Yet your argument is: It’s wrong because it would be against the law (“theft”)
No, your assumption is apparently that the word “theft” has an inextricably law-based definition. It doesn’t—stealing’s immoral, that’s all there is to it.
it’s not theft to take back something that belongs to you.
Agreed, but irrelevant, as you’re talking about taking, not taking back. It doesn’t belong to you just because you decided it does.
Value is always and exclusively derived from labor.
That’s a ridiculous statement (re “exclusively”). As an extremely simple/obvious example that refutes this: the best cashier in the world’s skills are worthless unless a store already exists for them to cashier in.
It’s absurd to think the worker is entitled to 100% of the value their labor produces. Both employer and employee come together for that value creation to be possible. Neither entity alone can create that value, so they both deserve a portion of the result of their symbiosis; neither side deserves 100%.
“Profit = theft” is a moronic notion.
this argument is roughly on the same level as “drugs are illegal because they are prohibited.”
No, it isn’t, at all. I’m talking about morality, not legality. Total straw man on your part.
A full audit every year, and then you simply tax any wealth over the 500M mark. It’s that easy.
If, hypothetically, those audits ended up costing more than the additional tax revenue they yield, resulting in overall tax revenue decreasing, would you still want to do it?
why it would be wrong to take everything from the rich except, say, 500 million.
It’s wrong because theft is wrong. Just because the thing you’re stealing is something the victim can do without, doesn’t magically make it not theft.
So theft it remains, and wrong it remains, because theft is wrong.
Pretty simple, really.
Can you show a single example of someone actually expressing this sentiment, though? I’ve seen “quotes” like this hundreds of times, but never anyone on the ‘other side’ ever actually make this argument.
Holy false dichotomy.
When Firefox started recording key strokes
Source? That’s news to me, and when I tried finding a source myself, all I found were extensions etc. to add that to the browser.
EDIT: Both the comment I replied to, and a comment replying to me by the same person, have been deleted…were they caught in a lie/mistake and not brave enough to admit it? lol
I’m confused, didn’t you answer your own question?
No, there is a difference in motivation between doing whatever you want because you believe it’s hopeless re ‘consuming ethically’, and doing whatever you want because you’ve never given a single thought to the matter of ‘ethical consumption’ at all.
My contention is simply that the vast majority of people who ‘do whatever’ are in the latter category, that’s all.
people who interpret “no ethical consumption under capitalism” as a license to do whatever they want, because it’s all unethical.
Have you actually encountered someone who did this? Everyone I’ve ever known of who was in the ‘do whatever they want’ mindset, certainly wasn’t because of how they interpreted that ‘slogan’, it was just because they don’t give a shit to begin with—they almost certainly had never even heard it before.
I remember the joke that Microsoft called it that deliberately so that if people wrote “I hate ME” it wouldn’t sound like they were trashing the OS.
You thought that because the headline is pretty deliberately misleading. Clickbait trash.
The article is clear the broken update effects a specific subset of enterprise users, on a specific mix of base versions and cumulative updates.
So you admit the headline is lying, then? The headline doesn’t even try to use weasel words to say “some users”, it just straight-up says that the update removes things, heavily implying both that it’s a global change, and that it’s deliberate.
You mean the same Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) that Trump and Musk killed the enforcement of after a tweet? (Both billionaires, btw.)
Goalpost move, you said billionaires prevent those laws from passing. They passed. You lied. The end.
Are you arguing that a 1% excise tax limited to stock buybacks (even lower than the 2 and 3% I already argued won’t change the status quo) in any way counters [anything]?
Nope. A new tax that applies only to the wealthiest demographic successfully passing is just another refutation of your assertion that billionaires prevent legislation that affects them negatively from passing, and that’s the only reason I mentioned it. More desperate goalpost moves.
For every legal loophole that is closed
So you admit they do get closed. I thought billionaires never let detrimental legislation pass?
It would be convenient for you, if I were to suggest that, or any other argument you try to put in my mouth.
