Anyone who makes like 100 million dollars and thinks to themselves "this isn't enough money to stop working and just enjoy life" has something seriously wrong with them. The billionaire class will never be happy, and it's time for society to stop letting these loonies ruin society to satisfy their insanity.
I think it is far to keep working if you love what you are doing. To filter, there should be an absolute cap on wealth at a few hundred million dollars. This would eliminate the incentive to manipulate politics in favour of yourself, but if you want to keep working you should be doing it for society via charity or taxes on anything additional that is earned.
Have a nice ceremony and present a medal for winning capitalism.
>To filter, there should be an absolute cap on wealth at a few hundred million dollars.
One million dollars and not a penny more. Enough for most people to live comfortably, but not enough to buy governments, or for the upper classes to never need to work again to maintain their lifestyle and privilege.
No human being needs or deserves a hundred million dollars.
I agree with you in principle here, but to play devils advocate, $1,000,000 isn't a whole lot of money. A worker will make around that much at $25,000 a year over 40 years. If we have to keep money/capitalism, the limit should probably be around 10-15 million. That's still pretty high, but not egregious. Give or take ~40yrs on a high FAANG salary ($375k/yr). Still firmly upper middle class IMO.
I don't mean earnings over a lifetime or career, but currently. A worker making $25,000 a year will still probably never see a million dollars regardless of the limit. Maybe everything above that is taxed 100%. I don't know.
But the point is kind of to eliminate the upper classes and scale the economy back into the reach of most people. So there would be no FAANG salaries. The cost of everything (healthcare, education, housing) would go down. It would place a hard limit on political influence that isn't too far out of reach of current Congressional salaries and would probably limit pork barrel politics and insider trading as well. It would end inherited wealth and maybe even limit the length of copyright.
That's an admittedly naive and utopian view and I'll admit there are bound to be complexities and externalities I'm not taking into account because I'm not an economist. But it's either that or we seize the means of production and put the rich to the guillotines until the sewers choke on their blood. And then something something luxury space communism.
That's the crazy part. The people at the top seem to think they're better off if they can get another billion in the bank, regardless of the impact on the rest of society. But they, too, live in that same society that they are destroying.
They seem to think it's better to be a king in the Middle Ages than just a regular rich person in modern society. They forget that the lives of kings in the Middle Ages were absolutely terrible.
The purpose of capitalism is the flourishing of the capitalist classes.
The labor classes only need to be maintained like machines or draft animals, kept just alive and well enough to afford the rent on their lives so they can continue to create value.
The collective reactions to this aren't mental illness, they're trauma responses. Capitalism is accelerating towards its final form and the shock is giving people PTSD.
Billionaires are a convenient distraction for the upper middle class.
The wealthiest group of people (on the whole) is the 70-95th percentile.
If we were to have the toppling of "the rich" that brought about meaningful change to the "poor", it would necessarily include the toppling of the ~$200k income households.
Musk certainly doesn’t seem to be a poster child for eudaimonia, being allegedly addicted to drugs.