Originally Posted by Zuranthium
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It is still widely representative today, open your eyes. Who are the people saying Mexicans or whatever other non-white ethnicity are ruining America? Who are the people doing mass shootings targeted at these groups? Who are the ones saying cops and society has a whole has no prejudice and these minorities are simply whining (there's so much of that trash in this thread alone)? Who are the people that still say "gays are going to hell"? Who are the ones that can't fucking understand the difference between communism and socialism? Who are the ones that don't understand their own ingrained misogyny and cave-man like ideas of "how men should act"?
Rich people have done something "wrong" to get that wealth. Money is a social fabrication and the only way for someone to be that wealthy (aside from a couple very rare scenarios) is for a massive amount of other people to contribute to creating the product they are selling. In pretty much all cases, the amount paid towards labor and materials is lower than it really should be, and the amount of work being done by the person at the top is extremely disproportionate compared to what they are earning. Furthermore, once you have a large amount of money/success, you're able to use it to manipulate the system itself: being able pay for lobbying/publicity to warp public awareness in your favor, forcing other competition out, getting things for free.
And that's really just the most honest outcome of extreme wealth acquisition. More often than not, these entities are outright exploiting people in order to create their wealth. Whether it's lying about the effectiveness of their product, or lying about the competition, or hiding harmful side effects, or using planned/perceived obsolescence to force people to buy more, or cheating on contracts, or 3rd world labor/supply, or fucking Monsanto-like practices of forcing your shit on someone else's space and then saying you have a right to own them.
That doesn't even get into the environmental destruction created by the chase for money, and how humanity itself is catering to the lowest common denominator by blindly following unchecked capitalism. If a company can push out a ton of a shitty product and force everyone to buy it because there is no better available alternative, they will make a bunch of money for doing do so, but they are not actually contributing something good (or something better) to the world. They are simply using this fabricated thing called money to dominate a market and undeservedly empower themselves to stay at the top.
Then there's also the problem of generational wealth. Hundreds of years ago, for example, certain individuals were simply given huge amounts of land in our country. Their descendants have been born into massive wealth without having to do anything. Why do such people deserve to live in extreme comfort and privilege, while millions of others suffer? They don't deserve to, is the answer, and it's something that needs to be balanced in society.
No individual "needs" to have 100 million dollars either. If someone is making that much money, why can't they be content with just taking in 10 million instead (the rest going to taxes that are used to unselfishly be put towards the betterment of humanity)? Someone at that amount of wealth is still going to have a crazy amount more than just about everyone else. There's no reason they need to be sitting on endless piles of money. Humans are inherently selfish beings and as a society it should be our goal to curb that selfishness, by directly instituting practices/laws that fight against it. The same as penalties for drunk driving or whatever else. Destructive practices need to be addressed and fixed, in whatever form they come in. Wealth is a toxic fabrication/obsession of humans. We desire endless expansion but such a thing is impossible, certainly on one little planet.
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