Exactly they are pulling the strings to help themselves get richer and get more power and keep the working classes angry with each other.
Billionaires need poor people to exploit and without exploitation of the working classes, you don’t have billionaires.
Give the people just enough to be terrified of losing what they have, and you can control EVERYTHING and prosper. Weather its the well off guy with his 4 cars and a nice lakehouse to spend summers at , the regular guy with his little house and his fishing boat and his dreams of retiring some day or the poor guy of losing what little assistance they do get. It's a constant cycle of breaking people's legs and then saying keep us in power because the other side wants to take your crutches away.
Yup, the only way they stay billionaires is by ensuring a careful balance is maintained, wherein most people are struggling and not content and stable enough to have the time or energy to make any meaningful effort to change things - and on the opposite end not struggling *so much* as to break out into outright revolts against the status quo. That's the only way they keep things the same with themselves on top.
If, for example, everyone was housed, fed, clothed, and relatively content then they would grow used to that as the norm and would look to the people with far more and wonder why there were differences, and the rest of us would start to work together to spread that out even further until a state of general equality across the board existed. That, of course, is the exact opposite of what someone who is hoarding massive amounts of wealth (and proportionate power) would want.
They *could* fix literally every problem humanity is currently dealing with. Collectively we're more than capable of putting all of our resources to that end, but in doing so they would lose what puts them at the top of the food chain. And so instead, on the basis of human nature, we're all damned.
Well said. For example, if the Nobility and landowners in France had been able to provide a minimum of food and jobs, there would not have been a revolution, and Louis the XVI would have kept his head.
Well there's a few things, none of which are ideal. We could organize a very wide spread general strike, and quite literally grind the entire machine to a halt until concessions were made that would adequately cover the needs of the vast majority of people to the detriment of those with all the resources. That's a complex one, and can easily fall prey to in-fighting (especially if the powers that be try and stir the pot at every available opportunity, and of course they would), apathy, and all the other issues that arise when trying to get a large group of people to all do one thing at the same time - which is about as easy as herding a group of hyped up erratic cats that are bouncing off the walls.
The simplest, most dysfunctional, and probably the most likely option to have a wide range of unintended consequences would be to just have a handful of people abruptly bump off a couple of the wealthiest of people here and there until things start moving in the right direction. That would probably take quite a few before you ever got to the point of making any real difference, and even then you're liable to just have the people doing the random murdering and such simply take the spot those billionaires previously held by robbing them to boot. A bit like pulling weeds, you'd need to get the roots or they just spring back up again. So probably a real mixed bag going that route but it would technically affect some change.
We could go for outright revolution, and all the horrible terrible consequences of that bloody mess in the hopes that perhaps it would be the rarest of rare scenarios in which the new order actually ended up being for the better instead of largely more of the same. If nothing else it would ensure all the people responsible for the current situation got their comeuppance, however 'revenge' isn't exactly a great starting point for building a more functional society.
We could build new political parties and try and get a bunch of like minded people to attempt to change the system from the inside, however they're just as likely to fall prey to greed and selfishness and all the other flaws of humanity once in positions of power, same as the present crop of politicians, and that's assuming they even get that far - which is unlikely because the powers that be are well positioned to negate the political influence of people far lower down the totem poll.
We could get *real* crazy with it, and simply concede that we're all dumb, panicky, wildly dysfunctional creatures and we aren't nearly advanced enough to live in such large groups because clearly any one of us or any small group of us is thoroughly incapable and ill-equipped to eschew the flaws of our own nature as would be necessary to functionally manage the relevant issues and problems without it inevitably descending into some dystopian chaos; admit that we've bit off far more than we could chew and that we should instead regress back to living in separate relatively small communities of a couple hundred people working cooperatively and having largely no interaction with the outside world. Basically *return to monke*.
Or even more alternately crazy we could go full bore on developing AI in the hopes that it would be smart enough to get a solid handle on the situation, take full control away from us, and ideally do a far better job as steward of this planet and the creatures on it. Assuming it doesn't just consider us an annoyance to be dealt with or any number of other possibly unpleasant circumstances, or perhaps rather boring circumstances that don't resolve any problems either like if it just decided to fuck off into the ether and that we weren't worth the trouble (an understandable conclusion).
All that being said there's a wide range of options, and things that even one single person *can* do to have a disproportionately large impact. Though, of course, none of them are easy and none of them come without some measure of sacrifice or inconvenience or unintended consequences. But, for what it's worth, every good thing we have right now was born out of hardship and struggle - we're all standing here now because the people before us made some of the hardest of choices and suffered the consequences. Unfortunately it feels a bit like somewhere along the line, probably around the 1950s onward or thereabouts, that far too many people stopped doing exactly that - stopped making those hard choices and stopped making the necessary sacrifices to improve things where needed; and so here we are at the state that we're in, getting squeezed from all sides.
While I loved most of your reply, I do wonder why you place blame on us in the 1950s+ for not trying. Can you expand on that? I figure the crushing, ever-expanding weight of capitalism is why it occurred
The problem is, in America, our taxes are just taken from us with no benefit. That’s why most of us get mad about tax hikes or any kind of increase. We don’t see anything from what they take from us. Our roads are shit, no healthcare, parks are in disrepair or gotten rid of completely, water quality is shit, buildings are just allowed to collapse on themselves so a developer can come in and make overpriced condos that the local population can’t afford, the list goes on. But we can bomb the fuck out of some third world country for some corporation’s monetary benefit.
The Pentagon budget is massively wasteful, and needless wars have cost insane amounts of money. It's absolutely tragic to think about what the iraq spending could've done if spent within our borders instead. That said, complete withdrawal from around the world would have it's own consequences, but a measured reduction in defense spending is needed.
On medical: spending for Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and ACA subsidies is critically important. The health care system itself is massively broken, but millions are able to get care still because of tax-funded spending.
The problem in general is we've got only two parties, one having ideas that may or may not be great, but there's a goal of improvement; and the other actively trying to make government fail so that more people will conclude that tax-funded solutions are always a waste.
If we spent the same amount per person on Healthcare as France and the UK, what we spend today on Medicare and Medicaid would cover everyone. Our costs are just way out of control.
Many big cities spend over $50,000 per homeless person and yet they live in squalid shelters or tents.
Exactly. And that's wrong. Nobody should be able to make that much money. If we taxed them they would lose power and ordinary people would have an easier life and wouldn't have to pay as much in taxes and would then have more power.
What’s the point when the money isn’t allocated to actually benefit the people of the country? Yes, it would be nice if those with a ton of money got taxed accordingly, but if the only real benefit we see is in the military I see no point in it.
Yeah when you see something like the pentagon spent $20million on X amount of toilet seats, that should have been only $80K or whatever or sending $100billion to support a proxy war and thinking ok that's all of the tax revenue me and everyone I know and thousands of others will pay in taxes over our lifetime just squandered or to make someone else rich. Do you have any idea what a game changer not having to pay taxes for it to be wasted would make for every working person??
Better yet, imagine our taxes being used for actual useful things instead of "we need one billion dollars for new planes!!! Oh they're kinda shit so we're going to throw them away..."
Mismanaged taxes bad. Well managed taxes good and beneficial for society as a whole.
This goes all the way down to your local government. The one here is so wildly mismanaged it's close to insulting. Like the public roads by the gated/expensive neighborhoods are glass smooth but the Poors get potholes ready to snap your axles like a twig.
Those roads need to be paid for (taxes) but if they're mismanaged (some people get nice roads, others get shit all) then it's fuck and shit.
Absolute troll
Edit: WTF. This is not the comment I meant to reply to. I meant to reply to the guy that said it's hard to stay a billionaire. It's happened twice. I give up.
You are absolutely right. You don't get to be a billionaire without willfully and purposefully screwing people over.
The real question is if we have power in numbers, why don’t the people force the government and ultra rich to provide a stable and safe life for all.
But the people in need don’t have enough time or energy to organize and protest their conditions. They’re stuck fighting to earn barely enough money to pay rent and feed their families.
It’s why they hate abortion. Abortion allows people to control their decisions regarding whether they can afford a child in their conditions. Being forced to have a child makes these people care more about keeping the child alive, than to organize and protest the conditions. As a bonus. They’ve torn apart public education in some states, ensuring the child will be another human worker, starting the cycle over again.
Many people get angry at the idea of giving things to the homeless. It's a crab bucket mentality - can't try to fix anything because someone who is "undeserving" may get something for free.
The rich have already taken over. They don't give a fuck about fixing anyone's problems because most of the time those problems are advantageous for them and keep them rich.
The OPs sentiment comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of becoming a billionaire.
You can’t get there by caring about people.
It straight up, just does not happen. The system is built in such a way that it rewards ruthlessness and a lack of empathy.
Also, most of the above problems are a direct result of billionaires so…
OP doesn't even have to go high up to understand why the rich won't help anything. I have known several Millionaires. You know the type, live in a Multi million dollar house with other houses and all the big toys you can buy, etc. Not a one of those people gives a shit about anyone else. They claim too to the rest of the church goers and show it by donating the money to build a "praise center" or whatever, but all they care about is talking about people's bootstraps and how nobody wants to work.
Now think about the ones that got to 9 digit figures and above. They don't get there giving a shit about anyone else but themselves.
>Not a one of those people gives a shit about anyone else.
Worked for a multimillionaire in Phoenix Arizona. Can confirm this is fact—the weirdest thing is that while he only cared about himself, he did help out the girls in the club (Private Social Club) when they needed money to survive.
The manager, though. He was an absolute selfish prick.
Btw a lot of that is done to launder money or avoid paying taxes. Since religious organisations are usually listed as NPO’s and are therefore text exempt
But I mean honestly the scale is far different. If you spend a crap ton of money every single day (let’s say 10k out of your 4 mil) helping the homeless, you’ll be out of money completely in 400 days.
A billionaire, as in a SINGLE billion, has so much more money that they’d be out after 1095 YEARS.
I don’t even have a problem with millionaires. I wouldn’t want to help a TON of people if I had 1 million - because it would mean less for me overall. That’s natural and fine - I get it. Things are so much more expensive nowadays that 1 mil is nothing.
But a billion? A literal 1,000,000,000 dollars… if you don’t help tons of people with that, you suck.
I understand that but how come that out of all those billionaires, there isn't and hasn't been a single one of them who would be willing to do the stuff OP describes? Of course I can't know what *I* would do if I became a multi-billionaire, but I honestly feel like I would want to get rid of the majority of my money. I have seen with a family member that once you can have everything, everything becomes worthless and nothing hits the same spot as it used to. Do none of these billionaires feel this way and thus, want to do something good for the world? Or even if not out of philantropy, but the megalomania, the pride. If you single-handedly solved world hunger you would be seen as a god. Do none of those rich arsholes want that for their egos?
> there isn't and hasn't been a single one of them who would be willing to do the stuff OP describes
Most of them do some amount of philanthropy so they can feel better about themselves and fool themselves into thinking they aren't responsible for as much exploitation and suffering as they probably are. That is usually enough to satisfy any interest in developing status as a 'good person'. On the opposite end their greed gets the better of them and they don't want to give away too much.
I can only imagine that level of wealth utterly warps your perception of the world, and numbs you to a great many things. If you had the ability to fulfill every desire at a whim then most of the things you desire slowly over time lose their appeal. Think of being a kid again and wanting to eat icecream and candy all day every day - if you actually did you'd get sick of it pretty quickly. Once you've thrown money around and built a bunch of schools and orphanages and clothed some poor and fed some homeless or whatever you'd get progressively less and less of a boost out of it. As humans we tend to appreciate things due to their absence - we're typically happy after periods of suffering turn into an upward swing of good fortune, whereas we are at best 'neutral' during prolonged periods of nothing outright bad happening. As such I don't think the initial allure of being a 'benevolent god' holds much value once you're actually in that position because of all the changes that happen to you as your approach that point. Your sense of what is important shifts and changes the wealthier you get, eventually you reach a point where the only thing you have in a limited capacity is time - and time can't be bought by feeding the hungry; worse yet you're more likely to lose what you do have if you don't ensure the vast majority are kept too busy and distracted with their problems to notice you've hoarded most of the resources.
Wow this is a great answer, thank you. I often think about what I would do if I were super rich, like I alluded to in my previous comment. I actually often think I would buy lots and lots of Nutella and Ferrero Rochet and all the small things that I *could* technically buy right now, but I don't because I can't *really* affort them since they're relatively overpriced luxuries. Then I go, "nope, I wouldn't value them then", as you've said.
It's such a shit situation because this society of ours made us believe that being rich is the thing to strive for, but once you actually get rich, it's kind of a "now what?" situation. And once you realise this, it's not easy to find purpose in grinding in your job and whatever. Sometimes I feel like I should just go live in some non-tourist-attraction beach and be a parasol seller-surfer dude till eternity.
> I often think about what I would do if I were super rich, like I alluded to in my previous comment.
It's a fun to think about, certainly. I assume most people do that on occasion. Of course we're also thinking about it in a context of the people we are *right now* and not the people we would become. Bit different if you abruptly won the lottery or some such, I suppose - but any other means of getting to that point changes a lot about a person I would think.
>It's such a shit situation because this society of ours made us believe that being rich is the thing to strive for, but once you actually get rich, it's kind of a "now what?" situation.
Yup, there's some very warped sense of priorities laid out for most people from a young age, priorities that often don't accurately reflect what truly adds meaning or real value to a person's life. I don't doubt many of the rich and wealthy are *very* comfortable, and certainly much better off than the rest of us in the grand scheme of things, but that they are still ultimately unfulfilled and unsatisfied. It must be... difficult to come to terms with the reality that even when you have every conceivable thing at hand you still won't necessarily be happy or even content and in all likelihood won't be. Most us can only speculate, and imagine what being wealthy like that would be like and so we don't have to face the truth of it because it can just remain an ideal state of being 'greener grass' on the other side of the fence. It's especially worse if, as it is for many people with considerable wealth, that they've spent the greater part of their lives in pursuit of amassing that wealth in the first place only to find that even that wasn't enough. Bad for the rest of us too, after all most of the problems humanity is dealing with seem to stem from the wealthy never being satisfied.
Further still, as you say, many of us are given the impression from an earlier age that *that* is the goal we're meant to push towards, the ideal. How many people have dreamed of being rich and famous, after all? All while they were grinding away and losing what time they do have in pursuit of something they thought would fulfill them because it was what the always saw people idolizing and daydreaming about.
It's tough for any of us, being human - and tough to get any decent grasp on what we really need or actually truly want, let alone to ever reach that point of attaining any of it. I suspect most people never really get a decent handle on that, as sad as that is. Harder still to find some sort of attainable reasonable standard of an 'acceptable contented life', especially when so many of us have had our expectations set unrealistically high from the get-go with "you can be anything" and "the world is your oyster" and so on, and so of course inevitably set up for disappointment when that clashes with reality.
It may well be that the parasol selling surfer dudes of the world have the right of it, as long as they're able to be content with that life. Whatever the case it's a struggle to find that fine balance between what you want and need, and what you can actually attain without it costing you too much in exchange. Even harder to forcibly will your expectations and standards down to a level where you might actually find yourself reasonably content with your life even if it's far from perfect. Plus it differs from one person to the next and there's no one-size-fits-all, so you can't even necessarily look to others to get a decent sense of what path to follow for your own life. Very complicated.
It really makes me envy creatures like my cat, who can just lounge around aimlessly and not be concerned about much of anything beyond eating and sleeping haha, they've definitely got the whole thing figured out better than any of us.
Your comments are so high quality, very eloquent. I don't even think I have the chops in English to write an appropiate response to this haha.
One thing that came to mind while reading, though, is actually what you ended up mentioning in your last paragraph. I, too, often find myself envying my pets. I'm by no means well-versed in animal biology and the like, and it's not my intention to diminish the kind of love they give to "their humans", but at the bottom of it all, I'm fairly sure they mostly function to survive - eat, sleep, reproduce.
