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this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Asklemmy
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Engineers, scientists and workers need an environment that allows them to innovate. How can we create such an environment without billionaires? Somebody mentioned kickstarter. What is missing that small investors make billionaires irrelevant?
It boils down to abolishing private ownership of the means of production. The fruits of labour of society must belong to society, not just a handful of people that have been inheriting wealth generation after generation.
Does it have to be exclusive? Society right now can own means of production. Cooperatives, joined-stock cooperations or foundations could be used to hold ownership and the fruits of labor could be shared.
If the majority is not willing to organize labor right now, who could take over the role of billionaires without abusing their position of power?
The billionaires abuse their power. The problem of an abusive manager being totally solved is an irrational height to set the bar at.
Why are billionaires not acceptable if abusive managers are acceptable?
Billionaires already represent societal detriments by the very nature of the absurd concentration of wealth into the hands of an individual.
Also billionaires tend not to personally manage things, which may be to save time for doing more abuse (see Elon)
What you are looking for is a "manager", which doesn't need to be a billionaire and, in fact, usually is not.
Who selects and controls the managers? Who motivates people to invest their income to pay the managers?
A million people have to pool $1000 each to create the equivalent of a billionaire. It could be possible yet it doesn't happen.
The trick is that billionaires cannot consume their entire wealth. Thus the economy has free money that looks for opportunities.
I hate stumbling upon libertarians.
Taxes. Next question.
This is hopelessly naive. Most of what they do with all that extra money is incestuous money laundering and regulatory capture. There's no reason to give unaccountable individuals such an absurd level of societal power when it's not like they "innovated" their wealth from thin air. Take it from the people they otherwise would take it from via, for example, a tax system and you can produce something accountable that can be changed freely by society and won't buy twitter to force us to read its tweets.
Society already pays many taxes and changing the spending doesn't happen freely by society.
Politics have their own disadvantages and billionaires are a complementary way to allocate resources.
That society can be locked into Twitter shows that taxes shouldn't be the only source of capital. Every democracy could have created a Twitter clone many years ago as basic infrastructure.
Like Norway's wealth fund, many countries could have invested in companies to generate profits and reduce taxes. Instead there are deficits. Politicians rely on society for sustainability whereas billionaires have to identify and improve sustainable forms of income.
If neither politicians nor billionaires should invest, what would be a good way to identify the people who should?
Much of what those taxes are currently spent on is utter bullshit for oligarchs
[citation needed]
China facilitated conditions for the creation of such clones quite well. America's cultural imperialism had already dominated Europe anyway and neocolonial infrastructure pushes many third world countries towards western services being synonymous with the internet itself. The market solution is for the dominant power to snowball, with all the problems that entails.
This is a joke. Aside from the politicians being bought out by those self-same billionaires, the latter are infamous for making things worse long term (or just in totality) in order to maximize quarterly profits, again see Twitter. They burn money on bribing politicians and institutions and drain society of wealth with various forms of tax fraud while paying hardly a cent for all the infrastructure that they use in wild disproportion to a normal citizen.
My point is that it should not be oriented around one person's executive decisions: Stop looking for a good king. It should be decided democratically or, at the most republican, by a representative who the laws are oriented around preventing the corruption of (no lobbying, PACs of any kind, "campaign donations" from anything but a private citizen, no "gifts" at all, no revolving door employment, no "speaking fees") who also is subject to a vote of no confidence or some equivalent procedure that allows the citizenry to terminate his term early (and put him on trial, if needed) if they find him to not be acting as he represented that he would. But all of this is to say it the representative should have as little personal agency as possible in day-to-day affairs, merely acting as a laborer performing tasks according to the lines the public wants him to without needing to have the entire citizenry be up-to-date on everything all the time (as they would need to be in a pure democracy).
Even if you manage to establish a clean democracy once, how do you prevent it from being corrupted?
The Lemmy migration shows you how small the number of active citizens is.
The world has enough places that citizens could organize in the way you describe, despite billionaire opposition. The problem is that humans are not wired that way. We rely on the self interest of sad people who seek solace in their empires to build our civilization.
Happy people would spend their time with other happy humans. Nobody really likes the noisance of business. You believe that you can find people who do the work of billionaires without the freedom. I think you won't find them and you won't find the ones to control them.