The fact that there are billionaires is the sign that they’re not being taxed enough.
Massive infrastructure / R&D projects like a space race is actually one of the more productive ways that billionaires could use their money.
Either not taxed enough or there’s almost no competition in the thing they do. And in a healthy free market, there should definitely be competition in a field that nets that much profits. The logical conclusion is that something is actively preventing the competition.
In a free market, competition has end results. Buisnes don’t just keep competing with one another ad infinitum. One of them eventually cant keep up and closes shop. It’s competitors expand into the space it previously filled. This process repeats until you have fewer and fewer firms that account for more and more of their sector of the economy. New business do not have resources to eke out space in an already filled niche.
Under a long enough time frame, a free market creates less competition.
It’s not a policy failure at all. It’s a systemic feature. Capitalism is dog eat dog until only one dog remains. If you want to fix it you need a new economic system.
If you want to fix it you need a new economic system.
We could try actually free markets with no benefits to anyone. By benefits here I mean tax breaks, government contracts and subsidies for companies.
Hereeee we areeeee…
I think capitalism can work depending on two things
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The state must discipline and tax the capitalists constantly.
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There is a competing system that capitalism has to outperform.
No, what actually ends up happening is the capitalists constantly pressure and influence the state to not tax them and not discipline them. It’s hard for the state to say “no” to that kind of money.
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If you’ve got money to waste on doing the same space shots that they’ve been doing for the last 65 years, just with newer technology, all while people in America are hungry, and suffering from lack of health care, then we should take away everything they own, and redistribute it to the people. We can even name each distribution after the benefactor. First we’ll have the Musk distribution, then the Bezos, distribution, then the Ellison distribution, etc.
And their companies, primarily created and made profitable by government grants and tax breaks, belong to the American people, and they should be confiscated, and operated for the profit benefit of the American people. To make it fair, the billionaire, and his descendents, will always have an entry level job available, at entry level wages, but they will be treated like any other employees, and can be fired without rehiring privileges. They aren’t entitled to any special treatment, other than a guaranteed job. After that, they have to behave themselves.
Musk does not do a space race. Not on his money, at least.
Instead, he does it on US taxpayer money, with billion-dollar contracts to get people to Mars by 2025 and other timelines like that. The government employee who approved one of the largest contracts to SpaceX quickly quit working for the government and now works… at SpaceX.
So you tell me, is Elon in a space race, or are the US taxpayers in a race to fund the billionaire?
Honestly, the space race part of it isn’t concerning to me at all. The fact that it’s between billionaire-backed companies is several policy failures, though.
NASA has traditionally relied heavily on defense/space contractors. The space shuttle was built by Rockwell International (which was eventually acquired by Boeing).
The Saturn V rocket that took people to the moon was manufactured by Boeing, Douglas (which became part of McDonnell Douglas, which was acquired by Boeing), and North American (which got acquired by Rockwell, which was acquired by Boeing).
But through consolidation in the American aerospace industry, the bloated behemoth that is modern Boeing has serious issues holding it back. And so the rise of new competition against Boeing is generally a good thing!
Except the only companies that were started up to compete with Boeing were funded largely as ego projects by billionaires who made so much money in other fields that they have excess billions to throw around.
NASA’s new approach to contracting is fine, too: basically promising prizes to companies that hit milestones, which put the risk (and potential reward) on the private companies. Then, once SpaceX did demonstrate feasibility, NASA switched to fixed price contracts for a lot of the programs and did save a ton of money compared to previous cost-plus contract pricing. It’s unclear whether other space companies can deliver services at prices competitive with SpaceX, but their attempts at least force SpaceX to bid lower prices.
Ideally, we would’ve retained a competitive aerospace industry in the past few decades, and a bunch of companies would be competing with each other to continue delivering space services to NASA and other space agencies (and private sector customers that might want satellite stuff). And these companies would be big corporate entities where the major shareholders aren’t exactly household names (like Boeing today).
The way Bezos and Musk became billionaires would be a problem even if they didn’t try to go to space. The way they’re trying to go to space doesn’t really move the needle much, in my opinion.
Seize their assets, fund NASA.
That’s how you actually make America great.
National space programs suck. We need a united international space push. Something overseen by… Let’s call it the Union Aerospace Corporation. When earth science and tech is combined who knows what they can do on distant research bases set up in places like Mars. Maybe even open portals to transfer matter and energy across vast distances.
