If all the money ends up in hands of billionaires and their corporations and there will be no money in hands of regular plebs…
Who do you think will have to pay the taxes?
Also, the people would figure out a different way of trading or currency. And with that one getting taxed, all the billionaire’s money become worthless.
This is why I think they are all into crypto, because they see it as the next big currency and want to be the person controlling it
we all rot as they continue eating steak
Aren’t we supposed to get cake, at least?
bootlick them enough and you’ll get a slice of synthesized cakes
Cake = the caked on shit at the bottom of a bread pan.
They let us borrow some so that we can buy their products and pay them back more. We have to trade our labor to make up the difference between our passive income and current expenses, but they’ll only give us just enough to sustain a population of laborers.
Some take a risk and borrow wayyyy more than they can really pay back with their own labor and use that money to buy assets that they hope will be successful in integrating with the loop of money. If it’s successful, their assets buy the labor of others to generate income so they pay back the loan and do it all over again.
Elysium happens.
I’ve never seen it. Is it good?
yeah, it was actually a good movie. The big thing was that all the super rich lived in space on a halo ring while Earth went to hell for everyone else.
these days this movie hits a little too close to home for me.
The economy collapses and you get a revolution, mass emigration, and/or other major societal upheavals – probably as soon as a lot of people start going hungry…
There is only 9 meals between man and revolution
We had that before. It was called feudalism and it was terrible. One day, the people got pissed off enough to cut off a few heads. A golden age ensued for a couple hundred years.
I would imagine at some point government will start becoming creative to tax the billionaires or the corporations. Though the masses becomes entertainment for the billionaires to keep money valuable else like you said if they all have the money then it’s worthless. The government by this point would be so weak since rampant corruption would be so ingrained that any idea of taxing the billionaires would be incredibly hard to pass. So I think what likely will happen is a societal collapse. If this were to happen globally end of our current civilization.
They are getting into government because they know government must stop them.
Uhmm … the billionaires ARE the government right now. They are engaging in fraud and crime right out in the open.
It’s not in the billionaire’s interest for us plebs to have no money at all. A lot of their interests are funded by us. Paying for power, food, iPhones, clothes, cars, holidays etc. So if they have it all and we have none, the economy will collapse, people will barter with vape juice and booze, and the billionaires will realize they cannot eat money.
When the economy collapses the question of who will pay taxes is a secondary problem. The primary one will be to rebuild the state and a new currency and then they’ll look at the tax code.
You are presuming that the economic-configuration would be the same…
That isn’t correct.
The Deep South’s slaves weren’t allowed any economic-autonomy, were they?
We’d be mere-property. mere-slaves, no rights, & just mowing-us-down-with-bullets if we protested, if it got far enough.
You know, the way communist dictators mow-down their own farmers/food-producers ( Stalin ), or their own intelligentsia ( Mao ), or the way fascist dictators mow-down the woke.
Most currence is mere-leverage, & with that-fake an economy, they can certainly come-up-with something that locks us out.
Trumpcoin, e.g: either you use trumpcoin XOR you’re ICE’d, if you see what I mean…
If they have to manufacture criminality, in order to “justify” some more “enforcement”, well, for bullies, that’s called entertainment, right?
the economic-phase/paradigm we’re currently-in is only 1 phase of many.
The barter-system the Indigenous peoples ( who hadn’t come-up-with a currency of any kind ) works, for low-intensity economies…
the “economy” that functioned in the nazi concentration-camps ( people traded for pieces-of-paper, or cigarettes, etc ), or in prisons, is an economy…
Underground-economy’s likely to be present in nearly-all economies, especially the ones rooted in class-based-validity…
( in the academic-class-system associating-with-an-important-name is a kind of “currency” )
The intent is total-segregation-of-privilege-&-power to them, from all-others.
Why should they care if the all-others part doesn’t work, or isn’t sustainable?
So long as it works until they die, … they won, right?
_ /\ _
What you are describing sounds an awful lot like collapse to me. Your slavery South comparison is missing that a lot of what they produced was exported to places where at least officially slavery was banned. So that model is propped up in one location by areas with purchasing power from the general public elsewhere. The thought experiment was what if everywhere was the slavery South, in which case the economy will no longer be sustainable.
