Who could have forseen the woes of capitalism?

, we’ve decided as a society that even global leaders, scientists and life saving doctors who do the most important work don’t earn that much.

The US doesn't even pay the President $1 million a year salary. Arguably the most powerful person in the world isn't even considered a millionaire status job. And yet we allow shitfuckers like Elon to scam their way into hundreds of billions. It really says that the majority of Americans are A-OK with scams and cutthroat tactics representing them.

We're at the point where the Pentagon needs to check with Elon Musk before making decisions because he personally controls 50% of the satellites in orbit and if he feels offended he can prevent the US, and anyone else, from using them. He can single handedly turn the tides of war. He's undoubtedly more powerful than the US president. He's unelected and has zero accountability. Why are we all ok with this??
- Because these ~~oil~~ ~~railroad~~ tech barons have been good for the economy and therefore the growth of the United States, and no one wanted to stop one while there was still more money to be made and now it's late and gonna be an uphill battle to undo.
- The fact that the DoD hasn't seized control of Starlink as a national security asset is insane. They could even pay him a fair market price for the company and keep all the employees on. Just appoint government personnel at the highest levels to ensure it stays online.
  
  That's not a good solution either. The government seizing assets from private citizens isn't cool. That's oppressive. But the government should have built that network with our tax dollars, not given our tax dollars to a private citizen to build and keep all the profits from. I'm not saying he should retain control, but I am saying he should have never been given control.
  
  The government seizing assets from private citizens isn’t cool.
  
  It’s very good and cool.
  
  Eminent domain
  
  Defense Production Act of 1950
  
  Nationalization
  
  Means of production
  
  It would be very good and cool under a socialist state, but not in the US currently and I'll explain my reasoning. In the US, nationalization represents the transfer of an enterprise from a single capitalist firm to the capitalist class as a whole via the state. Nationalization can bring benefits to both the working and capitalist classes, but ultimately the workers are still being exploited by the state for private profits instead of social ends. When an enterprise is nationalized by a capitalist state, the former owners are usually generously compensated with state bonds bearing a fixed rate of interest; this enables them to continue to exploit the workers involved at a rate of profit now guaranteed by the state. The class struggle continues, but but it is now necessary for the workers to struggle not against a single private management but against the capitalist state in its entirety. This is one of the reasons why Mussolini and Hitler heaped praise on FDR for his New Deal policies. They did a lot of good for people during the depression, but they also were market interventionist in a way that put a lot of corporate control in the hands of the capitalist state.
  
  I won’t nitpick and just say that you’re mostly right. Nationalization within the imperial core has only ever provided small, temporary relief for a labor aristocracy that benefits from imperial super-profits.
  
  Nationalizations outside of the imperial core is a move toward independence from the imperialist states, so it’s much more significant. So significant that the imperial core may try for regime change to claw those resources back.
  
  Yes, 100% agree. Thanks for the additional insight.
  
  I wonder if there are already plans to take control of starting in an emergency? The DoD should eat game then it’s there isn’t.
  
  The NSA could probably let them in through one of the back doors.
  
  Just appoint government personnel at the highest levels to ensure it stays online.
  
  So like Chinese government? Socialism? Marx? Stalin? Mao? You damn traitor! Spy!
- Why are we all ok with this??
  
  I am not okay with it. I am extra special not okay with it because Musk is a shit heel.
You don't need to earn a million dollars per year to be a millionaire. The president gets a salary of $400k per year and has literally all of their expenses paid for, including room, board, maid service, butlers, cars, airfare, clothing, medical care, etc. They serve for 4-8 years, and they receive compensation for life. It doesn't take long to become a millionaire in that scenario. There are no US presidents that aren't millionaires.
- The context of that quote is a little lost, because these days with inflation and housing prices, just owning your own home probably makes you a millionaire.
  
  I think you meant to reply to my other response where I quoted William Jennings Bryan. If so, you're right, the number has changed. $1M in 1896 is the equivalent of $36.5M today. But it certainly applies to billionaires, and we were talking about them, so I felt that it was relevant.

