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Piñata economics
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this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2025
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Revolution and the end of capitalism aside, I have yet to find a Lib who can explain to me why it would be wrong to take everything from the rich except, say, 500 million. There would be no losers. The rich would still be rich, but we could do so much good with the money.
"it would be wrong because one day i might have 500 million bucks and a penny and i'm not giving you that fucking penny" shitlibs i guess
Can you show a single example of someone actually expressing this sentiment, though? I've seen "quotes" like this hundreds of times, but never anyone on the 'other side' ever actually make this argument.
i could but i'm not doxxing the idiots i live near
You've never gone outside and talked to Americans have you?
100 million tops. 50 million ideally. These people buy governments for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. No one should be wealthy enough to even consider buying elected officials, also all solitary positions of executive power should be split into councils of not less than 9 people, but always an odd number on the council.
Even number but nobody works every single day.
I suppose the common response would be that preventing billionaires from hoarding insane amounts of wealth would remove incentive from them to “innovate and create jobs”. Not that I buy that as being true or worth the wealth disparity currently seen.
To that I'm thinking that humans have an innate desire to innovate, and we wouldn't need jobs if we had fair taxation of the ultrawealthy and UBI.
So basically... the main argument against UBI? LMFAO
Yeah, I mean whether you subscribe to the belief or not, that is the general liberal thinking. If they thought differently, they probably wouldn’t be liberals anymore.
IMO the main argument against UBI is:
"I think all the money would go to landlords because I don't know what elasticity is but nonetheless feel qualified to speak about economics."
The rich own the people (and now, drones) that stand between you and taking it from them.
There are roughly 50,000,000 of them that enforce the current system. There are over 8,000,000,000 of us. We don't need everyone, just 500,000,000 of us could topple them.
When you put it like that, the liberal brain implodes.
Don't ask me exactly how or why, it just does, they become emotional and irrational at that point.
Maybe pictures of dragons sleeping on piles of gold would help, stories about how they only leave them to terrorize nearby village folk, occasionally abduct a young girl and steal her away to a mythical island, for god knows what purposes.
One of the issues is that their value isn't fixed. A billionaire as relatively little in the way of liquid (or liquidatable) assets. Their company might be worth billions, but, by taking it, you will destabilise it. Its value will plummet.
In order to access that money, you need to syphon it off more slowly. Think of the goose that lays golden eggs. Cutting it open won't get you a glut of gold. The counterpoint is that you still need to collect the eggs!
In my opinion, we need a tax setup that forces individuals to regress to the mean. (Default is the rich and poor both move towards average when they are of average performance).
We also need to force companies to follow a power law. A few big companies, with the number growing as you move down. A tax setup that punishes forming big conglomerates, and so encourages more medium and small companies would be optimal. Have it adjust based on the overall industry. This both keeps industries competitive, and syphons money from those most able to bear it.
There is a huge difference between knowing what is needed, and how the fuck to implement it however!
Kill the poisoned goose, see if it's children can function as democracies rather than dictatorships.
Killing the goose blindly is just self destructive. We want to them to be able to die, but we need to reduce their size first. That way better options can take up the slack.
Answer me this. Collapse every company worth more than $1B simultaneously. What would happen to the quality of life of those at the bottom? It would be...bad.
Not much worse than the current system that has a planned economic meltdown every decade or so, to prevent the poors from ever gaining a foothold.
You massively underestimate the complexity and fagility of the systems supporting you right now. Food, power and good production would basically collapse.
The biggest problem is the megacorps, they are too big to fail and so need to be broken up. The best way to do that is to make it financially in their interest to shatter themselves. Power law taxes would help both so it now, and keep companies from growing to that level. It also controls the speed of the change, so the supply lines we rely on remain functional.
You massively underestimate the number of us who don't need those systems, and have nothing to lose.
What would be the standards for getting an asset seizure? Would it be the individual or governments job to prove the asset? What would be the rules for conflict of interest? How does due process work? Who gets the money?
Does a mayor just get to seize assets rather than balance their city budget? Does the federal government get to pick and choose who gets inspected? If the taxpayers refuse to send bombs to Israel or Saudi Arabia, can the president run down a list of people who haven’t been inspected yet? Can somebody park the wealth in the Caribbean and do wire transfers multiple times a day? Since most of the wealth is imaginary numbers, what the fuck is a bureaucrat supposed to do with Nvidia stock inflated to the moon? Do we just dissolve companies where the populace cannot comprehend how it benefits the economy/society? Or disagree on the companies value? Taxpayers strongly believe both sides of AIs value (or potential) to the economy.
