this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
2083 points (96.6% liked)
Lefty Memes
4352 readers
455 users here now
An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
Serious posts, news, and discussion go in c/Socialism.
If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.
Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, updooting good contributions and downdooting those of low-quality!
Rules
0. Only post socialist memes
That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)
1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here
Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.
2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such
That means condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.
3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries.
That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).
4. No Bigotry.
The only dangerous minority is the rich.
5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.
(if you are reading the rules to apply for modding this community, mention "Mantic Minotaur" when answering question 2)
6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals.
Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
- Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:
- Racism
- Sexism
- Queerphobia
- Ableism
- Classism
- Rape or assault
- Genocide/ethnic cleansing or (mass) deportations
- Fascism
- (National) chauvinism
- Orientalism
- Colonialism or Imperialism (and their neo- counterparts)
- Zionism
- Religious fundamentalism of any kind
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Most of their billions is ownership in companies they grew into what they are today. It's not like they have billions to spend, it's that their ownership is worth billions according to the market.
While that may be technically true, is running defense for these people who would happily see you and everone you care about die if it would make them another buck really something you want to be doing?
I don't mind defending what I see as theft, even if it's from people I don't like. Is it crazy to defend something you see as wrong even if you don't like the person? I don't think right and wrong changes based on if the act is being done to someone I like vs don't like
Why is theft inhereintly wrong? Would you see Robin Hood as the villain of his story? It's not a matter of whether you like them or not, their exorbitant wealth is a bad thing in of itself. Why should they sit on so much wealth when most have so little?
Do you mind if I steal your property? Would that be wrong? Or is it fine as long as I'm poorer than you?
The difference is between private property and personal property. Private property is the means of production that produce wealth by extracting a profit margin from the labor of the workers that operate that means. Seizing private property is just democratizing the ownership of it between all the workers that use it, because you can't really steal a corporation or a factory, just change ownership. Seizing personal property is taking someone's toothbrush or car or books.
Stealing ownership is still stealing though. You are suggesting we steal personal ownership in a company, ownership which is only worth a certain amount because the stock market says it is.
It's not like they're going to just give it up. Do you think that the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few people is a good thing? Is it a good thing that billionaires get to waste money shooting off rockets while so many people go without a roof over their head?
Wealth in this case is ownership in companies that have a massive worldwide presence. If wealth is ownership in the companies you own, then yes, I don't think they should be forced to give that up. What they decide to spend their wealth on is up to them.
The only acceptable way to use that much money is to reinvest it in the society that enabled you to become a billionaire.
It would cost around 20 billion dollars to end homelessness in the US, why should people be allowed to have net worths of 100 billion+ when it would only cost 1/5th of that to provide everyone with a home? Is stealing from one man to house hundreds of thousands of people a bad thing to do? Is personal ownership of wealth worth more than human life to you?
Bill Gates seems to be doing a decent job of that, I'm glad he made the choices he has to redistribute his wealth, and I'm also glad it's his choice.
I really doubt it's that simple. Where are these houses being built, in the middle of nowhere I suspect? How many homeless people want to move there? Will there be jobs out there? What about electricity, gas, and Internet?
Why would they need to be built in the middle of nowhere? We can build high density apartments if we need to, a roof over your head in a small apartment is better than the sidewalk.
Because the price you quoted wouldn't be nearly enough if we built in expensive cities, it has to be built in cheap to build areas for that number to make sense.
Yes. That's reinvestment in rural areas. Eisenhower economics.
Market value and use value are not the same thing. Cases like Musk obviously display wild overvaluing, but the practical use a repatriated asset can provide is not the same as its price tag unless your only use for it is to sell it.
So how do we calculate wealth if it isn't based on what the market says it's worth? If we are going to tax Musk on his wealth, most of which is stock, how do you figure out the "real" wealth to tax?
