• danc4498@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Has a billionaire ever lost all their money? Outside of criminal cases. Seems impossible.

    • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 months ago

      There was a browser game some had developed where you had to spend all your money. It was similar to cookie clicker.

      The point of the game was that once you have a billion dollars, you have so much money that you literally could not spend that much money.

      • Wilzax@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I could easily spend a billion dollars but most of it would be doing Mr Beast type shit like building houses and wells and hospitals or paying for people’s medical procedures.

        You have to be pretty heartless to have that much money and keep it all to yourself

        • _g_be@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          I couldn’t not do that as well, which implies that to get that stinking rich and stay that way you must be some degree of sociopath

    • Frozengyro@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Even in a criminal case, they will have more than the rest of us to live on after there 3 year, club fed sentence

    • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Perhaps Mikhail Khodorkovsky. I’m sure he managed to squirrel away some of his wealth and now lives comfortably in exile, albeit with a huge bullseye on his back. But if your standard is “lose 100% of their wealth” then that almost never happens to anyone, even working class people who declare bankruptcy due to overwhelming debts.

      Does Muammar Gaddafi count? He lived like a king with an anime-style cadre of elite female bodyguards, being essentially the emperor of Libya. He died after some soldiers dragged him out of a ditch and summarily executed him.

  • ChicoSuave@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Maybe Ayn Rand was onto something, we should tax the most wealthy people people since they are the wealth creators. We should expose John Galt and marvel at how well the billionaires can rebuild their wealth from nothing in any field they enter. Atlas Shrugged is a guide on what to do to help stop billions from going to the few.

  • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Oh, I’ve somehow remembered that weird period when I was kinda leftist. (Usually I’m ancap.)

    Not because I stopped believing that people are not born equal or that people deserve and need different things, and that voluntarism is good, but because evolutionary mechanisms, which are one of the main arguments in favor of markets, invisible hands, bootstraps and such, are skewed by inheritance and starting with different base.

    This led me to believe that the Marxist division of private property and “personal” property (doesn’t sound right in English, private seems more personal than “personal”, while it’s less in Russian), where the latter was what formally existed in USSR and the former was some bad, bad capitalist concept, has the right to exist.

    The former shouldn’t be inherited or gifted. The latter is complete property.

    This would kinda make sense by removing generational wealth, but there’d be a question of criteria separating these two things. I guess it would involve the concept of “means of production” and land and resources would be something that can’t be personal property. But it’d be all a question of amounts anyway.

    And then there’s a question of whether such a society will or will not be eaten by another, where not only wealth is accumulated by clans, but also sometimes knowledge of power.

    EDIT: It feels so good to put the A-word in any comment involving politics. You just know that every fool out there won’t think further. It’s as if you had a dam defending your little cozy town from sewage sea around.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Ancap is called anarcho-capitalism because it’s usually considered that you can make capitalism with it. But it’s not one of the axioms.

        Its components are voluntarism, non-aggression and property as a simple concept, because otherwise taking anything from another person is not clearly aggression. Property on knowledge is generally not recognized in ancap (so no trademarks and patents), property on resources in usually disputed in ancap (because you haven’t made those resources and have the same right to them as everyone else).

        You have also answered the wrong post, this one was not about ancap at all (are you a buggy bot or just came here through my post history?).

        Actually the opposite - some compromise between Marxism and our world which for me personally seems better than all those complex wealth redistribution systems. Simply abolish inheritance of a kind of property that some call means of production, some something else etc. Then that material value may be used in some socially useful way, while the society becomes much more egalitarian and market mechanisms start working again. Naturally this means that companies won’t grow big, so cooperatives will become plausible form of organization.

        It’s some kind of Trotskyist socialism, I’m just trying to extract it from my memory of the short period when I was excited by such stuff.