sataniccapitalist reblogged
sataniccapitalist reblogged
If capitalism were really about "voluntary exchange of labor for money", this would be encouraged.
sataniccapitalist reblogged
Of course we can tax billionaires
On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.
Billionaires are pretty confident that they can't be taxed – not just that they shouldn't be taxed, but rather, that it is technically impossible to tax the ultra-rich. They're not shy about explaining why, either – and neither is their army of lickspittles.
If it's impossible to tax billionaires, then anyone who demands that we tax billionaires is being childish. If taxing billionaires is impossible, then being mad that we're not taxing billionaires is like being mad at gravity.
Boy is this old trick getting old. It was already pretty thin when Margaret Thatcher rolled it out, insisting that "there is no alternative" to her program of letting the rich get richer and the poor go hungry. Dressing up a demand ("stop trying to think of alternatives") as a scientific truth ("there is no alternative") sets up a world where your opponents are Doing Ideology, while you're doing science.
Billionaires basically don't pay tax – that's a big part of how they got to be billionaires:
By cheating on their taxes, they get to keep – and invest – more money than less-rich people (who get to keep more money than regular people and poor people, obvs). They get so much money that they can "invest" it in corrupting the political process, for example, by flushing vast sums of dark money into elections to unseat politicians who care about finance crime and replace them with crytpo-friendly lawmakers who'll turn a blind eye to billionaires' scams:
Once someone gets rich enough, they acquire impunity. They become too big to fail. They become too big to jail. They become too big to care. They buy presidents. They become president.
A decade ago, Thomas Piketty published his landmark Capital in the 21st Century, tracing three centuries of global capital flows and showing how extreme inequality creates political instability, leading to bloody revolutions and world wars that level the playing field by destroying most of the world's capital in an orgy of violence, with massive collateral damage:
Piketty argued that unless we taxed the rich, we would attain the same political instability that provoked the World Wars, but in a nuclear-tipped world that was poised on the brink of ecological collapse. He even laid out a program for this taxation, one that took accord of all the things rich people would try to hide their assets.
Today, the destruction that Piketty prophesied is on our doorstep, and all over the world, political will is gathering to do something about our billionaire problem. The debate rages from France to dozen-plus US states that are planning wealth taxes on the ultra-rich.
Wherever that debate takes hold, billionaires and their proxies pop up to tell us that we're Doing Ideology, that there is no alternative, and that it is literally impossible to tax the ultra-rich.
In a new blog post, Piketty deftly demolishes this argument, showing how thin the arguments for the impossibility of a billionaire tax really is:
First, there's the argument that the ultra-rich are actually quite poor. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg don't have a lot of money, they have a lot of stock, which they can't sell. Why can't they sell their stock? You'll hear a lot of complicated arguments about illiquidity and the effect on the share-price of a large sell-off, but they all boil down to this: if we make billionaires sell a bunch of their stock, they will be poorer.
No duh.
sataniccapitalist reblogged
Bosses hire 22 year olds, then complain that they act like 22 year olds
https://fortune.com/2024/09/26/bosses-firing-gen-z-grads-months-after-hiring/
sataniccapitalist reblogged
This is what causes inflation, in case you're wondering.
Businesses should not be allowed to own residential property and I am not kidding even a little bit.
Homes should belong to the people who reside in them full stop.
Homes should never be an economic commodity.
sataniccapitalist reblogged
"You probably shouldn't have taken the job."
- the exact same people who complain when no one wants to take the job anymore
sataniccapitalist reblogged
🇺🇲
"THE ONLY DANGEROUS MINORITY IS THE RICH"
📸 "The only dangerous minority is the rich."
A sticker found on a street sign on the corner of Constance and Aline Streets in the East Riverside neighborhood of New Orleans, in southeast Louisiana, USA.