Comparing “most people” to billionaires is ludicrous in terms of spreading the wealth. The average American makes between 1 and 2 million over the course of their entire life. So if you have 1 billion, you have 1000 lifetimes worth of money. Musk is worth 342 billion. The amount of wealth trapped in the 1% is absolutely preposterous.
As for your villainizing of “drug addicts”, try to tell me wealthy people don’t abuse alcohol and prescription drugs, and cocaine. The only difference is when they kill a cyclist while driving drunk they get a reduced sentence and it doesn’t ruin their lives.
Beautiful weather in 2035? I like your optimism.
The comic takes place at midday on the winter solstice, so it’s like a beautiful spring day, just as it shouldn’t be.
(I’ll leave it up to someone more motivated to figure out what the shadow length and mountains indicate about what this means for latitude and longitude, but I’m pretty sure it’s not impossible.)
Realistically, if a couple rich people ever obtain all the money, they no longer have any, because money only has the trait of being money and not merely some piece of metal or paper or information or whatever else when it is used as a medium of exchange, and if almost nobody actually has any, then exchanging it on a meaningful scale is no longer possible.
Under this scenario, one must imagine that people would eventually start growing food and making things on land that they do not “own” and trading it amongst themselves, until some new thing that people actually have access to becomes money. Even hiring security to prevent that ceases to be possible, because paying that security means giving some of that money to someone else, and even if you do that, if theyre the only people getting paid it, then no economic base exists to support things like grocery stores that accept that money anymore, making those security people gain nothing from accepting it and thus have no incentive to do that work for you anymore. For the rich to stay rich, they must leave at least enough money (and resources) in common circulation for the economic system that maintains their power to continue to have relevance.
These billions of dollars are not held in money, but rather held in terms of things which convey control over resources and other people’s lives.
Under this scenario, one must imagine that people would eventually start growing food and making things on land that they do not “own” and trading it amongst themselves, until some new thing that people actually have access to becomes money. Even hiring security to prevent that ceases to be possible, because paying that security means giving some of that money to someone else
Consider the plight of horses following the invention of the automobile. You might think that if the costs of feeding a horse exceeded the value that could be gained by employing its labor and the farmers therefore as rational economic actors no longer provided them with food, they would go into fields regardless of ownership and eat the grass there. But actually what happened with most of them is they were slaughtered and rendered into meat and glue. I’m sure a lot of people found the idea of a bunch of feral horses running around inconvenient, and they control the land and its access, and the horses and their movements, with fences and ropes and such.
There is now effective mass surveillance, there are now drones with guns, and there is automation dramatically reducing the number of people required for most tasks. I don’t think it’s actually the case that maintaining our cooperation, or even our lives, is the only option faced by the very wealthy to retain their power.
It’s not about the money, it’s about what money allowed them to possess. If they get to possess all the lands, all the commodities, all the technologies, all the books, everything (as explicitly said by the character’s dialogue “We have finally given you all of our worldly possessions”, notice how the word “possessions” is used instead of “money”), they’ll still have it even though money isn’t circulating anymore. After all, money is actually their creation to hold what the money was really meant to represent: gold and wealthy. Money was created as a “certificate of gold ownership” in a world that used to use gold as a means of exchange resources. People don’t possess gold anymore, they possess what is promised to be a “certificate of gold”, with gold not having monetary backing anymore due to fractional reserve banking and stock market speculation which together “created” “money” out of thin air without actual value other than “guarantee” from the banks that they’d keep accepting it and circulating it, until they don’t anymore.
That’s why they are investing in robots and automation. Once they have servants programmed within the constraints of their will, servants that (supposedly) won’t turn against them because they’re non-sentient machines, they won’t need “peasants” (as they consider everyone else) anymore.
