Why and how the moderately rich can and should save the poor from the ultra rich

in economics •  7 years ago 

If Donald Trump fulfills his campaign promise to deregulate business, he’ll make a lot of rich people richer. Warren Buffett believes Trump will, which is why "the oracle of Omaha" said he's 100% optimistic about the next four years. I doubt Buffett will ever see that the cost/benefit analysis of economic oppression and growth don't add up, but there are others sitting in ivory towers watching America turn into a burning sweat shop. Some of them will have to wake up and realize it doesn’t matter if you die rich if the world dies too.

Poor people understand this, but it doesn't matter what they think, because in a capitalist economy, money is power, and poverty is powerlessness. The rich have all the power, because they took it from the poor using high prices, low wages, fines, fees and interest. Now the poor have one foot chained to their landlord's house and the other chained to their job. It’s financially impossible for them to protest long enough to matter, but they need to, now more than ever, because America just chose the least sane member of the 1% to protect Americans from the 1%.

The rich are the only people with the power save the human race from the rich, and I wouldn’t expect the owners or heirs of Amway or Blackwater to undermine their own business model, but there are other types of rich people who got their money in more humane ways. Some of them would rather invest their fortunes in the future than let it sit in their bank accounts where it serves no purpose other than being a measurement of the owner’s ego and ability to take money from the poor.

Rich philanthropists have been donating to Republican and Democrat campaigns for decades, which has worked great for those expecting a return on their investment. Anyone who wants change, should stop giving money and support to the RNC and DNC, because that’s putting gas in the car that drove Godzilla into town. They’re not the solution. They’re the problem.

Listed below are some ways rich philanthropists can spend between one and ten million dollars to make a meaningful difference during the Trumpocalypse:

Fund a think tank

If politics and economics isn’t your area of expertise, then the best thing you can do, before you give money to anyone, is fund a think tank. Recruit a team of researchers and geniuses and tell them to write a book for you titled, “What’s Wrong With The World, And How To Fix It For Under $10 Million.”

If you have any money left, you can enact the plan. If not, you can pitch it to rich people. Hopefully you can inspire more of them to use their fortune for good than “The Gospel of Wealth” did.

Fund a constitutional convention

You could spend a few million hiring your own crack team of geniuses, or you could pool your resources with some friends and spend a few million more to literally hire all the smartest people on Earth, put them in an apartment complex, and tell them to stay there until they’ve created a new social contract, or some kind of road map to fulfilling humanity’s potential. They could either publish their conclusion as a suggestion, or you could raise donation money for the team to use to enact the plan they come up with.

Fund a social media platform that organizes grass roots political parties

America’s problems are complicated, but one thing is certain, as long as the RNC and DNC monopolize all the political representation in America, nothing will change. They’re corrupt. Their election system is corrupt, and they don’t represent Americans. None of the third party political groups are a good fit for most Americans either.

America can’t be divided into Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Tea Parties and Green Parties. That’s not what America is. It’s made of hipsters, gangsters, educators, scientists, Millennials, Baby Boomers, African Americans, Latinos, white males, Christians, Atheists, Muslims, parents, tradesmen, entertainers, the homeless, entry level workers, women, INTPs, ENFJs, the mentally ill and experts in fields. These are the kinds of groups people identify with in their daily lives. If people are to be truly represented in politics, they need spokesmen from their groups.

To organize and find their spokesmen, they need a social media network designed to match people according to interest and attributes, like a dating site, except with project management tools.

Fund free online education

The silver bullet to all the world’s problems is education. If everyone had access to the ultimate free online school, then anyone with an internet connection could become a genius at anything. Then everyone could solve all their own problems, and nobody would be powerless. The more educated people there are, the more impossible it becomes to control the masses with circus acts like the 2016 election.

