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I've been having some thoughts recently about the billionaires among us, some opinions, some takes even. My politics on this has evolved over time; at one point they were admirable titans of industry, then they were capitalist parasitic ticks, then they were a necessary part of the incentive structure that drives to economy, and now they are a bloated level of inefficiency preventing the market from functioning efficiently.
But over all this time, I've kinda synthesized a superstructure that I don't think is gonna change, that I think is not on the left right axis, but on another mysterious plane: I'm jealous of china. I think we're gonna have to steven universe meme one of these guys. I don't even really care who, and I don't care who does it. It could be Il Duce Trump, it could be General Secretary Mamdani, it could be some boring centrist whose name we don't know.
Anyone who imposes consequences on or limits the behaviors of the managing class would win my instant approval. This could just be because of my space autism getting triggered unimaginably by space-x getting fucking shackled to a corpse right before IPO/ Artemis being a big fucking waste of time and money* / Boeing doing boeing stuff, it could be the long 2008 hangover, it could be a thousand things.
I guess I'm just kinda over us deciding that once you reach a certain net worth, you are some sort of luminous being. You can go to pedo island and it's fine, you can do drugs that normies go to prison for an it's fine, you can fuck up critical national infrastructure and it's fine, you have infinite money when it's time to do what you want but somehow you have no money (or negative money!) when it's time to contribute to the public good.
I recall Luigi, and I recall the polling: people old enough to have been adults when a the post FDR wealth redistribution program was still around were very unfavorable; people who came into consciousness as the program was being fully unwound in the late 80s and 90s were split 50/50, and people who never experienced that social milieu were yelling "BASED BASED BASED!"
I really think that unless the uniparty plays it's cards right, the next realignment is not gonna be pretty for anyone. We need another FDR type to head that shit off like it's vanguardist communism in the 1930s, and at this point I don't think I care if they are left or right, they just need to be for the bottom and middle and even most of the top, and against the peak.
*Yes I know about pork. Pork can at least do something! highways can get build, parks are nice, and if we need to build bombs somewhere to it might as well be in bumfuck nowhere to give the nowhereians something to do other than meth.
While I definitely understand the sentiment, other people have already commented on the reality of the situation.
I think the biggest thing that actually makes the whole system more asymmetric is globalized finance for fungible assets, like cash, bitcoin, heavily traded stock options. For non-fungible assets like buildings, real estate or physical assets it's a bit more questionable.
The rich cannot be functionally governed in 2026. The only real currency at that level is power, and money buys a decent amount of it. What can you do against someone rich and powerful? They'd move. They'd pack up their bags and go somewhere their money is more accepted; capital, like armies and water, follows the path of least resistance. You can't tax them, even if you could figure out a way to enforce labyrinthian tax laws and close loopholes you'd better keep an army of lawyers on retainer and a heavily armed IRS, and doing so has its own perverse incentives on those who dodge them by technicalities. They'd move. They'd buy islands, they'd pay off foreign governments, they'd set up shop elsewhere and continue their business. And that's just talking about individuals, not the networks of vast multinational corporations that can be easily moved. The Fed could make a lot of noise publicly about declaring Elon persona non grata tomorrow; it wouldn't change much for him unless they actually bag him a la Jack Ma, and as long as wallets are going to get lighter even the people responsible for bagging him will #resist.
Vigilante actions like Luigi's seem more appealing partly because a large section of society understands that there is no recourse under the rule of the state or immune system for handling functionally unaccountable parasites. In many cases the parasites are the system.
My opinion on Musk has changed a lot over the years. I thought for ages he was a grifter who found the hack of selling the government and his investors big ideas that allowed him to functionally fund his moonshots forever because they make people feel good. Then it seemed like maybe he had an eye for people, and then SpaceX became the obvious leader in the space arena (although comparing them to NASA at this point is like comparing a functional human being to one with fifty self-inflicted concussions). But at least he's trying to do something with his money that isn't "I want to own all the water". I respect a rich crank who wants to use his resources to turn people into dinosaurs way more than someone who wants to use it to simply increase his own share of the pie.
Elon Musk paid $11 billion in one year in Federal taxes. Have you even paid so much as $11 million in total?
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