That’s why they’re investing in flying to the damn Mars. Once they (supposedly) have a new (supposedly livable) settlement far from “peasants”, they can let everyone else die in this scorching Earth that reached this point due to their greedy actions.
money is a proxy for resources, is the thing, having someone “own” everything includes owning all the money, at which point you end up with the same issue. Ownership is meaningless without a system to enforce that, because one person cant prevent everyone else from using “their” stuff on their own, and systems require buy in from a large fraction of the population to function, which requires giving enough people a reason to participate. Automation doesnt really solve this, it increases the total amount that can be produced, meaning you can hold a higher fraction of the total because the smaller fraction left can be “enough” to keep the system running, but some tasks exist that require a significant degree of intelligence and thinking to do, meaning you must either have humans do them, or have machines that are smart and self aware enough that them finding ways around restrictive programming becomes an issue.
I dont think Mars has anything to do with some plan by the rich to escape tbh. Early space colonies by nature would be cramped, form-follows function places to live, and the rich tend to like a lot of comforts. It seems to me more likely that they would send other people to colonize mars as a vanity project, or for resource extraction, or just because they personally like the concept and have enough money to push for it to be done, than that very many of them would personally go there. They might suggest that it could be a way to escape climate change or such in order to try to prompt others to buy in, but that notion falls flat on its face when one considers that even if we burned every scrap of coal in the ground, every drop of oil, and then fired off every nuclear weapon, it would still be easier to build a settlement on earth than one on mars. If you have the resources and the technology to build a mars colony, “the planet burning” is no longer much of a threat to your survival anyway.
EDIT: I guess I should clarify that Im not trying to say that I dont think wealth inequality is an issue, I think its one of the biggest issues we have, I just think this narrative I sometimes see of “The rich all have a long term plot to kill everyone and then fly off into space” looks to me like conspiratorial thinking that overestimates the rich and misunderstands their motives, which I feel is a negative thing, because it makes the solution seem less like “replace or transition the system into one that naturally tends to a more equitable distribution of resources” and more like “These specific guys are the villains, kill/imprison them and it’ll fix everything, and also mistrust automation and space development because they further their plans”. The second of those I think would even if successfully implemented, just result in a new generation of rich people naturally arising later on as wealth begets wealth, while neglecting technologies that I feel are vital for increasing the sum total of human prosperity.
Footnote: the rich people aren’t talking to them. An AI is talking to them.
It’s the voice of siri
False. They still have clothes and eyeglasses.
And they’re fat.
That looks an awful lot like the present.
Yes, people that aren’t really poor just complaining because someone else has more than them. Everyone loves communism / socialism until no one has any incentive to do anything and everyone is poorer as a result.
Yeah that minimum wage sure makes people go above and beyond lol 🤡
It’s argued that slavery was a choice. Working minimum is far more so.
Argued by racists…
Who in the hell is arguing that slavery was a choice?
What happens when you don’t work for the slave master?
If you have an answer, you have an option, and that means choice. Did you never hear “Give me liberty or give me death”? Going out and being productive without an employer is far easier, is it not?
What happens? Yes either liberty if you successfully escape and likely death if you do not. You seem like a selfish person, so you may not have considered that slaves have loved ones too. No man is an island.
Fucking yikes dude.
Thats a deluded take.
We already have people without incentive, and who make everyone poorer as a result. They’re called billionaires. They have no incentive to improve the world, because it’s being broken is what they benefit most from. Bezos doesn’t benefit from happy healthy employees, he benefits from desperate, powerless employees. They can’t fight back if they’re terrified of losing their job.
The combined net worth of the 2020 class of the 400 richest Americans was $3.2 trillion, up from $2.7 trillion in 2017. As of March 2023, there were 735 billionaires in the United States.
Meanwhile, poverty is the 4th leading cause of death in the United States. Killing 10 times as many people as homicide in 2019.
As far as the evils of socialism, why is the life expectancy 7 years better for men and 5 years better for women in Canada vs the United States? Could it be socialized medicine and ready access to healthcare perhaps?