Free online schools exist, but none of them offer courses in every subject, and they’re so expensively run, it would cost a nation’s fortune to create all the classes. The solution is to crowdsource the job like Youtube and Wikipedia have done. The world could create its own perfect school within 10 years if someone made a website that has a list of every subject and guidelines for submitting content, and allowed users to fill in the blanks. The school could be completed in 4 years if you spent a billion dollars to hire retired school teachers to work full time uploading content. If Bill Gates and Warren Buffet really wanted to, they could end ignorance in one year. If you know them, you should have a talk with them about their priorities, or at least pick up their slack.

Build floating cities

Since Trump was elected, panicky Americans crashed the Canadian immigration website. Sales for my book, “Tips on Emigrating to New Zealand” have tripled, and a lot of people are finding out it’s nearly impossible to permanently leave the country you were born in.

Americans would vote with their feet if an unsettled land mass existed to escape to. Unfortunately, the only place left to go is the ocean, but you play the hand you were dealt, not the one you wish you had. Our exodus to sea is long overdue. The technology exists to build floating islands for less money than it costs to buy an acre of land in Honolulu. Build a concrete drum the size of a cruise ship and stock it with beds, gardens and jobs. Then let settlers move in and enjoy not being in America.

As a bonus, the artificial reefs created by the hulls of the floating villages will revitalize fish populations, and they would be the perfect vessels to collect garbage from the ocean. The more people who live at sea, the less people live in the economies that are churning the world’s resources into the garbage being dumped into the ocean.

Humanity won’t survive unless the suburbs are replaced with a better city model, but that will take centuries to accomplish. In the meantime, the poor are still living in pain, fear and debt slavery. This can be eased by modifying suburbia to be more sustainable.

Elon Musk is already doing this with cheap solar roofs. If someone else could invest their fortune into inventing and selling next generation technology home water collection/filtration units and greenhouses, then everyone could produce their own food, water and electricity without government assistance.

If we continue building houses, stores and offices using the same designs and materials, property owners will continue being bankrupted by home repairs, and humanity will go extinct from using all its resources to build cheap junk that falls apart and needs to be replaced.

Someone needs to invent a new wall that’s cheaper, stronger, more durable and easier to construct than what we use now. If the perfect wall already exists, then a billionaire real estate tycoon who is obsessed with walls needs to devote their fortune to popularizing it. Simply building a better wall would solve a staggering amount of the world’s problems. Trump would eliminate more illegal immigrants by giving Mexicans a new kind of wall they could use to convert their shanty towns into Hobbitons, than by building a 30 foot tall concrete scar along the border.

Build low cost sustainable cities**
**
If everyone were guaranteed the necessities of life: food, water, clothing, shelter and utilities, then being broke would be a minor inconvenience and not a life threatening emergency. Living without savings would be tolerable, and people would have the freedom to be politically active.

Once people have everything necessary to survive, then 99% of their problems are already solved. The only thing left to do is happily fulfill their potential. If everyone had their needs filled by a non-government agency, then they wouldn’t need a president to save them.

Build an intentional community that has a job for every bed and creates/supplies all its working members’ needs in exchange for 20 hours of work per week. Have members who join sign a social contract that’s less oppressive and cultish than the average fast food employment contract, and then let the members work, live, love and learn in leisure.

Design the city to be as space-efficient as possible, and build the infrastructure using earth bags and other low cost technology. After you’ve saved 250 people from capitalism and started making a profit, expand the community, make new ones, and help other countries copy your success. Once the idea catches on, everyone will be voting with their dollars on new homes instead of new politicians.

After everyone is living sustain-ably, then recessions, depressions, stock market crashes and all the other economic disaster will become obsolete, and the race for profits won’t drive humanity to extinction by turning the world’s resources into consumer garbage.

Give me your money

Donating money to political parties is more useless than flushing it down the toilet. You're throwing fuel on the fire. It'd do more good to just give it all away to panhandlers. You shouldn't do that either though, because it would only temporarily ease one symptom of a systemic disease.

If you're so desperate for change that every four years, you donate a lot of money to a random maniac you've never met and/or heard of, then give it to me.

