this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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Doesn't work like that. It's more like fighting a Hydra. If a Billionaire worth $50B dies, like 10 Children are gonna inherit $5B each. So we would have even more Billionaires afterwards.
So you're saying we're distributing wealth from the top down? Splatter down economics?
Interesting idea. Cut enough heads of the Hydra until the heads are so small, that they don't pose any threat.
From my experience playing Crusader Kings 2 and 3, gavelkind's a bitch.
Splitting your enemy's demesne amongst their successors gives you more but weaker enemies (and sometimes some friends), and leads to infighting and chaos amongst them.
Nine times out of ten murdering an enemy with lots of children leaves you better off than not murdering them.
(Of course, though, this scales inversely to the number of successors, so if there's only one or two proceeded only if their stats are lower than your enemy's, or if it'll still be a few years before they come of age.)
But the wealth would still be less centralized and they would be easier to kill for a while or have yo spend a larger percent on security its progress just because one virtuous heroic act doesn't immediately save everything doesn't mean doing a little bit every day won't make the world better because if you kill those five kids and kill their 25 heirs then you've just cracked the no billionaires mark! So its a couple years not a couple months the world would still be saved
Sounds like work worth doing, a little extra time doesn't sound like a deal breaker to me.
We'll all be out of work eventually. Nothing but time to hunt billionaires.
Sounds like an ever evolving target practice to me.
The difference is that each head would be weaker and weaker until it's just a bunch of snakes like the rest of us.
All we want is wealth distribution.
The more the family tree gets eliminated, perhaps those names further down the branches understand they don't want to die and do the right thing.
Younger generations want to end the progressive familial abuse patter of previous generations. This is no different.
That just means we aren't done yet. Besides, quite a few of them would refuse their fortunes if it meant the went on the Most Wanted List.
It's like money is a cursed artefact.
In theory though impossible in practice:
If we halved the wealth of the current richest person.
Equally divided that wealth to the 50% poorest household.
And repeated from their till there are no more Billionaires.
Musk would end up at 800 mil after having his wealth divided 10 times. While people who had no money to start now have around 50K
(Broad numbers, Not an accurate calculation)
That's still good, though.
If the richest people were only 1000x wealthier than the poorest... wow.
Currently, the richest people could spend the entirety of every penny an average person would make from the day that person was born to the day that person died every single day and still not run out of money before that person died. That's an entire person's fiscal existence spent every day for their entire life and it wouldn't even make a dent.
So, yeah, I'd take 1000:1
This is why I think we need to start talking about wealth caps. I don't understand why the left hasn't jumped on that.
Thats what i mean, we theoretically can redistribute the majority of wealth to end all poverty and there would still be enough centralised wealth for the current rich to still live in royal luxury and feel special about.
Of course there would be massive opposition unless we figure what that does to inflation. So I don’t think it'll ever happen but its a point that we absolutely could redistribute wealth without eradicating the upper class.
Instead as an actual solution i think we should count differently and consider all wealth to be a personal cost of a human taking resources from the shared planet. What you consume and possess is what you cost to others. Life is inherently a destructive action.
By measuring the cost and aiming to keep it low we can allow free access to groups (elderly for example) to a share of industrial output.
They don’t need to pay with money, society just needs to count the cost of their transaction. Invite for a welfare talk if there is a problem with overconsumption.
This project is a wip but i imagine that using what is called fountain pen money now could be used to pay classical industry with classical money. The fountain pen money is technically a debt but its the natural debt of human life with no expectation to ever close it.
I'd hate to break this to you, but...
500,000,000
÷50,000
= 10,000
$800 million is over 10,000× wealthier than $50k, not 1000×...
The other part of this is they don't get the huge portion of wealth that is being generated anymore. It goes to the people making it instead. It's not just a 1 time, take half their money and give it to the poor thing.
That's still pretty okay and I bet some of those steps would be like hey I don't want this money I would rather continue to live as a human being
They said "2 months". So you keep doing the work within that time, until the fortune is diluted enough to drop below 1B per person
How about "the current billionaire class" instead?
Because you're right, but the initial comparison is still something worth saying and I don't mind getting pedantic.
Also, there's like 1000 billionaires. 500 kids a month aren't getting shot.
Beg to differ: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2024/guns-remain-leading-cause-of-death-for-children-and-teens
7 a day, works out to about 200 a month
Sickening figure that in my opinion, doesn't change at all when moving between 200 and 500. One is too fucking many
Yay, overpopulation got patched (/lh)
Your own link shows that you're wrong....
I don't think people would mind having more Billionaires to kill.
Up to a point. The inheritance getting split every time plus being taxed would diminish it quickly.
