We should take their money then. It helps us, and it doesn't hurt the rich since they'll just get it back and then we can take it again. Everybody wins.
So what you're saying is taking money away from CEOs isn't immoral because they'l just get it all back. Therefore there is no need for stealing from the rich to be illegal, right?
When I tell people that rich people get rich because it's 90% luck and 10% "work" they look at you like you're crazy. People really underestimate being in the right place right time and knowing the right people, or just being born to rich parents.
Pure ideology. The right thing to point out here is that capitalists have a lot of material advantages that go way beyond the liquid balance in their bank account. The ability to access easy, virtually unlimited credit is probably the most relevant here. If we seized all of Elon Musk's liquid assets ( ), he probably would be a centimillionaire again pretty quickly, because there are tons of entities--both institutional and individual--who would be more than happy to hand him free money because of who he is. If people are willing to hand you millions of dollars for free, give you preferential treatment as an investor, and generally bend over backwards to ingratiate themselves to you, it's almost impossible not to end up super rich.
This is part of why "taxing the rich" is a bullshit lib non-solution to the ghoulish system we have now. The problems are structural, and a small number of people have privileged virtually unlimited access to the means of production. If you took away that access, most billionaires would fare significantly worse than ordinary people, because they don't actually have any skills beyond exploiting their privileged access to capital.
he probably would be a centimillionaire again pretty quickly, because there are tons of entities--both institutional and individual--who would be more than happy to hand him free money because of who he is.
He'd run a quick grift on people like in the OP and be back on his yacht in a month.
Okay counter proposal: put rich people in a dome with no interaction with anyone else. No help, no working class culture, just a a big Truman Show dome with nothing but Trumans.
sure, if you take their money maybe. but if you take their capital, then it gets a little tough for them (they'd be scraping the bottom of the barrel for bullshit jobs just like the rest of us)
In fairness, I think there is one behaviour that helps you become a rich fuck, and that's a psychopathic disregard for the welfare of all other humans. I've had opportunities to make more money in life if I were willing to just screw over others, but I couldn't live with making weaponry, price gouging or otherwise wrecking the lives of fellow proles.
Nonetheless, lets take away all the money from all the rich fucks and give it a try, eh? It should be obvious to anyone that capitalism inherently causes capital to accumulate in select few hands either way, but it'd be a nice step one.
We build a society that rewards cunning, dismisses beauty and art as irrelevant, and morality as detrimental to the machine, and then we scratch our heads wondering why there's so much corruption in authority positions?
There's definitely psychopathic tendencies involved and a lot of having the right connections and knowing the right people. Wonder if the psychopath brain helps with making the connections or if there's some sociopath in there too?
Even if this were true, never do they ask where habits are formed and why someone has “rich person habits” in the first place. Could it be because they were raised since a young age with ample nutrition, adequate healthcare, private education and lots of family business connections?
Likewise, aren’t the “poor person habits” formed out of a childhood of desperation, sickness, hunger, poor education and no economic mobility?
Shouldn’t the goal be to have everyone on Earth have the “rich person” childhood so that everyone can have good habits? Like even by their own logic they should support socialism so that everyone on Earth can have the beneficial “rich person habits”.
The underlying truth is they don’t think certain people are capable of being smart or successful even with the most privileged upbringing because they are racists. This entire talk of “people of bad habits” is way to sanitize and obfuscate their underlying racist position.
Worse, they think everyone who isn’t poor is poor because they’re just lazy and dumb, they think habits are developed out of some sort of ontological void rather than any upbringing or context
The problem with induction is it works while it works, but when it doesn't work it doesn't work. It's all circular reasoning.
A hydrated person is hydrated because they hydrate themselves habitually. A dehydrated person is dehydrated because they dehydrate themselves habitually.
The word water doesn't even come up in the above. And no consideration of what happens if you strand a hydrated person in the desert: they can't hydrate, so are they still a hydrated person?