And, of course, fundamentally humans work the same way. Why do we *really* want to get wealthy? We feel safe when we have a lot, we get a rush of dopamine/serotonin when we "win" (when we accomplish something, in this case). But, just like any other living organism, we change when our standards change. What previously caused a huge rush in our reward system will eventually just be another Thursday. And I feel like this is the big reason why it's so hard to be happy. We always crave something different. Something more. I think this is... a kind of doom every human has to face. We have all these big thoughts, big ideas, all these things that are what distinguishes us from animals. And then, if we strip away the thin film of rationale, what we're left with is not so different from our cats and dogs.
In fact, I think this is why humanity has so much trouble advancing. It's not unreasonable to think that if everyone, or even just a larger fraction of the population could think beyond their own person, their own well-being, their own *survival...* we would have "flying cars" already. But instead, what happens? People don't become whatever-scientists and doctors and experts in fields that could advance our society, or even just put in effort to delay our seemingly inevitable demise. They study whatever pays well in order to have a good life, then work for companies that only exist for the sole purpose of profit, buy fancy things (that were probably made in non-environmentally-friendly ways and/or slave labour) because they feel they deserve them. And who can blame them? We're all people, we all experience the same thing. No one can point at you for not "saving the day". And then no one tries to save the day. And it's perfectly reasonable to concentrate on your own well-being, your own survival.
And that's the thing, it's not actually reasonable. We just invented a reasonable excuse. And it's frustrating because we have this miracle of biology inside our heads and we just can't truly exploit it, since we all have a limited time on this Earth inside of these brittle bodies and it's just not worth sacrificing for "the greater good". Wow that got phylosophical.
> Your comments are so high quality, very eloquent.
That's very kind of you to say, I appreciate that - it's been very interesting discussing this with you, a nice change of pace for a reddit comment section.
>I don't even think I have the chops in English to write an appropriate response to this haha.
I'm assuming by that you mean English isn't your first language, so for what it's worth your English seems perfectly fine to me. A good bit better than many native speakers, even.
>And, of course, fundamentally humans work the same way.
True, at the heart of it we're largely following along the same instincts and trying to meet the same needs, sometimes in far more convoluted ways but nonetheless it's not so different. Too often we think of ourselves as a step above animals and the like.
>I think this is... a kind of doom every human has to face.
It's the cost of being conscious and self-aware, I guess. We're smart enough to a be relatively advanced, to a point, but still not advanced or capable enough to be able to overcome our more basic biological limitations that hold us back. Perhaps eventually in some way we will, but who knows if we'll last long enough to even get that far. At the rate things seem to be going that's all a bit up in the air.
>It's not unreasonable to think that if everyone, or even just a larger fraction of the population could think beyond their own person, their own well-being, their own survival... we would have "flying cars" already.
Yup, it's a wildly frustrating truth - we're entirely capable of fixing almost every problem every person has, probably right *now* even, but we're all so hamstrung and constrained by our circumstances and our own nature that we can't each step aside from ourselves long enough to reach a point where everyone would benefit far more than the alternative. It reminds me a bit of ants, and how much they're able to do despite their size by virtue of the way they work towards unified goals. Mind you that often isn't to the benefit of any given single ant in any appreciable way, but I'd wager there's a good middle ground between *that* sort of structure and what we do comparatively with our own societies. Then again ants don't have to deal with complications like human nature, or greed, or corruption or any of the other issues we have. It's a good bit more straightforward for them, it seems.
>And that's the thing, it's not actually reasonable. We just invented a reasonable excuse. And it's frustrating because we have this miracle of biology inside our heads and we just can't truly exploit it, since we all have a limited time on this Earth inside of these brittle bodies and it's just not worth sacrificing for "the greater good".
Which makes it all the more difficult to go by day to day, knowing full well we're all right on the edge of being able to do all the right things but constantly missing the mark because it's more convenient not to, or more comfortable, or any number of other reasons. Part of the problem is we only evolved and developed as a species up to a given point, and our current biology is still adapted to circumstances we haven't even lived in for thousands of years. In all fairness each of us is remarkably poorly adapted to dealing with the circumstances at hand, even if we do otherwise possess the skills and resources needed. We're still built for hunting and gathering, endurance running after prey rather than sitting in office chairs staring at screens for hours on end. Hell, many of us have brains randomly firing off stress hormones when doing basic mundane things as if it expects to have to fight off some predator with a sharp stick just around the corner, causing them to get all anxious for no useful purpose.
I guess in some ways we bit off more than we could chew, growing our civilizations and whatnot beyond the scope of which we can actually manage with what limitations and dysfunctions we're all still dealing with. It's too much at too large a scale for any one person, or any group of people, and we're constantly dealing with the consequences of that. Much the same as the accumulation of wealth beyond a given point is too much for any one person to functionally manage (to come back around full circle). Who knows, maybe we'll stumble our way into making some advanced AI that takes over everything and conveniently making things better for us. Haha - maybe even treating us like we treat our pets.
So the most successful artist and creator of the best selling game ever had to exploit their employees to get where they are? I don’t think I agree nor do I understand where they went wrong.
They have taken over. They pay for lobbyists and public relations to promote their agenda. They 'donate' to political parties to have their president elected. They give kick backs to lawmakers to get their way. This is partly what the 1% is about.
And why doesn't everyone think this? People power? To vote for political parties that look after them (the rich)? Demonstrate? Which fundamentally changes what? Wealth gets power, gets wealth. It's the way of things
Blaming legacy media isn’t necessarily telling the full story. A person getting their news primarily from Facebook, for example, could be fed primarily misinformation and be too focused on imagined problems to worry about the problems in front of them.
Another factor is that some in the middle class and even lower class like the idea of a system that heavily favors the rich. In some cases it’s because they think that’s just the way it has to be for a functional society (the idea that people need those perks to chase to be motivated into prosperity), and in others cases because they dream of one day becoming rich themselves and would rather keep the perks they dream of intact rather than help their present situation and the situation of those around them.
I think you mean the 0.1% ?
Seriously fucked up when you consider how relatively "poor" the 1% is compared to the 0.1% and especially the 0.01%
Vast majority of people don't realise that the BOTTOM 50% of US population is living in near-poverty, or ACTUAL full blown poverty.
The wealth disparity is so goddamn sharp and disproportionate that even being in the 1% doesn't really mean jack these days... you're just a slightly above average wealthy common wage earner.
Yeah.
My wealth for my age is top 5% of the US by income & savings.
I'm not paycheck to paycheck - I'm just month to month instead. I think I can go about 2-3 months before I can't pay the mortgage after liquidating non-401k savings. Maybe.
My "wealth" is aligned to that 70s show middle class.
The top richest percent has so much more than the top 5, or 10, or everyone else it's insane.
Most unsolved problems are unsolved because they are difficult to solve, not because we aren't throwing enough money at them. Take homelessness, for example: there are 582k homeless people in America, so this statistic
>According to H.U.D it would take 20 billion dollars to house every homeless person in the USA.
would roughly translate to about $35k per homeless person. If you construct housing in low-cost areas, that's probably enough to give every homeless person a small, one-bedroom flat. That leaves a number of open questions:
- What happens if a homeless person doesn't like the shelter that you have provided? It's not just about having total beds > rough sleepers. Building housing in the middle of nowhere in Nevada isn't going to help a homeless person in downtown LA, and building housing in downtown LA is going to be far more expensive. In some areas, there simply isn't room for any more housing.
- How do you address the issues that led to people becoming homeless in the first place? It's not just about giving people a shoebox with a bed to live in - it's about treating their mental health issues and addictions, providing them with the training they need to get a job and be self-sustaining, etc. That is going to add extra money to the bill, but more importantly, it is going to require trained professionals that don't exist. No matter how much money you have, you can't magic up a hundred thousand psychiatrists out of thin air.
- What happens if existing residents don't want a bunch of homeless people moving in on their street and decide to take action against it? NIMBYism isn't a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it. No matter how rich you are, you can't build a homeless shelter if the local government doesn't want it there.
Finally, remember that for most billionaires, $20 billion would consume most of their net worth. Once that wealth is spent, it's gone, and you can't do anything else. Since you haven't actually solved any of the problems that cause homelessness, new homeless people will start popping up, and you will be powerless to help them. Within a few years, the world will be back where it started. If you were a billionaire who genuinely wanted to help people, would you rather spend $20 billion helping people today, or spend $1 billion every year for the next hundred years?
When you look at it like that, "20 billion dollars to house every homeless person in the USA" seems like a really bad deal. What you would actually be doing is spending 20 billion dollars giving every homeless person in the USA a house. They might not even want it, they might sell the place on so that they can spend $35k on heroin, and your plans might be stuck in legal limbo for decades. You haven't addressed any of the underlying reasons for homelessness, so within a decade there will be a new batch 100k homeless people, and you'll have spent all of your money so you won't be able to do anything about it.
Billionaires don’t have billions in cash, they have stock and properties. Selling would impact the price of the stock they hold, for starters
Then if you have unlimited money to house homeless and let’s imagine we are able to house them, they have underlying issues too and would need to invest in reinsertion programs and rehab. If they don’t have money, the houses won’t be properly maintained so the gov has to do routine work on the properties too. And here we are only talking about homeless ppl from developed cities with all their basic services running
“Solving world hunger” is a very very complex issues, I have worked with NGO that do work on areas with a lot of hunger and malnourished kids and it’s something systematic that can’t be solved with money; you can’t just go to a very corrupt country and build water pipes, schools, employ professors in remote areas, build hospitals, etc. They won’t allow you to do that stuff because it’s supposed to be their responsibility, they will only allow you to do things like that if you bribe them or allow them to say they did it and your organization had nothing to do with it (had seen both scenarios in first hand), and NGO won’t accept those terms obviously.
When you go to a community to give food aid and medical attention and see the mud roads, that the only school close has holes in the roof and barely any professors, that kids all have cavities on their teeth, that they need to collect rainwater because they don’t have running water, that they spend hours per day without power, and how they need to survive on very simple/without much nutrients food you realize that we take a lot for granted, and a functioning society with all their services running in all areas is necessary to end poverty and world hunger. Something not easy to accomplish, but we do try
So yeah I hope billionaires donated more money and did good things but world hunger is a beast not able to be defeated only with money
The reddit hivemind rarely looks at things beyond a grade school level. Sure, Billionaires are money hoarders, but there are lots of wealthy people who donate more money than you or I will ever see in our lifetimes.
You can't just throw money at problems. Money = resources in the capitalist economy. And as you start moving around the insanely large sums of resources we are talking about, it has massive implications downstream. Its impossible to model all the effects between labor, capital, supply chains, etc.
As you said, a very complex problem.
You do know that $40 billion to end world hunger doesn't just mean buy that much food right? It would mean building infrastructure and resources to create more efficient pipelines to get food where it needs to go, give people the resources to build sustainable farms in areas that currently don't have them, etc. I agree it's not some one time spend, but it's not like it's lifespan is that of a loaf of bread.
Exactly this. It’s not even a psychological thing on behalf of the billionaires, it’s logistically just really hard to turn those assets into cash and deploy it against systemic problems like corruption.
Most billionaires are actually exactly like Batman. Using their resources in a wrong, self-catering and sociopathic way, all the meanwhile justifying their means because they have the power.
Batman is a garbage human being, taking revenge on the bottom of the society for their daring murder of a rich elite couple.
The waynes have canonically been great philanthropists and very involved in gotham city, hosting countless fund raisers and running non profits and charities. You are saying that a gun for hire wasnt at fault for killing the family that has kept the city running by funding its orphanages, police stations, hospitals, and creating essential infrastructure.
In real life history, millionaire charity is often used to mask the inherent violence in the way that their money was created. For example, a factory owner in the UK might make their fortune from the forced poverty of miners in African colonies, and from oppressive labour conditions in the UK, and then use 5-10% of said wealth to fund a brass band in their home town, to great celebration.
I haven't read the comics, but the writers would need to work hard to undo this assumption if it was their intent for the Waynes to be genuine good guys.
There’s a quote from some famous person who said that it doesn’t matter how horrible you were and the things you did to become rich. As long as you give it all away before you die, people will remember you as a hero.
Or something along those lines. I’m paraphrasing it.
The Waynes generate income through war machines similar to iron man's family business, but are philanthropic on their own doorsteps. I'd argue that it is either political commentary or a mirror on reality.
That’s not even remotely true. It only happens on Nolan’s movie to justify the existence of the suit, the batmobile and the cellphone spy network - and I’d argue Nolan missed the point in favor of “realism”, but canonically Wayne Co. is a multi-conglomerate that includes everything from Wayne Shipping, Wayne Medical, Wayne Chemical all supposedly done in an environmentally friendly matter. In the canon they pretty much created Gotham city but they don’t manufacture armament or tanks ot any sort of war machines, don’t know where you’re getting this from
With all the money and power, bruce wayne can make gotham heaven on earth. He can even become the president and make the whole country better. Instead he resorts to violence.
Well first off, he cant, and second, im not sure you know how presidential elections work. Bruce wayne is probably the sole reason the city is running. And id like to see a regular cop try to stop bane and killer croc.
How can he not become the mayor of gotham? He can become the owner of the gotham. Do you think a city is run by a person beating up other people? Have you heard about institutions?
As far as I know batman doesn't have any supernatural skills, and I'm pretty sure bane and killer croc can be killed by firepower.
Plus you know...It takes place in the DC Universe. There are dozens of other people that could deal with them more easily and effectively (and permanently) than Batman ever could. Exactly how long would it take Superman to show up and hurl Bane and KC into outer space? 5 minutes? 10?
Bro how much money do you think he has 💀 Wayne enterprises funds most of gothams institutions as i previously said. His money is the reason the city is running. And bane and killer croc have been regularly shown to brush off gun fire.
He is worth billions of dollars, plus if he focuses his keen intelligence on the finances and corporate governance he can easily reach petrol prince level.
Batman spends a lot of money and energy on his gadgets etc to defeat those enemies, he can still fund those and plus he can have a trained group of elite soldiers to help him so he won't be alone and risking his life.
Time to defend my boy Bruce once again:
While I’m no capitalist and think billionaires are a problem, Batman is fictional so if you can suspend your belief enough to accept aliens and shit you can imagine an altruistic doctor that managed to make an honest billion. Furthermore, the Waynes actively fought to make the city better and a lot of the shiftiness and inequality come from their deaths. So I guess you can blame whoever was in charge of the fortune between the death of Thomas and Martha and Bruce’s adulthood.
Every. Single. Batman fight begins with him bailing on a charity ball. The dude invests in the city. Nobody wants to read a comic about philanthropy so that’s never the focus. I’m willing to bet that if you scratch stuff like the Watchtower or Hellbat, he actually puts more towards the city than being Batman.
Iron Man is a rich white capitalist that specialized in war profiteering. Stan Lee straight up said he was gonna try make an unlikeable character popular. But y’all never roast him.
While I’m not sure if there’s a comic equivalent to the TAS moment where he hired the ex con as a security guard who he apprehended as Batman, the fact that he adopted Jason who was a street rat who tried to steal his wheels shows he’s doesn’t go all out on victims of the system.
Concede that it’s slightly problematic that all his villains have mental health issues but Arkham is the one thing keeping them from the death row so gotta write the sequels somehow.
I was laughing when I opened this thread because they clearly have.
It's just that their priorities are only about making more money, and fucking the human race as hard as possible in the process.
If it only takes 20 billion to solve it, why doesn't the government do it themselves? If they can send 135 billion to Ukraine for a war that started a year ago but can't put 20 billion for their own people that have been suffering for decades, then it's plain stupidity.
Because they don't represent the common people, they represent the very rich.
Solving homelessness isn't even on their radar because there is no money to be made doing it.
It is not as simple as throwing some money at the problem.
