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Rising inequality is turning US into an autocratic state, billionaire warns
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
285 points (98.6% liked)
politics
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Most Billionaires didn't get that way by being stupid and will recognize that this is a cascade failure scenario.
Cant be on top if the whole Jenga tower gets kicked over.
Then why didn't they stop building their dragon hoards back before a decent chunk of society started calling for their heads?
Game theory, pure and simple. At its core, it is nothing more than the mathematical codification of self-interest. Within capitalism, it becomes one of the most powerful tools for justifying and even glorifying selfishness and greed. By reducing human interaction to competitive strategies designed to maximize personal gain, it frames cooperation, empathy, or long-term collective well-being as irrational or inefficient. The result is a system where decisions that harm the many can be rationalized as “optimal” so long as they benefit the few who hold power and wealth.
Most people recognize the absurdity of this: we are essentially allowing the worst actors to dictate outcomes for everyone else. And all of it is wrapped in the veneer of mathematical inevitability, as though greed were a natural law instead of a human choice.
it's a collective-action problem. everybody needs to act, but the first one to do so has a relative disadvantage to those who don't, so nobody wants to be the first.
that's why we need state-regulated wealth taxes. if everybody pays them at the same time, nobody loses out relatively speaking, and the system continues to work for everybody.
Dragon hoard doesn’t really describe what it’s like.
It’s more like going in to work every day, like everybody else at the office, sitting in meetings all day, and then watching the stock price shoot up until one day your net worth crosses 1,000,000,000.
It’s like getting a high score in a video game. There’s no mountain of cash in some warehouse. It’s just a number on a screen.
You seem like you're doing your best to downplay all the amoral decisions that exploit millions of people in your description of a passive income generating a billion dollars. No one generates a billion dollars passively and no one does it without ignoring a significant amount of suffering along the way.
Do you have an example of a particular billionaire you’d like to discuss?
My example would be Google. Founded in 1998, IPO in 2004. That’s essentially when Sergey Brin became a billionaire.
We can all point to bad things Google has done over the years but I’m having a hard time finding any of them that occurred before 2004. Who are the millions of people that Sergey Brin exploited between 1998 and 2004?
Note that Google had only 2500 employees in 2004 and almost all of them became millionaires on the day of the IPO.
It’s not just a French Revolution style scenario they have to worry about. Look at what has happened to some Russian billionaires. Not so fun enjoying the playboy lifestyle when you’re afraid to drink tea or get anywhere near an open window.
Well said. It is very much like a Jenga tower loses support as people just pick more and more from it to grow a company with no thought given to the destruction it causes. What a fantastic analogy!
Uhh, yes they can. They are billionaires.
Billionaires still bleed and die
wont be billionaire for long if nobody has money left for goods or services
I guess it's only a few highly visible billionaires who seem colossally stupid.
The smartest ones seem smart because they know when to shut up and when to disappear from public view. If Trump knew when to shut the fuck up, almost, if not, none of the felonies he has would have stuck.
The stupid ones are usually the ones who started with enough wealth, sociopathy and family connections to just fail upwards. Staying rich is rather easy past a certain degree of wealth.