Behold, your words, verbatim:
When those policies conflict with the interests of billionaires, the billionaires stop them from passing.
That headline works whether or not that C is capitalized, heh…
The only reason it was ever that high is because the tax code at that time was so full of loopholes/deductions/etc. (that are closed today) that you could have that be the rate with practically no one actually paying it.
What I’m trying to say is, don’t hold your breath for that to ever return in present day.
Working class Americans (and not just those at or below the federal poverty line) support policy changes that would materially improve their lives. When those policies conflict with the interests of billionaires, the billionaires stop them from passing.
Are you seriously suggesting that legislation that is detrimental to billionaires never becomes law?
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, among other things, imposed an excise tax on stock buybacks, something that will literally never impact anyone who isn’t significantly wealthy, and that passed. A year before, the Corporate Transparency Act passed, and basically struck the death knell for shell company schemes, (not a whole lot of that happening among the working class, lol) by requiring “Beneficial Owners” to be reported to FinCEN, so they know who the actual human beings who own them are. Billionaires lost the ability to hide assets and real estate within anonymous LLCs.
It’s ridiculous to think that billionaires are all just smiting any and all legislation that would negatively impact them at will. You are clearly deep in some echo chambers.
Its very easy to make an incorrect correlation
I think you don’t understand what “correlation” means. The correlation is clearly and inarguably what I showed it to be: billionaires per capita went up as poverty went down. That’s a plain fact.
43% of the US living in poverty
I’m not going to bother examining how legitimate this stat is, because even if I just take this at face value, what is that compared to the 40-60% I cited? It still does nothing to support the point that billionaires are ‘holding the working class down’ to any statistically-significant degree. If we take the bottom of the range of the estimate I got, 40%, and took your figure as-is, 43%, then a 7x increase in billionaires per capita increased poverty by 3% total over 100 years! That stat takes “nothingburger” to a whole new level.
That doesn’t do much of anything to support the assertion that billionaires are ‘capping the lives of the working class’, when there being seven times more of them makes no statistically-significant difference in the poverty rate.
Not to mention that 1925 is in the midst of the roaring twenties, before the Great Depression, and your article was written a few years after a global pandemic that wreaked havoc on the world’s economy—two facts that both skew things in favor of your claim.
Edit: That argument is just “trickle down economics” with extra steps.
Trickle down economics is the argument that financial benefits given to the wealthiest will naturally make their way down to the rest, so there is no need to aid the impoverished directly.
There is literally nothing in what I said that suggests that course of action, at all. My talking about how taking direct action to eradicate poverty ought to be the top priority is literally the opposite of that. You’re full of it.
the existence of billionaires is a cap on the lives of the working class.
Billionaires (inflation-adjusted, of course) per capita in the US increased by about 7x compared to 100 years ago, while the percentage of the population living in poverty is 4-6x lower today than it was 100 years ago, compared to what it is today.
The correlation is in literally the opposite direction as what you claim. How do you reconcile these facts with your assertion?
The finish line should not be “raise money to fund public programs.”
The finish line should be “billionaires don’t exist.”
Financially speaking, helping the poor and hurting the rich are not the same thing, and it’s honestly concerning when I see people prioritize the latter over the former. Eradicating poverty matters infinitely more than keeping people’s net worth (which as a reminder, is just a guessed (there is no billionaire whose net worth is precisely known), hypothetical, fluctuating price tag on the stuff they own, should they decide to sell it) under some arbitrary maximum.
And that’s without even mentioning how much tax revenue is wasted on things that don’t actually serve the population at large. What good is an extra $X billion in tax revenue if it’s all pissed away anyway? As one example, the US government spends more per capita on healthcare than any other country, and yet we’re far from #1 in most healthcare categories. How does that make sense? We’re already not getting what we’re paying for, fixing things like that is more important than simply increasing the amount of money going down the same wasteful hole, I think.
This is what you’ve arbitrarily decided is the case, though, not the reality.