The existence of billionaires is a policy failure
The existence of billionaires is a policy failure
Comments
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Arent they also using public money for this mainly?
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Yup. Public contracts, grants, and subsidies that could be funding federal agencies are being pocketed by these sex pests.
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Public contracts are not the same things as grants and subsidies. They are contracts for services to be rendered, and SpaceX quite frankly won them handily by being fundamentally better and cheaper then the competition.
And most of their funding has come from private investment, and by building and running the Falcon 9 which is by far the cheapest and most reliable way for anyone to get stuff into space at the moment.
You can hate Musk without being blind to the fact that SpaceX is legitimately doing things no one has ever done before with rocketry. The SLS is a traditional rocket that was designed by NASA and built by contractors and it literally costs orders of magnitude more to fly, has never actually flown yet, and at most could fly twice a year. Public ownership is not a magic bullet that makes everything instantly better.
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They've been allowed to game the system to hoard way more wealth than any single person should have been able to. They were supposed to pay their employees more, charge less to their customers or if all fails pay more taxes. But they didn't do any of that.
If this was a video game that would be called an "exploit that breaks the gameplay experience for everyone else" and it would have been solved in a patch. But to remain in the same analogy, they are buddies with the game developers so they're allowed to do anything they want. The only difference is that everyone in the country is forced to play this broken game as it is.
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Musk does not do a space race. Not on his money, at least.
Instead, he does it on US taxpayer money, with billion-dollar contracts to get people to Mars by 2025 and other timelines like that. The government employee who approved one of the largest contracts to SpaceX quickly quit working for the government and now works... at SpaceX.
So you tell me, is Elon in a space race, or are the US taxpayers in a race to fund the billionaire?
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Honestly, the space race part of it isn't concerning to me at all. The fact that it's between billionaire-backed companies is several policy failures, though.
NASA has traditionally relied heavily on defense/space contractors. The space shuttle was built by Rockwell International (which was eventually acquired by Boeing).
The Saturn V rocket that took people to the moon was manufactured by Boeing, Douglas (which became part of McDonnell Douglas, which was acquired by Boeing), and North American (which got acquired by Rockwell, which was acquired by Boeing).
But through consolidation in the American aerospace industry, the bloated behemoth that is modern Boeing has serious issues holding it back. And so the rise of new competition against Boeing is generally a good thing!
Except the only companies that were started up to compete with Boeing were funded largely as ego projects by billionaires who made so much money in other fields that they have excess billions to throw around.
NASA's new approach to contracting is fine, too: basically promising prizes to companies that hit milestones, which put the risk (and potential reward) on the private companies. Then, once SpaceX did demonstrate feasibility, NASA switched to fixed price contracts for a lot of the programs and did save a ton of money compared to previous cost-plus contract pricing. It's unclear whether other space companies can deliver services at prices competitive with SpaceX, but their attempts at least force SpaceX to bid lower prices.
Ideally, we would've retained a competitive aerospace industry in the past few decades, and a bunch of companies would be competing with each other to continue delivering space services to NASA and other space agencies (and private sector customers that might want satellite stuff). And these companies would be big corporate entities where the major shareholders aren't exactly household names (like Boeing today).
The way Bezos and Musk became billionaires would be a problem even if they didn't try to go to space. The way they're trying to go to space doesn't really move the needle much, in my opinion.
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the thing is that NASA did indeed try to build reusable spaceships themselves back in 1968 with the space shuttle. the thing is: they didn't make it. their space shuttle sucked and cost more than non-reusable rockets. Then some 30 years later SpaceX came along and somehow did the impossible, which is to build reusable rockets that are actually cheaper than the previous, non-reusable rockets. So, that's a big step forward. As a consequence, NASA started paying SpaceX for the fine product they were making that they tried to make themselves previously but failed.
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I've played fallout for more than 2 decades. How the fuck are we diving face first into every sci-fi dystopia at the same time? Like, there's hints of star wars, dune, fallout, 1984, the outer worlds, hunger games, Idiocracy etc. I'm hoping cyberpunk 2077 shows up and gives a sliver of a chance.
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Because those things were based on the real world and we are very bad at learning from the ever-growing list of mistakes we can’t stop making.
Cyberpunk 2077 is not a good world and does not have a good ending. That world is a horrid, capitalist dystopia. Maybe you should watch Edgerunners if you still can’t figure it out from the game.
