Tax the rich
Feed the poor
Till there ain’t no
Rich no moreIncidentally, no
Poor no more
EitherWhat?!? But then how will I know who I’m BETTER than?!?
I have a dream that we will one day live in a nation where we are judged not by the size of our bank account, but by the content of our character.
(Spoilers: we won’t.)
If you ever figure out where that nation is, let me know and I’ll start packing.
There are probably some small remote tribes/communes out there somewhere that follow this.
They won’t accept large scale immigration.
That’s because they judge people on the content of their character, and, well, most people suck.
Not me though. I’m pretty damn rad.
me too, I have packed already. Let me know the gps coordinates please 😄
Real bad news for rich people.
They do tend to be inversely proportionate.
Self education.
I’m stealing your edit
i just want a small property with a yard and a couple trees and room to grow some plants and tinker on projects
if only i didn’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on avocado toast in my 20s
Take a look at moneybags over here being able to afford avocado toast!
Not since their 20s
I just don’t want to be homeless when I am old. That’s all I want. Having food and housing. A two room apartment for me and my husband would be nice. If I can use the public transport on top of that, I’m all set. A three room apartment would be a luxury and being able to go out every once in a while would be absolutely astronomical.
(I also want to have healthcare but I am in Germany so I got that going for me which is nice. )
Modest home. Stone fruit trees. Nice big pole barn for projects.
My wife and I have been searching for community and reasonable housing costs. My data analyst self began mad research of all sorts for about a year. Then, we moved into a vehicle and explored for eight months.
Boots on the ground, we learned that everything is much, much better if you’re at least 40 minutes from the closest Walmart. This is harder than it seems. It’ll likely be an hour+ commute to a workplace with decent pay. But, it’s been consistently true wherever we’ve traveled (US): No Walmart nearby means a solid community and cheap land.
We found a place we like. My wife accepted a job offer today. We bought a 14’ enclosed utility trailer and will build a temporary home in the two weeks before we leave, avoiding rent and mortgage until we find the perfect piece of land.
My plan was to steal one from a real estate company but i can try your thing
We can, but it requires not having billionaires.
No more billionaires, but everyone can be a millionaire.
The shortest path to equality is to greatly reduce taxes on the middle class and increase them on the wealthy.
It puzzles me why leftist parties don’t all embrace lower taxes for the middle class.
It puzzles me why leftist parties don’t all embrace lower taxes for the middle class.
They all do. My best guess as to why you’d say this is that you’re including Democrats.
edit: Or, I could be a self-centered American that didn’t consider others. I’ll do better.
At risk of a strawman…
The shortest path to equality is to greatly reduce taxes on the middle class and increase them on the wealthy.
That’s what’s best for equality and for economic growth. Does this mean Democrats are horribly incompetent? Perhaps it’s that equality and economic growth aren’t their goals.
It’s also possible they’re not from the US. There are dozens of us. Dozens!
Fuck. I’m being a self-centered American, again. I’ll do better in the future. Thanks for the help.
Considering the strains currently on the environment, finding a way forward that doesn’t require continual growth is likely a necessity for our long term survival (possibly short term too)
But, muh’ capitalism!
If it doesn’t work then we’ve killed all these socialists and communist for nothing.
(Do I need a /s here? Is it obvious? Should be obvious.)
It puzzles me why leftist parties don’t all embrace lower taxes for the middle class.
Functionally, we don’t have one. The closest is the Green Party, but they’re so powerless that they may as well not exist.
A lot of leftist view taxes as a good thing, when taken from those who can afford them
Taxes have never been the issue. How they are used is. But that gets obfuscated so that the 99% shoot ourselves in the foot
Taxes are DEFINITELY an issue when I pay more taxes than many billion dollar corporations.
Yes. You (and I, and most of us) are experiencing the end result of the American people being played with a deceiving narrative. “No taxes” is a con game to get us to this type of situation
You’re wrong. It doesn’t require no money. It requires that you have rejected the sucker for money.
Only in a perfect world.
This is literally the future Jesus’ theoretical return presents but a lot of (not all) Christians aren’t on board.
Yeah, people have believed in dumb shit like that since our species emerged from the primordial ooze.
Only in any world that doesn’t die shortly thereafter.
This world isn’t going to die.
