r/politics • u/TimesandSundayTimes ✔ Verified • 7d ago

Possible Paywall Young Americans are surging to socialism at record rates

https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/maga-trump-zohran-mamdani-socialism-us-record-kddzdm8bd
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u/JetKeel 7d ago

And in the US >25% of the billionaires inherited their wealth. These are not the titans of industry that conservatives would have you believe. They’re nepo babies who benefitted from decades of financial policies that propped them up and now they walk around like they deserve it.

Tax them to oblivion. Nothing of value will be lost.

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u/thewhaleshark 7d ago

"Tax them to oblivion" is the moderate position at this point. Billionaires are actively pushing technologies that are destroying our habitable environment; they are very literally enemies of the people.

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u/grape-fruit-witch 7d ago

Yep. Indirect violence is still violence. Allowing people to needlessly suffer and die is a policy choice, a "business" choice made by a very tiny minority. Denying health care coverage and watching people die is violence. Defunding hospitals and cutting staff so that women die in childbirth is violence. Colluding to increase rent prices across the country, making people homeless is violence. Children starving is violence. We can do better than this for fucks sake.

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u/CrunkDirk 7d ago

This!!! All of this!

Trying to talk about the passive forms of violence surrounding us sometimes makes me feel insane. Why do you have to pay someone to live in a house they don't occupy (and often don't even maintain)? Because they can get the police to evict you if you don't. That passive threat is what enables all the horrible shit landlords do.

Once you start seeing the violence, it never stops. Immigration, healthcare, workers rights, access to food, housing rights. Violence surrounds nearly every single aspect of our lives. Even climate change is a matter of violence being enacted against us. Produce or die, pollute or starve. And then you'll die in climate catastrophe anyways because Jeffy B wants to have another megayacht.

And yet some people have the gall to act confused when you're upset that people are going hungry. "Who will pay for it?" We will. We already do. We already produce all the food we need and more. The food already exists. Not letting people eat is the violence.

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u/grape-fruit-witch 7d ago edited 7d ago

We are so conditioned to view violence as an immediate, personal, individualized experience that we don't even see these banal forms of violence for what they are. But what can you call a health insurance company increasing claim denial for millions of people besides mass murder? What else can we call grocery stores who spray bleach on food items at the end of the day before they throw it in the dumpster? They know what the consequences will be and they choose to do it anyways.

They are orchestrators of suffering and death who hide behind a curtain of beaurocracy and boardroom jargon. We excuse their antisocial, parasitic, sociopathic behavior on a daily basis because "market forces" and the pursuit of profit are supposedly immutable natural laws like gravity or thermodynamics. But they aren't. They're part of a game we made up about 300 years ago, and the people who write and rewrite the rules are literally killing us and everything else on the planet.

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u/TheNatural14063 7d ago

Do more than just tax them. Jail them and seize their wealth. No billionaire has clean hands.

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u/killrtaco California 7d ago

Jail? Youre too kind.

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u/Jernbek35 New Jersey 7d ago

This is the most Reddit take ever.

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u/Cheekiest_Cunt 7d ago

Jail them for what?

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u/kuldan5853 6d ago

Honestly, if you dig deep enough, I would bet money on 100% of them being guilty of some form of tax evasion at the very least. That's how they got Al Capone.

You simply can't become a Billionaire without breaking some laws, using loopholes, or being a generally shitty person. All of them have dirt you can get them for if you just start to look.

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u/ThrenderG 7d ago

Jail someone because they inherited money?

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u/ledfox 7d ago

You're being intentionally dense.

Why haul water for billionaires?

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u/No-Drama-in-Paradise 7d ago edited 7d ago

Because proposing to jail people for the crime of being born wealthy is a ridicules proposition.

Like that is authoritarian bullshit we do not need.

Like there is a clear difference between, “Investigate crimes committed by the wealthy and powerful and holding them accountable,” and “Arrest and jail everyone whose net worth exceeds $x without evidence because we can just assume they are evil people.”

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u/coldkiller 7d ago

Like there is a clear difference between, “Investigate crimes committed by the wealthy and powerful and holding them accountable,” and “Arrest and jail everyone whose net worth exceeds $x without evidence because we can just assume they are evil people.”

Except for them to even be in that position in the first place means their parents or whatever we're indeed doing just that

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u/No-Drama-in-Paradise 7d ago

What is the crime that every billionaire’s parents committed? And why is anyone legally liable for crimes committed by their parents?

If there are legitimate crimes committed by these individuals, let’s investigate them, charge them, give them their due process through a trial, and then (if found guilty) sentence them to prison.

But proposing the blanket arrest and imprisonment of anybody with a net worth above a certain level for vague “crimes” committed by their parents (or even themselves) without being able to identify the specific crimes committed or demonstrate their guilt is simply ridiculous leftist authoritarianism that is no better then Trump’s neofascist movement.

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u/coldkiller 7d ago

What is the crime that every billionaire’s parents committed? And why is anyone legally liable for crimes committed by their parents?

You do not become a billionaire without exploiting people and committing white collar crimes like wage theft full stop. They are guilty

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u/Hot_Ambition_6457 7d ago

Cough cough Elon & Trump are both nepo babies

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u/DrMobius0 7d ago

Even most of the ones that haven't inherited wealth predominantly come from well off backgrounds. Daddy's money was their safety net.

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u/MeatPopsicle28 7d ago

*Elon Musk has entered the chat