William Jennings Bryan, who was a three-time Democratic presidential nominee and served as Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson, said "No man can earn a million dollars honestly". He campaigned under the idea that all of the wealthy are corrupt, and the United States needed reform. It's a sad state of affairs that the majority of our citizens won't vote for politicians that represent the interests of the working class. Almost all of our politicians support and assist the wealthy, and refuse to acknowledge the issues facing the working class, yet people keep putting them in office.

Historical note: $1million in his time is $36.5m today
- Wow, that really put it in perspective. How far we have let greed get the better of ourselves. Where are the guardrails to prevent this?
  
  Inflationary currency needs and expects this. Just how it works.
  
  The guardrails protect this.
lol nowadays a million dollars is like, the bare minimum you need for a comfortable retirement that doesn’t include “dying before 70” as part of the plan.

Inflations a son of a bitch.
Part of it is that people have been sold on the idea that they could be rich one day too.

Every billionaire is a wage thief.

What makes Buffet exceptional is that he agrees with you. He has said our system is perverse in that it rewards him more than teachers who actually work for a living.

But he won't give the money to the people so... Still evil. He's just giving it to his kids and calling it charity

I have screenshotted and quoted you to a half dozen people now. Well said.

Bill Gates: No u

Buffet and Gates are just playing from The Gospel of Wealth, by A. Carnegie.

What a read. He really just...up and says it all, doesn't he.

I disagree. There is ONE billionaire that is not evil.

Wanna know who?

Tell me when you know about one.

Pavel Durov. Owner of Telegram.

For a decade I'm waiting for him to slip on his lies and spill out the billionaire evil. But there's still no drama, no posing, no yacht, no island, no employee-torturing, no supercars, no castles... Just a guy who happened to get a ton of moneyz and trying to fulfil his vision of a free messenger that won't cooperate with governments like the others do. There's a reason it's banned in many countries and he's even been deported from his motherland.

Not saying he's an angel, and billionaires really shouldn't exist at all. But if i had to choose one of them to get a fair trial instead of the ad-hoc-guillotine, it'd be him.
A dead one? Maybe you mean Bill Gates?
- Well, he is still alive physically.
  
  I wasn't saying bill gates was dead. I was asking if the only good billionaire was a dead billionaire. I was then suggesting you might believe Bill Gates is the one good billionaire. They were separate possible answers I was trying to think of.
  
  I only said he was physically alive. (Spoiler: dead inside)
  
  Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?

Warren Buffet haven't "earned a billion dollars". Net worth means the value of all your assets and in his case it's mostly stocks. Look at the evolution of his net worth and see how it accelerates as he gets older. That's compounding interests doing what they do.

He could easily get a billion dollars cash whenever he wanted. Look, Musk got $42B in cash within a couple months, immediately lost half of it, and his net worth went up. It doesn't matter that the majority of their wealth isn't liquid. They can get cash whenever they want by borrowing it from banks and investors at lower rates than their holdings appreciate.
Defend him however you wish, he and his descendants will never have a need for anything in their lives, and that is because they robbed so many on their way up
- Please explain me how this robbing works exactly.
  
  Ownership of Capital is theft from Workers.
  
  This'll get you upvotes from the people that agree with you but it's almost like you're not even trying to change my mind. You're intentionally being vague and that doesn't contribute anything to the discussion.
  
  Alright, then please, tell me how familiar you are with the following concepts and we can go from there.
  
  Marx's Law of Value
  
  The M-C-M' circuit
  
  If you aren't familiar with either, you're truly better off reading Marx than getting a second-hand lecture, but I'll do my best.
  
  I think my question is pretty straight forward. The claim is that Warren Buffet has robbed others so he could become wealthy. I simply asked how does that work exactly. I'm not sure what my knowledge of Marx's philosophy has to do with you being able to answer my question. If you have a good understanding of it yourself then it shouldn't be too hard to explain it to an idiot like me.
  
  The reason claims like this rubs me the wrong way is because what Warren Buffet is doing is hardly different from what I'm doing myself aswell. It's just the scale that's different. About half of my wealth is tied into stocks. Stocks that I've bought with my own money that I have earned with my own labour. I'll never be able to become rich by working and I'm not going to become rich by investing either but that doesn't mean I shouldn't leverage the stock market to boost my own finances. The claim I hear you making here is that I'm essentially stealing from workers aswell.
  
