Lefties trying to understand Smaug
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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None of those billionaires are sitting on some giant amount of assets like the dragon. They just own shares in a company which is worth a lot of money because of its future earnings value.
Unlike smaug, who hoards wealth & stops that wealth from being put to any productive use, all those billionaires built that wealth themselves by making companies people wanted to buy shares of.
Libtards don't understand capitalism or productivity or actually taking risk. Instead they think visionaries & capitalists serve no purpose, and all the value in the world is created by dumbfuck wagies punching their timecards.
Trying to explain speculative wealth is pointless when you're talking to people stupid enough to believe in the labor theory of value.
"I dug a hole out in the forest for a few hours and then filled it back in. I created VALUE!!!!"
"Backed by the labor of the people." Isn't that what the Nazis did?
No, seriously, that's what the fools who insist on saying "NSDAP" keep telling me.
It's exactly the difference between throwing all your money under your mattress or in a safe vs. a earning interest as deposit in a fractional reserve bank, or illiquid investments like stocks or bonds.
Expecting lefties to know what happens when you have money is a fool's errand. Most of them have never had assets and live benefit check to benefit check.
Don't forget that, even thought they own shares, they don't necessarily have a lot of influence over the day-to-day running of the company.
If they own the majority of shares, the best they can do is hire and fire executives, who are required by law to maximize shareholder profit.
I wonder if it ever occured to leftists that the billionaires who try to pay their employees more than they're worth are not billionaires anymore; not because it costs them profit to do so, but because it causes the companies to fail completely?
Even if it occurred to them, they don't care. "Haha go bankrupt then! See what it's like to live on the other side of inequality for once in your life." They are stupid and evil.
I wouldn't say Zuckerberg serves a purpose. People who produce actually useful stuff do, though, even if they are billionaires.
This meme is just created by someone who doesn't understand economics.
The zuck serves a purpose alright, but it's not primarily an economic one.
It really depends, Zuckerberg is doing a shit job now, and guess what? That's reflected in the stock price. Capitalism generally works.
I have no doubt that Zuckerberg did a lot of really visionary things & brought a lot of innovation to social media in the early days of facebook's development. He entered into a highly competitive emerging area & emerged victorious because he was able to mastermind the best product.
Of course he's made a number of bad decisions in the last few years that have a lot of people bearish on Facebook's future.
Well, he's a visionary in collecting people's data and selling it to the highest bidder. But I'm not sure that is a thing to cheer.
They don't actually take risk, though. When their shit doesn't work, they just get bailed out.
Tell your lefty friends to cool it with the Anti-Semitic remarks.
Made me laugh
It's always fascinating when communists reveal that they genuinely think rich people are sitting on Scrooge McDuck vaults and hoarding money purely to keep it out of the hands of BIPOC folks.
Shekels are somewhat limited quantity that people actually do fight over. If you want any, you have to fight someone for it. Blacks are just not good at that competition, and jews excel at it.
Slightly off topic, but there's no way Smaug is the second wealthiest fictional character. Sci-fi is a thing, and some fuckers own planets or solar systems. There are also single fictional items so valuable that owning something you can hold in your hand would be worth more than Smaug's entire mountain.
I'd say it's on-topic enough.
Let us discount sci-fi, because scale is a thing, and restrict it to real items in mono-world fantasy/real settings. No Magickium crystals. No priceless artifacts (since The One Ring, from that very setting has more value than that mountain of gold. Hell, even the poorly-defined Arkanstone has more value than the mountain of gold).
King Midas (myth) owns more gold than Sauron, or easily could if he so desired.
King Gilgamesh (Fate) owns more gold than Sauron, for he defines all treasure in the world to be his own and oddly enough no one contests his claim.
But they're kings. They're supposed to be rich (though so are dragons), so let's scale down:
Batman's net worth is approximately twice that of Smaug's. Bruce Wayne may only have 10 billion, but Batman's additional assets such as The Lighthouse more than make up the shortfall.
Either way, that's three characters, all of which would have existed when this article came out a decade ago.
You are failing to understand that, to the leftist, there's only three sources of fiction, in all of human history. LotR, Harry Potter, and Marvel.
I think once you can get stuff from space, there will be a lot of gold.
When did the "price of gold [take] a tumble"? Certainly wasn't recently.
Not that I would expect libshitz to know what the market price of anything is.
The article they referenced is from 2012. This pic is archaic.
It's been circling the leftyverse for a while. I wondered if anyone on the right have seen it.
Who in the world argues that people shouldn't be paid "living wages"? (Whatever that means)
Lefties always put stupid arguments in their opponents' mouths and acting like geniuses for refuting them.
