On Fri, Nov 08, 2019 at 06:11:40PM -0800, Razer wrote:
"Nobody should have a billion dollars, and those who do are something other than fully human."
“Money as a measure of value,” Marx tells us in Capital, “is the necessary form of appearance of the measure of value which is immanent in commodities, namely labour-time.” Money, then, is for Marx a form of sedimented time. But if this is true, then having one billion dollars (or pounds, or whatever) takes one completely beyond all human time.
One billion dollars is far, far more money than anyone could realistically spend, on their needs, within the span of a human lifetime. If you have one billion dollars, you are completely shielded from all ordinary human concerns: Never again will you know hunger, or lack shelter, or suffer from inadequate medical care. Of course, there may very well be lots of comfortable, middle-class people who will also be lucky enough to never know those wants again, but the difference is that the billionaire is isolated even from the possibility of experiencing those wants. They are like the Christian who has been saved from despair in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death, who is eliminating the possibility of despair at every moment. If you have in your possession one billion dollars, then almost literally anything you desire — anything anyone might possibly conceive of desiring — can be yours, just as soon as you happen to desire it. But with no real friction between desire and reality, how does wanting even function? Can someone who lives like this even be said to know desire, anymore, at all?
And just as nobody can spend a billion dollars in their lifetime, nobody can earn it either. People have taken to saying “every billionaire is a policy failure”, because that sort of money makes nakedly obvious the truth Marx tells us about all wealth accumulated under capitalism: that it’s part of a process that is only possible because the people who own the means of production are, effectively, stealing it from their employees,"
https://theoutline.com/post/8187/billionaires-are-not-people/ Reasons why you should kill a rich pig as soon as possible >>
Ironically, although non-ironically also, your position is perfectly aligned with Juan's. When turmoil strikes, the left eats its own. When turmoil strikes, it becomes politically correct, hallowed even, to let loose envy and jealousy, to decry the "wealth" of others and to blame those who collect money of any sort as evil and "to be blamed for all our ills". From the linked article above is the classic envy programming, with the end goal of "murder and mayhem on the streets": Two students purportedly overheard in a cafe, talking about someone having a billion dollars: "People actually have that amount, like that amount of currency — in money? And they’re just allowed to sort of... have it?" To portray such unthinking, such envy, such base human nature, to play on this in service of The Almighty Democratic Party etc etc, is absolutely, utterly despicable! Jordan Peterson is absolutely right about this particular point (notwithstanding his personal failings). This line of thinking, this "logic" if we can call it that for a moment, is an upholding of base human natures which ought be acknowledged and handled, not let loose as some "unspoken conspiracy, get out your torches and pitchforks now!" We don't handle the "problem of guns" by banning guns. And despite London Mayer Khan's limp brain and aural effluence to the contrary, we don't handle "the problem of knives" by banning knives. In EXACTLY the same way, we don't handle the problem of selfish or "insufficiently good" billionaires, by a Marxist revolution murdering every wealthy and intellectual human in sight. This call (as implied/ espoused in the above linked article) is absolutely pathetic! Marxos is perfectly on topic where he persistently reminds us of the Holodomor and its fundamental causes, where "wealthy" farmers who owned a cow (literally one cow), were murdered for their evil gotten "wealth", and those greedy mothers who collected the remnant grains left over after mechanised harvesting, were also murdered for their "thievery". "When we leave unchecked 'our' base human nature, we support bringing forth evil into our world." This endless call to "kill all the BAD people" is the Marxist Pol Pot regime reborn, nothing but Stalin's gulags in new robes. We HAVE to find a different way to transition between hierarchies other than widespread bloodshed, because as soon as the blood of one "bad oligarch" is justified, we co-incidently/ commensurately, justify our own murder; and we well know that in that case, murder, of millions of humans, will ultimately prevail. There's an old old saying "live by the sword, die by the sword". There is a flip side to every coin. Are we even capable of finding another way?