@m A society without billionaires won't necessarily solve every big problem we have.

But a society with billionaires effectively prevents them from being solved.

@m could you please elaborate and be concrete?

This sounds pretty much vague, generic, without clear problem statement.

(sincerely asking out of curiosity)

@kravemir @m It's a glib social media toot, so there's that.

I think the biggest problems currently facing humans (specifically in the general region I call home; there are others elsewhere) are hollowing of democratic society, and the climate disaster. In any society where money can be used to buy influence (which is effectively any society that has money at all - the buying of influence can range from running influence campaigns, to outright trying to buy an election, to buying a major medium like eg. what Musk did with Twitter), billionaires are almost definitionally an anti-democratic force: They have enormously more power than any other individual, but they have no democratic mandate behind that power. They can (and often do) make decisions that have huge impacts on many other people's lives, with the affected people having zero influence - this is *the opposite* of democratic governance, and people subjected to seemingly random whims of billionaires understandably become disillusioned in democratic norms. (This is one, but not the only, cause of the rise of modern fascism.)

Billionaires generally lead disproportionately energy- (and emissions-) intensive lives - by 2024, the emissions caused by a single billionaire in 90 minutes was about equal to the lifetime emissions of an average person (see oxfam.org/en/press-releases/bi…). Many of them have fortunes directly tied up in the fossil fuel economy (or in activities that are powered by fossil fuels) and actively resist legislative action that tries to curb emissions. Furthermore, the enormous fortunes commanded by billionaires will *only* be used to combat said problems if a billionaire chooses to - which they often won't, because both are directly against their current financial interest. If all those resources were directly available for eg. climate change mitigation, decarbonization and economic aid for the global south (rather than eg. funding private jets, recreational space tourism and renting an entire city centre for a wedding), we'd all be in a lot less dire situation than we are, I think.

@m thanks for the elaborate reply.

However, basically it boils to two core problems:

- power being in wrong hangs (who doesn't (need to) care),
- wealth and consumption unevenly distributed (to the point of wasteful vanity by very privileged people).

This is present in capitalism. However, I don't think, or at least not persuaded that any (sustainable) political system is immune to these issues.

I maybe reply more later. This is interesting topic, food for though.

@kravemir @m Those problems have been present in every political system ever practiced, and I'm not sure they can ever be *eliminated* - this is my main beef with "utopian" schools of left-wing politics, in fact. Even in an anarchist commune, you'd very likely see informal power (and luxury excess) accruing to the most charismatic anarchists. You have to build specific mechanisms to mitigate these problems, and pretending they don't exist is an effective way to make sure they don't get mitigated.

(I think anyone who has spent significant time in an actual anarchist activist community has probably seen a variation of this play out. I certainly have. "We don't have any leader, and we all agree exactly who our leader isn't!", to riff off Terry Pratchett.)

But I do think they can be substantially reduced (and yes, capitalism is an obstacle to that). At present, a lower-hanging fruit for doing this (lower-hanging than The Glorious Revolution That Fixes Everything, at least) would be some form of income or wealth cap that effectively makes it impossible for any individual to become a billionaire.

The level of wealth and income inequality in the United States today surpasses the then-absurd extremes of the Gilded Age of a century ago. Sure, unevan distribution happens, but this particular neoliberal political system effects a wealth pump upwards into the hands of a very few individuals at an unprecedented rate and scale that cannot be sustained. Billionaires are a visible symptom of the pathology. According to Peter Turchin, this wealth pump will almost surely result in a catastrophe of some kind that could end up being bloody; even if you don't believe Turchin's theories, it'll certainly result in unacceptable mass immiseration (and arguably already has). A smarter system would employ government power and resources to distribute wealth more evenly and fairly, something we used to do in the United States but stopped doing from the 1970s onward.

As for power being in the wrong hands, there are no right hands for power to be in. There are no special anointed ones who are immune to the corrupting influence of power. Power too should be distributed, to reduce this risk.