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This is exactly why individuals should not be allowed to have tens (let alone hundreds!) of billions of dollars in wealth - they become all-powerful and too eas
by cgtyoder 4y ago
This is exactly why individuals should not be allowed to have tens (let alone hundreds!) of billions of dollars in wealth - they become all-powerful and too easily subvert the will of the people. They become their own ruling class, which is unacceptable in a functioning democracy.
- hstan4 4y agoShouldn’t be allowed? What’s the magic number the government will stop allowing one to accrue wealth?
- rwmj 4y agoThat, or they piss it away on vanity projects like this and level themselves downwards in the process.
- colordrops 4y agoWhat is "the will of the people" with regards to Twitter?
- jdrc 4y agoThe will of twitter employees
- darthg0d 4y agoDo you think all Twitter employees have a say in how Twitter is run?
- NaturalPhallacy 4y agoI mean it's pretty obvious which side they're on: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/summary?id=D000067113 https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/twitter/summary?id=D0000671...
- kdtsh 4y agoWell, no, that just shows it’s obvious which side they’re not on. The Red and Blue are two very large tents.
- swalsh 4y agoYou're only a people if you have a blue checkmark.
- Kye 4y agoTwitter couldn't exist in its current form without billions from billionaires carrying it through years of not being able to fund itself. It would have had to grow slowly, probably in some decentralized form like Mastodon did with people and organizations funding their own instances and linking up through a common protocol. The world would have been better for it. In a different universe, (for example) branches of governments run their own instances for politicians and candidates to speak on without having to worry about clashing with moderation policies that serve other use cases on other instances.
- systemvoltage 4y agoZero to Tesla. It's not like he has hundreds of billions of dollars sitting in cash. Almost all of his wealth is in Tesla/SpaceX. He created value from basically zero. Didn't steal it from anyone.
- krrrh 4y agoDemocracies are great, but they become weak when the majority crushes minority opinion and the chilling effects of a singular ideology makes it difficult for those without resources to speak their minds and openly engage in debate [1][2][3]. And this is even more true when there are few alternate centres of power outside of the state. Billionaires, along with NGOs, unions, etc, provide these alternative centres of power that are essential when a perspective or ideology becomes too hegemonic. This is even more obvious when the whole point of what Elon is doing is trying to do right now is to make twitter a more free, fun, and open platform for people who don't have the fuck you money that he has managed to earn. Of course the other utility of billionaires is that when they've earned it themselves they have shown some skill at allocating capital, and can pursue important societal goals that government or existing corporations have proven incapable of, like space flight, electric cars, better urban mass transit, brain-computer interfaces, etc.. None of those achievements seem important to people who have decided that Elon == bad for whatever transgression they believe is more important. [1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-study-shows-people-have-never-been-more-afraid-to-speak-their-minds-301420083.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-study-shows-peo... [2] https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/poll-62-americans-say-they-have-political-views-theyre-afraid-share https://www.cato.org/survey-reports/poll-62-americans-say-th... [3] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/12/22/cancel-culture-what-views-are-britons-afraid-expre https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/1...
- colechristensen 4y agoYou can't just have two possible opinions in society, we've been going more in that direction and it is quite hostile to freedom. Love him or hate him, Elon adds value because he has a lot of power which isn't at all aligned with either of the two dominating opinions in America.
- seoaeu 4y agoImportant to whom? The same power that lets a billionaire develop spaceflight can also be used to instigate an ecological disaster, roll back human rights, or unleash killer robots.
- cwkoss 4y agoBold of you to think the US has a functioning democracy
- annexrichmond 4y agoHow is this argument relevant? What difference is it whether person A with billions of dollars or person B with billions of dollars of net worth owns Twitter? Democracy? No one is forcing anyone to use Twitter. Current users are free to leave.
- hatsubishi 4y ago
- akie 4y agoIt seems to me that you are actually the one who doesn't understand how extreme concentration of wealth has the potential to steer and disrupt societies.
- CoastalCoder 4y agoYour comment seems to cover a lot of territory, but it's not very specific. If you'd like to go deeper on a single line of criticism of the GP, I'd be interested in reading it.
- misiti3780 4y agoIf you were our supreme leader, how would you prevent private individuals like Musk, Bezos, etc from acquiring their wealth, given it is tied up in the value of very useful companies they created ?
- akomtu 4y agoNo need to speculate. The US Dept. of Treasury has just created the Office of DEI and that's not an April 1st joke. Musk is simply going to get a low diversity score from that high office and prohibited, by a new statute, from owning more than 10% in a public company.
- TMWNN 4y ago>Musk is simply going to get a low diversity score from that high office Musk is, bona fide, 100% African American. Checkmate, atheists.
- cellar_door 4y agoDon't worry, it'd just be seized and put in control of very competent and qualified "elected" members of The Party.
- Phenomenit 4y agoProgressive taxation to hundred percent for both individuals and corporations.
- godshatter 4y agoWell that's one way to get them to leave the country, I guess.
- sakopov 4y agoThat's straight up fucking stupid. 100% tax is not a tax. That's theft.
- misiti3780 4y ago
- seanw444 4y ago
- algoatecorn 4y agoYea for sure, it's totally awesome when individuals hold absurd wealth because they never abuse it and we definitely don't have countless examples throughout history of this phenomenon causing harm to society.
- FredPret 4y agoAnd we definitely don’t have countless examples throughout history that shows the disastrous consequences of not allowing individual economic freedom and all it entails
- throwaway290 4y agoEconomic freedom is like free speech (and any other freedom, really). It can not be absolute unless everyone behaves in good faith, once you assume you have rogue players who exploit the good faith behavior of others you have to have rules. So you will find literally no place where absolute freedom is practiced, and for good reasons. Sadly, in case of economic freedom a rogue player who has billions can also have political power to lobby against inconvenient to them rules, and ah everyone wants to be on their good side.
- jklinger410 4y ago[flagged]
- FredPret 4y agoYour fact-free, example-free, and above all pompous line of argument is an excellent antidote to your own ideas
- jklinger410 4y ago
- ambrozk 4y agoExactly. It's sickening to see a billionaire like Elon Musk push around the ordinary people who currently own Twitter! (The ordinary people are Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, and State Street Corp.)
- honeybadger1 4y agoLol, People don't care about facts brother, some people are just jealous and love to hate.