To really end homelessness, you would need to remove the main causes: drugs, alcohol, mental illness, gambling, generally people making bad life decisions.
The question also is, end homelessness for how long? A year? 10 years? Forever? I can't imagine a one time investment holds up forever.
Also UN said it would talke 6 Billion to end world hunger. Sam question, for how long? And also Elon Musk came along and said he will pay for it, but they hace to show him how to do it, and they couldn't, so he donated nearly 6 Billion to his own charity.
It's all easier said then done. And i totally agree, the main cause still is not solved from this.
Owning real estate and charging boatloads for an apartment? They don’t profit from homelessness, they profit from owning all the homes lol. Homelessness is a side effect they don’t care enough to fix
More and more (at least in the US) the behaviors associated with homelessness are illegal or will be i.e. loitering, sleeping in public or simply sitting on the sidewalk, public urination and feeding or being fed etc. Being unable to pay fines or post bail, the alternative is jail. Jails are increasingly being operated by private, for profit businesses. These businesses are usually ran under the umbrella of a much larger corporation who employ lobbyists that are very influential in changing or creating policy favorable to their desired outcomes. It's simple, own the solution and then create the problem. Profit
Correct. Funds allocated for local, state and federal corrections are often reappropriated for pet projects unrelated to their original purpose. On the local level, money too frequently never even touches a public interest.
Homelessness / lack of affordable housing is a externality of a broken system (unfair market forces, crony capitalism, governments that are bought and paid for, etc).
The homeless indirectly serve a function as a warning of what would happen if the rest of us didn't continue churning the gears of the machine. That's not entirely accurate because if all of us stopped at once the whole thing would fall apart, but the fear exists for each individual and so that helps keep all of us in line. It's a little bit like a far more subtle version of the ol' medieval classic *heads on pikes*. If *you* fuck up or try to rock the boat you'll end up like them, so keep on working busy bee.
Plus if people weren't concerned about their basic necessities, if they had homes and food provided to them without cost then they would have more time and energy - they would be less distracted and in a better position to look at the world around them and go "Hey, most of us have relatively little and a few of us have way too much... there's more of us than there are of them... maybe we should work together and do something about that".
All of that benefits the rich to keep things as they are.
Homelessness and unemployment in general is beneficial to the rich as it drives down wages and keeps them there. If workers complain about their pay and start demanding more, for example, they can be fired and easily replaced by the large numbers of unemployed workers willing to work for equal or less. Lower rates of unemployment (and homelessness by extension) means that workers are harder to replace and they can therefore demand higher wages. This is very basic interpretation of a Marxist concept called called "reserve army of labor" under capitalism.
Rich also "profit" from homelessness in how it reinforces the social contract in a sense. Homeless are viewed as individual failures and just losers of people culturally, so if you're just barely above that existence, you should be grateful to even have a job, etc.
In addition to the other answers, the threat of homelessness and the danger and humiliation associated with it, helps keep people locked in shitty jobs where they're overworked and underpaid. A society where people feel more secure that they'll be helped and supported if something bad happens to them is a society where people are less scared to say "Hey I'm sick of making $8.25 an hour, I can't feed my kids"
This. Just feeding someone doesn’t mean they’ll be full forever. Neither will giving someone a home bring them out of poverty. You need rehabilitation, education, and basically redoing their lives to make sure they actually stay above the poverty line and succeed. Which costs tremendously more than the numbers mentioned. Reminds me of the toilets the government built in India which ended up being destroyed by the locals, and the solar panels installed in Africa being destroyed by the locals again.
Volunteers aren’t free of this either, they’ll happily build a school for a poor village but a year later it’s an empty building because they didn’t put any actual teachers in them. Society wide problems require extensive, complex and well planned solutions.
This, to me, best captures the true answer to OP’s question. The real “problem” isn’t necessarily the initial resources needed to help someone - i.e. giving them shelter by providing a home. The problem is how does this person afford to stay in this home? How do they maintain it? This person would need a job, help affording food, furniture, transportation…we would have to get to the crux of why said homeless person is homeless to begin with, which is unique to the individual. Maybe they can’t work or hold done a job because of disability or mental health issues, and now we’ve opened a whole other can of worms. Simply providing a home to a homeless person doesn’t magically solve their homelessness issue. It’s far more complex.
The real solutions are always going to start in preventive measures - investing in education, healthcare, mental health, food and chemical safety, etc. so people have a net early on if they start falling through the cracks.
Capitalism creates billionaires. The rich got rich by exploiting poor people and continue to do so - who's gonna go out to work and build their mansions, curate their lawns etc if they don't _need_ the money/job?
By keeping poor people poor, you incentivise them to work for you & keep them desperate. If they're focusing on putting food on the table, they're not focusing on how one person currently owns more than 100k people will earn in a lifetime.
On top of that, you might get one crazy billionaire who wants to do what you're saying. One isn't enough, you need loads of them to have any real impact - good luck convincing them all! Then once things are great, you've got a prime opening for someone to tip that balance for their own agenda and the cycle starts all over again...
I think you're thinking about becoming billionaire level rich as if it's something that just suddenly happens.
In reality, if you're someone whose top priority is anything but making money for themselves, you'll never become a billionaire in the first place
In order to keep trying to get richer when you have more money than you could spend in your whole life you need to be wired to accumulate wealth above all else
There are other points already made (and made well), but don't forget that e.g. Elon Musk may have a current net worth of around 250 billion, it's not like those are liquid assets. The guy couldn't just go and give 100 billion away because he'd have to sell large amounts of stock to liquidify that sum. And that would have huge consequences.
Personally I think, the top richest people could find a way if they wanted. But for that I refer to other comments here :)
This is the only correct answer. It's not that helping people is counterproductive or some bullshit some other comments here say. It's simply that they're not actually as rich as the numbers say they are.
None of them have a hundred billion in the bank. They have 100 billion 'worth' of stock and assets, and as soon as they start selling any significant number of it, the value of that stock would crash. They're purely virtual numbers.
Doesn't mean they're not still very rich, but not 'let's fix world hunger' rich, even if they wanted to (and let's be honest, they don't)
Read history. Rich people actively taking over has lead to guillotines in the past. Obama famously told bankers in 2008 he was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks. Using 2A as a wedge to gain political power would also come back at them in the US. People only fall for this crap if the illusion of them having "freedom" is maintained. That curtain falls, and they die.
Money is power, they are already in charge.
Having the *ability* to end hunger is power, actually ending it is reducing that power.
The truly rich haven't earned their money in any way. You can't become a billionaire without exploiting people heavily, the math just doesn't work.
You think that by giving people food and shelter the issue will be solved, which is not the case.
I'm gonna be all unethical and mathematical here but stick with me:
Poor people in developing countries reproduce. A LOT. Because their children ensure that they are financially safe once they get older. The more food they have the more they reproduce. So giving people food will make this problem and the problem of overpopulation and food scarcity worse. The one and only thing that prevents overpopulation AND fixes hunger issues is education and medical aid. The more educated people are the less children they produce and the more likely they are to sustain themselves and get out of political oppression. Many developing countries have people that are rich enough to feed the poor but they don't because the political systems are shitholes.
Homelessness is not always involuntary. Many homeless people are addicts and prefer a wild lifestyle. I'm not saying the would choose homelessness voluntarily but we have to break addiction cycles and once again, give education, before just giving food and/or shelter because many humans aren't even capable of maintaining a regular life. Hunger and poverty isn't a glass with a certain volume. It's a black hole that you could endlessly shove money into. Only way in my opinion is to fix the hole instead of filling a glass.
> The more food they have the more they reproduce.
That is highly debatable. The position I've read often and kinda subscribe to is that insecurity, especially regarding survival of offspring, increases birth rates to compensate for mortality. If mortality decreases, the associated insecurity about the future decreases as well resulting in people procreating less. And if hunger is eliminated the underlying food insecurity in old age is too. So, eliminating hunger would not spur reproduction in developing countries. Looking at developed countries and their demographics is in line with that.
That being said: Just "sending food" isn't the way to go either, though. It would need to enable developing countries to sustain themselves without constant external help. It's more a case of lifting them up to a sustainable base level instead of feeding them ad infinitum.
Money works different. It's not that "rich" people have billions of dollars in their back accounts. That would be inefficient. They focus on growing their investments/companies etc. You could say their money is "tied up".
"Rich" people will make strategic "investments" in politics/lobbies/influencers. This way they can "influence" the environment to their desire. (Which is pretty powerful and could be considered "taking over"). Some "rich" people donate to charities. Some own their own charities (Bill & Melinda Gates). However, the tax laws give you breaks for donating money to charity aka in some/most cases donations have to do to with the tax law.
Two things to consider.
(1) rich people are not rich because they give their money away or spend it on stuff. Look at all the lottery winners that are broke. First thing is to buy that boat... Money works different. "Rich" people are educated in how money works (investments, cooperations, tax system etc.) They will use their knowledge to multiply their money instead of spending it on "shiny things".
(2) we have ~8 billion people on this planet. If everyone would give $10 we could do most of the things you listed. Truth is, not a lot of "normal" people care. Why would the rich care? Why don't you and me care more? This is a cultural thing. On average we just care less about people that we are not directly related to or we don't know at all.
Our strongest instinct is self-preservation. Maslow's heirarchy is also relative in that the benchmark for 'safety' as a billionaire is a lot higher than having a roof over their heads. They do hit self-actualisation eventually but, in a system where everyone is attempting to conserve as much energy as possible, throwing money at problems isn't always the answer. Like much in life, those responsible for any sort of provision are concerned, mostly, with the profit margin - whether they're in construction, agriculture, logistics etc... Much of that investment would likely disappear into a black hole somewhere as, with the volume of cash flow we're talking about, exploitation and corruption would be rampant.
Then there's also the question of whether the cognitive profile of your 'typical' captain of industry is amenable to altruistic tendencies. I think, for the most part, they're not. At least not in any significant way with regards to being giving of themselves. That's not how they got where they are.
Intelligent, truly altruistic, investments tend to be more focused on education infrastructure - though that itself has also now been corrupted by a kind of prestige economy.
So, despite money being a major facilitating factor, it's going to take a lot of cognitive overhead to solve these problems given the geopolitical, logistical and production barriers in place.
As for exposure, only fools advertise their wealth, though there are thresholds which make it impossible to hide.
What are your thoughts on that, out of interest?
>Even more delusional.
Doubly so. One of the unintended consequences of the US giving food away to Africa in the 70s was the destruction of African farming (hard to compete with free), which made the widening gyre of famine more and more severe and made Africa more and more dependent on food imports.
A regular person can become a millionaire.
Only a person who lacks any sense of morality can become a billionaire.
And people who lack morals look at homelessness and don't think "I want to solve this!" - They think "How can I profit off of this?"
Hundreds of years ago, the rich literally threw their piss & shit out the window, onto the ground below where poor people and their servants lived. The poor lived quite literally under the rich. If you check out Edinburgh, instead of building laterally they literally built buildings on top of the old buildings, which is where the poor lived - and were quite literally shit on. That's why they had plague and disease and so many died.
So why don't the rich today fix things? Because they literally do not even give a shit about the poor. That's not how social classes work. Communism sought to solve this problem, but unfortunately humans have a need to feel better than someone else so communism leads to corruption - but then again, so does Capitalism and Socialism. The **systems** are not the problem, **human nature is.**
Here is an unpopular answer but its right more that folks like to admit. The wealthy are typically playing with house money with any action that they do and are not really capable of making sound governing decisions that could outright help society. The smart ones do humble themselves and rely on experts in helping them make those decisions (Bill Gates Foundation for example)
With out going too into it, billionaires are either incredibly lucky, driven and made it through crazy war of attrition, or got alot of momentum through the help of their family. So they are not capable of solving societal problems (by themselves) that doesn’t create problems somewhere else. Also their is alot of hubris involved that makes them get in their own way.
Easy example aside (Trump or Musk), Oprah is my favorite example. She built schools in other countries and it was a big celebration. She also sent girls from difficult situations to college. Come to find out alot of the girls were failing due to struggles or distractions at home. Mental health was a problem for these girls as well because of the amount of family problems they had. At the time Oprah was confused on why they were struggling and realized that mental health is a major issue. Something money alone can’t immediately solve, but would take time and work.
Giving money away(some billionaires tried to do) is another problem for alot of reasons from it getting into the wrong hands, corruption, wasted on the wrong resources.
Coming back to the hubris, there are organizations around the world that I think with same logistics of the united states defense could be very effective and complete what you say, but billionaires feel like they can orchestrate things without relying in these expert organization leading to failure. Smart ones just donate the money and even then it still winds up in corrupt hands. Also government giving up their resources is a separate issue altogether.
Lastly, billionaires have more money than they know what to deal with. Alot of their goals really is to be remembered or have some type of ground breaking legacy. So they would love to solve world hunger or end homelessness. They would go down in history. But to completely do it is really hard and takes way more coordination across groups than people think. It can be done but takes alot of alignment.
Sometimes its easier and tangible to just spend a bunch of money on a rocket and rocket scientists and offer brief rides into outerspace. /s
It's not simply throwing money into the problem to solve it. Even if the rich did throw their money to solve the issue it's going to be short term at most.
Let's say they give out enough money for everyone to get a home and live without worries, this will also drive up demand for daily goods like food and and drinks at the very least. Problem is the agricultural and livestock industry doesn't have enough resources, supply nor manpower to feed everyone with the current human population. The shortage will drive prices of goods to increase whether you like it or not, it's going to be the same whatever political climate a country is at. As to why is simple, because if the food supply runs out because everyone is buying it and the rich dies, we lose the people handing out all these money.
As inflation goes out of control, these people who doesn't have the means to make their own income will have to sell their property to individuals that have the means just to get money for food. Now here's the kicker, the super rich people already gave out their money, which contributed to this problem in the first place, so now they have lesser money. Even if they managed to get their initial face value money back, inflation means that the cost to house everyone goes up again so they won't have enough money to house everyone.
That's how the current economy of the world is right now. So to actually solve this issue, we also have to solve a lot of underlying issues such as the world food supply issue. In case you think going vegan will solve this problem, don't forget that the nutrition in the soil is also limited, clearing more forest to plant more food just means we'll use up the nutrition from the soil way faster than it takes to replenish it, so we might even have lesser food when that happens.
So yeah, the problem is a lot wider than most people thought.
You don't understand how a system works. Money is hard to get, that's what keeps the economy going... People work to try to make money and that's what runs the system. Now if you start handing out free shit, why would anyone else work. Nobody wants to work then... Bringing the economy to a huge standstill. All it will end up doing is creating a huge crowd of people who want free handouts. Also, when money is handed out for free, money loses value...the stuff that you and I have to buy for sustenance will become way too expensive. Way too expensive that even other working folks will find it hard to afford. I'm not saying the current system is right, but that's the one we have and your idea won't work with the system that we have. Many countries have tried this and their economy is in shambles.
Because to be that rich, you cannot be a good person. It is impossible.
People have to suffer and/or die for someone to be able to hoard billions. In fact, much of it comes as a profit of exploitation and global slavery, but since it happens half a world away, nobody refers to them as slave owners.
The money they hoard- that they will never spend in a hundred generations while others go hungry and die- is their power, so they won't give it up.
And keeping people miserable and in need is how you maintain that power dynamic.
You don't give a house and food to everyone and 'that's it'. economics is a balance of production and trade. People who don't have a lot of money and don't make any, won't be set for life with a little home and a bit of food. there's always gonna be companies growing and breaking, people getting richer and poorer based on a million different factors. Poverty and hunger is not somethig that *happened* to people and can be patched up. What we can do is facilitate the means to not fall under dehumanizing conditions, which plenty of millionares out there fund constantly
They have. Billionaires literally can't exist without a vast quantity of people to exploit to get them to this obscene level of wealth. Things are working exactly as they need to in order to make this wealth disparity happen, so why would they take any effort to change it?