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The main reason is because people are stupid and get taken advantage of accordingly.
Every time you saw a moron say "they're a business and they need to make money!" you saw someone lowering their standards to make a rich person richer.
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No one should have enough money to purchase entire branches of government. Musk could give every member of congress 10 million and still be a billionarie many times over. That kind of wealth is not compatible with democracy.
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These assholes get taxed 1-2% on their total wealth increases per year - and even that gets offset with their loopholes - meanwhile the average people pay anywhere between 30-50% of just their income (and that doesn't account for other taxes like VAT, property, vehicle and road taxes, and so on).
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And not only that, but if you taxed them at 99% they’d still have silly amounts of money and ungodly financial security while even 20% off a poor person being paid by a less rich local business is just hurting the both of them. Taxes are a good thing but like you say they are horrendously unbalanced.
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Seize their assets, fund NASA.
That's how you actually make America great.
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National space programs suck. We need a united international space push. Something overseen by... Let's call it the Union Aerospace Corporation. When earth science and tech is combined who knows what they can do on distant research bases set up in places like Mars. Maybe even open portals to transfer matter and energy across vast distances.
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the thing is that NASA did indeed try to build reusable spaceships themselves back in 1968 with the space shuttle. the thing is: they didn't make it. their space shuttle sucked and cost more than non-reusable rockets. Then some 30 years later SpaceX came along and somehow did the impossible, which is to build reusable rockets that are actually cheaper than the previous, non-reusable rockets. So, that's a big step forward. As a consequence, NASA started paying SpaceX for the fine product they were making that they tried to make themselves previously but failed.
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It's not a policy failure at all. It's a systemic feature. Capitalism is dog eat dog until only one dog remains. If you want to fix it you need a new economic system.
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Thr government is supposed to enforce regulations in a capitalistic market like ours.
Amazon should have been torn a new asshole for some of the anti competitive things they've done for example, which would have maybe prevented or at least slowed what happened.
Google should have been broken up ages ago
And so on.
The rules and regulations are there, it's just become so corrupt they aren't being enforced.
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Hereeee we areeeee...
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If you want to fix it you need a new economic system.
We could try actually free markets with no benefits to anyone. By benefits here I mean tax breaks, government contracts and subsidies for companies.
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"We could try actually free markets with no benefits to anyone. By benefits here I mean tax breaks, government contracts and subsidies for companies."
I'm far from an expert but didn't we more or less try that during the industrial revolution? As I recall from old history books, it wasn't so great for the majority of citizens and the economy was an actual roller coaster ride.
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I think capitalism can work depending on two things
- The state must discipline and tax the capitalists constantly.
- There is a competing system that capitalism has to outperform.
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No, what actually ends up happening is the capitalists constantly pressure and influence the state to not tax them and not discipline them. It's hard for the state to say "no" to that kind of money.
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There is a competing system that capitalism has to outperform.
That's an interesting thought. Still trying to wrap my mind around how it might work.
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They are choosing to devote vast amounts of finite earth resources on their space man hobbies instead of using any of it to fix or improve the situation on earth, in their countries or for anyone else other than themselves. These people should be dragged out of their comfortable lives for crimes against humanity.
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They have nothing to improve. Their life is great. And that's the problem.
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And when earth will inevitably be uninhabitable for humans, they will fuck off to space and let us die here.
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Yea, it is.
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90% should be the minimum after 1 million a year
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I'd go for 99% after 5 bil
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I'd go for 200% after 5 bil, because their wealth needs to be lowered.
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Log tax rate.
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Billionaires shouldn't exist at all
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There should be a wealth cap much lower than that. Perhaps 10 mil. Enough to live comfortably for life but not enought to have enormous power over politics.
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I say we put them all in a rocket and shoot them into space...
That's it. Problem solved.
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Yeah... no. First other, no less greedy people will inherit their wealth, second capitalism guarantees the concentration of wealth to absurd degrees. "Kill all billionaires" is surprisingly not a good solution to the problem of billionaires.
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Oh, I read the OC idea as a symptom cure. It's not as good as curing the cause, but symptoms need to be addressed too.
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We can build more rockets...
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That's kinda expensive. Just put then in a field and strap some explosives on them, same net effect without wasting millions of taxpayer money.
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I say we put them all in a rocket and shoot them into space…
you're not gonna believe this but that's actually what they're trying to do.
