• Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    You could confiscate 99.9% of the wealth of the top 100 richest people in the world, and they would all still be wealthier than 99% of the world’s population.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      This ignores a few other components.

      People in structures doing actual evil don’t need to be rich themselves. They are fine with using their masters’ property or power to feed their own ego. And a lot of what happens using those can’t be directly controlled by said masters, but is accepted as normal side effect.

      Confiscation of wealth is not enough. Borders and passages should be erected again where they have eroded, for individual freedom, including that of speech, individual property rights, and individual responsibility mirroring those. And impediments, like legal formalism, fear of responsibility, and cuckold culture of spectators getting their dopamine dose by reacting to posts in social media instead of action, should be cleared out.

      That wealth is a symptom, not the core issue. The core issue is that societies are vulnerable to said cuckoldry.

      It’s not “capitalism”. The way Jeff Bezos accumulated his power has the “capitalism” component much proportionally smaller than that in your honest earnings. “Capitalism” is a (not the worst in existence) system with rules for you, while for Jeff it’s a much more general system with no clear rules, the cloak and dagger macchiavellian stuff, the way Soviet elite power dynamics worked.