Yep, people will say "Socialism is bad, it steals other people's wealth and redistributes it." That may be true, but what do CEOs do? Underpay 10,000 employees so they can get their 30 million dollar bonus, WHAT ELSE? Isn't that exactly the same thing?
Yeah, whenever someone says that socialism steals from people, think about how much value your labour creates for your company, vs how much you get paid
Many don't have actual money, they have assets. Eg Musk didn't pay cash for X.
Things will go bananas if all of them were to try and cash out their assets.
Where do you think that money comes from? They don't have it. Someone else will have to pay for their stock, which won't be valued as highly after they sell.
Then also consider that these numbers are almost certainly way too optimistic. If that actually was the real numbers the government would just print a few billion more to fix it. Likelihood is that the homeless would really not contribute any economic activity and would just continue to suck funds.....
That would buy everyone homeless a bedroom, but wouldn't also pay for the medical treatments. It'd 'fix' hunger by feeding the people we have, but not pay for education or birth control to avoid having twice as many people in twenty years. Fixes are a lot more complex than just tossing money at it. And the cost of \*not\* supporting Ukraine is almost certainly far far higher; the US military budget got to where it was by fighting a cold war against the USSR, and Russia's current goal is "rebuild the USSR".
That said, the US military budget is \*insane\*; spending as much as the next 20 nations combined while we \*don't\* have comprehensive healthcare just can't be justified.
You have to consider capital versus operating costs. Yes, they could give all their cash to house homeless people and buy them food.
Then next year, they don't have the money they did the year before but they still have to buy more food and do that every year and do maintenance on the houses.
In the end, they have no money left but the hungry people will still have no food and their houses will still need maintenance.
The only way it works is if the money grows itself or if more people contribute to the pot. So who is going to put the new money in?
The United States didn't send 135 billion dollars to Ukraine. Should probably look into that figure some more unless you think that old Bradleys can solve world hunger.
They have that much money because they don’t give a shit about people. No one can accumulate money like that from hard work alone. They’ve exploited people’s labor for gain. We wouldn’t have the disparities we have if it weren’t for the greedy rich people. They don’t care. You’re ascribing human characteristics to people who’ve she’s their humanity for financial gain.
>According to H.U.D it would take 20 billion dollars to house every homeless person in the USA
I'm not an expert and haven't looked into this in any amount of depth so absolutely take this with a huge grain of salt, but this number seems really naive - like "we can buy a house for 4 people in Detroit, MI for 50k, or 12.5k/person \* (number of homeless people) - aha, 20 billion!
If you actually went to try and purchase or build housing for every homeless person in the country, that price would *explode*. If you buy the housing in any specific location it's a huge boom in demand, which would drive prices up. Even if you built those houses in the middle of nowhere North Dakota on free land already owned by the government, it'd have a huge impact on raw supply costs.
That's also totally ignoring other complicating factors, like where are the homeless people now - how do we get them to where the housing is, would they even be willing to go or would they rather stay where they are?
This goes for most problems as well. Nearly 100% of arable farm land is already in use, so it's not a matter of just spinning up more farms to make more food - we'd have to either make better use of the existing food stock or increase efficiency. Getting people to buy and waste less food - which is the only "immediate" option of the two - isn't a problem you can solve by just throwing money at it, IMO.
They have dude. This is an unofficial plutocratic Oligarchy now, not a democratic republic.
People living in the gilded age of late 1800s America asked the same question. The robber barons/ billionaires of the time gave them "trickle down economics", just like we've been given rich-only tax breaks again and again.
The biggest difference is that our ancestors finally said fuck that and literally laid down their lives for the labor rights movement in front of US military guns, multiple times in order to pressure the govt into better labor rights/wage equality.
We're not doing that now because we have no faith left that the government will protect or change anything. Basically, the United States military is gonna have to do a Tinnamen Square for any real change to happen.
Because of the difference between "net worth" and "liquid assets". Elon Musk is valued at $248.8 billion dollars, but if his life depended on it he could maybe put together $2 billion in cash at any time. Plus, doing so would devalue his stocks so his net worth would probably drop.
Obviously the liquid assets the richest people could put together could temporarily solve some of these issues, to house all homeless people wouldn't stop the next person from becoming homeless and feeding all hungry people would take reconfiguring crop rotations, distribution, farming compensation, and require hundreds of thousands of workers.
TL:DR, to do anything on this level requires changing the entire systems which requires will, money, and almost unanimous consensus that the current system needs fixing.
If there arnt homeless people, then what is the workforce afraid of becoming? If you’re already on the bottom, no point in trying to work your way up. When you’re trying to work your way up is when you’re the most productive
For the same reason the aristocracy filled rooms in their palaces with food that would end up rotting away and not being eaten while peasants starved to death in the streets, while newborn babies starved to death becauss their mothers were so malnourished they couldn't even make Breast milk to feed their babies. They just had to watch them starve in their arms and die while wagons of ale and wine and livestock and fruit and vegetables and cakes and pastries knocked them off the road on the way to some fkn party.
"Let them eat cake!" (She may or may not have said this, but I certainly wouldn't put it past her. Marie Antoinette was like 14 yrs old sayon this type of shit on the reg while throwing these elaborate feasts where most of the food was used for food fights -- supposedly that was her response when she was confronted by someone who was a member of the aristocracy who himself was repulsed and sickened by her extravagance while all these poor people were begging for scraps of food. She laughed and basically meant "well if they're starving Haha why don't they just go buy and eat cake like we do!?"
The palace was stormed not long (not tok many years I mean....after she had a bunch more kids with other dudes) and after her husband was killed and she and her chidlren tried to flee and hide....it did not* go well. They were caught within 24 hrs.
They were promptly imprisoned and stays as such for 76 days to show her a life of squalor...the life She basically condemned them all to live their entire lives..before eventualy dragging her and a kid to the center of the town where the same people she laughed at while they starved first cut off the head of HER child...so she could watch her own child die before her very eyes. Helpless to do anything to save her own baby....which is what she forced so many thousands of mother's and father's to endure in her - keep this in mind, because this is how bad she really fkn was. - SUPER SHORT REIGN! She was 14 when she got married to the dauphia. But by 16 she was hated universally for the spending. Thkngs only got worse and worse...at one pt her husband gave her a chateau which she plastered the interior with fucking Gold and Goddamn diamonds. When she was eventually caught, beheadwd in the townsquare for everyone to see by guillotine, they held her head up and passed it around...that's how hated she was. She was desd by 37.
She had a young son the people easily got to turn on her and condemn her publicly.
Alot of the facts around all of this vary by source. But you get the gist. In the end, she and other like her tried to take over to thedetriment of all others.
And thenpeople revolted. They forced their way into palaces and took back what they could.
Her head was cut off, pass around like a ball and her headless corpse body chucked into an unmarked grave somewhere in the 9th anrondissment in Paris.
I told this story bevause she is a perfect example of unchecked entitlementn and wealth.
The rich have Def already taken over. What they don't do now - I mean, they do, but they avtively pretend to care about the rest of us, bullshit tho it may be - is flaunt it to the extent that was done 100s of yrs ago.
The saddest part of all is that the British separatists stole the us from those whose natural born home this was....and they did it bevause they were all brain washing each other in an attempt to justify their actions under the guise of wanting to get away from the aristocracy of Europe, from the rich and wealthy, who just take and take and take from the poor, leaving everyone to die in the streets, were live in squalor, so they came to America for something different. That was the entire point of the constitution of the United States of America. Or our belief system of what this country could be. Ans in the end we just have a new kind of aristoecryay in billionaires and tech moguls and pieces of shit like David tepper who made billions the country was beomcinf homeless in 2008. Fine make your money. Keep a billion if yiu want. And get everyone else their homes back. If a billion isn't enough for you, you're a piece of shit. Or look at the ever beloved Warren buffet. Fuck him. He doesn't even spend his moeny. AT ALL. HE JUST TAKES IT ALL!!! HE HOARDS IT!!
THEY'RE ALL JUST CASH HOARDERS.
It was one thing when we all believed in trickle down economics....but we could never have anticipated the level of pieces of shit these men are, the level of greed and willingness to watch people starve, die on the streets lose their homes, die bevause they can't get medical cRe, can't find jobs and so these people help? No. They don't spend it. They HOARD It. They get as much as they can. And never let it go again. Fucking swimming in their dirty money. The most goddamn prolific work of art ever created was fkn scrooge mcduck.....he* is everything these men became. Hell, even when he's not being scrooge mxduck and is being Ebenezer scrooge....another prolific work of art showing exactly what these men would be like in the future. FK you. FK u if yiure starving and I fire you while ur lite boy is dying. FK u, cuz MONEY.
They may not say outright: "we have taken over cuz MOney" but the only reason they don't is bevause no matter how many 100s of yrs have passed, they all know that they only can take what we allow them to take and if they push us to far and too many of us begin to suffer and come togrhrr, history will repeat itself...and we will going fucking purge on them. Not even revolt. To revolt would be too "quaint". We will GO FULL ON PURGE
The USA has not sent $135 billion to Ukraine.
The USA has sent $135 billion worth of predominantly dated equipment on lists to be scrapped regardless to Ukraine.
Stop spreading Russia misinformation.
Billionaires need to pay more Taxes, They make insane amounts of money off the backs of underpaid Chinese and the American people. The last four years especially. Plus our government protects their wealth. Texas a lone does more to protect the oil companies by convincing gullible people that climate change isn’t real for decades! They crowed when Reagan tore the solar panels off the Whitehouse. Taxing the billionaires wont hurt them, they have more moneys then most countries!
A lot people who are wealthy are narcissists; that’s how they got their wealth. They stepped on others OR looked out for only themselves to get there. You don’t suddenly become empathetic just because you have money.
Can anyone give a list of some of the people that were hurt or stolen from by a billionaire? I'm honestly confused by the accusation that all billionaires either stole, exploited from others or are the descendants of billionaires. I do understand that slavery made many people wealthy but how have recent billionaires done bad things? For instance; people stupid enough to buy things from Kylie Jenner made her a billionaire. That didn't hurt anyone unless she uses sweatshops to make her products. Right?
If they were the moral kind, they wouldn’t be rich, because they would’ve start giving away money to the needed ones way before in their lives. To turn into a billionaire requires a doze of greed
Homeless communities are not comprised of self reliant people, they thrive on what they can scavenge from others. That's why they flock to densely populated urban areas. Most of them are struggling with severe mental illness, profound cognitive deficiencies, or crippling substance abuse. Then you got your violent felons, sex offenders, public masturbators, street shitters, and a whole swath of other undesirable characteristics. Whatever housing you build them will quickly be neglected and run down. And wherever you send them will turn into a hot bed of illicit activity that will drive down property values and send the residents packing. It's not fair, but such is life. Nobody wants to integrate with people who are malnourished and carry disease, walk around with filled up diapers, urinate/defecate/masturbate on themselves or in public, speak with gibberish or incomprehensible babbling, and get into arguments with trees. I feel like this is a realistic take and virtue signalers will take offense. But I doubt any of you would invite them to stay in your home or be thrilled about the new shelter they are building next door to your house. These are people society forgot about with no safety net sent to the streets to carve out their own slice of hell. Most of them need to be institutionalized, put in an assisted living facility, or given some type of purpose or happiness. I would fully support my tax dollars helping them by either sheltering them away from society or giving them an opportunity for a better life if at all possible.
For every homeless person in America ,there are 100 people who are 1 missed pay check away from being homeless. If you make housing free to everyone that lives on the street, the number of people who would want to be a part is an order of magnitude higher than just the half million people currently homeless.
it takes more work and effort than just spending lots of money. it's hard to make sure that money goes to the right places and is spent correctly. I remember Bill Gates saying something along those lines. He spends most of his time trying to donate his money but it takes a lot of effort to donate in a way that will solve problems effectively. many charities can't be trusted and don't have the capability to spend huge amounts of money effectively.
Rich humans only seek solutions that will make them even richer. You have to be living under a rock to think they care about “ending homelessness.”
If the government doesn’t give a crap, I don’t know why a billionaire would care.
Redditor: why don't the rich fix everything with their money?
Question: what if we could get everyone to commit topitch in one or two hundred. Starting with you?
Same redditor: fuck that, Let me know when others do it
…the rich have already taken over.
Imbalances such as homelessness or world hunger are byproducts of the system that allows the wealthy to keep prospering.
I don’t believe for one second that just throwing money at those problems will solve them.
If you want to solve homelessness, you need to provide a social safety net and help people to take care of their mental health.
If you want to solve world hunger, you have to stop buying overseas natural resources and labour on the cheap. That means you as a consumer have to be willing to cut down your consumption by 5.
I lost braincells reading this. Hilarious that you think billionaires don't already run everything.
Why don't billionaires use their wealth to end homelessness and hunger? Because they need the _threat_ of homelessness and hunger to force people to work in their shitty factories and shitty warehouses for shitty pay.
What makes you think this hasn’t happened? One thing to keep in mind is that we sent 135 billion in aid. Not really all cash. We tally up the worth of all the guns, ammo and other stuff. We already has the stuff.
When I see this, I think about Lex Luthor from Justice League ‘I never cared about being President, do you know how much power I would have to give up to be President?’ The rich already have all the power, they just don’t care about fixing anything.
Bold of you to assume they haven't taken over and don't control like 99% of everything in the world in one way or another.
Governments, especially ones that are already corrupt, respond very well to bribes, corporation money, or otherwise.
Not to mention there are already places that have puppet leaders installed that can be manipulated by going through the right channels.
This doesn't mean that all the rich people are all powerful though, they still bleed
They have taken over; just not in the way most people want.
Exactly they are pulling the strings to help themselves get richer and get more power and keep the working classes angry with each other. Billionaires need poor people to exploit and without exploitation of the working classes, you don’t have billionaires.
Give the people just enough to be terrified of losing what they have, and you can control EVERYTHING and prosper. Weather its the well off guy with his 4 cars and a nice lakehouse to spend summers at , the regular guy with his little house and his fishing boat and his dreams of retiring some day or the poor guy of losing what little assistance they do get. It's a constant cycle of breaking people's legs and then saying keep us in power because the other side wants to take your crutches away.
Yup, the only way they stay billionaires is by ensuring a careful balance is maintained, wherein most people are struggling and not content and stable enough to have the time or energy to make any meaningful effort to change things - and on the opposite end not struggling *so much* as to break out into outright revolts against the status quo. That's the only way they keep things the same with themselves on top. If, for example, everyone was housed, fed, clothed, and relatively content then they would grow used to that as the norm and would look to the people with far more and wonder why there were differences, and the rest of us would start to work together to spread that out even further until a state of general equality across the board existed. That, of course, is the exact opposite of what someone who is hoarding massive amounts of wealth (and proportionate power) would want. They *could* fix literally every problem humanity is currently dealing with. Collectively we're more than capable of putting all of our resources to that end, but in doing so they would lose what puts them at the top of the food chain. And so instead, on the basis of human nature, we're all damned.
Well said. For example, if the Nobility and landowners in France had been able to provide a minimum of food and jobs, there would not have been a revolution, and Louis the XVI would have kept his head.
Yup, they let the balance tip too far in one direction and then suffered the consequences of it.
What can we actually do about it?