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Win win
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I think we just need to send them into space... Forcibly. Permanently.
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That's what they want. We can't eat the rich if we can't reach the rich.
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I wouldn't want to eat deep-freeze-dried meat anyway.
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it isn't. it is an intended best case scenario for those invested. capitalism rewards trickery and thievery. excess wealth is part of its system dependent on class hierarchies. it was millionaires before billionaires and now we're about to have our first trillionaire. for fucks sake.
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It's a clear sign the government isn't, itself, spending enough on spaceflight and associated R&D.
Turning our next generation of economic and military supremacy over to the dipshit horn dogs that tanked retail sales and fucked up the post office seems like a huge mistake.
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Both can be true
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The fact that there are billionaires is the sign that they're not being taxed enough.
Massive infrastructure / R&D projects like a space race is actually one of the more productive ways that billionaires could use their money.
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If billionaires are the ruling class, then it's a policy success.
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If you've got money to waste on doing the same space shots that they've been doing for the last 65 years, just with newer technology, all while people in America are hungry, and suffering from lack of health care, then we should take away everything they own, and redistribute it to the people. We can even name each distribution after the benefactor. First we'll have the Musk distribution, then the Bezos, distribution, then the Ellison distribution, etc.
And their companies, primarily created and made profitable by government grants and tax breaks, belong to the American people, and they should be confiscated, and operated for the profit benefit of the American people. To make it fair, the billionaire, and his descendents, will always have an entry level job available, at entry level wages, but they will be treated like any other employees, and can be fired without rehiring privileges. They aren't entitled to any special treatment, other than a guaranteed job. After that, they have to behave themselves.
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nor that they give a rat's ass about sustainability, humanity, earth etc like some of them like Elon claims
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If there was a space race then you can guarantee that elon would want it out of the country.
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Either not taxed enough or there's almost no competition in the thing they do. And in a healthy free market, there should definitely be competition in a field that nets that much profits. The logical conclusion is that something is actively preventing the competition.
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In a free market, competition has end results. Buisnes don't just keep competing with one another ad infinitum. One of them eventually cant keep up and closes shop. It's competitors expand into the space it previously filled. This process repeats until you have fewer and fewer firms that account for more and more of their sector of the economy. New business do not have resources to eke out space in an already filled niche.
Under a long enough time frame, a free market creates less competition.
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that nets that much profits
that's kinda the issue, building rockets isn't all that profitable. they do it anyways because they believe in the vision and that it will pay off long-term, just not short-term
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You think the free market can save us from billionares. Wow. How long have you been drinking that kool aid man.
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$999,999,999 is just fine though!
Stop focusing on an arbitrary figure and start focusing on a real progressive income tax with no loopholes or workarounds.
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"Billionaire" is a sound bite to focus attention. Publicizing "An improved progressive taxation rate" isn't as marketable.
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$999,999,999 is just fine though!
Better than $450 billion, gotta start somewhere
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The existence of an "AI race" between China and the U.S., where government contracted billionaires in both countries insist that citizens accepting authoritarian surveillance, is just a patriotic duty necessary to win that race, is a policy failure.
Especially when investigative journalism uncovers in 2025 that the U.S./Silicon Valley sold China the mass surveillance system that has allegedly given them such an upper hand in this imaginary race.
2019: Trump CTO Addresses AI, Facial Recognition, Immigration, Tech Infrastructure, and More
Q:"Maintaining U.S. leadership in AI might have costs in terms of individuals and society. What costs should individuals and society bear to maintain leadership?”
A:“I don’t view the world that way. Our companies big and small do not hesitate to talk about the values that underpin their technology. [That is] markedly different from the way our adversaries think. The alternatives are so dire [that we] need to push efforts to bake the values that we hold dear into this technology.”...“A patchwork of regulation of technology is not beneficial for the country. We want to avoid that. Facial recognition has important roles—for example, finding lost or displaced children. There are use cases, but they need to be underpinned by values.”
The baked in "values" of the men telling you not to worry about regulations:
2025: Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race
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It's not a policy failure; it's a feature of the system. We need a different system that doesn't allow the existence of billionaires to begin with
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Time to bring out the soluti-honhonhon.
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I agree, but they're not giving enough credit to human greed and megalomania. It should be at least 50/50.
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I am not in a theme, but what bad in having them moving the progress by doing the space race? Maybe they are jerks, but they try to do something. Or, at least, pretend to. Can someone explain why there is so much hate towards them?
