I'm not locked in here with you, you're locked in here with me!

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yes fair point. I am also ok to give them the following choices:

1- live in a poor country with minimum wage with no opportunity to change jobs and a wealth cap (your annual earnings from other sources should be comparable to annual earnings of a minimal wage job). I have the feeling that after a couple months they will commit suicide. for billionaires directly affiliated with arms companies, this should be a country which was recently a war zone.

2- trial by combat. no wait that is game of thrones got confused.

This extra punishment’s purpose should be to act as a deterrant

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Seems like the people in the comments are rather fond of the idea

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Very idealistic to think that the redistribution of all that money wouldn’t just cause mass inflation! Also, mot of the money is tied up in companies. They don’t just have the money lying around. There would be no one to buy all these assets. I get the sentiment, that they make money from the work of their employees. At some point companies become to big to fail but when someone is starting a business the personal risks and investment someone takes to grow a company also should be respected.

We don’t produce nearly enough for everyone to be get fully all the things they rely on while barely anyone works. Thats not how the economy would end up working. We need a social safety net, so no complete free market which is toxic but as much as I dislike some billionaires your proposal is just not realistic and fantizises violence without accomplishing anything

Melllvar

But also note that 99% of the victims of the guillotine during the French revolution were innocent commoners, most of the nobility escaped abroad long before the reign of terror started, and the final victim of the terror was the guy who had been in charge of it.

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Not every billionaire built their life doing something unethical. Killing them wouldn’t make you any better. People also fuel monopolies out of convenience even if they have a choice to act ethical. We should strive for legislative change. The billionaire might be the owner of parts of a company, but we as a society use the services for our daily lives. What economic system that actually works also supports free ideas, innovation and the willingness to perform other than something based on capitalism (Communism never worked and doesn’t reward it properly). Treating symptoms won’t treat the cause. We need legislative change.

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Actually doing this would not only be immoral but just treat the symptoms of the downfalls of capitalism, not the cause. We need legislative change that has a proper social safety net, not violence LARPing.

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Now this guy worry about what’s immoral. How about hoarding wealth off the backs of labor, is that immoral?

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Billionaires use violence all the time to get what they want. Just because they hide behind layers of abstraction that they’ve set up, doesn’t mean they aren’t using violence.

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In a perfect world, that would be ideal. But for at least 50 years, capital has been buying the legislators and we’re backsliding even further from positive change. Without the threat, there’s no reason for them to let things change for the better for the rest of us.

JackGreenEarth

Of course. However killing billionaires is still immoral if there are peaceful solutions to redistributing the wealth, and useless if the act of killing them doesn’t magically redistribute the wealth fairly (it doesn’t)

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What’s your larger point? Why hedge with “killing billionairs is immoral” instead of just saying what you really mean.

JackGreenEarth

What do you think I really mean? Killing anyone, including billionaires, is unethical. Maybe it could be justified in a utilitarian sense if it was guaranteed to lead to wealth redistribution and there was no other way, but even that isn’t the case.

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Do you understand why people use of the phrase “eat the rich” or their threats to bring out guillotines? Do you understand the historic relevance and the iconography. To me, if you did, there would be no reason to make the misguided statement, “that’s immoral.” Other than to create subterfuge.

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This whole populism trend is concerning to me. I agree that some folks are more responsible than others for the problems we face today. Even so, singling out and blaming a small group of people for the problems we face, then punishing them with legislation, is not the most productive way forward. We need real, serious solutions. “Get rid of X” rarely, if ever, works.

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“rarely”: so you admit sometimes the solution is “get rid of X” ? Then why would “get rid of billionaires” not be a solution for you ? To be clear I’m not saying we should kill them or physically hurt them in any way, we can simply reappropriate their wealth turning them into non-billionaire, also making it illegal for anyone to be a billionaire in the future. Why would that not work in your opinion ?

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if there are peaceful solutions to redistributing the wealth

But that’s the whole point, there aren’t any.

The whole idea of being able to tax them fairly and properly is merely a pacifier so the people think they have a chance. And while they hope something might change, the rich actually use their power, money and influence to rig the system in a way that ensure they’ll never have to pay their fair share.

There’s no peaceful solution to the unethical and violent accumulation of wealth

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It’s hard to tell. Satire is usually funny. #justaprankbro

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No, fuck X. Get rid of it.

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What if we don’t kill them, but just rob them instead?

The moderate lemming

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What we need to think about is how this works practically. A billionaire isn’t someone with a billion dollars in their bank account: it’s someone with a 50% share in a business with a market cap of $2bn. How do we address that fairly?

Now I’d say that a business with a certain level of profitability owes something to its employees, such that very few businesses would reach that level of capitalisation.