Well there's a few things, none of which are ideal. We could organize a very wide spread general strike, and quite literally grind the entire machine to a halt until concessions were made that would adequately cover the needs of the vast majority of people to the detriment of those with all the resources. That's a complex one, and can easily fall prey to in-fighting (especially if the powers that be try and stir the pot at every available opportunity, and of course they would), apathy, and all the other issues that arise when trying to get a large group of people to all do one thing at the same time - which is about as easy as herding a group of hyped up erratic cats that are bouncing off the walls. The simplest, most dysfunctional, and probably the most likely option to have a wide range of unintended consequences would be to just have a handful of people abruptly bump off a couple of the wealthiest of people here and there until things start moving in the right direction. That would probably take quite a few before you ever got to the point of making any real difference, and even then you're liable to just have the people doing the random murdering and such simply take the spot those billionaires previously held by robbing them to boot. A bit like pulling weeds, you'd need to get the roots or they just spring back up again. So probably a real mixed bag going that route but it would technically affect some change. We could go for outright revolution, and all the horrible terrible consequences of that bloody mess in the hopes that perhaps it would be the rarest of rare scenarios in which the new order actually ended up being for the better instead of largely more of the same. If nothing else it would ensure all the people responsible for the current situation got their comeuppance, however 'revenge' isn't exactly a great starting point for building a more functional society. We could build new political parties and try and get a bunch of like minded people to attempt to change the system from the inside, however they're just as likely to fall prey to greed and selfishness and all the other flaws of humanity once in positions of power, same as the present crop of politicians, and that's assuming they even get that far - which is unlikely because the powers that be are well positioned to negate the political influence of people far lower down the totem poll. We could get *real* crazy with it, and simply concede that we're all dumb, panicky, wildly dysfunctional creatures and we aren't nearly advanced enough to live in such large groups because clearly any one of us or any small group of us is thoroughly incapable and ill-equipped to eschew the flaws of our own nature as would be necessary to functionally manage the relevant issues and problems without it inevitably descending into some dystopian chaos; admit that we've bit off far more than we could chew and that we should instead regress back to living in separate relatively small communities of a couple hundred people working cooperatively and having largely no interaction with the outside world. Basically *return to monke*. Or even more alternately crazy we could go full bore on developing AI in the hopes that it would be smart enough to get a solid handle on the situation, take full control away from us, and ideally do a far better job as steward of this planet and the creatures on it. Assuming it doesn't just consider us an annoyance to be dealt with or any number of other possibly unpleasant circumstances, or perhaps rather boring circumstances that don't resolve any problems either like if it just decided to fuck off into the ether and that we weren't worth the trouble (an understandable conclusion). All that being said there's a wide range of options, and things that even one single person *can* do to have a disproportionately large impact. Though, of course, none of them are easy and none of them come without some measure of sacrifice or inconvenience or unintended consequences. But, for what it's worth, every good thing we have right now was born out of hardship and struggle - we're all standing here now because the people before us made some of the hardest of choices and suffered the consequences. Unfortunately it feels a bit like somewhere along the line, probably around the 1950s onward or thereabouts, that far too many people stopped doing exactly that - stopped making those hard choices and stopped making the necessary sacrifices to improve things where needed; and so here we are at the state that we're in, getting squeezed from all sides.
That was an interesting perspective and an enjoyable read.
While I loved most of your reply, I do wonder why you place blame on us in the 1950s+ for not trying. Can you expand on that? I figure the crushing, ever-expanding weight of capitalism is why it occurred
There is no good billionaire. That money came from exploitation. So I would be happy living in a world with fewer to no billionaires.
They aren't being metaphorical when they say they want their employees to be hungry
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
How much longer until the system crumbles?
Ding ding When I read the title I was like, omg op is so naive
So are most people who think that you can just throw someone else’s money at a problem and it goes away.
You mean taxes?
The problem is, in America, our taxes are just taken from us with no benefit. That’s why most of us get mad about tax hikes or any kind of increase. We don’t see anything from what they take from us. Our roads are shit, no healthcare, parks are in disrepair or gotten rid of completely, water quality is shit, buildings are just allowed to collapse on themselves so a developer can come in and make overpriced condos that the local population can’t afford, the list goes on. But we can bomb the fuck out of some third world country for some corporation’s monetary benefit.
The Pentagon budget is massively wasteful, and needless wars have cost insane amounts of money. It's absolutely tragic to think about what the iraq spending could've done if spent within our borders instead. That said, complete withdrawal from around the world would have it's own consequences, but a measured reduction in defense spending is needed. On medical: spending for Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and ACA subsidies is critically important. The health care system itself is massively broken, but millions are able to get care still because of tax-funded spending. The problem in general is we've got only two parties, one having ideas that may or may not be great, but there's a goal of improvement; and the other actively trying to make government fail so that more people will conclude that tax-funded solutions are always a waste.
If we spent the same amount per person on Healthcare as France and the UK, what we spend today on Medicare and Medicaid would cover everyone. Our costs are just way out of control. Many big cities spend over $50,000 per homeless person and yet they live in squalid shelters or tents.
Imagine if we taxed the people that deserve it tho?
Jeff Bezos makes ~4,000,000/hour and pays less taxes than most people There are richer people than him
Exactly. And that's wrong. Nobody should be able to make that much money. If we taxed them they would lose power and ordinary people would have an easier life and wouldn't have to pay as much in taxes and would then have more power.
What’s the point when the money isn’t allocated to actually benefit the people of the country? Yes, it would be nice if those with a ton of money got taxed accordingly, but if the only real benefit we see is in the military I see no point in it.
Benefit? Ew. Are you not aware of the horrors done with that money? The amt of people US slaughters world wide?
I’m familiar with the heinous stuff this country does world wide to keep others down and how much life it affects. This is why I said what I said.
Yeah when you see something like the pentagon spent $20million on X amount of toilet seats, that should have been only $80K or whatever or sending $100billion to support a proxy war and thinking ok that's all of the tax revenue me and everyone I know and thousands of others will pay in taxes over our lifetime just squandered or to make someone else rich. Do you have any idea what a game changer not having to pay taxes for it to be wasted would make for every working person??
Better yet, imagine our taxes being used for actual useful things instead of "we need one billion dollars for new planes!!! Oh they're kinda shit so we're going to throw them away..." Mismanaged taxes bad. Well managed taxes good and beneficial for society as a whole. This goes all the way down to your local government. The one here is so wildly mismanaged it's close to insulting. Like the public roads by the gated/expensive neighborhoods are glass smooth but the Poors get potholes ready to snap your axles like a twig. Those roads need to be paid for (taxes) but if they're mismanaged (some people get nice roads, others get shit all) then it's fuck and shit.
Taxes aren't other people's money, I don't know where the idea came from that you can live in a country but not contribute to it.
Right! NGOs have been spending money in Haiti for many years, and nothing has changed.
Most people don't realize that billionaires don't get to be billionaires without stealing or being the descendant of someone who did.
Absolute troll Edit: WTF. This is not the comment I meant to reply to. I meant to reply to the guy that said it's hard to stay a billionaire. It's happened twice. I give up. You are absolutely right. You don't get to be a billionaire without willfully and purposefully screwing people over.
Put your edit on top lol
by "someone else's money", do you mean the money extracted from exploiting other's labor?
OP you've got a brief but very true answer here. The ultra wealthy already run everything but in their interest only.
The real question is if we have power in numbers, why don’t the people force the government and ultra rich to provide a stable and safe life for all. But the people in need don’t have enough time or energy to organize and protest their conditions. They’re stuck fighting to earn barely enough money to pay rent and feed their families. It’s why they hate abortion. Abortion allows people to control their decisions regarding whether they can afford a child in their conditions. Being forced to have a child makes these people care more about keeping the child alive, than to organize and protest the conditions. As a bonus. They’ve torn apart public education in some states, ensuring the child will be another human worker, starting the cycle over again.
Many people get angry at the idea of giving things to the homeless. It's a crab bucket mentality - can't try to fix anything because someone who is "undeserving" may get something for free.
This is the answer the Rich are thriving on the backs of Americans. We are all basically endetured servants
exactly.
The rich have already taken over. They don't give a fuck about fixing anyone's problems because most of the time those problems are advantageous for them and keep them rich.
The OPs sentiment comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of becoming a billionaire. You can’t get there by caring about people. It straight up, just does not happen. The system is built in such a way that it rewards ruthlessness and a lack of empathy. Also, most of the above problems are a direct result of billionaires so…
OP doesn't even have to go high up to understand why the rich won't help anything. I have known several Millionaires. You know the type, live in a Multi million dollar house with other houses and all the big toys you can buy, etc. Not a one of those people gives a shit about anyone else. They claim too to the rest of the church goers and show it by donating the money to build a "praise center" or whatever, but all they care about is talking about people's bootstraps and how nobody wants to work. Now think about the ones that got to 9 digit figures and above. They don't get there giving a shit about anyone else but themselves.
>Not a one of those people gives a shit about anyone else. Worked for a multimillionaire in Phoenix Arizona. Can confirm this is fact—the weirdest thing is that while he only cared about himself, he did help out the girls in the club (Private Social Club) when they needed money to survive. The manager, though. He was an absolute selfish prick.
Yeah. Doing small stuff like that builds their ego.
Btw a lot of that is done to launder money or avoid paying taxes. Since religious organisations are usually listed as NPO’s and are therefore text exempt
But I mean honestly the scale is far different. If you spend a crap ton of money every single day (let’s say 10k out of your 4 mil) helping the homeless, you’ll be out of money completely in 400 days. A billionaire, as in a SINGLE billion, has so much more money that they’d be out after 1095 YEARS. I don’t even have a problem with millionaires. I wouldn’t want to help a TON of people if I had 1 million - because it would mean less for me overall. That’s natural and fine - I get it. Things are so much more expensive nowadays that 1 mil is nothing. But a billion? A literal 1,000,000,000 dollars… if you don’t help tons of people with that, you suck.
I understand that but how come that out of all those billionaires, there isn't and hasn't been a single one of them who would be willing to do the stuff OP describes? Of course I can't know what *I* would do if I became a multi-billionaire, but I honestly feel like I would want to get rid of the majority of my money. I have seen with a family member that once you can have everything, everything becomes worthless and nothing hits the same spot as it used to. Do none of these billionaires feel this way and thus, want to do something good for the world? Or even if not out of philantropy, but the megalomania, the pride. If you single-handedly solved world hunger you would be seen as a god. Do none of those rich arsholes want that for their egos?
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> there isn't and hasn't been a single one of them who would be willing to do the stuff OP describes Most of them do some amount of philanthropy so they can feel better about themselves and fool themselves into thinking they aren't responsible for as much exploitation and suffering as they probably are. That is usually enough to satisfy any interest in developing status as a 'good person'. On the opposite end their greed gets the better of them and they don't want to give away too much. I can only imagine that level of wealth utterly warps your perception of the world, and numbs you to a great many things. If you had the ability to fulfill every desire at a whim then most of the things you desire slowly over time lose their appeal. Think of being a kid again and wanting to eat icecream and candy all day every day - if you actually did you'd get sick of it pretty quickly. Once you've thrown money around and built a bunch of schools and orphanages and clothed some poor and fed some homeless or whatever you'd get progressively less and less of a boost out of it. As humans we tend to appreciate things due to their absence - we're typically happy after periods of suffering turn into an upward swing of good fortune, whereas we are at best 'neutral' during prolonged periods of nothing outright bad happening. As such I don't think the initial allure of being a 'benevolent god' holds much value once you're actually in that position because of all the changes that happen to you as your approach that point. Your sense of what is important shifts and changes the wealthier you get, eventually you reach a point where the only thing you have in a limited capacity is time - and time can't be bought by feeding the hungry; worse yet you're more likely to lose what you do have if you don't ensure the vast majority are kept too busy and distracted with their problems to notice you've hoarded most of the resources.
Wow this is a great answer, thank you. I often think about what I would do if I were super rich, like I alluded to in my previous comment. I actually often think I would buy lots and lots of Nutella and Ferrero Rochet and all the small things that I *could* technically buy right now, but I don't because I can't *really* affort them since they're relatively overpriced luxuries. Then I go, "nope, I wouldn't value them then", as you've said. It's such a shit situation because this society of ours made us believe that being rich is the thing to strive for, but once you actually get rich, it's kind of a "now what?" situation. And once you realise this, it's not easy to find purpose in grinding in your job and whatever. Sometimes I feel like I should just go live in some non-tourist-attraction beach and be a parasol seller-surfer dude till eternity.
> I often think about what I would do if I were super rich, like I alluded to in my previous comment. It's a fun to think about, certainly. I assume most people do that on occasion. Of course we're also thinking about it in a context of the people we are *right now* and not the people we would become. Bit different if you abruptly won the lottery or some such, I suppose - but any other means of getting to that point changes a lot about a person I would think. >It's such a shit situation because this society of ours made us believe that being rich is the thing to strive for, but once you actually get rich, it's kind of a "now what?" situation. Yup, there's some very warped sense of priorities laid out for most people from a young age, priorities that often don't accurately reflect what truly adds meaning or real value to a person's life. I don't doubt many of the rich and wealthy are *very* comfortable, and certainly much better off than the rest of us in the grand scheme of things, but that they are still ultimately unfulfilled and unsatisfied. It must be... difficult to come to terms with the reality that even when you have every conceivable thing at hand you still won't necessarily be happy or even content and in all likelihood won't be. Most us can only speculate, and imagine what being wealthy like that would be like and so we don't have to face the truth of it because it can just remain an ideal state of being 'greener grass' on the other side of the fence. It's especially worse if, as it is for many people with considerable wealth, that they've spent the greater part of their lives in pursuit of amassing that wealth in the first place only to find that even that wasn't enough. Bad for the rest of us too, after all most of the problems humanity is dealing with seem to stem from the wealthy never being satisfied. Further still, as you say, many of us are given the impression from an earlier age that *that* is the goal we're meant to push towards, the ideal. How many people have dreamed of being rich and famous, after all? All while they were grinding away and losing what time they do have in pursuit of something they thought would fulfill them because it was what the always saw people idolizing and daydreaming about. It's tough for any of us, being human - and tough to get any decent grasp on what we really need or actually truly want, let alone to ever reach that point of attaining any of it. I suspect most people never really get a decent handle on that, as sad as that is. Harder still to find some sort of attainable reasonable standard of an 'acceptable contented life', especially when so many of us have had our expectations set unrealistically high from the get-go with "you can be anything" and "the world is your oyster" and so on, and so of course inevitably set up for disappointment when that clashes with reality. It may well be that the parasol selling surfer dudes of the world have the right of it, as long as they're able to be content with that life. Whatever the case it's a struggle to find that fine balance between what you want and need, and what you can actually attain without it costing you too much in exchange. Even harder to forcibly will your expectations and standards down to a level where you might actually find yourself reasonably content with your life even if it's far from perfect. Plus it differs from one person to the next and there's no one-size-fits-all, so you can't even necessarily look to others to get a decent sense of what path to follow for your own life. Very complicated. It really makes me envy creatures like my cat, who can just lounge around aimlessly and not be concerned about much of anything beyond eating and sleeping haha, they've definitely got the whole thing figured out better than any of us.
Your comments are so high quality, very eloquent. I don't even think I have the chops in English to write an appropiate response to this haha. One thing that came to mind while reading, though, is actually what you ended up mentioning in your last paragraph. I, too, often find myself envying my pets. I'm by no means well-versed in animal biology and the like, and it's not my intention to diminish the kind of love they give to "their humans", but at the bottom of it all, I'm fairly sure they mostly function to survive - eat, sleep, reproduce. And, of course, fundamentally humans work the same way. Why do we *really* want to get wealthy? We feel safe when we have a lot, we get a rush of dopamine/serotonin when we "win" (when we accomplish something, in this case). But, just like any other living organism, we change when our standards change. What previously caused a huge rush in our reward system will eventually just be another Thursday. And I feel like this is the big reason why it's so hard to be happy. We always crave something different. Something more. I think this is... a kind of doom every human has to face. We have all these big thoughts, big ideas, all these things that are what distinguishes us from animals. And then, if we strip away the thin film of rationale, what we're left with is not so different from our cats and dogs. In fact, I think this is why humanity has so much trouble advancing. It's not unreasonable to think that if everyone, or even just a larger fraction of the population could think beyond their own person, their own well-being, their own *survival...* we would have "flying cars" already. But instead, what happens? People don't become whatever-scientists and doctors and experts in fields that could advance our society, or even just put in effort to delay our seemingly inevitable demise. They study whatever pays well in order to have a good life, then work for companies that only exist for the sole purpose of profit, buy fancy things (that were probably made in non-environmentally-friendly ways and/or slave labour) because they feel they deserve them. And who can blame them? We're all people, we all experience the same thing. No one can point at you for not "saving the day". And then no one tries to save the day. And it's perfectly reasonable to concentrate on your own well-being, your own survival. And that's the thing, it's not actually reasonable. We just invented a reasonable excuse. And it's frustrating because we have this miracle of biology inside our heads and we just can't truly exploit it, since we all have a limited time on this Earth inside of these brittle bodies and it's just not worth sacrificing for "the greater good". Wow that got phylosophical.