It’s just going to change.
Our species might though.
Depends on the path we take. They’re after my truth.
If you live in a society where you work a 40 hour week and you STILL can’t afford basic things like shelter, food, utilities and healthcare, then the rich are stealing too goddamn much from you.
$40 billion per year to end world hunger.
https://www.wfpusa.org/articles/how-much-would-it-cost-to-end-world-hunger/
BUT
avocado toast. 🥑
Solve world hunger for one meal. $40 billion worth of Avocado toast.
Man if I had forty million bands i’d do it. Just rip off the bandaid. The world would be a better place.
I doubt that number takes into account corruption.
It also doesn’t account for corporate price gouging or the fact that the only reason people go hungry in the world is because letting them starve is more profitable than feeding them even the leftovers and about-to-go-off.
As well as what you said, theres also no reason not the presume the number could be much lower too.
That was a joke. Maybe end world hunger for a week.
Nope, those are the numbers. The UN isn’t in the habit of publishing satire.
Right now, as we live and die, there’s enough food to keep every human fed, with plenty of enjoyable meals included (not just boiled chicken and broccoli).
It’s about distribution, which is a corporate problem.
Capitalism encourages scarcity so the line will always go up.
It’s the fixed nitrates making this possible. We’re severely over the Earths organic capacity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
Distribution is the problem. Authoritarians left and right are the problem. I work for a nonprofit that feeds the poor and temporarily under resourced and the government is our biggest obstacle.
What specific problems does the government cause for this non-profit, exactly? What “authoritarian” policies is this “left” you speak of enacting which harms the needy?
“Left and right”’in this context probably means everywhere, not “liberal” and “conservative”.
So what you asking about just the “left” probably makes no sense.
“What specific problems does the government cause”? is a great question. I hope we get an answer.
I somehow don’t think we will, considering the original commenter is seemingly pretending that they didn’t see the comment. I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt, but it’s hard to believe that they’re actually telling the truth about any part of what they said considering they apparently think Trump is the best candidate we have. American centrist and right wing policies are pretty anti-poor.
He uses “left” to refer to Democrats in his comments so I just assumed he meant it here too.
My only guess is that they mean “a for-profit church” when they say “a nonprofit that feeds the poor and temporarily under resourced”. But I dunno, maybe they’re telling the truth.
Distribution is a problem but trucking food from one country to a poor country is not the fix to end world hunger forever. Food aid is fine as a temporary solution but moving food from one country with a surplus to a poor country as a long term solution will just destroy the local agricultural industry which would keep these nations dependent on other countries for food. This happened with the clothing industry in many African nations. The West dumped so much clothing into many African nations as charity that local clothing shops and tailors have to compete with free clothing, thus the clothing industry is unable to flourish. The best solution is to help these nations improve their local food productivity and grow their economy.
So, we shouldn’t feed people because capitalism. Got it.
Pretty sure they are just suggesting we teach people to fish
I never said we shouldn’t feed people. Just that fixing the distribution problem alone isn’t the end all fix to end world hunger. And this isn’t about capitalism since even in a socialist country where all the workers own the means of production, you know like farmers, there is an economy that can collapse. Yes we should feed hungry people by giving them food but we should also help them increase their food productivity so that their economy doesn’t collapse because of the influx of food. Since most poor countries are agricultural economies.
Keeping poor nations poor and dependent on aid isn’t good either.
I want wealth to be an indicator of a well-rounded member of society, instead of its current role as a proxy for sociopathy.
Also, how about relabelling excessive financial accumulation as something along the lines of ‘financial obesity’.
Obesity used to be a sign of wealth, and confer higher social status. So oligarchs would be introduced as “the biggest, the fattest, the most corpulent of them all, Richie Apartheington!”
Now, aside from everyone being fat, the poor are especially fat
And the rich aren’t because they have the time and resources to be healthy
Trying to get rich is the selfish version of “every man for himself”, building a more equal society is the empathetic one: in a fair society there are no threats to seek your own life.
To each for his ability; from each as much as we can take
😭
The problem is that a fair society is not a stable equilibrium. Selfish people profit in a fair society at the cost of others.
We intend to change the social contract.
Nah I definitely want both. My current hobbies are expensive. My dream hobby of getting a pilots license and a small plane would be really expensive.
