We should take their money then. It helps us, and it doesn’t hurt the rich since they’ll just get it back and then we can take it again. Everybody wins.

So what you’re saying is taking money away from CEOs isn’t immoral because they’l just get it all back. Therefore there is no need for stealing from the rich to be illegal, right?

RIGHT?

As a Marxist I can think of a simple way to test this hypothesis.

Habits of rich that make them rich:

-Getting lucky

-Exploiting the labor of others

The fact that your zip code can better predict your future wealth than the amount of time you worked is not enough for these folks.

They’ll sooner start investigating magnetic anomalies in gated communities and attaching magnets to their temples

You could take all the CEO’s money they’ll just earn it back

I wish a cracker would put his money where his mouth is

Habits like “being born to rich parents”

Ask him if he owns a factory

no, they’re absolutely correct

poor person habit: sell your labour in order to live

rich person habit: own the means of production

try disproving that you dumbshit commies

Pure ideology. The right thing to point out here is that capitalists have a lot of material advantages that go way beyond the liquid balance in their bank account. The ability to access easy, virtually unlimited credit is probably the most relevant here. If we seized all of Elon Musk’s liquid assets ( ), he probably would be a centimillionaire again pretty quickly, because there are tons of entities–both institutional and individual–who would be more than happy to hand him free money because of who he is. If people are willing to hand you millions of dollars for free, give you preferential treatment as an investor, and generally bend over backwards to ingratiate themselves to you, it’s almost impossible not to end up super rich.

This is part of why “taxing the rich” is a bullshit lib non-solution to the ghoulish system we have now. The problems are structural, and a small number of people have privileged virtually unlimited access to the means of production. If you took away that access, most billionaires would fare significantly worse than ordinary people, because they don’t actually have any skills beyond exploiting their privileged access to capital.

Okay counter proposal: put rich people in a dome with no interaction with anyone else. No help, no working class culture, just a a big Truman Show dome with nothing but Trumans.

sure, if you take their money maybe. but if you take their capital, then it gets a little tough for them (they’d be scraping the bottom of the barrel for bullshit jobs just like the rest of us)

In fairness, I think there is one behaviour that helps you become a rich fuck, and that’s a psychopathic disregard for the welfare of all other humans. I’ve had opportunities to make more money in life if I were willing to just screw over others, but I couldn’t live with making weaponry, price gouging or otherwise wrecking the lives of fellow proles.

Nonetheless, lets take away all the money from all the rich fucks and give it a try, eh? It should be obvious to anyone that capitalism inherently causes capital to accumulate in select few hands either way, but it’d be a nice step one.

Things are the way they are because of the way they are.

We have already made such an experiment in 1917, and it had disproved this hypothesis.