[omnimike]

Money only gets you things when you spend it. Real power is how much money you have to spend, not the market cap of the companies you own. There’s a tired meme that billionaires are somehow more powerful than the politicians in charge of all the money.

[spacemadness]

Why did I expect anything other than HN defending billionaires when reading the comments. In the most naive way at that. As if billionaires aren’t influencing policy directly.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

Here[0] is a recent story of Texas billionaires who can more or less can pick the representatives they want

  Hours before the Texas House overwhelmingly voted to impeach Ken Paxton in May, a well-funded supporter of the attorney general issued a threat to his fellow Republicans.

  A vote to impeach Paxton, Jonathan Stickland wrote on Twitter, “is a decision to have a primary.”

  “Wait till you see my PAC budget,” he later added.

  Stickland is the leader of Defend Texas Liberty, a political action committee that has donated millions    of dollars to far-right candidates in the state. It is a key part of the constellation of political campaigns, institutions and dark-money groups that a trio of West Texas oil tycoons — Tim Dunn and brothers Farris and Dan Wilks — have pumped small fortunes into as part of a long-term crusade to push Texas to the extreme right.

[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2023/07/24/ken-paxton-impeachme...

[omnimike]

Sorry, you misunderstand. I’m not defending billionaires, I’m condemning politicians.

Politicians and policy should not be for sale in the first place. The fact that they are means, yes, rich people have more power to control policy, but the solution isn’t to ban rich people from getting rich. We need to ban money from influencing policy. Instead, the Supreme Court decided that money is speech and political corruption is protected by the first amendment. We need to undo that.

The brain dead part are the people (apparently common on hacker news) who think that stopping people getting rich is a better solution than, for eg., campaign spending limits.