Newest phone every year, doordash avocado toasts for $30, daily coffee from starbucks, transgender surgery, 2 vacation flights to a tropical paradise a year, funko pop collection, ...
Seems like a tactic of leftists throughout history is to make up new bullshit words ("a living wage", "transgender", "gender affirming care") and then call you a bad man with other made up words ("racist", "misogynist", "homophobe") for not supporting that thing they made up in the first place.
Living wages are inflation given life. You pay people more, and the rent immediately goes up. I've seen it happen.
It's good for people who keep their jobs, because they're earning that $15/hr or whatever. It's bad for people that get let go, which was the first thing my buddy who ran a restaurant did when the city passed a minimum wage. He ended up working more himself to cut down on payroll.
I do, because "living wage" has no definition other than "more." People should be paid according to what they're able to negotiate.
In other words: 14 Americans each created more wealth than a literal mountain of gold.
Bastards...
>mfw Smaug is a black dragon
>mfw he stole all of his wealth from indigenous people of shortness
>mfw White people killed his ass and threw him in a lake rather than get him the help he needed
smdh my head
Nearly every single idol of leftists is more akin to Smaug than any they vehemently hate upon. Perfect example, take any vocal leftist Hollywood star, and look what they do with their money. Do they personally invest it and get involved with their investments? Or do they just hoard that cash? All the billionaires leftists shit their pants over at least invest their money into businesses and those businesses infrastructure that provide jobs in the first place.
But low value people don't understand that to get a better wage you need to make yourself high value first. If they understood that fundamental point, they wouldn't be low value.
Daily reminder that Ebenezer Scrooge represented a typical champagne socialist who wanted the government to support the poors so they'd stop bothering him.
oh oh! let me try!
ahem
The problem is way deeper than who has what. Smaug's hoard is something like 20x the amount of gold extracted from the earth in all of history. The fact that people can have more 'wealth' than that means a tremendous portion of the global economy is fake and gay.
Ok, commie.
They are not wrong. Consider that billionaires are the main assholes financing most of the ongoing culture war and woke propaganda.
Eh all the gold in the world could fit in an olympic swimming pool. The dragon's lair appeared bigger than that, I thought.
Yeah, it was obvious they hadn't counted correctly.
I should clarify all the mined gold in the world. I dunno how much remains underground.
Are people here really defending billionaires?
Not sure why the right feels compelled to simp for billionaires, who are largely truly awful people, but this meme just shows a lack of understanding of basic economics.
It's not so simple. Since they almost always hold their money in stock, you can't just "tax" it without destroying the economy. Billionaires all having to sell off a large portion of stock to pay taxes would destroy the stock market.
Similar things have actually happened in history. There was I believe a Roman tax that was essentially a net worth tax on landowners. So what happened? All the land owners had to sell all at once, crashing the prices & destroying real estate values. A small number of ultra-rich were able to take advantage of the situation to vastly increase their wealth by buying low. There was enormous economic damage, the taxes raised were far less than expected, and the result was greater wealth inequality.
Liberals always think they can just make shit happen through force of will, but they're fucking stupid and they always fuck things up. And even though my story comes from over 2000 years ago, the socialist dumbfucks still try to do it today.
My solution is death & gift taxes. Let the billionaires have their money. Once they die, then the government can feast on the corpse of the estate. I couldn't give less of a shit that Paris Hilton doesn't get to inherit billions, and I don't think taking away dead hand control of money would negatively impact risk taking and innovation at all.
No. Fuck no. Jesus christ almighty NO. Death taxes are literally the worst form of tax. Corporations don't fucking die. But mom & pop sole proprietorship shop owners do. What you're suggesting is more of what is already killing small agriculture and consolidating power in the hands of less than a dozen agricultural conglomerates. It's incredible how you can bring up that story and not connect dots about what your proposal would do.
Corporations die all the time by going bankrupt, at around 25 years on average. So most of them die earlier than people do.
In capitalism a corporation is a measure of meritocracy; if it outcompetes other companies it continues, if it gets fat and inefficient and makes poor decisions then it dies.
Look at Disney or Anheuser-Busch - they're doing everything in their power to die by making bad decisions.
What you're objecting to is capitalism where the meritocracy has been removed, like ours today. For example, consolidation eats the small proprietors instead of the other way around because the small ones can't succeed by being better, higher quality, more efficient because the large players just keep them off the shelves. Even a medium sized RC Cola can't compete with Coca-Cola because anti-competitive practices keep it off the shelves or very limited quantity.
Corporations do not pay a death tax every time the farm changes hands. If you do not see the difference there is literally no point in conversing with you.
No shit. Corporations are not people, why should they be taxed the same?
Do you think people should have to pay capital gains on their net worth because some corporations do? We shouldn't have S corporations because people don't have shareholders?