So you want the freedom of getting a pilots license and a small plane.
What if you used that plane every so often to fly others around? Or perhaps you share it with others like a time share?
It feels like there’s an answer here. I’m just spit balling, though. I’m not even fully against capitalism, I’m just kind of tired of… Well… All the billionaires and dramatic wealth inequality.
Wanting to be rich would mean wanting to have more wealth hoarded than you can spend. That’s psychotic and doesn’t sound like what you want
Freedom doesn’t get me one of these plus funds to run it: https://www.racingjunk.com/gt3-cup/184608118/2022-porsche-992-gt3-cup.html?category_id=5896&np_offset=-1#5
So both. For sure.
So you’re saying you want to have waay too much money that other people wouldn’t be able to also enjoy that? You would rather have money in the bank instead of people having food or a place to eat? That’s the rich were talking about.
Again, you just want financial freedom. Which would mean you have enough money to do whatever you want.
Being rich means you want to (esentially) steal money and hide it away from other people who also want to do fun things
Sounds deep but isn’t
Sounds deep but isn’t
Title of your sex tape
Sounds deep but isn’t
lol literally. like yes… that’s the point of being rich. unless you have literal scrouge mcduck fantasies of diving into an ocean of momey
It is shallow, sure. That doesn’t, however mean that it isn’t deep. Money is literally both and that’s because it eats your shoe sole and your soul. Don’t believe me? Good. Don’t believe anything at all. I don’t. I know what I know because I listen to “God” the Devil and the Dead. Six one way half a dozen the other. Heaven is what they don’t explain.
Hold on. I need to thrown the fuck up. Lets deconstruct the evil here. I know exactly what the Devil is saying and why Heath Ledger was murdered by the CIA.
what
Seemed fairly clear to me.
In 1884, meridian time personnel met in Washington to change Earth time. First words said was that only 1 day could be used on Earth to not change the 1 day bible. So they applied the 1 day and ignored the other 3 days.
I just want freedom period. If that means being rich then I guess I’ll do that
what if it means taking other ppls freedom away from them in the process?
can you provide an example please…
'sploiting workers
theres companies making money off of prison labor, if u want a not very subtle example. in the US, prisons are also for-profit institutions, making it even more insidious.
then ur typical capitalist labor situation ofc. ur boss makes more off of their workers labor than their workers get paid. this “surplus value” is how bosses get richer than the ppl who work for them; all without having to do any actual work of their own.
ow also landlords who rent housing to ppl for a price, often providing very little or even no maintenance at all for that building. this exploits peoples need of shelter for the landlords personal gain, as landlords squeeze as much money out of ppl as they can get away with (also for example, keeping security deposits for no good reason).
Removed by mod
what is ur answer to this system?
Removed by mod
What if I can make money actually helping people or in my IRL case the environment?
i mean, thats great! but the moneys gotta come from somewhere, and in most cases someone else is being exploited.
most non-profits actually suffer from this issue where getting funding is the number one priority.
the organization has to bend its methods to what will look good on paper vs what would actually be best for their cause
u will work yourself to death and make everybody around you miserable
That’s not freedom. Money is always a trap.
I mean, yeah. That’s pretty much it
It’s interesting how this scene was constructed. The blacksmiths and their table never appear outside except when guiding the one lost blacksmith back home. The old man is usually sleeping in the bar mumbling about his lost son (flute boy) until the pre-credits end sequence where they are reunited in the forest. The text boxes normally have a transparent background, but here it’s a darkened floor tile from Sahasrahla’s hut.
Even more more puzzling is how the imagery has absolutely nothing to do with the message. Like Dr. Manhattan Bobby on the moon complaining about capitalism.
Whoever created this did that. They probably put the floor tile over the original text.
Yeah, at first I thought this could be a rom hack, which was interesting to me. But the more I look, it’s clearly just an edited picture; Link missing his shadow being the giveaway.
Not sure what your point is old man, but I can’t get the freedom that the rich enjoy without being rich.
Deluding myself into a state of bliss when the mortgage is due doesn’t help anyone, especially me.
What if … there were no rich people?
♫ Imagine all the people sharin’ all the world ♪ ♪ Yoo, hoo, oo-oo ♫
Then there would be no reason to go above and beyond.