Civil asset forfeiture is bad regardless of who it happens to. We could fucking just prosecute them instead for corruption and pass more taxes for a bigger return of money. Make screwing over billionaires a sport on how to squeeze away all the profits they want to skim from the top.
Taxes. The answer is taxes and actual audits. We've been doing that sort of thing for a very long time, it's just that the rich assholes have had access to the tax code.
A full audit every year, and then you simply tax any wealth over the 500M mark. It's that easy.
I think the commenter above you is implying that if everyone knew that 500M was the cap, then every bubble would pop and the market would crash.
I think it's a good idea. If you can't survive the rest your life on 500M then you're doing things way too lavish for any society to support. (And that doesn't mean you couldn't invent and work and make more than you spend, keeping your worth at 500M indefinitely)
If, hypothetically, those audits ended up costing more than the additional tax revenue they yield, resulting in overall tax revenue decreasing, would you still want to do it?
I'm actually betting that a full audit of everyone who even claims to be worth more than, say, 100 million, would send most of these fucks to jail for financial crimes. Which is worth it on its own.
That's one hell of a hypothetical. Especially since on average every single dollar that any government puts into tax recovery yeilds an average of a $6 return on the lowest end, and when aimed against the rich frequently returns hundreds of dollars in profit.
It's wrong because theft is wrong. Just because the thing you're stealing is something the victim can do without, doesn't magically make it not theft.
So theft it remains, and wrong it remains, because theft is wrong.
Pretty simple, really.
Theft is what happens every day in every working relationship. Value is always and exclusively derived from labor. If someone has capital worth 500 million, that means they have the labor value of 500 million. Did they earn this value themselves? Of course not, it is the value of our labor that they have stolen.
But even if that weren't the case, this argument is roughly on the same level as “drugs are illegal because they are prohibited.” Always remember: in the Third Reich, it was legally forbidden to hide Jews. But it was legally permissible to kill them. What the law says must never be the basis of morality. And on top of that, the law is simply something that is determined as such. It can just be changed. In your words: we can easily define it as “not wrong.”
That's a ridiculous statement (re "exclusively"). As an extremely simple/obvious example that refutes this: the best cashier in the world's skills are worthless unless a store already exists for them to cashier in.
It's absurd to think the worker is entitled to 100% of the value their labor produces. Both employer and employee come together for that value creation to be possible. Neither entity alone can create that value, so they both deserve a portion of the result of their symbiosis; neither side deserves 100%.
"Profit = theft" is a moronic notion.
No, it isn't, at all. I'm talking about morality, not legality. Total straw man on your part.
Nevertheless, without labor, the store will not generate any (exchange) value. If you think the store itself has value, that value was also created solely through labor. Exchange value is created solely through labor. After all, labor is ultimately what is exchanged. Anything that did not require labor has no exchange value.
What does the employer bring to the table? Exactly one thing: the means of production. But even those were created by labor. So the capitalist didn't contribute anything either. He just has capital. Everything of value, the entire economy, every mashinery, every computer, every commodity, was created solely through labor. Capital is the parasite that appropriates a large part of the value created by society without doing any work itself.
Yes. The worker alone creates the value. He does not need the capitalist. If the means of production were in his hands, he would not have to work for free for the capitalist's profit.
You grew up in capitalism and have internalized capitalist ideology. That's why it seems natural to you that we allow an entire group of people to do nothing (except rig politics in their favor) and still accumulate most of humanity's resources. But in fact, it's a huge scam against me, you, and everyone else who has to sell their labor to survive.
Yet your argument is: It's wrong because it would be against the law ("theft"). But that's merely a matter of definition.. And it's not theft to take back something that belongs to you.
No, your assumption is apparently that the word "theft" has an inextricably law-based definition. It doesn't—stealing's immoral, that's all there is to it.
Agreed, but irrelevant, as you're talking about taking, not taking back. It doesn't belong to you just because you decided it does.
Either way, it's a question of definition.
And it doesn't not belong to me just because you decided it doesn't. What is “belonging” if not a legal status? However, my assertion is that in our capitalist society, we have established a legal system whereby even though you and I produce things, they do not belong to us. Instead, under threat of punishment or, alternatively, the threat of starvation, we give them to another group that has contributed nothing at all. What do you call that? Robbery! What the capitalists call property, they took away from us first. You need to get rid of that neoliberal mindset and stop fighting for their interests and against your own.
This is what you've arbitrarily decided is the case, though, not the reality.
Retrieving property stolen by a thief is not theft itself
It’s not theft. It’s restitution.
They stole it from us first in the form of unpaid wages.