You would think more people on Lemmy would recognize a Doom reference. I’ve never played any Doom game but that was enough for me to go “That’s Doom right?” and confirm with a quick search
Um, no.
$999,999,999 is just fine though!
Stop focusing on an arbitrary figure and start focusing on a real progressive income tax with no loopholes or workarounds.
“Billionaire” is a sound bite to focus attention. Publicizing “An improved progressive taxation rate” isn’t as marketable.
I’ve played fallout for more than 2 decades. How the fuck are we diving face first into every sci-fi dystopia at the same time? Like, there’s hints of star wars, dune, fallout, 1984, the outer worlds, hunger games, Idiocracy etc. I’m hoping cyberpunk 2077 shows up and gives a sliver of a chance.
The main reason is because people are stupid and get taken advantage of accordingly.
Every time you saw a moron say “they’re a business and they need to make money!” you saw someone lowering their standards to make a rich person richer.
Because those things were based on the real world and we are very bad at learning from the ever-growing list of mistakes we can’t stop making.
Cyberpunk 2077 is not a good world and does not have a good ending. That world is a horrid, capitalist dystopia. Maybe you should watch Edgerunners if you still can’t figure it out from the game.
The point was that as bad as cyberpunk’s future is, I’m fairly certain ours will be worse in 52 years. At least in their timeline there’s a resistance.
I suppose so? But there are things we can do right now that give us far more than a sliver of a chance. Unfortunately those things are “boring” and not as fashionable, like doing actual research and trusting real experts so it’s rough out there.
The existence of an “AI race” between China and the U.S., where government contracted billionaires in both countries insist that citizens accepting authoritarian surveillance, is just a patriotic duty necessary to win that race, is a policy failure.
Especially when investigative journalism uncovers in 2025 that the U.S./Silicon Valley sold China the mass surveillance system that has allegedly given them such an upper hand in this imaginary race.
2019: Trump CTO Addresses AI, Facial Recognition, Immigration, Tech Infrastructure, and More
Q:"Maintaining U.S. leadership in AI might have costs in terms of individuals and society. What costs should individuals and society bear to maintain leadership?”
A:“I don’t view the world that way. Our companies big and small do not hesitate to talk about the values that underpin their technology. [That is] markedly different from the way our adversaries think. The alternatives are so dire [that we] need to push efforts to bake the values that we hold dear into this technology.”…“A patchwork of regulation of technology is not beneficial for the country. We want to avoid that. Facial recognition has important roles—for example, finding lost or displaced children. There are use cases, but they need to be underpinned by values.”
The baked in “values” of the men telling you not to worry about regulations:
2025: Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race
90% should be the minimum after 1 million a year
I’d go for 99% after 5 bil
I’d go for 200% after 5 bil, because their wealth needs to be lowered.
Log tax rate.
There should be a wealth cap much lower than that. Perhaps 10 mil. Enough to live comfortably for life but not enought to have enormous power over politics.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist at all
nor that they give a rat’s ass about sustainability, humanity, earth etc like some of them like Elon claims
It’s not a policy failure; it’s a feature of the system. We need a different system that doesn’t allow the existence of billionaires to begin with
I think we just need to send them into space… Forcibly. Permanently.
That’s what they want. We can’t eat the rich if we can’t reach the rich.
They’ve been allowed to game the system to hoard way more wealth than any single person should have been able to. They were supposed to pay their employees more, charge less to their customers or if all fails pay more taxes. But they didn’t do any of that.
If this was a video game that would be called an “exploit that breaks the gameplay experience for everyone else” and it would have been solved in a patch. But to remain in the same analogy, they are buddies with the game developers so they’re allowed to do anything they want. The only difference is that everyone in the country is forced to play this broken game as it is.
Arent they also using public money for this mainly?
Yup. Public contracts, grants, and subsidies that could be funding federal agencies are being pocketed by these sex pests.
Public contracts are not the same things as grants and subsidies. They are contracts for services to be rendered, and SpaceX quite frankly won them handily by being fundamentally better and cheaper then the competition.
And most of their funding has come from private investment, and by building and running the Falcon 9 which is by far the cheapest and most reliable way for anyone to get stuff into space at the moment.
You can hate Musk without being blind to the fact that SpaceX is legitimately doing things no one has ever done before with rocketry. The SLS is a traditional rocket that was designed by NASA and built by contractors and it literally costs orders of magnitude more to fly, has never actually flown yet, and at most could fly twice a year. Public ownership is not a magic bullet that makes everything instantly better.