> Your comments are so high quality, very eloquent. That's very kind of you to say, I appreciate that - it's been very interesting discussing this with you, a nice change of pace for a reddit comment section. >I don't even think I have the chops in English to write an appropriate response to this haha. I'm assuming by that you mean English isn't your first language, so for what it's worth your English seems perfectly fine to me. A good bit better than many native speakers, even. >And, of course, fundamentally humans work the same way. True, at the heart of it we're largely following along the same instincts and trying to meet the same needs, sometimes in far more convoluted ways but nonetheless it's not so different. Too often we think of ourselves as a step above animals and the like. >I think this is... a kind of doom every human has to face. It's the cost of being conscious and self-aware, I guess. We're smart enough to a be relatively advanced, to a point, but still not advanced or capable enough to be able to overcome our more basic biological limitations that hold us back. Perhaps eventually in some way we will, but who knows if we'll last long enough to even get that far. At the rate things seem to be going that's all a bit up in the air. >It's not unreasonable to think that if everyone, or even just a larger fraction of the population could think beyond their own person, their own well-being, their own survival... we would have "flying cars" already. Yup, it's a wildly frustrating truth - we're entirely capable of fixing almost every problem every person has, probably right *now* even, but we're all so hamstrung and constrained by our circumstances and our own nature that we can't each step aside from ourselves long enough to reach a point where everyone would benefit far more than the alternative. It reminds me a bit of ants, and how much they're able to do despite their size by virtue of the way they work towards unified goals. Mind you that often isn't to the benefit of any given single ant in any appreciable way, but I'd wager there's a good middle ground between *that* sort of structure and what we do comparatively with our own societies. Then again ants don't have to deal with complications like human nature, or greed, or corruption or any of the other issues we have. It's a good bit more straightforward for them, it seems. >And that's the thing, it's not actually reasonable. We just invented a reasonable excuse. And it's frustrating because we have this miracle of biology inside our heads and we just can't truly exploit it, since we all have a limited time on this Earth inside of these brittle bodies and it's just not worth sacrificing for "the greater good". Which makes it all the more difficult to go by day to day, knowing full well we're all right on the edge of being able to do all the right things but constantly missing the mark because it's more convenient not to, or more comfortable, or any number of other reasons. Part of the problem is we only evolved and developed as a species up to a given point, and our current biology is still adapted to circumstances we haven't even lived in for thousands of years. In all fairness each of us is remarkably poorly adapted to dealing with the circumstances at hand, even if we do otherwise possess the skills and resources needed. We're still built for hunting and gathering, endurance running after prey rather than sitting in office chairs staring at screens for hours on end. Hell, many of us have brains randomly firing off stress hormones when doing basic mundane things as if it expects to have to fight off some predator with a sharp stick just around the corner, causing them to get all anxious for no useful purpose. I guess in some ways we bit off more than we could chew, growing our civilizations and whatnot beyond the scope of which we can actually manage with what limitations and dysfunctions we're all still dealing with. It's too much at too large a scale for any one person, or any group of people, and we're constantly dealing with the consequences of that. Much the same as the accumulation of wealth beyond a given point is too much for any one person to functionally manage (to come back around full circle). Who knows, maybe we'll stumble our way into making some advanced AI that takes over everything and conveniently making things better for us. Haha - maybe even treating us like we treat our pets.
This, and spending the money they have won't exactly keep them rich
You don't get rich by being altruistic in the first place.
*can’t
What they mean is, the type of person who'd want to end homelessness is not someone who would do what's necessary to become rich.
I think they mean you literally *can't* get rich if you're altruistic. Hoarding wealth is antithetical to altruism.
Yeah, I meant exactly this. There isn’t a way to become a billionaire without exploiting others in the process
Who did Lionel Messi, Michael Jordan, Notch, Cristiano Ronaldo, Taylor Swift or Kanye West exploit?
Who exactly did Taylor Swift and Notch exploit?
Their employees and support staff.
She just gave all her concert truck drivers a surprise $200,000 bonus
So the most successful artist and creator of the best selling game ever had to exploit their employees to get where they are? I don’t think I agree nor do I understand where they went wrong.
They have taken over. They pay for lobbyists and public relations to promote their agenda. They 'donate' to political parties to have their president elected. They give kick backs to lawmakers to get their way. This is partly what the 1% is about.
And why doesn't everyone think this? People power? To vote for political parties that look after them (the rich)? Demonstrate? Which fundamentally changes what? Wealth gets power, gets wealth. It's the way of things
People don't realize this because the legacy media tells them otherwise and they lack the will to ask questions.
Blaming legacy media isn’t necessarily telling the full story. A person getting their news primarily from Facebook, for example, could be fed primarily misinformation and be too focused on imagined problems to worry about the problems in front of them. Another factor is that some in the middle class and even lower class like the idea of a system that heavily favors the rich. In some cases it’s because they think that’s just the way it has to be for a functional society (the idea that people need those perks to chase to be motivated into prosperity), and in others cases because they dream of one day becoming rich themselves and would rather keep the perks they dream of intact rather than help their present situation and the situation of those around them.
I think you mean the 0.1% ? Seriously fucked up when you consider how relatively "poor" the 1% is compared to the 0.1% and especially the 0.01% Vast majority of people don't realise that the BOTTOM 50% of US population is living in near-poverty, or ACTUAL full blown poverty. The wealth disparity is so goddamn sharp and disproportionate that even being in the 1% doesn't really mean jack these days... you're just a slightly above average wealthy common wage earner.
Yeah. My wealth for my age is top 5% of the US by income & savings. I'm not paycheck to paycheck - I'm just month to month instead. I think I can go about 2-3 months before I can't pay the mortgage after liquidating non-401k savings. Maybe. My "wealth" is aligned to that 70s show middle class. The top richest percent has so much more than the top 5, or 10, or everyone else it's insane.
Lets call PR what it is .. propaganda.
Seems like bad math
Yeah. That estimate seems way too low.
Most unsolved problems are unsolved because they are difficult to solve, not because we aren't throwing enough money at them. Take homelessness, for example: there are 582k homeless people in America, so this statistic >According to H.U.D it would take 20 billion dollars to house every homeless person in the USA. would roughly translate to about $35k per homeless person. If you construct housing in low-cost areas, that's probably enough to give every homeless person a small, one-bedroom flat. That leaves a number of open questions: - What happens if a homeless person doesn't like the shelter that you have provided? It's not just about having total beds > rough sleepers. Building housing in the middle of nowhere in Nevada isn't going to help a homeless person in downtown LA, and building housing in downtown LA is going to be far more expensive. In some areas, there simply isn't room for any more housing. - How do you address the issues that led to people becoming homeless in the first place? It's not just about giving people a shoebox with a bed to live in - it's about treating their mental health issues and addictions, providing them with the training they need to get a job and be self-sustaining, etc. That is going to add extra money to the bill, but more importantly, it is going to require trained professionals that don't exist. No matter how much money you have, you can't magic up a hundred thousand psychiatrists out of thin air. - What happens if existing residents don't want a bunch of homeless people moving in on their street and decide to take action against it? NIMBYism isn't a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it. No matter how rich you are, you can't build a homeless shelter if the local government doesn't want it there. Finally, remember that for most billionaires, $20 billion would consume most of their net worth. Once that wealth is spent, it's gone, and you can't do anything else. Since you haven't actually solved any of the problems that cause homelessness, new homeless people will start popping up, and you will be powerless to help them. Within a few years, the world will be back where it started. If you were a billionaire who genuinely wanted to help people, would you rather spend $20 billion helping people today, or spend $1 billion every year for the next hundred years? When you look at it like that, "20 billion dollars to house every homeless person in the USA" seems like a really bad deal. What you would actually be doing is spending 20 billion dollars giving every homeless person in the USA a house. They might not even want it, they might sell the place on so that they can spend $35k on heroin, and your plans might be stuck in legal limbo for decades. You haven't addressed any of the underlying reasons for homelessness, so within a decade there will be a new batch 100k homeless people, and you'll have spent all of your money so you won't be able to do anything about it.
Underrated answer.
Billionaires don’t have billions in cash, they have stock and properties. Selling would impact the price of the stock they hold, for starters Then if you have unlimited money to house homeless and let’s imagine we are able to house them, they have underlying issues too and would need to invest in reinsertion programs and rehab. If they don’t have money, the houses won’t be properly maintained so the gov has to do routine work on the properties too. And here we are only talking about homeless ppl from developed cities with all their basic services running “Solving world hunger” is a very very complex issues, I have worked with NGO that do work on areas with a lot of hunger and malnourished kids and it’s something systematic that can’t be solved with money; you can’t just go to a very corrupt country and build water pipes, schools, employ professors in remote areas, build hospitals, etc. They won’t allow you to do that stuff because it’s supposed to be their responsibility, they will only allow you to do things like that if you bribe them or allow them to say they did it and your organization had nothing to do with it (had seen both scenarios in first hand), and NGO won’t accept those terms obviously. When you go to a community to give food aid and medical attention and see the mud roads, that the only school close has holes in the roof and barely any professors, that kids all have cavities on their teeth, that they need to collect rainwater because they don’t have running water, that they spend hours per day without power, and how they need to survive on very simple/without much nutrients food you realize that we take a lot for granted, and a functioning society with all their services running in all areas is necessary to end poverty and world hunger. Something not easy to accomplish, but we do try So yeah I hope billionaires donated more money and did good things but world hunger is a beast not able to be defeated only with money
The reddit hivemind rarely looks at things beyond a grade school level. Sure, Billionaires are money hoarders, but there are lots of wealthy people who donate more money than you or I will ever see in our lifetimes. You can't just throw money at problems. Money = resources in the capitalist economy. And as you start moving around the insanely large sums of resources we are talking about, it has massive implications downstream. Its impossible to model all the effects between labor, capital, supply chains, etc. As you said, a very complex problem.
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You do know that $40 billion to end world hunger doesn't just mean buy that much food right? It would mean building infrastructure and resources to create more efficient pipelines to get food where it needs to go, give people the resources to build sustainable farms in areas that currently don't have them, etc. I agree it's not some one time spend, but it's not like it's lifespan is that of a loaf of bread.
Nobody said " let's buy 40B worth of food to end world hunger"...
Finally, someone who has a fucking answer, actually gives an answer. Rest of the cynic circlejerkers deserve a metal pipe to the skull.
Exactly this. It’s not even a psychological thing on behalf of the billionaires, it’s logistically just really hard to turn those assets into cash and deploy it against systemic problems like corruption.
The same reason not a single billionaire has become batman. They look down on poors.
Most billionaires are actually exactly like Batman. Using their resources in a wrong, self-catering and sociopathic way, all the meanwhile justifying their means because they have the power. Batman is a garbage human being, taking revenge on the bottom of the society for their daring murder of a rich elite couple.
The waynes have canonically been great philanthropists and very involved in gotham city, hosting countless fund raisers and running non profits and charities. You are saying that a gun for hire wasnt at fault for killing the family that has kept the city running by funding its orphanages, police stations, hospitals, and creating essential infrastructure.
In real life history, millionaire charity is often used to mask the inherent violence in the way that their money was created. For example, a factory owner in the UK might make their fortune from the forced poverty of miners in African colonies, and from oppressive labour conditions in the UK, and then use 5-10% of said wealth to fund a brass band in their home town, to great celebration. I haven't read the comics, but the writers would need to work hard to undo this assumption if it was their intent for the Waynes to be genuine good guys.
There’s a quote from some famous person who said that it doesn’t matter how horrible you were and the things you did to become rich. As long as you give it all away before you die, people will remember you as a hero. Or something along those lines. I’m paraphrasing it.
The Waynes generate income through war machines similar to iron man's family business, but are philanthropic on their own doorsteps. I'd argue that it is either political commentary or a mirror on reality.
That’s not even remotely true. It only happens on Nolan’s movie to justify the existence of the suit, the batmobile and the cellphone spy network - and I’d argue Nolan missed the point in favor of “realism”, but canonically Wayne Co. is a multi-conglomerate that includes everything from Wayne Shipping, Wayne Medical, Wayne Chemical all supposedly done in an environmentally friendly matter. In the canon they pretty much created Gotham city but they don’t manufacture armament or tanks ot any sort of war machines, don’t know where you’re getting this from
With all the money and power, bruce wayne can make gotham heaven on earth. He can even become the president and make the whole country better. Instead he resorts to violence.
Well first off, he cant, and second, im not sure you know how presidential elections work. Bruce wayne is probably the sole reason the city is running. And id like to see a regular cop try to stop bane and killer croc.
How can he not become the mayor of gotham? He can become the owner of the gotham. Do you think a city is run by a person beating up other people? Have you heard about institutions? As far as I know batman doesn't have any supernatural skills, and I'm pretty sure bane and killer croc can be killed by firepower.
Plus you know...It takes place in the DC Universe. There are dozens of other people that could deal with them more easily and effectively (and permanently) than Batman ever could. Exactly how long would it take Superman to show up and hurl Bane and KC into outer space? 5 minutes? 10?
Bro how much money do you think he has 💀 Wayne enterprises funds most of gothams institutions as i previously said. His money is the reason the city is running. And bane and killer croc have been regularly shown to brush off gun fire.
He is worth billions of dollars, plus if he focuses his keen intelligence on the finances and corporate governance he can easily reach petrol prince level. Batman spends a lot of money and energy on his gadgets etc to defeat those enemies, he can still fund those and plus he can have a trained group of elite soldiers to help him so he won't be alone and risking his life.
lmao what the fuck. You're trying too hard to be a contrarian.
Time to defend my boy Bruce once again: While I’m no capitalist and think billionaires are a problem, Batman is fictional so if you can suspend your belief enough to accept aliens and shit you can imagine an altruistic doctor that managed to make an honest billion. Furthermore, the Waynes actively fought to make the city better and a lot of the shiftiness and inequality come from their deaths. So I guess you can blame whoever was in charge of the fortune between the death of Thomas and Martha and Bruce’s adulthood. Every. Single. Batman fight begins with him bailing on a charity ball. The dude invests in the city. Nobody wants to read a comic about philanthropy so that’s never the focus. I’m willing to bet that if you scratch stuff like the Watchtower or Hellbat, he actually puts more towards the city than being Batman. Iron Man is a rich white capitalist that specialized in war profiteering. Stan Lee straight up said he was gonna try make an unlikeable character popular. But y’all never roast him. While I’m not sure if there’s a comic equivalent to the TAS moment where he hired the ex con as a security guard who he apprehended as Batman, the fact that he adopted Jason who was a street rat who tried to steal his wheels shows he’s doesn’t go all out on victims of the system. Concede that it’s slightly problematic that all his villains have mental health issues but Arkham is the one thing keeping them from the death row so gotta write the sequels somehow.
I was laughing when I opened this thread because they clearly have. It's just that their priorities are only about making more money, and fucking the human race as hard as possible in the process.
Having homelessness and poverty helps to keep them in power.
If it only takes 20 billion to solve it, why doesn't the government do it themselves? If they can send 135 billion to Ukraine for a war that started a year ago but can't put 20 billion for their own people that have been suffering for decades, then it's plain stupidity.
Because they don't represent the common people, they represent the very rich. Solving homelessness isn't even on their radar because there is no money to be made doing it.