Had this argument a few days ago. Someone said 'kill all billionaires' as a low-effort comment, and I noted that whilst that makes a good protest sign slogan, I wouldn't want to whip up a mob trained solely on that heuristic - I asked them to get specific in what they want to lynch this billionaire for. Not because I want to defend billionaires, but Lemmy is a discussion platform, and "kill all billionaires" is a thought stopper.
Thats true and some are definitely worse like oil and media and weapons billionaires are worst tailor swift and rhianna can go last and we can kill them with like heroin overdose or something else that's not so bad
Or maybe you can convince them to give away most of their fortunes (still keeping enough to live the rest of their lives in luxury, of course, because what's a few hundred million to these people?), when being a billionaire is no longer allowed.
Like, allow anyone to make up to $999,999,999 after-tax, and anything after that (whether capital gains or income) is taxed at 100%. It's that simple. You only need to "take care" of the ones who try to stop it or reverse it.
Imprison the ones who try to circumvent it with offshore banking, webs of trustees, money laundering, or other loopholes that are only available to the wealthy (like a collection of priceless paintings that are used as a bank account, or yet another personal yacht written off as a business expense).
I've had similar thoughts, I was slower typing this.
(future Korazail here. On rereading, I want to be clear about the difference between wealth and income. I think we tend to focus on income tax brackets, but the real danger is when the super wealthy can fund their lifestyle and power on the idea that they have money. Rarely are they counting any of that as income, so wonderingwanderer's thought of <1b income would apply to nobody. We need to tax wealth. I earn $$$$ each year, but my bank balance is $ because it costs $$ to exist and I am fortunate enough to have $ to spend on luxuries and keep $ in reserve. If I had a bank balance of $$$$$, then it doesn't matter how much I earn in a year; my money itself provides the $$ to exist and $$$ for luxuries with overhead to spare. I might be able to retire on a bank balance of $$. The billionaires have $$$$$$$$$$ in the bank and it would take me 9 million years to catch up at my rate)
Give them some time to prepare, but a wealth cap with harsh penalties seems a pretty reasonable solution to the wealth inequality problem. Death would be a pretty damn harsh penalty, but a really effective one. I'd also take taxing or socializing their assets until they are under the cap.
A billion dollars is just such a staggering amount of money that there's no reason for any person to control it. And as for 'why lynch this billionaire?' You don't get to a billion in net worth all by yourself. I'd posit that Taylor Swift is my favorite billionaire, and she is known for treating her staff well and giving out life-changing amounts of money to individuals that work for her... but what if she were incentivized to keep her worth below a billion? Larger donations to charity, lower ticket prices to her shows, better pay rates to her staff instead of bonuses (which would raise competitive pay for others in the industry), etc.
People like musk can just fuck right off. They provide no real value. If you invent something that is so useful that it is worth multiple billions, make it a public asset and go invent the next thing. If you made it to a billion dollars, just shut up and retire. Let someone else figure out the next step and get their billion, you don't need two. The person who suggested bezos pivot from bookstore into general marketplace was probably a random developer who is still there and making <100k/year, but they had the good idea, not the guy with the purse. If we all had more purse, I think we'd have more people trying things and finding the next big thing.
If I were to author a law, I'd tie the cap to a multiplier or fraction of some economic indicator that isn't individual, like total money transacted in a year globally or something. The number should be around a billion at this moment, but I'm not really mad at it being higher, since we're targeting the small number of people hoarding wealth.
If you make the cap feel really big, like a billion, then the people, even with millions to their name, won't feel like it will ever apply to them; but the real predators with multiple billions will be impacted.
Your parenthetical statement is why I mentioned capital gains. Billionaires don't make their wealth from income, no. It comes from capital gains.
Capital gains tax brackets currently max out around the same rates as $40K income tax brackets. And they still write off so much bullshit and play loopholes that most of their gains go untaxed.
A one-time wealth tax makes sense. 100% on anything over $1B. After that, a progressive tax rate that includes capital gains as well as income, and maxes out at 100%, which could honestly apply to anything over $100M since it's annual anyway. If you make $100M in one year you're already set for life. No one needs more than that. If you make $100M ten years in a row, congratulations, you made a billion dollars.
Even a hundred years in a row still ultimately returns $10B total, which is honestly fine given all the rest is implemented. Making $100B would require maxing out income/gains rates every year for a thousand years, so it's not like we would have to worry about Bezoses and Musks, and there would be enough tax revenue to fund everything necessary, and no billionaires could complain that "one billion isn't enough!" Because if they're so "hard working" then all they need to do is max out their income/gains for ten years and they make another billion!
I think this scenario seems manageable.
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