I don't have any political experience, but neither does Donald Trump. He has more business experience than me, but I have seven years of military service, which should be required to apply for the job of commander and chief anyway. I've already written a series of essays on the systemic flaws within the military system that negatively impact the troops, which civilian politicians never bring up, because they couldn't know those problems exist.

If you like candidates who advertise themselves as "regular Joe's," who are in touch with the working class, then vote with your dollars for me, not another Ivy League simpleton who seems folksy because he has the IQ of Forrest Gump. I'm no Goodwill Hunting, but I'm closer than Donald Trump in intelligence and street cred. I've written instructions on how to think, and I've lived in ghettos, trailers, tents, suburbs, cities and farms. I've worked the dirtiest, hardest, nastiest jobs along side illegal immigrants and felons, not as a social experiment, but to make enough money to eat that night. I got on-the-job training in poverty before I learned about it in college. I'm well qualified to represent the poor and understand their problems. Plus, I have a reputation for articulating important ideas using words correctly.

You may not agree with all of my philosophies on ethics or religion, but if you read everything I've written on those subjects, you should get the impression I sincerely care about people. I don't give hate speeches. I advocate equality. Trump's first book was about how to take money from other people, and mine was about how the meaning of life. If you had to put your life in the hands of me or Trump based solely on the books we've written, I'm clearly the lesser of two evils.

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump raised close to $1 billion in campaign contribution each. Obama's plan was "hope and change." Clinton's was to have a vagina and not be Donald Trump, whose 100 day plan reads like a Nazi capitalist conspiracy theorist manifesto. I have a better, more fleshed out plan than any of them came to the table with.

If you'd vote for Godzilla just to wreck shop so we can rebuild, then give me your money. I won't hunt, kill or destroy anything. I'll jump straight to the rebuilding. My plan is to not use your campaign donations to buy a landfill of posters and pens, but to invest it in building profitable, expandable, sustainable intentional communities.

If I ran for president of the United States, I'd either get assassinated by an investment firm or stonewalled by Congress. I can succeed as the president of the world's first viral, sustainable intentional community though. You won't have to wait four years to see if I keep my word and then wait another ten to see if it had any longitudinal effects on the world. Give me a million dollars, and I'll start blowing your mind and raising people's quality of life in three months.

What I’m going to do when I’m rich
My one-point solution to solving the world's problems

Media sources: 1, 2, 3

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Sloth for pres! Upvoted, resteemed. Thanks for taking the time in your posts to present this battle more clearly. People feel it, but can't really put their finger on what's going on. I am so appreciative of your efforts in helping us all.

I couldn't agree more that the race towards profits, the endless expansion based on a world of infinite resources, is unsustainable and is leading towards disaster and extinction. There are big money powers, in my view, who are preventing the transition into a sustainable economy and society.

I couldnt disagree more. Regulations are a yoke around the neck of all businesses. I own a small business, and regulations are the same for me as large corporations. They can more easily absorb the cost than i can. That is why you usually see big companies on the side of the Dems. Government hurts the poor more than the rich. For example, a few years ago i could put new tires on a midsize sedan for about $240, now the same tires cost over $700. All due to burdensome epa regs. Do you think Warren Buffet has to worry about the extra cost, or do you think working families suffer?

"Government hurts the poor more than the rich."

The rich control the government. That's why it passed laws that stifle small businesses but are negligible to big businesses.

Exactly. They erect new barriers to entry in every profession and then wonder why innovation and growth are drying up.

That's why the answer to growing inequality can never be more government. The answer is less government. If politicians have no power to decide market winners and losers than large businesses would have no ability to hinder the development of small businesses.

Hello my dear friend
I am following your account every day { 🤝 }
@haji

This post has received a 4.00 % upvote from @booster thanks to: @thewisesloth.

Keep us posted of how many funds your donation campaign brings in. ;)

I love your plan! I've been trying to get people together on Facebook to start a Berner Village, and I talk to other people often who are planning this same kind of thing. For instance, there is another Steemer who is working to start an intentional Ubuntu community in Tennessee. We all just need to get under the same umbrella!

Who is the user who wants to start the Ubuntu community?