  EDIT: I asked chatGPT to steelman your position. This is what it said. Does this represent your view correctly?
  
  When someone says "Ownership of Capital is theft from Workers" in a critical context of capitalism, they are likely expressing a viewpoint rooted in Marxist or socialist ideology. This statement reflects the belief that under capitalism, the ownership and control of capital (such as factories, land, machinery, etc.) by a relatively small group of individuals or entities (capitalists or owners) is inherently unjust because it deprives workers of the full value of their labor.
  
  In Marxist theory, the means of production are considered to be collectively owned by society as a whole, and the capitalist system is seen as a mechanism through which the bourgeoisie (capitalist class) exploits the proletariat (working class) by extracting surplus value from their labor. According to this perspective, workers are only paid a portion of the value they produce, while the remainder is appropriated by the owners as profit.
  
  From this viewpoint, the statement "Ownership of Capital is theft from Workers" suggests that the capitalist system is fundamentally exploitative, as it allows capitalists to profit from the labor of workers without adequately compensating them for their contributions. It highlights the unequal power dynamics inherent in capitalist societies, where a minority of individuals or corporations control the means of production and accumulate wealth at the expense of the majority who rely on selling their labor to survive.
  
  It matters precisely because I need to know what I'm working with here. If you understand the concepts I asked about, I can pinpoint exactly where the robbery takes place. If not, then I have to try to explain those concepts in their most basic form.
  
  You're right, it isn't too difficult to give you a brief overview, but without a firm understanding on your part it could open up far more questions than answer, unless you truly understand the basics of Marxism.
  
  As for yourself, yes, you are ultimately stealing from Workers, but unfortunately that is the only way to actually retire in this Capitalist system without a pension or massive savings. The goal is to escape the Proletariat and join the bourgeoisie via steady Capital accumulation, and go from exploited to exploiter.
  
  As for ChatGPT, it was broadly correct but was extremely vague and skipped over important details like the M-C-M' circuit I mentioned earlier, the broad cycle by which Capitalists use a sum of Money M to pay people to create a commodity C and sell for a greater value M'. Asking ChatGPT about Marxism is going to result in a lot of missed details and risk misinformation.

Bill Gates has also literally saved more lives and helped more impoverished people than you and the the closest 500 people you know. Yes, no one, no matter what they invent, create, or build, should be worth over a billion dollars, but unlike Amazon employees or wal mart, no one working at Microsoft ever needed food stamps and he stopped amassing wealth a long time ago, and even convinced some of his retarded wealthy friends to do the same.

If you've never dug deeply into the ramifications of the Gates' charity work, you might be surprised how much they use charity and their organizations to exert influence and control over the regions they help. It isn't purely from the goodness of their hearts: billionaire philanthropy is both a PR tactic for washing over their bad behaviors and a way of creating a captive, dependent population that you can control.
- What regions has gates gained control of, and for what purpose? He's not trying to control the government of the country he lives in, and he already has a bottomless supply of money and investments, so what's he after?
That is what Bill Gates’ PR machine wants you to believe.

Adam Ruins Everything - Why Billionaire Philanthropy is Not So Selfless

The Nation: Why Bill Gates’s Philanthropy Is a Problem

Jacobin: Bill Gates’s Philanthropic Giving Is a Racket

Citations Needed podcast:

Episode 45: The Not-So-Benevolent Billionaire: Bill Gates and Western Media

Episode 46: The Not-So-Benevolent Billionaire, Part II - Bill Gates in Africa

News Brief: Big Pharma, Bill Gates Spin Against Generic Vaccines for Global South as Biden a No Show

News Brief: #VaxLive is a PR Scam So Those Causing Vaccine Inequity Can Pose as Saviors of Global Poor

Episode 146: Bill Gates, Bono and the Limits of World Bank and IMF-Approved Celebrity 'Activism'
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  
  Adam Ruins Everything - Why Billionaire Philanthropy is Not So Selfless
  
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- I clicked and read the second link there from the nation. It's just an opinion piece from a guy ranting about not agreeing with how Gates has been giving away his money and that he was still also making money on investments. You could post a dozen links like that going the other way really easily as well. Fact check still shows he's given away $50,000,000,000.
  
