https://thisecommercelife.com/blogs/comics/the-day-all-billionaires-died
I’m sure it’s annoying for some to click offsite, but it’s 20 panels long. IMO worth the read, though!
too fucking bad
My friends always say “You can’t just kill them. There will be someone to take their place.” The obvious response is kill them too. Eventually, people will stop being so eager to take their place!
Though as the comic says, there’s always going to be assholes. Limiting how much power they have would be great.
I am currently running a game of Vampire predicated on “what if you all just… took out the ultra rich?”. It has been satisfying.
There’s what, roughly 4000 billionaires? Them going all at once, and anyone who crosses the line going too, would put quite the damper on the pursuit of wealth, methinks.
That’s like not even 2 9/11s
Its not even a day of COVID-19
On the pursuit of absurd amounts of wealth. Sure. But, $200m is still an absurd amount of wealth, and wouldn’t be affected in this scenario.
Also, if there were no billionaires, someone worth $990m would be the most powerful person around. Right now if someone’s worth say $800m they’re motivated to get to $1b or more. But, they know that if they get there they’ll still have nowhere near the power of Bezos or Musk.
With a hard limit of $1b, centi-millionaires might be even more motivated to hit $990m because there would be nobody more powerful or wealthy than them.
They’re right, though. It’s easy to say “make people not want to be billionaires” but outside this comic, it’s impossible. We need to address the issues that allow billionaires to exist and pass on their fortunes tax-free.
If I received a million dollars, everyone I care about would live a long, happy and healthy life. Elon Musk spent almost $300 million dollars just on the current US midterms to elect Republicans and enact legislation that will give him control over you and keep you poor and desperate…
It’s not impossible. There’s wealth taxes, there’s guillotines.
That’s… addressing the issues that allow billionaires to exist.
If you systematically kill billionaires then it is a systemic solution.
The solution is an income and wealth tax tied to minimum wage. I also like a maximum wage (100% tax beyond) and a maximum wealth (ditto) including unrealized gains both tied also to minimum wage.
That can be part of a solution. You also need to plug up holes like “it’s not a wage - i just got a personal loan using my company stock as collateral”.
Oh, absolutely. Unrealized gains would include company stock and I’m not sure banks will be giving big loans on limited stock.
I have other ideas like corporations not being able to own Intellectual property (or severely restricted terms for such ownership), Abolishing political parties, abolishing organized religion, maximum corporation size (revenue and employee count) etc.
It’s your duty as a human to kill billionaires on sight. With whole groups of people killing them no one can be guilty.
The world prospers.
Take power and abolish them.
This is an attainable future, they say where there’s a will there’s a way
All of those people have an address. It’s just a matter of circulating them.
Several addresses, even. And I believe you can track their private jets.
One of the last bright spots over on Reddit is that they are still tracking his jet every day.
And in the grand scheme of things, there actually aren’t that many of them.
I believe in wytchcraft!
Prosciption for anyone with a net worth over a billion dollars. It becomes an affirmative defense in a murder trial that the victim had wealth beyond the legal maximum. This avoids the issue of government enforcement. You don’t have to try and track down every criminal billionaire squirreling their wealth away in hidden accounts. It just becomes legal to kill anyone with a net worth over a certain amount. The government doesn’t have to track down and arrest billionaires. They have to worry about their own children killing them, inheriting their money, and just donating anything over the legal threshold.
I need a “+” after billionaires. Can’t let Elon escape on a technicality.
If it follows set theory, then all trillionaires are billionaires. Math got your back!
Was worth verifying tho. Don’t want no monkeys paw shit coming back at us
Mmmm, cathartic.
“one day, like a miracle…” No, you need to make change happen the hard way.
There are no silver bullets, only lead bullets.
One of the purposes of science fiction and fantasy is to allow us to imagine a different world, without necessarily knowing how get there from here. In this case, we’re imagining a post-billionaire world without worrying about how to get there from here.
If that world seems better than the one we have now, we could decide to put a long, difficult plan in place to get to that world.
I wouldnt tell anyone i got superpowers but there woild be signs
Idk what messed up religion y’all are trying to come up with now but we need to lock in and strike these mfers out of the country.
That’s a good start
That would be nice but the pessimist in me know people would cap themselves at $900,000,000 and then gift millions of the interest they’d make to political mercenaries who will do their bidding as long as they’re on payroll.
Yeah, but they’d have SO much less power an influence than if they had dozens or hundreds of billions.
IDK, it opens the world up to some fucked up mechanics. Like, I assume the measure of $1B isn’t cash, or else a lot of billionaires wouldn’t explode since it’s all stocks. So in that case it’s just the worth of your assets.
So what stops two $500M people from assassinating good people just by offering to make a joint purchase of that person’s right shoe for $1B? That would mean the right shoe of the good person is now worth $1B and they explode. It’s basically Death Note on steroids at this point.
I don’t think the intention is to take the mechanics of how and why exactly they explode at face value. It’s interesting to theorize, but the comic points out that “no one knows why”. If it’s some supernatural power, it could be argued that they’d be able to discern between normal value and malicious intent.
Would still make an intersting thought experiment to come up with some set of rules of explosion that is actually air tight.
the mechanics is exactly the concern that large parts of the middle class andpeople interested in crypto have with wealth taxes, how will the system handle cases where there is no market for an asset but it would typically have value (think memecoins that can be produced by the billions over an hour) or items that the owner has no knowledge of the value but have a high value non the less.
Also, people are underestimating how much damage is being done by people who are merely centi-millionares and deci-millionaires. Yes, they have a lot less money. But, there are a lot more of them.
This was much better than expected.
“Teachers were finally paid closer to their worth.”
I dunno, I just think the phrasing “closer to their worth” is really funny when the picture being painted is a hopeful one. We can’t actually hope that teachers will get a decent pay, even in a better world.
Kinda the point I think. It’s not a completely Utopian fantasy, and plenty of the capitalistic (etc) problems that already existed would still be here.
“was it antifa” 😆
Was it Luigi ?
That would certainly encourage the parasite class to actually DO beneficial things instead of hoarding, if they can’t spend it on themselves.
You get to 1.9 million and you better start building housing and parks and shit.
But if not, you explode. And that’s fine too.
Do… do you think a billion is 2 million?
This made me laugh so hard thank you. It reminds me of when I was a kid, I thought 200 came right after 100. Then 300, 400, and so on.
We’re too poor to understand astonomical wealth figures :(
sure, bicycle, bisect, bivalve, bi means two.
right?
Shoot, I would watch a whole sci-fi movie based on this premise.
I’m a bit existentially confused by the anticapitalist webcomic being hosted on Shopify.
You do not have to exist outside of a system to critique it.
Getting an anti capitalist deep inside a capitalist system is how you fuck it the best.
Capitalist systems naturally convert the majority of people into anti-capitalists given enough time. The speed at which a system becomes more humanist, and the degree of pain required to reach those improvements, are just a matter of time and effort.
This comic hints at what an ultra fast correction would look like. If only we were so fortunate.
Agree, it’s not a criticism of the comic or author, I just found it ironic.