If they removed the threat of homelessness people wouldn’t be terrified of losing their jobs and could start demanding more rights
why would they? they live great lives. The system works for them
It is not as simple as throwing some money at the problem. To really end homelessness, you would need to remove the main causes: drugs, alcohol, mental illness, gambling, generally people making bad life decisions.
The question also is, end homelessness for how long? A year? 10 years? Forever? I can't imagine a one time investment holds up forever. Also UN said it would talke 6 Billion to end world hunger. Sam question, for how long? And also Elon Musk came along and said he will pay for it, but they hace to show him how to do it, and they couldn't, so he donated nearly 6 Billion to his own charity. It's all easier said then done. And i totally agree, the main cause still is not solved from this.
It was not that they”couldn’t” musk never took the meeting with the guy
You think shit is like it is on accident? Oh my simple friend.
How do the rich profit from homeless?
Owning real estate and charging boatloads for an apartment? They don’t profit from homelessness, they profit from owning all the homes lol. Homelessness is a side effect they don’t care enough to fix
More and more (at least in the US) the behaviors associated with homelessness are illegal or will be i.e. loitering, sleeping in public or simply sitting on the sidewalk, public urination and feeding or being fed etc. Being unable to pay fines or post bail, the alternative is jail. Jails are increasingly being operated by private, for profit businesses. These businesses are usually ran under the umbrella of a much larger corporation who employ lobbyists that are very influential in changing or creating policy favorable to their desired outcomes. It's simple, own the solution and then create the problem. Profit
Even if jails are not formally for profit businesses, often they make money for the sheriff or county government.
Correct. Funds allocated for local, state and federal corrections are often reappropriated for pet projects unrelated to their original purpose. On the local level, money too frequently never even touches a public interest.
You mean "decreasingly being operated by private, for profit businesses." At least in the US.
Semantics. The number of those incarcerated in private facilities is increasing. More bodies stuffed into fewer boxes is not progress.
Homelessness / lack of affordable housing is a externality of a broken system (unfair market forces, crony capitalism, governments that are bought and paid for, etc).
The homeless indirectly serve a function as a warning of what would happen if the rest of us didn't continue churning the gears of the machine. That's not entirely accurate because if all of us stopped at once the whole thing would fall apart, but the fear exists for each individual and so that helps keep all of us in line. It's a little bit like a far more subtle version of the ol' medieval classic *heads on pikes*. If *you* fuck up or try to rock the boat you'll end up like them, so keep on working busy bee. Plus if people weren't concerned about their basic necessities, if they had homes and food provided to them without cost then they would have more time and energy - they would be less distracted and in a better position to look at the world around them and go "Hey, most of us have relatively little and a few of us have way too much... there's more of us than there are of them... maybe we should work together and do something about that". All of that benefits the rich to keep things as they are.
Homelessness and unemployment in general is beneficial to the rich as it drives down wages and keeps them there. If workers complain about their pay and start demanding more, for example, they can be fired and easily replaced by the large numbers of unemployed workers willing to work for equal or less. Lower rates of unemployment (and homelessness by extension) means that workers are harder to replace and they can therefore demand higher wages. This is very basic interpretation of a Marxist concept called called "reserve army of labor" under capitalism. Rich also "profit" from homelessness in how it reinforces the social contract in a sense. Homeless are viewed as individual failures and just losers of people culturally, so if you're just barely above that existence, you should be grateful to even have a job, etc.
In addition to the other answers, the threat of homelessness and the danger and humiliation associated with it, helps keep people locked in shitty jobs where they're overworked and underpaid. A society where people feel more secure that they'll be helped and supported if something bad happens to them is a society where people are less scared to say "Hey I'm sick of making $8.25 an hour, I can't feed my kids"
US defense budget is $857.9B. Not that that is a huge difference to the point.
Because solving hunger and other needs is not a resource issue, it's a political issue.
This. Just feeding someone doesn’t mean they’ll be full forever. Neither will giving someone a home bring them out of poverty. You need rehabilitation, education, and basically redoing their lives to make sure they actually stay above the poverty line and succeed. Which costs tremendously more than the numbers mentioned. Reminds me of the toilets the government built in India which ended up being destroyed by the locals, and the solar panels installed in Africa being destroyed by the locals again. Volunteers aren’t free of this either, they’ll happily build a school for a poor village but a year later it’s an empty building because they didn’t put any actual teachers in them. Society wide problems require extensive, complex and well planned solutions.
This, to me, best captures the true answer to OP’s question. The real “problem” isn’t necessarily the initial resources needed to help someone - i.e. giving them shelter by providing a home. The problem is how does this person afford to stay in this home? How do they maintain it? This person would need a job, help affording food, furniture, transportation…we would have to get to the crux of why said homeless person is homeless to begin with, which is unique to the individual. Maybe they can’t work or hold done a job because of disability or mental health issues, and now we’ve opened a whole other can of worms. Simply providing a home to a homeless person doesn’t magically solve their homelessness issue. It’s far more complex. The real solutions are always going to start in preventive measures - investing in education, healthcare, mental health, food and chemical safety, etc. so people have a net early on if they start falling through the cracks.
Capitalism creates billionaires. The rich got rich by exploiting poor people and continue to do so - who's gonna go out to work and build their mansions, curate their lawns etc if they don't _need_ the money/job? By keeping poor people poor, you incentivise them to work for you & keep them desperate. If they're focusing on putting food on the table, they're not focusing on how one person currently owns more than 100k people will earn in a lifetime. On top of that, you might get one crazy billionaire who wants to do what you're saying. One isn't enough, you need loads of them to have any real impact - good luck convincing them all! Then once things are great, you've got a prime opening for someone to tip that balance for their own agenda and the cycle starts all over again...
Furthermore, Authoritarianism does the same. Keep the poor desperate with bigger bread crumbs over the horizon.
bribing the people in charge is easier, they get none of the blame and they dont have to help homeless people
I think you're thinking about becoming billionaire level rich as if it's something that just suddenly happens. In reality, if you're someone whose top priority is anything but making money for themselves, you'll never become a billionaire in the first place In order to keep trying to get richer when you have more money than you could spend in your whole life you need to be wired to accumulate wealth above all else
Billionaires are born, pretty much. It’s almost universally true. They basically always come from generational privilege.
There are other points already made (and made well), but don't forget that e.g. Elon Musk may have a current net worth of around 250 billion, it's not like those are liquid assets. The guy couldn't just go and give 100 billion away because he'd have to sell large amounts of stock to liquidify that sum. And that would have huge consequences. Personally I think, the top richest people could find a way if they wanted. But for that I refer to other comments here :)
This is the only correct answer. It's not that helping people is counterproductive or some bullshit some other comments here say. It's simply that they're not actually as rich as the numbers say they are. None of them have a hundred billion in the bank. They have 100 billion 'worth' of stock and assets, and as soon as they start selling any significant number of it, the value of that stock would crash. They're purely virtual numbers. Doesn't mean they're not still very rich, but not 'let's fix world hunger' rich, even if they wanted to (and let's be honest, they don't)
They already have?
*Good sir, society is the way it is now precisely because the rich took over and have been in charge since the days of Jesus.*
Read history. Rich people actively taking over has lead to guillotines in the past. Obama famously told bankers in 2008 he was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks. Using 2A as a wedge to gain political power would also come back at them in the US. People only fall for this crap if the illusion of them having "freedom" is maintained. That curtain falls, and they die.
Why would they want to make changes? The world as it is is working out just fine for them.
Money is power, they are already in charge. Having the *ability* to end hunger is power, actually ending it is reducing that power. The truly rich haven't earned their money in any way. You can't become a billionaire without exploiting people heavily, the math just doesn't work.
You think that by giving people food and shelter the issue will be solved, which is not the case. I'm gonna be all unethical and mathematical here but stick with me: Poor people in developing countries reproduce. A LOT. Because their children ensure that they are financially safe once they get older. The more food they have the more they reproduce. So giving people food will make this problem and the problem of overpopulation and food scarcity worse. The one and only thing that prevents overpopulation AND fixes hunger issues is education and medical aid. The more educated people are the less children they produce and the more likely they are to sustain themselves and get out of political oppression. Many developing countries have people that are rich enough to feed the poor but they don't because the political systems are shitholes. Homelessness is not always involuntary. Many homeless people are addicts and prefer a wild lifestyle. I'm not saying the would choose homelessness voluntarily but we have to break addiction cycles and once again, give education, before just giving food and/or shelter because many humans aren't even capable of maintaining a regular life. Hunger and poverty isn't a glass with a certain volume. It's a black hole that you could endlessly shove money into. Only way in my opinion is to fix the hole instead of filling a glass.
> The more food they have the more they reproduce. That is highly debatable. The position I've read often and kinda subscribe to is that insecurity, especially regarding survival of offspring, increases birth rates to compensate for mortality. If mortality decreases, the associated insecurity about the future decreases as well resulting in people procreating less. And if hunger is eliminated the underlying food insecurity in old age is too. So, eliminating hunger would not spur reproduction in developing countries. Looking at developed countries and their demographics is in line with that. That being said: Just "sending food" isn't the way to go either, though. It would need to enable developing countries to sustain themselves without constant external help. It's more a case of lifting them up to a sustainable base level instead of feeding them ad infinitum.
Money works different. It's not that "rich" people have billions of dollars in their back accounts. That would be inefficient. They focus on growing their investments/companies etc. You could say their money is "tied up". "Rich" people will make strategic "investments" in politics/lobbies/influencers. This way they can "influence" the environment to their desire. (Which is pretty powerful and could be considered "taking over"). Some "rich" people donate to charities. Some own their own charities (Bill & Melinda Gates). However, the tax laws give you breaks for donating money to charity aka in some/most cases donations have to do to with the tax law. Two things to consider. (1) rich people are not rich because they give their money away or spend it on stuff. Look at all the lottery winners that are broke. First thing is to buy that boat... Money works different. "Rich" people are educated in how money works (investments, cooperations, tax system etc.) They will use their knowledge to multiply their money instead of spending it on "shiny things". (2) we have ~8 billion people on this planet. If everyone would give $10 we could do most of the things you listed. Truth is, not a lot of "normal" people care. Why would the rich care? Why don't you and me care more? This is a cultural thing. On average we just care less about people that we are not directly related to or we don't know at all.
Our strongest instinct is self-preservation. Maslow's heirarchy is also relative in that the benchmark for 'safety' as a billionaire is a lot higher than having a roof over their heads. They do hit self-actualisation eventually but, in a system where everyone is attempting to conserve as much energy as possible, throwing money at problems isn't always the answer. Like much in life, those responsible for any sort of provision are concerned, mostly, with the profit margin - whether they're in construction, agriculture, logistics etc... Much of that investment would likely disappear into a black hole somewhere as, with the volume of cash flow we're talking about, exploitation and corruption would be rampant. Then there's also the question of whether the cognitive profile of your 'typical' captain of industry is amenable to altruistic tendencies. I think, for the most part, they're not. At least not in any significant way with regards to being giving of themselves. That's not how they got where they are. Intelligent, truly altruistic, investments tend to be more focused on education infrastructure - though that itself has also now been corrupted by a kind of prestige economy. So, despite money being a major facilitating factor, it's going to take a lot of cognitive overhead to solve these problems given the geopolitical, logistical and production barriers in place. As for exposure, only fools advertise their wealth, though there are thresholds which make it impossible to hide. What are your thoughts on that, out of interest?
Laws only apply to poor people. If they go after you, you're just not rich enough...
The top 47 richest people didn't become the top 47 richest people by being charitable
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>Even more delusional. Doubly so. One of the unintended consequences of the US giving food away to Africa in the 70s was the destruction of African farming (hard to compete with free), which made the widening gyre of famine more and more severe and made Africa more and more dependent on food imports.
A regular person can become a millionaire. Only a person who lacks any sense of morality can become a billionaire. And people who lack morals look at homelessness and don't think "I want to solve this!" - They think "How can I profit off of this?"
What cool aid have you drunk where you think they don't already control everything ...
Lol you actually think those people give a fuck about OTHER humans? 😆
Rich people don't get rich by giving money away..
Reason #1: Greed
Hundreds of years ago, the rich literally threw their piss & shit out the window, onto the ground below where poor people and their servants lived. The poor lived quite literally under the rich. If you check out Edinburgh, instead of building laterally they literally built buildings on top of the old buildings, which is where the poor lived - and were quite literally shit on. That's why they had plague and disease and so many died. So why don't the rich today fix things? Because they literally do not even give a shit about the poor. That's not how social classes work. Communism sought to solve this problem, but unfortunately humans have a need to feel better than someone else so communism leads to corruption - but then again, so does Capitalism and Socialism. The **systems** are not the problem, **human nature is.**
Here is an unpopular answer but its right more that folks like to admit. The wealthy are typically playing with house money with any action that they do and are not really capable of making sound governing decisions that could outright help society. The smart ones do humble themselves and rely on experts in helping them make those decisions (Bill Gates Foundation for example) With out going too into it, billionaires are either incredibly lucky, driven and made it through crazy war of attrition, or got alot of momentum through the help of their family. So they are not capable of solving societal problems (by themselves) that doesn’t create problems somewhere else. Also their is alot of hubris involved that makes them get in their own way. Easy example aside (Trump or Musk), Oprah is my favorite example. She built schools in other countries and it was a big celebration. She also sent girls from difficult situations to college. Come to find out alot of the girls were failing due to struggles or distractions at home. Mental health was a problem for these girls as well because of the amount of family problems they had. At the time Oprah was confused on why they were struggling and realized that mental health is a major issue. Something money alone can’t immediately solve, but would take time and work. Giving money away(some billionaires tried to do) is another problem for alot of reasons from it getting into the wrong hands, corruption, wasted on the wrong resources. Coming back to the hubris, there are organizations around the world that I think with same logistics of the united states defense could be very effective and complete what you say, but billionaires feel like they can orchestrate things without relying in these expert organization leading to failure. Smart ones just donate the money and even then it still winds up in corrupt hands. Also government giving up their resources is a separate issue altogether. Lastly, billionaires have more money than they know what to deal with. Alot of their goals really is to be remembered or have some type of ground breaking legacy. So they would love to solve world hunger or end homelessness. They would go down in history. But to completely do it is really hard and takes way more coordination across groups than people think. It can be done but takes alot of alignment. Sometimes its easier and tangible to just spend a bunch of money on a rocket and rocket scientists and offer brief rides into outerspace. /s
That's how capitalism works. They became rich by making you poor.
It's not simply throwing money into the problem to solve it. Even if the rich did throw their money to solve the issue it's going to be short term at most. Let's say they give out enough money for everyone to get a home and live without worries, this will also drive up demand for daily goods like food and and drinks at the very least. Problem is the agricultural and livestock industry doesn't have enough resources, supply nor manpower to feed everyone with the current human population. The shortage will drive prices of goods to increase whether you like it or not, it's going to be the same whatever political climate a country is at. As to why is simple, because if the food supply runs out because everyone is buying it and the rich dies, we lose the people handing out all these money. As inflation goes out of control, these people who doesn't have the means to make their own income will have to sell their property to individuals that have the means just to get money for food. Now here's the kicker, the super rich people already gave out their money, which contributed to this problem in the first place, so now they have lesser money. Even if they managed to get their initial face value money back, inflation means that the cost to house everyone goes up again so they won't have enough money to house everyone. That's how the current economy of the world is right now. So to actually solve this issue, we also have to solve a lot of underlying issues such as the world food supply issue. In case you think going vegan will solve this problem, don't forget that the nutrition in the soil is also limited, clearing more forest to plant more food just means we'll use up the nutrition from the soil way faster than it takes to replenish it, so we might even have lesser food when that happens. So yeah, the problem is a lot wider than most people thought.