  They’re shit “facts” whose purpose is to hide how oligarchies work.
Imagine how many lives could have been saved with the appropriate allocation of those resources Gates never paid in taxes. We shouldn't allow billionaires to take all that wealth and decide unilaterally who gets to be helped and who doesn't.
- Gates has gone on the record a ton of times saying that the more wealthy you are, the more taxes you should be paying.
  
  Also, don't kid yourself. If the US government taxed him appropriately over the years you're talking what? Fifty billion? A hundred billion total? The US spends over six TRILLION dollars a year. You think they're just an extra like five billion a year in tax collecting away from free school lunches or Healthcare for all? We already have the money in the US to make things better for us. Our corrupt government system is what's holding that up. You aren't going to get extra help by them getting more in taxes.
Didn't he straight up prevent vaccine creation by torpedoing the public domaining of covid vaccines, killing millions?

It's posts like this that really make me embarrassed to be here on Lemmy. So many people here like to shake their fists at the sky and complain about how the world works. Yes, capitalism leads to major inequality. Other options are out there but also lead to major inequality. Best you can do for you and your family is to try to live well within the system, and vote for the changes you feel will best serve everyone.

Ranting about billionaires not being good people in any case just makes your audience stop listening.

Sounds like it would do you some good to take the advice of the post and read some Marx. It might help you contextualize the analysis that leads people to come to leftist conclusions.

Additionally, voting alone will not bring about positive change. You can't directly vote on changes in America, just candidates working within the Capitalist system. True change comes from grassroots action, like unionizing and building up parallel structures.
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- I'm trying to figure out what machine learning had to do with leftist memes
  
  Permanently Deleted
  
  ... machine learning?
  
  Permanently Deleted
Yes, capitalism leads to major inequality. Other options are out there but also lead to major inequality.

The problem is that other options are not being explored. In the past 200 years (in the western world), pretty much nothing apart from Capitalism has been tried, very few small-scale experiments or anything but even then its for policies such as UBI.

So yes, if you look at poorer regions of the world which are often the only ones trying new things out, you often do see inequality increase but maybe it has something to do with them being poorer regions and all the baggage that comes with it (say, corruption or coups or authoritarianism)? Maybe this also influences the kind of ideologies that get adopted by the ruling class, and how the countries under the new ideology are being ran?

Also, at least in my opinion, this kind of mindset of "this is how the world works so you shouldn't care and live life" feels misguided. I do agree that LARPing on the internet about these things is kind of counter-productive as you're not really achieving any real change, but turning blind eye to injustices happening in your country (or in the world to a lesser extent) is even worse - an ignorance-based call to inaction.
Ranting is just a detail here, focus on the point - it's a place of discussion. Like a tavern back in some older days. People talk here, come up with ideas, act on some of them, and it's through this ranting, too, that some people may eventually pursue political or otherwise influential careers, try and bring changes they want to see, exerice their rights.

You can't just get up and go to vote without having discussion either. This is all part of the process.

Didn’t Bill Gates revolutionize home computing for the average user? I’d consider that important work.

And why is it just billionaires? What about people worth tens of millions? Shouldn’t we also talk about them? Steve Wozniak is estimated to be worth around 140 million. Is he also evil?

Didn’t Bill Gates revolutionize home computing for the average user?

By literally stealing DR DOS, swapping the drive letters for the hard drive and floppy disk, and rebranding as MS DOS
- Also mustve been nice to have a mom on the board of IBM to help get a massive deal for his startup.....
  
  https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influenced-the-success-of-microsoft.html
  
  It's always some "started on 3rd base" bullshit with these "self made" billionaires...
  
  Even with "common" people I see this shit and it kills me. I was watching some bullshit "I did x and so can you!" video and this fucker goes on to explain how he had company backing, previous experience, consultants to sit with, and a previous degree...
  
  Yeah guy, I can totally just do that too...
Didn’t Bill Gates revolutionize home computing for the average user? I’d consider that important work.

No, he built a monopoly on top of a stolen product
- I might add a monopoly so bad and so illegal that even America at its most fascist was like "yeah, too far dumbass"