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!
Yeah, was not expecting to be bricked up so much today. You can’t just post stuff like that anywhere.
Now I’m going to be thinking about this all day.
Isn’t this the plot of a Kingsman movie?
I’m a bit existentially confused by the anticapitalist webcomic being hosted on Shopify.
“one day, like a miracle…” No, you need to make change happen the hard way.
History already taught that’s not how it works, someone or bunch of people need to make it happen for real, the alternative is natural disasters , old age and sickness or accidents.
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.
I’d prefer to stretch it out a bit: One every hour, starting with the “poorest” of them, climbing up the list every time.
Make the ones on top know that it will be their turn eventually. They cannot avoid it. They cannot cheat it.
They can donate everything they own to charities or whatever they want, and some will certainly try. But it’s too late - The culling cannot be stopped.
Go the other way. Start at the top and go down to the global mean.
Cmon, we want to watch the worst of them panic.
That would by definition kill everyone
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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
If you systematically kill billionaires then it is a systemic solution.
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 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.
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.
And in the grand scheme of things, there actually aren’t that many of them.
Several addresses, even. And I believe you can track their private jets.
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 believe in wytchcraft!
A wealthy heir creates a special trust that gives a billion dollars to anyone they write in a notebook, allowing them to have their very own Death Note.
I don’t think this curse/blessing is being fooled by legal loopholes like trusts. If you can control the money and spend it however you like, it’s yours, regardless of what name is legally attached to it. So I think the wealthy heir would just immediately die. I assume the magic or divine will can recognize the True Owner of an asset.
I assume this also prevents wealth-hoarding by proxy. Imagine a mob boss who wants to safely own a fortune in billions. He finds people with a lot to lose. Good jobs. Family. Nice house. Etc. Respectable upper middle class people with a lot to lose, but themselves nowhere near a billion dollar limit. The mobster offers the following deal-you-can’t refuse:
I am going to wire you ten million dollars, plus some for taxes. You will report some $10-15 million in income as taxes next year. After paying the taxes on this, you will be left with $10 million. You are to set this money in a bank account and never touch it for any reason. I may access this money at any time by requesting a wire transfer from you. Your new accountant we’re hiring for you will take care of it. In exchange, you may withdraw from the account a fee equal to half of the interest earned from it. You may also use this portion to cover the taxes from the interest. You will be periodically audited. Do this and you gain income without risk or effort. Don’t do this and we torture your family to death in front of you, kill you, then burn your house down around you. You have five minutes to decide. (Goons walk in holding knives and gas cans.)
We’re not talking law here. We’re talking magic or DIVINE WILL. I think in the above situation, the magic would be able to recognize that the money really belongs to the mobster. Legally it’s in the name of the patsy, but in all practical terms, it’s still the mobster’s. Only he has any authority to spend it. If the actual legal owner of it touches it, he condemns himself and his whole family to a gruesome death. No. I think any proper magic will simply recognize the True Owner of any asset, in the way that magic famously often recognizes True Names. I think any wannabe Light Yagami is just going to get exploded.
The heirs of billionaires need not actually condemn themselves to death though. You can legally refuse portions of an estate. Different jurisdictions have different ways of handling unallocated assets, but there would likely be a long chain of heirs listed in a will. Each would take an amount safely below the boom limit and decline the rest. If the list of heirs in the will runs out, I suppose state law takes over on who gets the rest. Some may just end up in government coffers.
What happens if the trust always designates a single next-in-line somehow? Does it just instantly kill everyone on earth?
Close your mouths. You’ll get CEO ephemera in
itthem.
