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There will always be people who are the smartest and/or shrewdest and/or most ambitious and/or luckiest, in a population. “Just get rid of the people who currently have the most wealth” is extraordinarily naive.
There’s kind of a difference between “whoever happens to be wealthiest at the moment” and “The 0.001% of the population that is three times wealthier than the bottom 50% of humanity combined.”
Over the long term, there really isn’t. Outside of a government imposing tyranny-tier control over everyone’s wealth, wealth inequality happens naturally, and inevitably, and the gap widens similarly.
What’s more important is making sure that even the poorest among us can have a decent standard of living. After all, if you waved a magic wand and now everyone in the US, for example, was earning $75,000 a year minimum, no one would be in poverty, right? And yet the size of the ‘wealth gap’ between the wealthiest and the $75k ‘minimum earners’ would effectively be identical; the gap between $0 and billions is basically the same as the gap between $75k and billions.
Toppling the wealthiest just because they’re the wealthiest isn’t going to solve any of the actual problems (especially when politicians get bribed for relatively-measly five figure sums, etc.).
Except that the only way you get everyone a baseline income of $75k is by taking it from the billionaires, thus reducing the gap much more substantially
you get everyone a baseline income of $75k is by taking it from the billionaires
Actually, no. That’s a hypothetical for a reason; the entire net worth of all billionaires combined (assuming a magic wand could convert the net worth figure into an equivalent amount of cash, literally impossible in reality) wouldn’t get everyone to $75k for even a single year.
Okay but have we tried this? Can we? Please?
Fallout S1 reveals what would really happen.
Tap for spoiler
Incontent with their underground paradise, they go out and obliterate all forms of civilization that aren’t them.
Do the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy version then. Load them all into a ship, tell them we’ve discovered a habitable planet and we’re sending our best and brightest to start a new civilization, and fire them into space.
Pretty sure you could at least get rid of Elon that way.
Hitchhiker’s Guide kinda did the opposite, the ark was filled with all the people doing the menial, boring and ‘unimportant’ jobs and the other 2 arks died out because they didn’t know how to get basic shit done… well actually it was an un-sanitized telephone but thats how I read the metaphor.
I’m pretty sure you’ve confused H2G2 with The Marching Martians