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it's noble to don't as a nation,. paid for by tax dollars. the fact that they have this money to fritter away pretending to do something special for the species is obscene.
They should not exist.
The pendulum will swing back some day soon.
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I'm absolutely pro taxing billionaires. But this has been like that forever and they fill an ingesting financing nieche with their dick measuring contest of a space race. Somebody financed all the expeditions to the north pole for example. They finance exploration and science ands engineering that the public is not willing to, but personally in glad somebody does. Also industry brings arguably far less politics and other inefficiencies with it that public funding does. Look at how the NASA budget is cut every few years and how their funding is mostly squandered overfeeding some States industry so their senators get to keep their constituency happy. I'm not saying I particularly love that there are people getting richer by the second while doing fuck all, but I love that they have a hobby that arguably benefits humanity long term.
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Damn, get off that billionaire dick and explain how that helps humanity when we are dealing with fascism, starving children and climate change. These fuckers aren't financing shit. Elon gets government contracts. Like how wrong can you be?
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Pretty much any engineering problem will, if solved, create some amount of transferrable advancement that will help humanity in other areas. It's why technological progress is so connected to war. It's not like they're taking money from their feeding children fund and spending it on dick measuring contests in space; the problem is that they had no intention of feeding starving children in the first place.
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Well last time when we had space race we got: gps, medical innovations, lighter materials, knowledge about weather helping things like hurricane predictions, better fuel, new methods to preserve food, cordless tools, memoryfoam.
I dont know how those helped humanity at all? Like insulin pumps? What a fucking waste, right? /s
I much rather have the billionare competing with rockets than that they compete with yachs.
Best thing would be if they payd taxes too in same relation to normal people
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Jesus all commies.
Now you guys have a problem with innovation.
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Governments can innovate, and indeed can do so more efficiently than corporations, since they do not need profits.
I assume you're reading this on the Internet, if you need an example.
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Which government did good innovation?
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Half the innovation and tech you use today is because of development by research councils that are government funded, military tech (government funded) or open source projects that were forked in some way shape or form.
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Leftists are the first to laud innovation when it benefits regular people. This is just a dick measuring contest by some asshats, financed by stealing billions of dollars from their workers.
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You do realize that NASA has a fixed budget for the science missions they can run right? Amd you do realize that when the launch costs for their satellites are 50x lower, that means they can run more science missions more often?
We all hate Musk, but it's fucking insane to look at the equivalent of the first airplane company that could land a plane and didn't just destroy it after every flight, and say 'thats just a dick measuring contest, how could that be useful?'
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You’re just outing yourself as a piece of garbage. I would pay my fucking employees, and if I somehow did it myself ethically it would be winning a lottery and I would share it amongst my friends and family.
I already do stuff like this. I own a sports car and I fight for pedestrianizing our streets, including the main one near where I live. I ride public transit and take the bike share service to get places. A guy once asked me to sign a petition to get rid of paid parking and I told him that I literally do not care and that it’s only fair that I personally pay to park my personal vehicle on publically funded infrastructure given how many people on that street don’t own cars and still have to pay for them.
You’re just an asshole who has already been visited by the sins of greed and pride and you’re just pissy that you don’t have the resources to act on those feelings. Be a better person, and quit this projecting bullshit; I don’t want any part of it.
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If I become a billionaire, Lemmings would be right to break out the French cutlery and bibs.
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Temporarily embarrassed millionaire energy here.
We understand their perspective alright. The concept of a millionaire or billionaire is simply disgusting because it is clear they use the power their wealth offers them to get out of paying their fair share while simultaneously needlessly exploiting us even further and in some cases meddling in politics or media so as to delude us into thinking: this is normal or – in your case – won’t someone empathize with the billionaire?
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I have no problem with the rich. In fact I love them! I'd love to have as many rich as possible.
Unfortunately, that means, the gold hoarding dragon monsters we have currently at the top need to go.
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Power of all forms corrupts, but that doesn't mean tyrants have a point when they disappear dissenters. Fuck the rich's perspective, not because I'm above being a rich asshole (maybe I am, maybe I'm not, who knows) but because even if I was it wouldn't justify hoarding my wealth at the expense of 99.9% of the population.
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Meanwhile I'm being taxed far too much
T(axed) E(nough) A(lready) Party
Axed nough lready