This is where AI comes in too, a new hyper repressive economy will be much easier to enforce with killer robots that do whatever you tell them without question.
The “plebs” will develop a new currency of their own. And by this I basically mean anything from bottle caps to IOU notes etc. Monopoly money, whatever. Arguably they could use something actually valuable too but using an IOU-type thing kinda secures it against theft. Point is that it starts with small communities with some degree of trust of course. Alternatively, trade work for food and goods - but we’re primed to use money so I think we’re likely to just create a new currency since we already know it’s simpler to just trade 5 bottle caps for a carrot than it is to wash dishes for… oh i dunno, 3 carrots or whatever.
This kinda is what we should be getting to do anyway at this point. The 1% should be regarded as a force of nature. You can’t win against them anymore you can win against a volcano. Best you can do is work around them (instead of trying to beat them at their own game which they are constantly rigging in their favor anyway).
Money itself only has as much value as we give it.
That’s crypto. Non governmental currency.
that’s the wet dream, fictional version of crypto.
that’s the idea that made me excited about crypto 15 years ago. (stupid young 31 old me 👶 )
Oh yeah, it’s stupid. But so is the idea of non-governmental currency having any sort of real or consistent value. Every exchange type that we come up with is subject to the same problems as crypto. Crypto just got there faster
“All the money” assumes there’s a finite amount of money. There isn’t. In a fiat currency, like the Dollar, Euro or Sterling, banks create money when they lend, and the money disappears again when the loan is repaid. This is what a banking license gives you; The ability to make loans without having the existing money to back them.
Government spends by telling it’s bank (The Federal Reserve, ECB or BoE) to lend money for the things it wants to buy. Taxes then repay that debt and the money doesn’t exist anymore.
In an economy where huge amounts of wealth is horded, there’s a problem of liquidity. All of that wealth is idle. It’s not circulating and there becomes a danger of economic collapse. Therefore more money has to enter the system, either through government spending or commercial banks making loans.
Horded money is also money that isn’t going back to banks to repay the lending. So the amount of money in existence goes up, driving the value of that money down. This is inflation. One dollar can no longer buy as much as it used to as it’s value has gone down.
So, billionaires cause:
- Large amounts of commercial debt to inject replacement money into the economy. That is, personal debt or corporate debt.
- Inflation caused by that cash injection
Sound familiar?
Now a government could choose to raise its spending so that it injects the required money into its economy, rather commercial banks doing it. The advantage of that is that they can balance that with raised taxes, so inflation doesn’t get out of control. They can also choose who to tax and protect areas of the economy.
Most governments don’t see it this way, arguing that they can only spend what they take in taxes (The “government spending is like a household budget” argument). This has been false ever since they all came off the gold standard. They can spend what they want and they can tax what they want. The difference will drive inflation, so has to be kept reasonable, but if they don’t spend enough the commercial banks take over and will absolutely drive inflation.
That’s the best and most straightforward explanation I’ve ever seen about this, well done
I have read about these ideas about money being created through loans before, but also read contradictory ideas.
Since you seem to know a lot about the subject, would you happen to know of materials where I can learn more about the topic?
So these ideas are the basis of modern monetary theory (MMT) i.e. the theory of modern money, not that it’s a modern theory of money. There’s nothing very controversial here, in that the “theory” is just a description of how things work when you have a fiat currency. The controversial parts are what you do in your fiscal policy once you think about things this way.
Stephanie Kelton is a vocal proponent of this style of framing. She’s been an economic advisor to Bernie Sanders and is the author of “The Deficit Myth” which explains these concepts. She also gave a TED talk on the concepts.
Richard Murphy is a UK proponent who writes a blog and has a YouTube channel where he explains the concepts.
There are others, but these two are a good way in. Searching for them, and also the the phrase “Modern Monetary Theory” should get you lots of talks, interviews and articles on both sides of the arguments.
Uhm, should probably mention that MMT is a relatively fringe theory not supported by most mainstream economists. Saying “there’s nothing controversial here” seems more than a bit disingenous…
How banks lend money isn’t controversial. How governments spend and collect money isn’t controversial. Those are just points of fact. The controversial part is the government being able to spend before it has tax levels which “support” the spending. That’s what I meant. MMT says that’s an available choice. That’s all.
