mmoxie:

i had this discussion with a coworker the other day and it’s still eating me

if a man has two billion dollars, and you take one billion dollars from him

his lifestyle doesn’t change

he still lives the life of a billionaire

he doesn’t worry about where he sleeps at night, what he’ll eat in the morning, what he’ll do during the day, because the answer to all three of those is still “whatever he wants”

if you take half a billion dollars from a billionaire, he still has half a billion dollars

again, he can do whatever he wants with that amount of money, few things on this entire earth are gated behind a cost higher than that

you have to keep taking money until you’re down in the single millions, down to like, a single million,

before a billionaire sees any kind of real threat to their way of life, and that threat tends to look like not being able to live in the biggest house theyve ever seen

and by the time you’ve done that, you’ve introduced roughly a billion dollars into the economy, where it can be used to benefit others directly in the form of public services

and the billionaire, reduced to millionaire, still lives a lifestyle where they don’t feel the pressures of day to day living the way the average person does, because they have the means not to worry about it

that rent check coming up, they can’t feel it, not with a million dollars in the bank, not unless they bought something so ostentatious that it demands a hugely inflated value every month- and if it does, why does it exist? does it exist just to be expensive? a mansion is no different than a gold-plated slice of pizza, it exists just to have a big price tag that keeps it exclusive to people so wealthy only they can interact with it

if billionaires weren’t the specter of human cruelty that they are, they couldn’t exist, they would be using their vast wealth of capital on anything else once they ran out of ways to spend on themselves

they only exist due to the cruel decision to neglect the human population around them, over and over again, every single day, and i am so tired of seeing them in the news in any terms other than open condemnation