patrick.net

Our news is designed to divide us against each other, wildly exaggerating racism, sexism, or whatever it takes to not talk about the harm billionaires do. If we are divided, or at least distracted, then we are not talking about the criminal billionaires and their defeat of democracy.

Sure, there are fawning fellating articles that go on and on about how generous billionaires are when funding programs that divide us further so we can't unify against them, but nowhere ever in the press will you find an article which flat-out states the truth that the billionaires are the problem, and in no way the solution.

This is why the news is nothing but deliberate divisiveness. It would be fun to catch the billionaires pulling the strings of the media, telling the nominal "editors" that divisive stories get top billing every night. Their slimy trail can't be that well hidden because it's all day every day in all the mainstream media.

And Americans in particular do not want to hear the nasty fact that wealth at that level is in no way a good thing for the country or for 99.9998% of its residents (literally). The American national religion worships billionaires as examples of what we should all want to be. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Fuck the little people. "Taxes are for the little people." The US tax system is nuts. Why are capital gains taxed at a lower rate than income from actual work?

Who wants to hear about the lifestyles of the two hundred million people between the coasts impoverished by Bezos, who has pretty much wiped out US retail and US manufacturing by selling us all cheap shit from China? Or about how the 5 billionaires of the Walton family killed Main Street with Walmart, also selling cheap shit from China? Or about how Bill Gates set the computer industry back decades by selectively murdering the competition by giving away their products until they died? Or how Larry and Sergei at Google and Mark at Facebook wiped out all real journalism by wiping out the ads that supported it, and now manipulate our elections, spy on us, and sell that data to the highest bidder, or to the government. Those stories are not as much fun as hagiographies. They do not get printed.

Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett collectively have more wealth than the bottom 160 million Americans.

Three people.

Three.

They are all Democrats.

Behind every billionaire is a long trail of bodies, ruined small businesses, ruined lives, and extreme political corruption. It was not "hard work". Nobody ever did enough work to earn a billion dollars themselves.

It would be so fucking justified to limit maximum wealth per person to one billion dollars, and the economy would surge as smaller competitors would finally have a chance. All of us would be far better off, except for the 800 US billionaires.

And don't bother calling me a communist. I'm all for getting rich, rich enough to retire nicely, but a billion? "Behind every great fortune is an equally great crime."



Billionaires made an extra $600 billion or so from the pandemic by wiping out small businesses.

Cui bono?, in English "to whom is it a benefit?", is a Latin phrase about identifying crime suspects. It expresses the view that crimes are often committed to benefit their perpetrators, especially financially.

Here's my tax plan:
0% wealth tax on wealth less than $100M.
10% wealth tax annually on wealth between $100M and $200M
20% wealth tax annually on wealth between $200M and $300M
....
100% wealth tax annually on wealth over $1B

This tax plan would affect only the 5,000 Americans with assets of more than $100M.

So there would be a limit on how rich you can get in America: one billion dollars in assets. After that level, billionaires stop hogging everything and let others have a chance too. Does anyone really need more than a billion? Why? Certainly nobody ever earned that much money through their own efforts. At that level, it's all monopolies preventing the free market from working. If you like free markets, you can't like billionaires. They are opposites.

The biggest bonus: if we keep the limit at one billion dollars, the rich will have a huge incentive to keep inflation at zero. So the saving of the rest of us would be preserved against confiscation by the Fed's printing press.