The thing about billionaires it that they could just stop. It’s not a skin colour, it’s not an ethnicity or even a religion.
If they wanted to they could redistribute the wealth. They could use their power to close the political doors they exploit.
Wouldn’t even have to check themselves out, wouldn’t even have to adopt some monastic lifestyle. But they would rather live in a world where they have lifetimes of obscene luxury at the expense of others. At a certain point you have to ask if causing suffering is part of their fun.
Anyone that would stop would’ve done so well before they got to the point of obscene wealth. Billionaires can only stop hypothetically - the only way to get them to actually stop is through force.
Yeah its essentially a mental illness once they get to the billionaire stage.
There is a finite amount of wealth…
Billionaires have to take it from everyone else to accumulate it. And then taking that money out of circulation hurts but so does them “investing” because it drives the price of everything up.
Especially for stuff like real estate where they make money buying but also investing in mortgage debt. The wealthy are incentiviced to drive prices skyhigh, but it’s unsustainable and huge crashes become more and more frequent. Everytime people get squeezed and some loss everything, and the wealthy gobble up even more.
As Trevor Moore once said:
It’s purely business
No, it’s not a zero-sum game.
That being said, they do exploit us.
There is a finite amount of wealth…
I wonder about that, actually. I think it’s quite likely that there is a literally finite amount of wealth, but a functionally infinite amount of wealth; that there is no actual scarcity. Our world produces enough to shelter, feed, and hydrate each of the eight billion humans on the planet. We have to throw away food, waste water, and leave perfectly livable homes empty in order to maintain the illusion of scarcity, all so that billionaires can maintain their hoards.
