the hands of so few.

  • Melllvar@startrek.website
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    5 hours ago

    One cannot reign innocently: the insanity of doing so is evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper.

    -Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, 1792

    Or, put in modern terms: There is no such thing as an innocent billionaire.

  • phx@lemmy.ca
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    4 hours ago

    I don’t think we should have the situations and lack of regulation that leads to billionaires, especially as it will likely continue to drain/erode the quality-of-life for everyone else to eventually lead to trillionaires…

  • splonglo@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    The wealth of the rich is still growing and it will continue to grow automatically until the middle class ceases to exist. If we do not take the assets back, it will become impossible for normal working people to ever buy a house, or have any economic power over their own lives at all - nevermind the political control or the media manipulation.

    Extreme wealth concentration is THE biggest issue facing society. Mamdani is absolutely right.

  • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    I agree there is no reason why an individual should have that much economic power. There is no justification for that amount of wealth in so few hands.

  • OpenPassageways@programming.dev
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    9 hours ago

    They could just stop impeding progress and let the working class have things like healthcare and a living wage. Guess that’s too much to ask and they would prefer guillotines?

  • DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    Yeah, we probably shouldn’t have people who horde so much wealth it negatively affects the economy.

  • Sunflier@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    It’s not that we shouldn’t have billionaires. Its that we have billionaires when we have people living on the streets because the rent is so ridiculous. Its that we have people dying on the streets because they cannot afford health insurance. The gravy on the shit-fest is that billionaires are actively bribing the politicians to prevent those policies from being implemented. That is the textbook recipe for guillotines.

  • HubertManne@piefed.social
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    13 hours ago

    Even the billionaires would be better off without billinaires. It their relative ranking was the same they would still have more money than they could spend but it would now come with clean air, water, land, better infrastructure, a healthier world, happier people to interact with.

    • plyth@feddit.org
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      9 hours ago

      What do the billionaires buy that pollutes nature that much?

      The pollution comes from millions of cars, chemicals for products like clothing and intense agriculture so that everybody can eat some form of meat.

      Billionaires allow us to feel helpless while we could agree with our neighbors to reduce the ecological footprint of society to a minimum.

      • brendansimms@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        The pollution comes from millions of cars, an industry forced on the people through decades of lobbying and bribery to eliminate the possibility of free public transportation, so that they could become richer. The pollution comes from products for clothing that are made cheaply as possible - at the cost of the environment - and extreme amounts of ad campaigns that purposefully change contemporary fashion ideals in order to keep fast turnaround on product and maximize profit so that they can become richer. Agriculture is corrupted by the rich so that it gets government subsidies in addition to maximizing profits by basing crop choice on profitability instead of sustainability, disregarding native species and planting unfathomably large fields of monocultures, squeezing the farmers themselves and funneling all the money to agri-business execs, i.e. they can become richer. Then they run ad campaigns saying ‘everyone needs to do their part to save the environment!’ which is clearly bullshit when the system itself is made to maximize profit, and not to maximize caring for the earth. Polluting the earth is profitable, and the profits flow ever upward.

      • HubertManne@piefed.social
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        9 hours ago

        Im not saying that. Its the wealth inequality that stunts society. People don’t have the resources to make decisions based on whats best and have to deal with what they can afford. Lack of infrastructure and regulators results in more pollution.