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dathinabtoday at 2:32 AM1 replyview on HN

> running into Russia.

except they also seem to speed running crashing the world economy, making it feels more like "speed running Russian government structures while speed running a soviet union future"...

which isn't really "that" surprising, if you consider that, while most people will suffer from a sever world economy crash, the ~top 1% or so will long term profit. Mainly because even iff they lose a huge lot they still have enough left to buy up theoretically well working businesses crashed by the large scale economy crash. Sure that would be very evil, but you only need a few of the richest pushing for it while the rest "just" doesn't push against it for this to happen. Or a few of the richest having even way more money then the rest. And given that both (huge differences in wealth of the wealthiest & lack of morals) seem the case it's hard to believe that the current direction is fully accidental.

Which brings use back to the topic of how any proper free market must not allow any to large concentration of money as it will break the market sooner or later. Or how democracies must not allow too much concentration of political power (or it break sooner or later very reliably historically speaking). Or how the one thing a society preaching tolerance can't tolerate is strong cases of intolerance. All the same kind of "naively it looks like a contradiction" cases where if you look into them it kinda start looking obvious that tolerating that is a bad idea.

Problem is while preventing aggregation of power, wealth, etc. is very viable if properly perused by politics, it's to late for prevention.

But also there isn't really a good fix once a country (or more like most of the world) failed to prevent it.

Trying to forcefully size assets is a severely unpleasant idea. More importantly but it's a thing things which tend to end very very badly.

And the ethical issues with that are pretty obvious, too.

Through also this isn't about millionaires, or the top 10%,1%,0.1%, but about wealth "beyond reason". Not sure where that starts but probably lowest in the the 50-100 millions and definitely in the billions (or trillions). I.e. the point where your wealth gives you trivially more political influence then the votes of the majority of people... I mean in the end about protecting democracy and a (proper) free market. It isn't about communism, no matter how much certain propaganda channels will claim that supposedly wanting a working democracy and free market is communism (or socialism). Through iff, and only if, you put the vague limit of when something start being "unreasonable rich" at a much lower point, e.g. inflation corrected 2 million, then _that_ is making it about communism like stuff. So it's a slippery slope. (Sadly too many people seem to have lost the ability (or will?) to have well differentiated discussions or opinions, always falling into extremes, so discussing such things seems often pointless)


Replies

bamboozledtoday at 4:17 AM

It does feel a bit like people have so much money they could basically drive us into extinction (or close too it) by constantly supporting and funding psychopathic lunatics like Trump, helping them stay in power and watching them do nothing to hurt their business, therefore do nothing to stop anthropomorphic climate change.