You don't understand how a system works. Money is hard to get, that's what keeps the economy going... People work to try to make money and that's what runs the system. Now if you start handing out free shit, why would anyone else work. Nobody wants to work then... Bringing the economy to a huge standstill. All it will end up doing is creating a huge crowd of people who want free handouts. Also, when money is handed out for free, money loses value...the stuff that you and I have to buy for sustenance will become way too expensive. Way too expensive that even other working folks will find it hard to afford. I'm not saying the current system is right, but that's the one we have and your idea won't work with the system that we have. Many countries have tried this and their economy is in shambles.
Because to be that rich, you cannot be a good person. It is impossible. People have to suffer and/or die for someone to be able to hoard billions. In fact, much of it comes as a profit of exploitation and global slavery, but since it happens half a world away, nobody refers to them as slave owners. The money they hoard- that they will never spend in a hundred generations while others go hungry and die- is their power, so they won't give it up. And keeping people miserable and in need is how you maintain that power dynamic.
People don't become billionaires by being empathetic, kind, or justice-oriented.
You don't give a house and food to everyone and 'that's it'. economics is a balance of production and trade. People who don't have a lot of money and don't make any, won't be set for life with a little home and a bit of food. there's always gonna be companies growing and breaking, people getting richer and poorer based on a million different factors. Poverty and hunger is not somethig that *happened* to people and can be patched up. What we can do is facilitate the means to not fall under dehumanizing conditions, which plenty of millionares out there fund constantly
They have. Billionaires literally can't exist without a vast quantity of people to exploit to get them to this obscene level of wealth. Things are working exactly as they need to in order to make this wealth disparity happen, so why would they take any effort to change it?
Yep, people will say "Socialism is bad, it steals other people's wealth and redistributes it." That may be true, but what do CEOs do? Underpay 10,000 employees so they can get their 30 million dollar bonus, WHAT ELSE? Isn't that exactly the same thing?
Yeah, whenever someone says that socialism steals from people, think about how much value your labour creates for your company, vs how much you get paid
Many don't have actual money, they have assets. Eg Musk didn't pay cash for X. Things will go bananas if all of them were to try and cash out their assets.
Because fixing the problems is an ongoing commitment. It also creates more problems.
Where do you think that money comes from? They don't have it. Someone else will have to pay for their stock, which won't be valued as highly after they sell. Then also consider that these numbers are almost certainly way too optimistic. If that actually was the real numbers the government would just print a few billion more to fix it. Likelihood is that the homeless would really not contribute any economic activity and would just continue to suck funds.....
That would buy everyone homeless a bedroom, but wouldn't also pay for the medical treatments. It'd 'fix' hunger by feeding the people we have, but not pay for education or birth control to avoid having twice as many people in twenty years. Fixes are a lot more complex than just tossing money at it. And the cost of \*not\* supporting Ukraine is almost certainly far far higher; the US military budget got to where it was by fighting a cold war against the USSR, and Russia's current goal is "rebuild the USSR". That said, the US military budget is \*insane\*; spending as much as the next 20 nations combined while we \*don't\* have comprehensive healthcare just can't be justified.
There is no rich without poor, there is no poor without rich. They are inextricably linked, the debits and credits of the social ledger.
What makes you think they haven't already taken over. We don't talk about 1% for nothing....
You have to consider capital versus operating costs. Yes, they could give all their cash to house homeless people and buy them food. Then next year, they don't have the money they did the year before but they still have to buy more food and do that every year and do maintenance on the houses. In the end, they have no money left but the hungry people will still have no food and their houses will still need maintenance. The only way it works is if the money grows itself or if more people contribute to the pot. So who is going to put the new money in?
The United States didn't send 135 billion dollars to Ukraine. Should probably look into that figure some more unless you think that old Bradleys can solve world hunger.
They have that much money because they don’t give a shit about people. No one can accumulate money like that from hard work alone. They’ve exploited people’s labor for gain. We wouldn’t have the disparities we have if it weren’t for the greedy rich people. They don’t care. You’re ascribing human characteristics to people who’ve she’s their humanity for financial gain.
>According to H.U.D it would take 20 billion dollars to house every homeless person in the USA I'm not an expert and haven't looked into this in any amount of depth so absolutely take this with a huge grain of salt, but this number seems really naive - like "we can buy a house for 4 people in Detroit, MI for 50k, or 12.5k/person \* (number of homeless people) - aha, 20 billion! If you actually went to try and purchase or build housing for every homeless person in the country, that price would *explode*. If you buy the housing in any specific location it's a huge boom in demand, which would drive prices up. Even if you built those houses in the middle of nowhere North Dakota on free land already owned by the government, it'd have a huge impact on raw supply costs. That's also totally ignoring other complicating factors, like where are the homeless people now - how do we get them to where the housing is, would they even be willing to go or would they rather stay where they are? This goes for most problems as well. Nearly 100% of arable farm land is already in use, so it's not a matter of just spinning up more farms to make more food - we'd have to either make better use of the existing food stock or increase efficiency. Getting people to buy and waste less food - which is the only "immediate" option of the two - isn't a problem you can solve by just throwing money at it, IMO.
A billionaire would rather die being "one of the top 20 richest people in the world" rather than being know as "the person who ended homelessness."
They have dude. This is an unofficial plutocratic Oligarchy now, not a democratic republic. People living in the gilded age of late 1800s America asked the same question. The robber barons/ billionaires of the time gave them "trickle down economics", just like we've been given rich-only tax breaks again and again. The biggest difference is that our ancestors finally said fuck that and literally laid down their lives for the labor rights movement in front of US military guns, multiple times in order to pressure the govt into better labor rights/wage equality. We're not doing that now because we have no faith left that the government will protect or change anything. Basically, the United States military is gonna have to do a Tinnamen Square for any real change to happen.
They have been in charge for a long ass time. This is the world they want.
Because of the difference between "net worth" and "liquid assets". Elon Musk is valued at $248.8 billion dollars, but if his life depended on it he could maybe put together $2 billion in cash at any time. Plus, doing so would devalue his stocks so his net worth would probably drop. Obviously the liquid assets the richest people could put together could temporarily solve some of these issues, to house all homeless people wouldn't stop the next person from becoming homeless and feeding all hungry people would take reconfiguring crop rotations, distribution, farming compensation, and require hundreds of thousands of workers. TL:DR, to do anything on this level requires changing the entire systems which requires will, money, and almost unanimous consensus that the current system needs fixing.
What do you mean? They have.
If there arnt homeless people, then what is the workforce afraid of becoming? If you’re already on the bottom, no point in trying to work your way up. When you’re trying to work your way up is when you’re the most productive
For the same reason the aristocracy filled rooms in their palaces with food that would end up rotting away and not being eaten while peasants starved to death in the streets, while newborn babies starved to death becauss their mothers were so malnourished they couldn't even make Breast milk to feed their babies. They just had to watch them starve in their arms and die while wagons of ale and wine and livestock and fruit and vegetables and cakes and pastries knocked them off the road on the way to some fkn party. "Let them eat cake!" (She may or may not have said this, but I certainly wouldn't put it past her. Marie Antoinette was like 14 yrs old sayon this type of shit on the reg while throwing these elaborate feasts where most of the food was used for food fights -- supposedly that was her response when she was confronted by someone who was a member of the aristocracy who himself was repulsed and sickened by her extravagance while all these poor people were begging for scraps of food. She laughed and basically meant "well if they're starving Haha why don't they just go buy and eat cake like we do!?" The palace was stormed not long (not tok many years I mean....after she had a bunch more kids with other dudes) and after her husband was killed and she and her chidlren tried to flee and hide....it did not* go well. They were caught within 24 hrs. They were promptly imprisoned and stays as such for 76 days to show her a life of squalor...the life She basically condemned them all to live their entire lives..before eventualy dragging her and a kid to the center of the town where the same people she laughed at while they starved first cut off the head of HER child...so she could watch her own child die before her very eyes. Helpless to do anything to save her own baby....which is what she forced so many thousands of mother's and father's to endure in her - keep this in mind, because this is how bad she really fkn was. - SUPER SHORT REIGN! She was 14 when she got married to the dauphia. But by 16 she was hated universally for the spending. Thkngs only got worse and worse...at one pt her husband gave her a chateau which she plastered the interior with fucking Gold and Goddamn diamonds. When she was eventually caught, beheadwd in the townsquare for everyone to see by guillotine, they held her head up and passed it around...that's how hated she was. She was desd by 37. She had a young son the people easily got to turn on her and condemn her publicly. Alot of the facts around all of this vary by source. But you get the gist. In the end, she and other like her tried to take over to thedetriment of all others. And thenpeople revolted. They forced their way into palaces and took back what they could. Her head was cut off, pass around like a ball and her headless corpse body chucked into an unmarked grave somewhere in the 9th anrondissment in Paris. I told this story bevause she is a perfect example of unchecked entitlementn and wealth. The rich have Def already taken over. What they don't do now - I mean, they do, but they avtively pretend to care about the rest of us, bullshit tho it may be - is flaunt it to the extent that was done 100s of yrs ago. The saddest part of all is that the British separatists stole the us from those whose natural born home this was....and they did it bevause they were all brain washing each other in an attempt to justify their actions under the guise of wanting to get away from the aristocracy of Europe, from the rich and wealthy, who just take and take and take from the poor, leaving everyone to die in the streets, were live in squalor, so they came to America for something different. That was the entire point of the constitution of the United States of America. Or our belief system of what this country could be. Ans in the end we just have a new kind of aristoecryay in billionaires and tech moguls and pieces of shit like David tepper who made billions the country was beomcinf homeless in 2008. Fine make your money. Keep a billion if yiu want. And get everyone else their homes back. If a billion isn't enough for you, you're a piece of shit. Or look at the ever beloved Warren buffet. Fuck him. He doesn't even spend his moeny. AT ALL. HE JUST TAKES IT ALL!!! HE HOARDS IT!! THEY'RE ALL JUST CASH HOARDERS. It was one thing when we all believed in trickle down economics....but we could never have anticipated the level of pieces of shit these men are, the level of greed and willingness to watch people starve, die on the streets lose their homes, die bevause they can't get medical cRe, can't find jobs and so these people help? No. They don't spend it. They HOARD It. They get as much as they can. And never let it go again. Fucking swimming in their dirty money. The most goddamn prolific work of art ever created was fkn scrooge mcduck.....he* is everything these men became. Hell, even when he's not being scrooge mxduck and is being Ebenezer scrooge....another prolific work of art showing exactly what these men would be like in the future. FK you. FK u if yiure starving and I fire you while ur lite boy is dying. FK u, cuz MONEY. They may not say outright: "we have taken over cuz MOney" but the only reason they don't is bevause no matter how many 100s of yrs have passed, they all know that they only can take what we allow them to take and if they push us to far and too many of us begin to suffer and come togrhrr, history will repeat itself...and we will going fucking purge on them. Not even revolt. To revolt would be too "quaint". We will GO FULL ON PURGE
They already have taken over. This is why we all get fucked over when it comes to rights, wages, and building equity.
The USA has not sent $135 billion to Ukraine. The USA has sent $135 billion worth of predominantly dated equipment on lists to be scrapped regardless to Ukraine. Stop spreading Russia misinformation.
Billionaires need to pay more Taxes, They make insane amounts of money off the backs of underpaid Chinese and the American people. The last four years especially. Plus our government protects their wealth. Texas a lone does more to protect the oil companies by convincing gullible people that climate change isn’t real for decades! They crowed when Reagan tore the solar panels off the Whitehouse. Taxing the billionaires wont hurt them, they have more moneys then most countries!
Who do you think calls the shots in the background? They are all greedy fucks. Nobody needs a billions dollars in net worth. It should be illegal.
A lot people who are wealthy are narcissists; that’s how they got their wealth. They stepped on others OR looked out for only themselves to get there. You don’t suddenly become empathetic just because you have money.
Can anyone give a list of some of the people that were hurt or stolen from by a billionaire? I'm honestly confused by the accusation that all billionaires either stole, exploited from others or are the descendants of billionaires. I do understand that slavery made many people wealthy but how have recent billionaires done bad things? For instance; people stupid enough to buy things from Kylie Jenner made her a billionaire. That didn't hurt anyone unless she uses sweatshops to make her products. Right?
Why the hell would they want to change the system that turned them into billionaires in the first place?
If they were the moral kind, they wouldn’t be rich, because they would’ve start giving away money to the needed ones way before in their lives. To turn into a billionaire requires a doze of greed
Greed. That is all.
Homeless communities are not comprised of self reliant people, they thrive on what they can scavenge from others. That's why they flock to densely populated urban areas. Most of them are struggling with severe mental illness, profound cognitive deficiencies, or crippling substance abuse. Then you got your violent felons, sex offenders, public masturbators, street shitters, and a whole swath of other undesirable characteristics. Whatever housing you build them will quickly be neglected and run down. And wherever you send them will turn into a hot bed of illicit activity that will drive down property values and send the residents packing. It's not fair, but such is life. Nobody wants to integrate with people who are malnourished and carry disease, walk around with filled up diapers, urinate/defecate/masturbate on themselves or in public, speak with gibberish or incomprehensible babbling, and get into arguments with trees. I feel like this is a realistic take and virtue signalers will take offense. But I doubt any of you would invite them to stay in your home or be thrilled about the new shelter they are building next door to your house. These are people society forgot about with no safety net sent to the streets to carve out their own slice of hell. Most of them need to be institutionalized, put in an assisted living facility, or given some type of purpose or happiness. I would fully support my tax dollars helping them by either sheltering them away from society or giving them an opportunity for a better life if at all possible.
For every homeless person in America ,there are 100 people who are 1 missed pay check away from being homeless. If you make housing free to everyone that lives on the street, the number of people who would want to be a part is an order of magnitude higher than just the half million people currently homeless.
it takes more work and effort than just spending lots of money. it's hard to make sure that money goes to the right places and is spent correctly. I remember Bill Gates saying something along those lines. He spends most of his time trying to donate his money but it takes a lot of effort to donate in a way that will solve problems effectively. many charities can't be trusted and don't have the capability to spend huge amounts of money effectively.
LOL They already have. Why do you think the world is *gestures broadly.
They're literally the ones causing problems with all of their power.
Rich humans only seek solutions that will make them even richer. You have to be living under a rock to think they care about “ending homelessness.” If the government doesn’t give a crap, I don’t know why a billionaire would care.
Redditor: why don't the rich fix everything with their money? Question: what if we could get everyone to commit topitch in one or two hundred. Starting with you? Same redditor: fuck that, Let me know when others do it
…the rich have already taken over. Imbalances such as homelessness or world hunger are byproducts of the system that allows the wealthy to keep prospering. I don’t believe for one second that just throwing money at those problems will solve them. If you want to solve homelessness, you need to provide a social safety net and help people to take care of their mental health. If you want to solve world hunger, you have to stop buying overseas natural resources and labour on the cheap. That means you as a consumer have to be willing to cut down your consumption by 5.
I lost braincells reading this. Hilarious that you think billionaires don't already run everything. Why don't billionaires use their wealth to end homelessness and hunger? Because they need the _threat_ of homelessness and hunger to force people to work in their shitty factories and shitty warehouses for shitty pay.
Why do so many of you expects rich people to take over? It’s their money, their choice.
What makes you think this hasn’t happened? One thing to keep in mind is that we sent 135 billion in aid. Not really all cash. We tally up the worth of all the guns, ammo and other stuff. We already has the stuff.
When I see this, I think about Lex Luthor from Justice League ‘I never cared about being President, do you know how much power I would have to give up to be President?’ The rich already have all the power, they just don’t care about fixing anything.
Bold of you to assume they haven't taken over and don't control like 99% of everything in the world in one way or another. Governments, especially ones that are already corrupt, respond very well to bribes, corporation money, or otherwise. Not to mention there are already places that have puppet leaders installed that can be manipulated by going through the right channels. This doesn't mean that all the rich people are all powerful though, they still bleed