Lessons I Have Learned From Billionaires.

[byronius]

1) We should, as a species, forbid the accumulation of wealth. It's bad for everyone and everything.
2) We should, as a species, move away from monetary capitalism. It's bad for everyone and everything.
3) Obsession with the accumulation of wealth is a sociopathic disease. It should be treated.
4) Billionaires abhor a democracy of well-educated citizens as if it is their antithesis.
5) Billionaires and their dependents are generally more foolish, incompetent, and un-self-aware than average citizens. Wealth is a debilitating force.

Before we colonize the solar system and move out, we should fix this problem. Clearly, the average billionaire believes in a fully primal/tribal caste-system. Left untreated, they will always attempt to resurrect some form of human slavery using modern technology and new paradigms to define it as not-slavery. They cannot help themselves.

They need our help. They are trapped in a fruitless and unworthy life.

One or two hundred years from now, these times will be viewed much as we view the 1400's. Billionaires are brutish, feral primates exploiting every weakness of civil government in order to pursue Totalitarianist Dystopia. Oligarchy and plutocracy are mere stepping stones on the way to what they each truly dream of: absolute and unquestioned control of the minds and destinies of every living creature. Of course, there can be only One -- but that contest must never be permitted to be played, not with emerging technologies (such as artificial intelligence) that could be used to circumvent the standard impossibilities that have always plagued their efforts in the past.

We must help them. They need our help. They are literally begging for our help. If we want to prosper and survive to spread out among the stars, we should help them now.

How? We should, as a species, forbid the accumulation of wealth.

[Brigid]

1. What I have learned from billionaires:

Money doesn't talk. It shouts -- so loudly it drowns out every other sound.

[Glorfindel]

2. I would be delighted to help them

Perhaps hasten them on their way "to spread out among the stars."

[Warpy]

3. The children suffer the most

They're pretty much divorced from their parents, receiving the bulk of their care from nannies and then it's off to boarding school to prep them for college. Heavy drug use is epidemic among the offspring of the obscenely wealthy, as are depression and other disorders.

I've learned that too much money magnifies your own character flaws and wrecks your life. When there's nothing left to save up for, there's nothing left to look forward to in order to try to rill that empty spot inside you. So you accumulate more, hoping the money will do it. It never does.

Hoarding money is as much a disease as hoarding garbage and animals is.

The mechanism to prevent it is progressive taxation, confiscatory at the top. That way, the plutocracy can have bragging rights over the numbers but not be able to use any of it to buy governments and oppress the people working for them.