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comment by spencerflem
spencerflem  ·  1105 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The billionaires are angry

On principle, it's undemocratic for so fantastically much power to be held by unelected individual people. And with basically all productivity improvements going toward lining their pockets, with wages trending downward even before inflation, with their short-sighted destruction of the environment, the American economy, privacy, etc...

It seems like basically every bad thing that's been happening in this country is a direct result of billionaires. When companies gut themselves, lay off all workers, outsource, and make a good brand garbage, some billionaire is getting rich. The billionaires lobby and oppose pro-worker legislation, are almost uniformly conservative, and after decade after decade of hoarding essentially all of the rise in GDP, flaunt their wealth with pointless and extravagant vanity projects.

Not to mention that it's billionaires who own the oil companies that have been ruining the environment for the last 50 years. And the same billionaires that conveniently bought all the good real estate in chilly Canada.

I hate them so much. And they only exist because we, as a society, allow them to. You can't get that much wealth by working. You get it by capturing the value that would be going somewhere else. Jeff Bezos didn't make all of Amazon have two day shipping. His army of underpaid and overworked wharehouse employees do that, for none of the money or benefits. The "heros" are actually doing the labor while bezos earns another hundred billion in the middle of a pandemic that (surprise) only benefits the billionaires.

If they stopped existing (taxes or otherwise), maybe the 6 Trillion the government printed would have gone to real people instead.

Their wealth in corporate stock only exists because we say it does. Hell, private property only exists because we say it does. So why the hell do we as a society say that one Jeff is allowed to hoard the entire GDP of some goddamn countries while people starve in the streets.