If you’re ‘terrified of losing your job’, the problem is probably you because your ability to leech off a rich person is in jeopardy, you buried yourself in debt, you’re living beyond your means, you have drug addictions, etc.
Bezos is an asshole. Not all rich people are bad (not all people are bad). -Strawman argument.
Meanwhile, poverty is the 4th leading cause of death in the United States.
Asserting something that can’t be proven. -Do you have a religion you want to dispense also?
As far as the evils of socialism, why is the life expectancy 7 years better for men and 5 years better for women in Canada vs the United States?
Could be many things like distance from equator, better food ingredient standards, etc. Do you think posing a question makes a point?
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Bezos is the example they were using to illustrate their point. Which isn’t a strawman argument by any definition of the term.
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That’s a statistic that can, in fact, be proven. They should probably cite a source for it, but given how you set the level of the discussion, I can see why they’d think that level of effort is unnecessary.
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Posing a question can be a way to make a point. It’s called a rhetorical question. It helps the argument if you follow up with an answer to the question, but the question on its own is enough to make a point.
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I would argue there is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. So yes, above a certain point, all rich people are bad. They hold an unusably vast hoard of resources. They elect to retain these resources rather than help others. Granted this is a subjective argument, but a sound one.
As for not being able to prove the danger of poverty, and my statistics you can rrad the research paper I pulled them from ar you leisure: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2804032
Most people in the US are more than capable of ‘spreading the wealth’. -So what stops us?
I chose to not be addicted to drugs, to be responsible with money, and learn valuable skills and indepencence from employers. Why should I provide for someone choosing different (or enabling them to go even further down a bad path)? Wealthy people are no different in this respect, they just have more money. Squandering it on people who claim to be poor isn’t as good as…
Buying up farmland in the USA to keep it out of the hands of China, or funding vaccinations. -Something a ‘billionaire’ has been doing.
Or… give an example of people winning big on the lottery and compare it to the people who’s lives were destroyed by the easy money. Being a better steward of money doesn’t make someone evil.
So you think people who are addicted to drugs choose that life?
I think you are ignoring the environmental pressures and sociological realities that result in drug addiction and poverty.
There are plenty of people in poverty, who is claiming to be poor?
I’m not feeling bad for you if you can’t afford your cigarettes, cannabis, crack, and alcohol because of your own damn choices.
I won’t say get a job: I’d say straighten yourself out and quit trying to rely on others handouts.
I am sure you’re a “genius” who thinks people are poor or living paycheck to paycheck because its only their fault. But you wouldn’t know anybody.
Poverty is about resources. Most people in the US have plenty of that. Most people living paycheck to paycheck indeed did it to themselves.
Talked to someone while returning bottles and cans the other day. They had an electric bike with a trailer. They make ~$80 a week just going around town picking up bottles and cans. -Something I used to do before e-bikes. I made 2x minimum wage doing it when redemption took longer and more effort (feeding through a machine). Almost any idiot is capable of doing this, others are capable of far more.
If you’re dependent on an employer in the US; you’re probably a lazy leech that simply refuses to do actual work because I could give example after example of work people could do for more money. -When you lack those resources, then complain about poverty.
Sounds like you were stealing scrap metal to me, right to private prison, you are now happily employed.
Cleaning up other people’s litter. lol The guy does a service. I just return my own and my landlords.
Most people isn’t good enough. Homeless people exist and underpin the entire concept of inequity with capitalism. The only thing they did was not have money.
I’ve been homeless, have you? You’re probably ignoring underlying problems like drug addictions, mental illness, and divorce. Also, some people simply choose the life.
Do you think that people only do things for money?
What kind of stupid question is this? No, I don’t believe idiotic things like ‘money is THE root of all evil’. There are obviously other incentives in life. What’s your point?
I’m trying to understand why you seem to think that socialism is a fantasy. In my experience, it’s usually a rebuttal about getting paid.