You’re saying all human ambition is based on money-hunger and thankfully that is false.
Exactly.
Me: poor as fuck. Tries to be kind, be grateful. Grow food. Share. Fuckingfeedingpeoeple.
Billionaires: how do we make biofuel out of neualinked catatonic undesirables as a more humane way of genocide? fucking matrix milking machining people.
This is actually a real fucking thing. And, oh, heh, look, it’s JD Vance and his puppet master, Peter Thiel, with the rest of the gang.
https://newrepublic.com/article/183971/jd-vance-weird-terrifying-techno-authoritarian-ideas
I’m definitely not rich. Not by a long shot. I might not be poor, but compared to the rich, I’m very poor.
I feel like, insane statements like “nobody will work if they don’t earn money from it” or similar drivel is entirely derived from the rich asshole capitalists own minds. What they mean to say is that they wouldn’t, and can’t imagine anyone would want to work if not for the accumulation of wealth. They lack imagination.
The key differentiator is that us (relative) poors need to work to live. If we didn’t need to work to live, many still would, simply to help others. I certainly would.
“nobody will work if they don’t earn money from it”
No, it’s just a tautology resulting from how work is defined. Anything you do on your own time (not paid) is by definition not work. It’s a hobby, a chore, volunteering, etc. By contrast, anything you’re paid to do but would stop doing if you stopped being paid is work.
Looking after a sick relative may feel a whole lot like work. The difference is that if you don’t do it, who will? Asking a stranger to care for your relative for free just isn’t done. That’s why it’s work if you’re a hired nurse but not work if it’s your relative and you do it for free.
You can do this exercise with anything. Go to a restaurant and you expect to pay for your food after you eat. Go to eat dinner at your mother-in-law’s place and you don’t expect to pay. In fact, she’d likely be baffled at best and insulted at worst if you tried to pay her for your meal. Cooking food for strangers is work, cooking food for friends and family is not.
Anyway, don’t you think there’s some validity to the original statement? Why would you expect strangers to cook for you and care for your sick relatives for free? Note that even if you’re not paying them but someone else (possibly the state) then it’s still work.
Work (verb): “be engaged in physical or mental activity in order to achieve a result; do work.”
No mention of compensation or pay.
For your nurse example, I know nurses that would absolutely do it for free, they enjoy working with their patients and helping them.
For me, I work in IT, if I didn’t need to make money to live, I would still do what I do without pay, simply to help others with their complex computer problems.
Just because you don’t “get” it, and/or, can’t understand it, doesn’t mean it isn’t something that many of us would take on. A lot of blue collar workers and even many white collar workers (especially non-owner/non-management types), just want to live a life that they can be proud of. We need to earn money to pay for the things that allow us to continue to live, but beyond that, couldn’t give any less of a shit about money.
Your world view is flawed, your understanding of the collective consciousness of workers is incorrect.
The jobs that would have nobody working them, would be jobs that are generally horrible to do. Especially toxic work environments, usually due to bad management. Making people’s lives horrible because you treat them like trash would be a death sentence, because if people don’t need to work for you to live, and you treat them like human garbage, then you will have nobody working for you.
These principles are pretty well founded. There are communities that have survived with little to no money or transactions happening (mainly only when dealing with outsiders), where members of the community do some sort of work for the community (maybe farming, plumbing, electrical, construction, etc) with no direct compensation, and in return, they gain all the benefits of the community. Hot meals, a warm home, etc.
These communes have existed, usually they’re associated with extreme isolation and other such conditions, but they take care of eachother without the need for any monetary system.
In many first world countries, the USA especially, people are isolated from eachother. Each person is so aggressively independent that a monetary system is basically a requirement to answer the question of “what’s in it for me?” In a more community focused setting, you pay it forward at every step. You do whatever work for the people in the community, and the community at large “pays” you back with their services and hospitality. This is not a question, it is an expectation of such members of a community like that.
For my work, my “boss”/manager is basically setting up and managing systems that I can use to help people with their issues, so I can focus on what I’m good at. Aside from the money that changes hands because we all need to pay rent and buy food, our jobs wouldn’t change under a system that has no monetary system. There’s still a demand and we fulfill that demand as best we can.