What a dumb argument. There are problems with estate taxes like farmers' children having to sell land to pay for the tax, but there's also good sides at least discounting loopholes like fewer people with huge amounts of unearned wealth.
That sounds like a great opportunity.
Not that I support it, because I don't think it's good policy, even though it does hurt billionaires.
Yeah, it's not exactly unlikely. And I think that many on the left are economically illiterate. That said, the right calling billionaires 'job-creators' and decent people is also cringe. It is possible to oppose counterproductive policies without praising them.
That was the cancer that was introduced into politics by the French Revolution: the belief in forcing through social and historical development through violence and terror.
Interesting, because the GOP has always attacked the estate tax. But does this not replicate your earlier concern? Imagine if Elon owns 70% of Tesla and then drops dead. If the government seizes it and then sells it, wouldn't it cause Tesla to crash and burn?
Yes because rich old donors literally paid them to. I don't think the same dynamic exists now because the issues have shifted so much. Republicans have to contend with populism now, and death taxes only affect the rich. R donors have much bigger problems to worry about than death taxes.
That said, I don't expect any legislation on death taxes. One of the problems with death taxes is that unless you're a communist, it doesn't produce revenues immediately. You need to wait. Congress is likely to assfuck our economy & debt to the point where they need to raise taxes in an emergency fashion.
No because the Fed already has trillions in stock on its books & buys & sells them. The Government would not have to sell any stock immediately. It could slowly sell it off over time.
Since people don't all die at once, the government liquidating assets from death taxes would be a trickle, instead of a tsunami hitting all at once.
Ah, well, as much as I like to call you a GOP partisan, you dissent from the GOP elite on some important points - for the better.
The good thing about death taxes is that it deprives billionaires. The bad thing about them is that it gives money to the government.
It doesn't matter how much money the government sucks up - it's always looking for more. I know this from personal experience. Countries that raised the age of retirement just threw the savings into 'climate change' idiocy.
I'm not an 'End the Fed' kind of guy, but I was very shocked when I discovered that the Fed buys stocks. How much of the current economy is just a bubble?
GOP is going to need to be a hybrid populist party in order to win. Trump changed that. The Democrats are now a very elitist party, so their populist flank is very open to attack. DeSantis knows this & has been exploiting that in Florida.
This is what "quantitative easing" has always been. The Fed just prints money then uses that money to buy securities like stocks & bonds.
This is one of the main drivers of inflation. The other being just raw government spending of additional trillions.
I agree, though I think the power of campaign contributions (i.e., bribes) will prevent the GOP from doing what it has to do to be a viable party.
Amazing how it took 11 years for me to figure out what QE is precisely. I knew it was pumping money into the economy, but I thought it worked through interest rates - by lowering them and allowing the creation of more money.
They base their world view on "owning the libtards."
>Standing against terrible logic means standing with those being criticised
Ah, binary thinking.
It's leftist policy that enables and empowers corporations. I will never agree with a post like this because agreeing implicitly requires agreeing with the idea of using the state to control companies as a whole, which ALWAYS fuck over the public and not the company. This is how you get companies that are "too big to fail", because the state will continually bail out these failures, because they need those jobs or want to protect their continually failing investment.
Billionaires and rampant wealth inequality is a result of leftist, statist policy. And what's amazing is that statists of all flavours will still support it without even fucking realising it.
The corps also act as powerful vanguards of states interests worldwide. Korea realized this when Samsung dominated the global smartphone market and they started changing the laws on their behalf. It's not only regulatory capture to help "capitalist fat cats", but a way to strengthen your nation's trading power and prestige. The US does it with all its largest multinats, as do other countries. The Corporation and the State are one in the same.
Yup. Which is why anyone who wants to stand against corporations should be standing against those that seek to monopolise power, AKA the state. Corporations can only exist through the state. Without the state, free trade is possible and businesses of all levels are on the same footing.
And contrary to the squeals from retards about historical examples, like the East India Company, the reality is that such enterprises were first and foremost bankrolled by the state, for the state.
And it's still the case to this day. Look at the companies that have the most leeway in swaying public opinion, namely social media companies, and all the major players are HEAVILY involved with state agents and/or funding. These are not private entities, they're state entities. It's not rich vs poor. Not corporation vs public. It's not even left vs right. It's the state vs the people. And those that object to stating said reality almost always seek to use the state against the innocent for their personal goals. And sure, many of those goals are noble, but at the end of the day, the argument still boils down to whether or not you believe that the ends justify the means. And in my experience, the statist always believes that it does.
Simp for? The only way I'm giving them money is when they get my tax dollars, and I don't have a lot of choice about that.
Lefties fail to inderstand value...constant