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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1455 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 7, 2026

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I was talking to a Progressive friend on Friday and the left's favorite topic came up: Billionaires. Or more specifically how it is impossible to be an ethical billionaire. Obviously there are loads of moral axioms loaded into that statement and several different framings that can be used to identify that. I'm curious if you take the idea outside the obvious marxist definitional stance, and look at how the billionaires got their money. Can you have a billionaire who ethically got their money? If we grant things like selling merch made in third world sweatshops a la TSwift or not paying employees the fair "value" of there labor as unethical. Anyone have some ideas. I said Gabe Newell, owner of Steam and did not get a convincing counter-argument for that, even in a marxist theory frame. I wonder if there are others?

You could point to any country that has run into hyperinflation so that all of its citizens become billionaires+. Talk to them about Zimbabweans in 2008: they were all billionaires! You could even get your hands on one of those billion-dollar zimbabwean notes and pass it around as a kind of "ethical immunity totem" as you discuss the issue.

They love saying that slogan because they have trained themselves online into rhetorically browbeating anyone who even slightly disagrees. Purity testing is a part of progressive (communist) culture.

It is a last-gasp of marxist zero-sum class warfare. If they they let go of Marxism, they really might have little else to add to the conversation.

You could even get your hands on one of those billion-dollar zimbabwean notes and pass it around

This is actually amusing. not as a "immunity totem" but as a effigy. Give it to another friend so we can "publically" condemn them. Real abducto ad absurdium.

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