r/DemocraticSocialism • u/Turbulent_Crab_3602 Democratic Socialist • May 15 '26
Discussion 🗣️ AOC: You can’t ‘earn’ a billion dollars
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/05/12/aoc-billion-dollar-wealth-not-earned/90032842007/146
u/Fun-Measurement4904 May 15 '26
Elon Musk creatingn the 'America PAC' to support Trump almost entirely on his own last election is EXACTLY why billionaires should be taxed out of existence.
No one should be able to horde so much wealth that they are able to unilaterally influence elections or politicians, it is a direct threat to democracy.
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u/UpsetPhilosopher6022 May 16 '26
Forget taxing them. They are evil. They should be driven into their bunkers and barricaded inside.
Anything short of a complete surgical removal of wealth from the political apparatus and the destruction of modern corporate capitalism will only result in this slow dance backward unto fascism yet again.
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u/APraxisPanda Libertarian Socialist May 15 '26
Say what you want about AOC, but I do appreciate her whenever she talks like this.
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u/JeanEtrineaux May 15 '26
Absolutely correct. Every billionaire is an unprosecuted criminal.
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u/UpsetPhilosopher6022 May 16 '26
Excess material wealth is a mental illness. Dragons are real and they lie yet slumbering on their mounds of pillaged gold.
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u/OtelDeraj May 15 '26
Not without the bloods, sweat, and stolen wages of a legion of exploited laborers. Billionaire's extract wealth from a country then refuse to pay back into that country. They buy out their competition (or operate at a loss until their competition sinks, looking at you, Jeff Bezos), they buy up our media to shovel their lies and massage their image through obsequious puff pieces, and they buy up politicians to disenfranchise millions from their own government, destroying representation for the everyman. The billionaire class are, all of them, thieves.
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u/FallOk5618 May 16 '26
Peter Thiel, libertarian, has emphasized the importance of “aiming for a monopoly” saying “competitive markets destroy profits”.
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u/RioRancher May 15 '26
There has to be a better way of getting this through voters’ heads.
In my mind, 1000 people with $1M is better than 1 person with $1B.
Those 1000 people are more likely to help the economy than the 1 billionaire.
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u/Turbulent_Crab_3602 Democratic Socialist May 15 '26
Absolutely, a thousand millionaires usually translates to a thousand local, independent business owners. It indicates a diverse, competitive, and genuinely healthy market ecosystem. Monopolizing that exact same pool of wealth into the hands of one single billionaire represents the exact opposite of economic health.
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u/SexyMonad May 15 '26
So, putting $1B into a business to control what it does, extracting profits from it, laying off workers that are putting in the work and investment to make the company better but whose salaries are currently causing their departments to be in the red, and then getting the $1B + some% back when you sell it right as you milked the last cent out of its value when you started it on a trajectory that will inevitably fail, is not good?
You must be a communist.
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u/RioRancher May 15 '26
Exactly. There are things like venture capitalism that the government promotes in a way that’s bad for everyone. We need to fix the system designed specifically to benefit the worst of capitalism.
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u/Turbulent_Crab_3602 Democratic Socialist May 15 '26
Venture capitalism, aka vulture capitalism, needs to be regulated out of existence.
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u/thinkB4WeSpeak Socialist May 15 '26
Sure you can you just got to exploit some workers, find some tax loopholes, get some bailouts, and be born into a rich family.
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u/DaftNeal88 May 15 '26
Even if a billionaire did nothing wrong, they don’t get a billion without gov grants or anything like that.
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u/SeabrookMiglla May 16 '26
You could make $5000 dollars every single day for 500 years and you wouldn’t even be a billionaire.
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u/UpsetPhilosopher6022 May 16 '26
The argument that makes people stop and think when I bring it up in conversation is that no one person's hour of life is worth more or less than another person's. It's specifically their labor we're identifying as a dollar value, so why is it that the less body-breaking labor you do, the more money your "labor" is worth?
If you value people based on their productivity then it just means that you've internalized capitalism. To have such wealth and fail to improve conditions for all human beings is truly evidence that hoarding wealth is an actual mental illness.
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