it’s super fun to talk to a “fiscal conservative” or “neoliberal” that’s real pissed off about the people scalping ps5s or concert tickets or whatever

“They buy up all the supply with unfair advantages like bots and using discord channels to get restock alerts before anyone else can know! Then they drive up the price so high no one can afford it!”

You can get them so close to having the epiphany that you just had but their dream of being a billionaire themselves one day causes so much cognitive dissonance that they will then defend elon musk. Or the neolib will defend all the poor very wealthy CEOs and executives worth 10+ million dollars while secretly wanting to defend billionaires like bill gates because he has better optics, but they realize billionaires in general have bad optics at the moment right now so they shut up

Ultra wealthy people in general are the issue. Billionaires are the absolute worst of it but the single person with an 80 million dollar estate is the same problem just on a smaller scale. That still chokes a fairly large community of resources. Billionaires just do the same thing to an entire nation, or even the world to some degree.

All of that money is equity. Basically none of these dudes are liquid and the bits they have that are liquid are from cashing out stolen equity. It’s because we have this fucked up idea that because I start a company I then hold the bag in perpetuity and you get nothing because I say so. Even if I bring you on in the beginning and you help me build it up from nothing, even if you help me run it as it grows to an empire, even if you help keep the empire running each and every day. I pay you money, as little as possible, and ideally no benefits, and you get absolutely no share of the company that you are helping to build.

So here I sit in my ivory tower, a company valued at 1 million, 5 million, 100 billion, 3 trillion. Who do I share that equity with? People who will loan me money. No one who will actually do any real work to make the company move forward day to day. Those people sweating and bleeding get nothing. The people getting a chunk of the pie are the ones that can afford to buy in and they reap the rewards as a result: they don’t trade their physical health for money, they don’t get paid shit, and as the company grows they make more and more while they sit on their asses like the parasites they are, sucking away your wages and benefits. Your health insurance is worse this year? Or it doesn’t exist at all? Gotta cut costs to please the shareholders and investors to turn a “profit”

That’s why in terms of stock ownership the top 10% of Americans own 87% of American owned stocks and the bottom 90% own 13%. The bottom 50% own 1% and the top 1% own 50%. This excludes the portion of the market owned by foreign investors but that’s still tremendous - the top 1% own 23 trillion dollars worth of equity.

Forcibly take over amazon, Walmart, Google, apple, etc and nationalize them. Give the equity owned by retail investors to the workers. And not just the fancy coders and engineers that probably already had stock options, to the people hocking phones at mall kiosks and doing tech support. Then jail all billionaires for life for crimes against humanity and outlaw advertising and we might save humanity