this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
408 points (99.0% liked)
Showerthoughts
36899 readers
939 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The problem is that wealth = power and influence in society and this has led to essentially all modern neoliberal ‘democracies’ having their governments captured and controlled by the wealthy elite. So the only way you would be able to implement something like this would be via a revolution replacing capitalism with some form of socialism that would make private wealth a thing of the past and provide a decent standard of living for all.
And if that in itself wasn't hard enough, the other evil empires of the world would never allow this to happen anywhere. No gaining traction permitted. It would take the complete collapse or civilization world-wide, and even then we would just return to medieval fuedalism and Gun Diplomacy.
A few dozen more Luigis would also make it easier.
luigis are all nice but they only treat the symptom. the system can produce replacements faster than we can individually remove them.
i think we can go further by grouping up and also going for the root causes (eg capitalism).
Imho a hard cap on personal wealth would be sufficient.
I used to think this would be sufficient as well but as you’ve probably noticed it’s damned near impossible to get our “democratic” governments to even consider something like this since they have been so thoroughly captured by the wealthy elite. You don’t have to call it revolution or socialism if those are scary words or just don’t seem possible but somehow we have to overcome that reality and I don’t see how it can be done without dispossessing these elites of their power so we can dispossess them of their wealth.
I feel like perhaps a slightly easier first step would be to push for a cap that is higher than anybody's wealth (say £100B) — so that the debate is initially only about the principle — and only then demand it be lowered. 1) salami slicing works, and 2) even just the fact of there being one (albeit unreachable) would imo do a lot psychologically.
And while we're at it, another pet policy of mine is a tax that starts at 0 and approaches 100% as your income approaches infinity. Then you'd just play with the steepness of the curve. You'd still have the problem of pre-existing hoardrd wealth though.
Also the astronomical additions to the govt budget from all this would prob lead to equally astronomical embezzlement, rendering the whole limit ineffective. So another, prob more decentralized, mechanism of redistribution would need to be devised first.