In the case of stock, when we say it is "overvalued", that is implicitly based on the idea that there is a better evaluation that we can at least estimate, wherein (using more Marxist terms) the use value and market value are more correlated.
How a wealth tax should be implemented depends a lot on the society in which it is implemented. If we are assuming it is just the US but with a wealth tax, then I think ignoring what I said and taxing people more when their stock is higher makes sense, because market-dictated wealth represents really the ultimate ability to direct society within the US. In other countries with more checks against the wealthy, another approach may be more justified.
Really, I don't like wealth taxes compared to other models like a higher capital gains tax, but anything that takes money disproportionately from all billionaires is probably going to have my support merely for that fact, because anything that mainly hurts them is likely to be a good thing relative to the nothing we have.
What about the middle class that relies on stocks to retire? If you aren't aware, retirement accounts are usually mostly stocks, do we tax the middle class retirement money?
I think your last paragraph is pretty telling, just blindly supporting anything that hurts billionaires simply because they are billionaires, no matter how unfair or unjust it is, or even his bad the consequences would be for the country.
I think there is a reason the most successful companies are from the US, you would have them move their bushes elsewhere that's more supportive of their size?
Obviously I don't want to fuck over retirees, so it should be a progressive tax, since those retirement accounts don't reach 8 figures, let alone 10 to 12.
I was pretty careful in my phrasing about it hurting billionaires specifically rather than hurting a larger swath of the population that included billionaires. Given that, I don't think it would hurt "the country" very much at all, and indeed benefit the country because billionaires are a perpetual malus on us.
There are several reasons, and I think you probably aren't adequately accounting for the US being the global hegemon and engaging in brutal imperial exploitation as being chief among them. The US literally goes to war using the most over-funded military in the world for the sake of oil companies. It backs juntas to get cheap deals on lithium. It authors puppet governments for fucking bananas.
Regarding capital flight: It's awesome if billionaires want to flee. If they try, seize everything from them. They play ball or fuck off, no need to accommodate them playing God.
Even a progressive tax is going to fuck over retirees, unless you are suggesting 0% below like $10M. Even then they are still paying taxes either when they put the money in or when they take it out, so taxing on the value is just double tax dipping.
So you are actually suggesting if billionaires want to move we steal everything from them? How is that even remotely ok?
Retirement funds are still not going to exceed like 5 million in the vast majority of cases, but sure! Let's have it be marginal below 10M, that's fine with me. The petite bourgeois should mainly be targeted with things like higher taxes on housing they rent out, and that's really a secondary concern in most places.
Yes, I am. It's as easy as "don't engage in capital flight" to not get hit by it. We can even be generous enough to leave them just a tiny bit, say 1% if they have exactly 1B, since 10M is quite a lot for a human.
Why should they be entitled to gut factories where they used the labor supply and infrastructure to make their money, destroying the local economy and putting many people out of work? "Property rights"? This is going to blow your mind: human welfare is more important than the property rights of people who are richer than God and could get by in insane comfort while never working a day for the rest of their lives anyway.
If I had to weigh the wholesale destruction of communities against John Locke feeling disappointed, I'll gladly accept the latter and travel to England to piss on his grave.
You are suggesting the most immoral thing I've heard yet. To just take everything from someone and leave them with nothing just because they want to leave the area that is hostile to them. Oh wait, nevermind, this sounds exactly like someone as communist would say, and something communist countries have done in the past.
lmao 10M is "nothing". I hope one day you realize that you can do better things than lick boots. If you've got a problem with immorality and robbery, take it up with the billionaires who are actually doing just that and not leaving people with piss, let alone 10M for picking the forewarned bad option. Where I'm from, trying to move something across borders when it is against the law is called "smuggling" and it's normal to seize all of what is smuggled rather than 99% (unless it's, like, people or something).
10M is nothing to someone who owns billions, it's all a matter of perspective. I have a problem with people who use or suggest immoral actions, and that includes you. Stealing from anyone is immoral, I don't care how much they have or how big of a company it is.
