If all the money ends up in hands of billionaires and their corporations and there will be no money in hands of regular plebs…
Who do you think will have to pay the taxes?
Also, the people would figure out a different way of trading or currency. And with that one getting taxed, all the billionaire’s money become worthless.
It basically already did
“All the money” assumes there’s a finite amount of money. There isn’t. In a fiat currency, like the Dollar, Euro or Sterling, banks create money when they lend, and the money disappears again when the loan is repaid. This is what a banking license gives you; The ability to make loans without having the existing money to back them.
Government spends by telling it’s bank (The Federal Reserve, ECB or BoE) to lend money for the things it wants to buy. Taxes then repay that debt and the money doesn’t exist anymore.
In an economy where huge amounts of wealth is horded, there’s a problem of liquidity. All of that wealth is idle. It’s not circulating and there becomes a danger of economic collapse. Therefore more money has to enter the system, either through government spending or commercial banks making loans.
Horded money is also money that isn’t going back to banks to repay the lending. So the amount of money in existence goes up, driving the value of that money down. This is inflation. One dollar can no longer buy as much as it used to as it’s value has gone down.
So, billionaires cause:
- Large amounts of commercial debt to inject replacement money into the economy. That is, personal debt or corporate debt.
- Inflation caused by that cash injection
Sound familiar?
Now a government could choose to raise its spending so that it injects the required money into its economy, rather commercial banks doing it. The advantage of that is that they can balance that with raised taxes, so inflation doesn’t get out of control. They can also choose who to tax and protect areas of the economy.
Most governments don’t see it this way, arguing that they can only spend what they take in taxes (The “government spending is like a household budget” argument). This has been false ever since they all came off the gold standard. They can spend what they want and they can tax what they want. The difference will drive inflation, so has to be kept reasonable, but if they don’t spend enough the commercial banks take over and will absolutely drive inflation.
I have read about these ideas about money being created through loans before, but also read contradictory ideas.
Since you seem to know a lot about the subject, would you happen to know of materials where I can learn more about the topic?
Then the plebs reach for the scythes and the machetes.
That’s why the billionaires steal as much money as they can, but stop short of making a critical mass of people desperately poor: they keep most people poor enough that they try to fight for what little they have left, and between themselves for the scraps, instead of uniting and rising up against the kleptocrats who engineer their poverty.
The billionaires are so out of touch that they have no idea how desperate the masses are becoming.
We’re slowly getting to the point where they’re get too greedy and moving past that critical mass point. I think Trumps presidency really turbo charged the idiocy.
A lot of rich fucks are starting to feel the danger though:
Depends on how you look at it. Technically, it’ll never happen. The megacorps still need employees to do some tasks. They’ll still have some pocket money.
OTOH, you could say that it’s already happened. The plebs are broke, the middle class is basically gone, and the tax structure can’t support everything that the government wants to do. Eventually, borrowing runs out, and we get a crisis that makes the current economic troubles look mild.
I don’t relish this path.
The “plebs” will develop a new currency of their own. And by this I basically mean anything from bottle caps to IOU notes etc. Monopoly money, whatever. Arguably they could use something actually valuable too but using an IOU-type thing kinda secures it against theft. Point is that it starts with small communities with some degree of trust of course. Alternatively, trade work for food and goods - but we’re primed to use money so I think we’re likely to just create a new currency since we already know it’s simpler to just trade 5 bottle caps for a carrot than it is to wash dishes for… oh i dunno, 3 carrots or whatever.
This kinda is what we should be getting to do anyway at this point. The 1% should be regarded as a force of nature. You can’t win against them anymore you can win against a volcano. Best you can do is work around them (instead of trying to beat them at their own game which they are constantly rigging in their favor anyway).
Money itself only has as much value as we give it.
That’s crypto. Non governmental currency.
that’s the wet dream, fictional version of crypto.
that’s the idea that made me excited about crypto 15 years ago. (stupid young 31 old me 👶 )
The economy collapses and you get a revolution, mass emigration, and/or other major societal upheavals – probably as soon as a lot of people start going hungry…
There is only 9 meals between man and revolution
It’s not in the billionaire’s interest for us plebs to have no money at all. A lot of their interests are funded by us. Paying for power, food, iPhones, clothes, cars, holidays etc. So if they have it all and we have none, the economy will collapse, people will barter with vape juice and booze, and the billionaires will realize they cannot eat money.
When the economy collapses the question of who will pay taxes is a secondary problem. The primary one will be to rebuild the state and a new currency and then they’ll look at the tax code.
You are presuming that the economic-configuration would be the same…
That isn’t correct.
The Deep South’s slaves weren’t allowed any economic-autonomy, were they?
We’d be mere-property. mere-slaves, no rights, & just mowing-us-down-with-bullets if we protested, if it got far enough.
You know, the way communist dictators mow-down their own farmers/food-producers ( Stalin ), or their own intelligentsia ( Mao ), or the way fascist dictators mow-down the woke.
Most currence is mere-leverage, & with that-fake an economy, they can certainly come-up-with something that locks us out.
Trumpcoin, e.g: either you use trumpcoin XOR you’re ICE’d, if you see what I mean…
If they have to manufacture criminality, in order to “justify” some more “enforcement”, well, for bullies, that’s called entertainment, right?
the economic-phase/paradigm we’re currently-in is only 1 phase of many.
The barter-system the Indigenous peoples ( who hadn’t come-up-with a currency of any kind ) works, for low-intensity economies…
the “economy” that functioned in the nazi concentration-camps ( people traded for pieces-of-paper, or cigarettes, etc ), or in prisons, is an economy…
Underground-economy’s likely to be present in nearly-all economies, especially the ones rooted in class-based-validity…
( in the academic-class-system associating-with-an-important-name is a kind of “currency” )
The intent is total-segregation-of-privilege-&-power to them, from all-others.
Why should they care if the all-others part doesn’t work, or isn’t sustainable?
So long as it works until they die, … they won, right?
_ /\ _
This is where AI comes in too, a new hyper repressive economy will be much easier to enforce with killer robots that do whatever you tell them without question.
What you are describing sounds an awful lot like collapse to me. Your slavery South comparison is missing that a lot of what they produced was exported to places where at least officially slavery was banned. So that model is propped up in one location by areas with purchasing power from the general public elsewhere. The thought experiment was what if everywhere was the slavery South, in which case the economy will no longer be sustainable.
Money is an abstraction for real things thst have either been stolen already or cannot be.
