[gizmo]

You can -- to some extent -- combat right wing populism with left wing economic populism, but there are two key problems with this strategy:

1) the Democrat party hates economic populism. Bernie would have to hijack the party like Trump did. But where Trump has many allies in positions of power, Bernie has none.

2) the populist rhetoric that people like the most is false. Grocery prices aren't high because supermarkets suddenly got greedy. Worker exploitation isn't why billionaires exist.

I also don't think it's good strategy blame a minority group for all the problems in the country. Billionaires are not a protected minority obviously, but when you stoke anger against one group it can easily result in a different group getting unjustly targeted (Mexicans, trans people, etc). We don't need any more of that and politics of hate and resentment isn't the way forward.

[ImHereToVote]

The COVID years oversaw the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich in history.

[Seattle3503]

October 2023 impressed upon me how quickly "kill the rich" can take on an antisemetic tint and become "kill the rich, you know, the jews"

[int_19h]

Either billionaires really earn their pay, which implies that they are thousands of times more productive as a person than the rest of us - literally superheroes.

Or - if you accept this as the obvious bullshit that it is - then all that money is not a fair compensation for anything, but rather the consequence of being in a position of economic power that makes it possible to extract wealth from the economy in one way or another. How exactly said extraction is done is immaterial - if the wealth is unearned, it means that it was taken from someone else, since someone ultimately did the work necessary to create it.

[gizmo]

I'm not making an argument about fairness. It's clearly unfair. I also don't dispute that wealthy people benefit from exploitation, just like we all benefit from labor in low wage countries.

However, I do dispute that wealth extraction is the primary source of wealth for the wealthy. Just like an engineer can save 100k in monthly AWS charges with 15 minutes of optimization work a good capital allocator can transform pointless labor that produces little to no value into labor that benefits society. The optimization process is the same: the engineer saves clock cycles and the capital allocator saves labor hours.

Labor is necessary ingredient for wealth, but labor by itself produces nothing. That's why humanity has lived in mud huts for eons, despite working every waking hour.

[TimeBearingDown]

You seem focused on the labor theory of value, and sidestep completely the entire idea of investors, or the entrepreneurial function they serve.

Advocate for higher taxes if you wish, but acknowledge that economics are not a zero-sum game and propose an alternative to savvy investment, unless you simply want to foment division or to upend modern capitalism entirely.

[int_19h]

Economics are only not a zero-sum game to the extent physics permits it to be. No amount of financial wizardry can change the fact that, ultimately, it's the labor that produces all wealth on the planet. Investors in modern capitalism, for the most part, serve the function of parasites, so yes, it would be very nice to upend it entirely.