Many mainstream economists will say that unchecked spending is reckless and you risk hyperinflation. Now we’re in to policy choices though. Regardless, if you spend without worrying about the other side of the equation (tax) they’d be right. However, that’s a strawman argument because that’s not what is being said.
I’ll be honest, I’ve yet to hear a convincing argument against MMT, and I’ve looked. I started off sceptical, but I now think it’s a useful framing tool. Every counter I’ve seen doesn’t address what it actually states, rather what they imagine it states (normally unchecked spending). If anyone has seen a good factual argument against MMT I’d be interested.
Depends on how you look at it. Technically, it’ll never happen. The megacorps still need employees to do some tasks. They’ll still have some pocket money.
OTOH, you could say that it’s already happened. The plebs are broke, the middle class is basically gone, and the tax structure can’t support everything that the government wants to do. Eventually, borrowing runs out, and we get a crisis that makes the current economic troubles look mild.
I don’t relish this path.
money represents power and whoever has power will have the money.
i think you’re looking at this from a very “everyday” perspective - you think of money as something that is passed around and goes from A to B. the system at large does not work that way. just like the earth is flat if you look at any small patch of it but is round when you look at it globally, the economy works very differently whether you look at it at an everyday scale or at a global scale.
on a global scale, things are determined by geopolitical considerations, not by whatever companies or buyers/sellers do. like, that china exports so-and-so many tons of steel and imports so-and-so many tons of pork meat has very little to do with companies working hard to produce these products. it’s mostly some globalist philosophy to determine what happens on a global scale. for example, tariffs might completely change the game, if only there is the political will for that. as do free-trade agreements.
again, the same is true for any big country. “money” on a country-level is a fiction. it was invented by banks for complex reasons (mostly to simplify trade) and can be modified as long as it’s meaningful to the state’s politics. like, the state can just print more money through the federal reserve bank. in fact, it does that all the time. that cannot be explained by simple “trade transactions” as you’re imagining them rn. there’s abstract and complex and completely non-trivial maths involved in this game. “what happens when the billionaires own everything” only makes sense as a question when you consider that the concept of “owning” stuff is fundamental - which it is not. “Ownership” is a legal construct because the state deems it useful. with a different philosophy, the very concept of “ownership” might lose traction and become meaningless. The question therefore is: What is the political will at a state level?
That is an ongoing process, but it looks much different from what you imagine. Even now, a large part of the economy is working for the top 10 percent, producing luxury goods and services. Wealthy customers provide the biggest margins for companies.
“Regular” customers are getting more irrelevant every day. There was a time when your role as a consumer was important for the economy. This role gave you power and influence because companies were competing for your money. This era is slowly coming to an end, something most people haven’t realized yet.
Rich people can be fools, and a fool and his money are soon parted. That’s why much of the economy is just everyone trying to scam everyone else.
Then the plebs reach for the scythes and the machetes.
That’s why the billionaires steal as much money as they can, but stop short of making a critical mass of people desperately poor: they keep most people poor enough that they try to fight for what little they have left, and between themselves for the scraps, instead of uniting and rising up against the kleptocrats who engineer their poverty.
That’s the subject of the chapter on the anarchist FAQ I was reading last week. Goes something like this: governments exist to serve the billionaires. When governments do something meaningful to other people it is a tug of war to reach a compromise, always with the goal of preserving the status quo.
We’re slowly getting to the point where they’re get too greedy and moving past that critical mass point. I think Trumps presidency really turbo charged the idiocy.
A lot of rich fucks are starting to feel the danger though:
The billionaires are so out of touch that they have no idea how desperate the masses are becoming.
You’re talking as if the billionaires are a group of organized people who know what they’re doing and act accordingly in a coordinated way.
I think the billionaires are a group of individuals, each trying to maximize their wealth, and they will absolutely take what they can get, because if they don’t, some other billionaire will take it.
And i see no evidence that they would stop short of causing mass poverty that will lead to riots.
The billionaires are not following a nefarious master plan that they agreed upon. They appear coordinated because they all act the same way, all mindlessly following the same instinct of greed that’s programmed in their genes. Just like bees or ants appear to work as a team, when in reality they’re all following the same simplistic automatic behavior.
yeah it’s convergent behavior. like they all independently arrive at the same behavior which causes the illusion of coherence where there is none.
It basically already did