What is against the law here? It's not illegal to move your business outside the country, it's not illegal to leave the country, what you are assuming is illegal is actually perfectly legal. It's not smuggling if you are just moving legal goods. Even you can leave a country like the US and transfer your money to wherever you go, it's not illegal at all.
I never said it wouldn't feel bad, but it objectively is a large amount of wealth for one person to have, enough to never work again. To view it as nothing indicates a disorder, so maybe .1% can go to rehabilitating them so they can understand their position, should they accept receiving such counseling.
Of course, your deontological view of a deeply exploitative class of people is untenable to do anything but limply defend the status quo, but I don't think I can teach you how to do philosophy coherently.
Remember that this hypothetical situation we are discussing is of a policy being implemented. That is to say, in this hypothetical, large-scale capital flight is illegal, and therefore to attempt it anyway is smuggling. The 1% left to them to do what they like with (even in whatever poor country they were leaving to exploit) is quite literally a significant mercy to them.
If they drastically reduced their lifestyle, don't get taxed heavily, and are able to invest it, then sure. However if you don't allow them to invest and they don't drastically reduce their standard of living, that's not nearly enough to retire on.
Even a fairly modest personal plane or small yacht will cost a million or more over years of use.
If your idea of philosophy involves theft, I don't think I want to learn it from you.
Ah, this concept is so insane that I just can't imagine it ever happening. In reality the companies and rich would leave and there would be nothing you could do to stop it.
Remember that we already said 10M was below the cutoff of the wealth tax, so they aren't being taxed heavily. Furthermore, they should be able to live their whole life without investing it if they are already like 35.
Whoa, so they can't afford toys that should generally be banned for ecological reasons anyway? Again, if you can't figure out how to live a happy life without a personal plane, you probably need to go to rich guy rehab. Just fucking find some cozy spot and live in idle luxury.
People don't functionally own land, they nominally own it at the mercy of the state. Many things work this way. Your problem is that you can't see beyond a narrow paradigm of how society is organized, as though a particular version of liberalism was ordained by God as being the natural order. It is not.
No, because they only have their power to move things around at the mercy of the state, a state which is generally nice to them because their class controls the state. Many countries have various types of laws opposing capital flight. One excellent example is various manifestations of "right of first refusal" being used to prevent the gutting of factories. There is also the matter of simple history of the mass-repatriation of properties for reasons much less severe than the kind of opportunism we've been discussing, everywhere from Germany to China, along with the complicated legal histories of capital flight in various countries (example). Turns out money laundering can actually be stopped and assets can and have actually been seized for various reasons.
I think you underestimate how fast $10M can be spent. There is a reason why most lottery winners go broke.
So basically you want them to just live like you do, without any extra luxuries? I'm guessing they also can only afford a modest house since even a normal house is $500k+ and then triple that if they have a mortgage.
I don't think it's a problem if people own a private plane as a hobby (you know, like a private pilot) or a big boat for enjoyment. I'm not talking about crazy expensive stuff here, even middle class people are owning private planes.
You and others here have explained your version of liberalism, I believe you call it Marxism, right? I don't believe it's the answer for anyone but communist countries like China, and I don't think that's the answer for the US or most other countries. Do you have another version you are proposing?
We aren't talking about money laundering or anything illegal, we are talking about people wanting to move for a better life. Only the worst of the worst countries will punish you by stealing everything from you simply for leaving.
They're successful in the US because they are sheikded feom all responsibility. That isn't success; that's oligarchy
Or maybe it's because we are big companies to exist without taxing or regulating them out of business.
That has never happened.
It will under the ideas you and others here have.
No it wont.
Yeah, it will.
Relying on stocks to reture is a BAD THING. YOU SAID YOURSELF that they could be wortgless tomorrow.
It would be worthless if half the ideas in this thread were enacted. Luckily they won't be and tons of middle class people will be able to retire thanks to the stock market.