Uhh, USA is one of the last to fall, off the backs of what we have the nerve to call “third world.”
It’s rich Theil refers to a book with a colonial slogan of “no free lunch,” after he and his ilk already sucked the husks of humanity dry. Pun intended.
The main problem with modern civilization is that it’s no longer possible to rob rich people. If Peter Thiel’s money actually physically existed, in like a vault somewhere, SOMEBODY would have burgled the vault by now, purely because of the insanely favorable risk vs reward ratio - like a lottery where the cost of buying tickets of every possible combination costs less than the jackpot, once the reward is high enough, there will always be SOMEONE who will make the necessary investment to negate the risk. And “robbing the rich” would always have enough popular support that there would be little effort to find the thief as long as the oligarch was unpopular enough. But now Thiel’s money no longer physically exists, and it’s basically impossible to forcibly take it from him without basically having to destroy the entire global banking system first in order to get at it.
You’re not wrong, but billionaires are just as easy to kill now as they ever were. If you can’t take the money away from the planet destroying psychopath, take the planet destroying psychopath away from the money.
Killing them doesn’t give you their resources though. If you managed to get away with it, you will have to spend money staying anonymous and some board of directors will use the company value to enrich the next asshole.
You don’t need their money. You need them not to have it. Do it enough times and whoever ends up with it will make more responsible choices with it even if nothing else changes.
This is why we used to let government deal with overgrown wealth. They’re the only ones with the power to stand up to robber barons. It’s too bad that this time they bought the government.
They redistributed it away from us, they can redistribute it back. Democrats decided it’s been 80 or 100 years, so we forgot they were never on our side, **remind them we remember. VOTE. THEM. OUT. PRIMARY. RIOT. **
It’s fucking rich Thiel trying to coopt Robert A. Heinlein. The man believed in people being free to do as they wish, but he was no fucking kleptocrat. I’m not convinced that his philosophy would comport particularly well with modern libertarians, who amount to sock puppets for the GOP.
He believed fiercely in being politically knowledgeable and involved:
The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. “We ignored Hitler,” he said. “We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all.”
They thought of the government as “They.” The only possible route to a clear conscience in politics is to accept political responsibility, either as an active member of the party in power or as an equally active member of the loyal opposition.
He believed in rationally-considered governance:
If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.
And while he sure seemed to hate Communism, something I don’t find all that surprising for a man of his generation, he arguably hated corruption and capitalist decay even more:
Of what use, then, are the American Communists?
They serve one function extremely useful to you and to the country, so useful that, if there were no Communists, we would almost be forced to create some. They are a reliable litmus paper for detecting real sources of danger to the Republic.
Communism is so repugnant to almost all Americans, when they are getting along even tolerably well, that one may predict with certainty that any social field or group in which the Communists make real strides in gaining members or acceptance of their doctrines, any such spot is in such bad shape from real and not imaginary social ills that the rest of us should take emergency, drastic action to investigate and correct the trouble.
Unfortunately we are more prone to ignore the sick spot thus disclosed and content ourselves with calling out more cops.
All of those quotes are from Take Back Your Government, a nonfiction book about how and why to get involved in politics, and one that I wish more people would read and take seriously. All of his fiction… you have got to take with at least a grain of salt. He loved to put political philosophy rants into his writing, but he also loved exploring weirdo scenarios that he may or may not have totally believed in, himself. Just because someone took a given interpretation from one of Heinlein’s fictions does not mean that he would be chill with a bunch of vampires bleeding the planet dry.
Uhh, USA is one of the last to fall, off the backs of what we have the nerve to call “third world.”
It’s rich Theil refers to a book with a colonial slogan of “no free lunch,” after he and his ilk already sucked the husks of humanity dry. Pun intended.
The main problem with modern civilization is that it’s no longer possible to rob rich people. If Peter Thiel’s money actually physically existed, in like a vault somewhere, SOMEBODY would have burgled the vault by now, purely because of the insanely favorable risk vs reward ratio - like a lottery where the cost of buying tickets of every possible combination costs less than the jackpot, once the reward is high enough, there will always be SOMEONE who will make the necessary investment to negate the risk. And “robbing the rich” would always have enough popular support that there would be little effort to find the thief as long as the oligarch was unpopular enough. But now Thiel’s money no longer physically exists, and it’s basically impossible to forcibly take it from him without basically having to destroy the entire global banking system first in order to get at it.
You’re not wrong, but billionaires are just as easy to kill now as they ever were. If you can’t take the money away from the planet destroying psychopath, take the planet destroying psychopath away from the money.
Killing them doesn’t give you their resources though. If you managed to get away with it, you will have to spend money staying anonymous and some board of directors will use the company value to enrich the next asshole.
You don’t need their money. You need them not to have it. Do it enough times and whoever ends up with it will make more responsible choices with it even if nothing else changes.
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I know that, but we’re talking about incentives to rob the rich, which in the best case would include a robinhood style give to the poor.
We’re clearly need to eliminate wealth inequality, but I’m skeptical killing a few billionaires will help.
Then kill them all
This is why we used to let government deal with overgrown wealth. They’re the only ones with the power to stand up to robber barons. It’s too bad that this time they bought the government.
Fight club style
They redistributed it away from us, they can redistribute it back. Democrats decided it’s been 80 or 100 years, so we forgot they were never on our side, **remind them we remember. VOTE. THEM. OUT. PRIMARY. RIOT. **
It’s fucking rich Thiel trying to coopt Robert A. Heinlein. The man believed in people being free to do as they wish, but he was no fucking kleptocrat. I’m not convinced that his philosophy would comport particularly well with modern libertarians, who amount to sock puppets for the GOP.
He believed fiercely in being politically knowledgeable and involved:
He believed in rationally-considered governance:
And while he sure seemed to hate Communism, something I don’t find all that surprising for a man of his generation, he arguably hated corruption and capitalist decay even more:
All of those quotes are from Take Back Your Government, a nonfiction book about how and why to get involved in politics, and one that I wish more people would read and take seriously. All of his fiction… you have got to take with at least a grain of salt. He loved to put political philosophy rants into his writing, but he also loved exploring weirdo scenarios that he may or may not have totally believed in, himself. Just because someone took a given interpretation from one of Heinlein’s fictions does not mean that he would be chill with a bunch of vampires bleeding the planet dry.