We’ll never get to the level of community we would need to get away from money systems unless that money system entirely crashes, and people keep doing their jobs for free to make sure that everything doesn’t go down with the money system.
Our money system, with the global banks and fiat currency, is basically a bubble. It is obligated to continue to grow or it will collapse. I won’t go into detail as to why, since this post is long enough, but needless to say, that kind of system is destined to fail since continual growth indefinitely is an unsustainable system. It’s only a matter of time. One decent documentary I know of on the subject, for further learning, is called “money as debt”. Take a look if you want to know more about our collective monetary systems. (Most of the world is using the same concepts and ideas in their money systems though that specific one, IIRC, is focused on the American money system)
Holy shit.
I had no idea who Peter Thiel was until a few weeks ago when I read Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue. Never heard his name.
I find a new reason to dislike him more and more nearly every day since.
And between him and Elon, PayPal, too.
Once you start down the rabbit hole (not the white rabbit hole elon loves), you will find there are a lot of thumbtacks and lots of string that are all connected and ready to strangle the world.
I spent a few years on the bird site… Did some things. Met some people. Learned some things. Shared some things.
The more you know… Can be a curse.
Knowledge is power, but it’s a heavy, heavy, heavy load we do not forget.
We will not forgive.
And, now, we return to the show:
eLon Hubbard, Jordan Petersinovich, Joe stRoganov
Petey and fElon (he seems to have found some hair in recent years)
The PayPal Mafia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia
Not all, but a majority of labor people do is to make money. What reason do I have to work extra hard for if not for financial gain?
People like to contribute to society because it feels good. People will respond positively to you if you contribute, and you will feel good about yourself. and you will feel like you’re part of something bigger, that you matter not just to yourself but to others too. Look at how much voluntary work is being done in society in all sorts of fields, this is being done for these reasons, not for money. You could argue, that this is mostly in certain fields, and most work would never be done for free. For instance a lot of volunteers are care-givers, and it’s easy to see why this is very rewarding. But would people go into the mines to mine coal just to benefit society. Well no, in our society as it is certainly not.
But could it be that we’re conditioned to think about our society in this way? In our society people get paid to do such things, it would feel very wrong to us, if people usually get paid for dirty work, that suddenly this would need to happen voluntarily. That would obviously be really unfair. But we could try to imagine what a world would be like without money. If you live in a community that functions like a sort of small anarchist communist society, and you’ve never heard of money or being paid for stuff, then it’s not hard to imagine someone caring about the well being of his community and wanting to contribute for previously mentioned reasons: feeling good about contributing, having a certain status because of contributing. It’s easy to see how people currently think, but it could very well be that people currently think a certain way because things currently are a certain way. And that if the world would be different, people would also think and behave different.
Surely in any case there will be a limit to the ‘working extra hard’, and it might be different from where the limit is for people in our current system. But that doesn’t have to be a negative. Competing to gain as much money as you can often goes far beyond what seems healthy. Money is such an integral part of how our society functions that for many it’s become a sort of obsession. When thinking of how you could live a successful life some people can only think: if I earn a lot of money, then I’ll be successful. And obviously this is bollocks. You’re free to define life success by whatever measures you deem important, but comparative study will show that the ones who earn most aren’t always the ones that feel most happy and fulfilled. Focusing solely on money often just stems from an insecurity, if it’s just money than I don’t have to really think. It can feel comfortable to not have to think because this objective of earning as much as I can is predefined and I can try to optimize my performance based on that. I think a lot of people can see how that’s a very lacking view on how to live, and it certainly won’t be the most rewarding strategy for life if you want to feel happy and fulfilled.
I agree with most of what you are saying, but it just doesnt work as a system in our current cultural framework. There has to be an exchange of value added to money given, its not perfect but there just is not a way to do it better differently without discouraging going above and beyond.
it just doesnt work as a system in our current cultural framework
True. But our current system fits our cultural framework, because it has shaped it to be the way it is. That in itself is no reason to stick with it. Not saying this can easily be changed. But we shouldn’t lose sight of far away possibilities just because they seem far away. It’s worth it striving for a better world.
YEAH! Old man!
Op discovers fiat currency.
What game is this?
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. It originally released for the SNES.
I believe it’s “A Link To The Past”.
