Me on the far left
Heh.
We get infinite hot water in our homes by turning a tap. We get antibiotics
Did billionaires give us these?
I mean, in a haha only serious way. Scientific curiosity gave us some nice stuff (like antibiotics). Government spending gave us some nice stuff (like running water). Even military spending gave us some nice stuff (like the internet). But the gifts of the rich, when I think of them, are a more mixed affair. Zuckerberg could retire today and have more money than he could ever spend, yet he keeps working, making Facebook more and more soul-destroying for regular people. What's his motive? Lots of people at AI labs could retire today as deca-millionaires, yet they keep working, trying to make sure that their company in particular gets to kill humanity first. Etc.
That's what people mean when they speak against the rich. You've set up a game where people who are really into "number go up" get to the top, and make the number go up more and more, without minding the effects on everyone else. Turn the internet into brain rot; fight a war to keep selling drugs (like the East India Company did in China); use child slave labor (like Nestle); or kill humanity.
Now, the...
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2But it suggests a reframing that might be helpful. For practical purposes, there's a maximum amount of money you can spend on personal consumption: if you have tens or hundreds of millions, you should be all set. And there's a minimum amount of money that makes you a danger to society, able to buy laws, screw over communities and so on; that number is also maybe around hundreds of millions, or single digit billions. The second number seems higher than the first. So we can allow people to essentially max out their personal consumption, thus maxing out their selfish incentive to do good things for society, while still stopping them from becoming a danger. This would also mean mandatory dilution of corporate control: when a company gets big enough to push on society, the public should get a bigger and bigger say in how it's run, with founders and investors keeping enough control to be ultra rich but not enough to run their bulldozer over society. How's that sound?
I have goals that benefit from having hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. So do other people. Money is for steering the world. I can use money to hire other people and get them to do things I want. "Personal consumption" is not the reason why almost anyone tries to get rich!
That's fair: you want to have billions of dollars' worth of "steering influence". But you are human. Humans have not only noble motives, but base ones too. Empirically, humans who get billions of dollars' worth of "steering influence" usually end up using most of it to get more billions. In my comment I gave examples.
Maybe you're a special human, and going through the process of getting a billion dollars will keep you noble and uncorrupted. I don't know; nobody knows until they actually go through it. But on base rates, I'm against any person getting billions of dollars' worth of unchecked steering influence. Including me and including you. Hope that makes sense.
EDIT: Rereading my reply, I see it's a bit off target. I won't delete it, because deleting comments is a bad habit that I really should get rid of; but just saying that now I see the descriptive part of your argument too. It's true that if people can't satisfy their world-changing goals (or just power-hungry goals) by starting a business, they'll go into other avenues and who knows what'll happen. I'll need to think about that.
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1The way I see it, life is like a game of monopoly. Those who have more power (money being one form of power) gradually have their advantage increase. The have-nots must forever spend effort and coordination to have a share of the pie at all, or see it regress to the haves by default.
But that said, I don't agree with the "smash everything and go back to stone age" fearmongering. Communist countries, for all their terrible record on human rights, haven't been especially backwards on science and engineering. Nor have countries with strong progressive taxation regressed to barbarism. When the weak join forces to win themselves a chunk of the pie, that can sometimes be nasty, but it isn't necessarily, definitionally nasty. I'm convinced it can be done in a good way.
In particular, a lot of billionaires choose to "spend" their wealth on continuing to control the company they founded. Almost all of Jeff Bezos' wealth is "spent" on owning Amazon, for example.
When I grew up in a communist country, they taught us that there was a difference between "personal property" (like your shoes and books and things like that) which was good, and "private property" (like owning a factory) which was bad.
The line between these two was basically that "personal property" is for consumption, but "private property" is the stuff that makes more stuff, it makes the initial small differences grow, so if we don't want it to grow out of control, we better nip it in the bud. (Only the Party, and the experts it appoints, are qualified enough to control the stuff that makes more stuff.)
I had a question that seemed obvious to me: which category does a PC belong to. I mean, you can use it to play games and chat with people, which would classify it as "personal property", just like food or phones; or you can use it to program computer games or social networks, which would classify it as "private property", just like the factories or newspaper companies. And it seems that the latter is more productive use of the computers, so... are you telling me that owning a computer is good, as long as I do not use it productively?
But by the time I was old enough to compose such...
The bottleneck isn't figuring out what measures would solve any given problem of the have-nots (Pigovian taxes, YIMBY, free healthcare, trains!!) The bottleneck is politically getting these measures implemented, when the haves who control most of everything (including most media and most political donations) will fight back every step of the way. At least if they stand to lose massively from the measures, which in the case of Pigovian taxes is certainly true.
that we must stand true to the Code and allow those billionaires to retain the wealth if we want to remain a Just and Wealthy society.
I think this right here is the crux of it. I doubt anyone who supports a wealth tax believes we live in a just society, and I expect them all to believe that the behavior of billionaires actively suppresses our wealth in the sense that you mean it. It looks, to them, like our current crop of billionaires are not honorably wealthy men, but trying very hard to become the new feudal lords themselves.
Protecting the Code is incredibly important NOT because it serves some billionaires, but because it serves every single person in our society that lives above the level of a 16th century peasant.
I think there's a shorter path to this conclusion that the people supporting the wealth tax will find more understandable, I bet: if we pass a law to take billionaire's stuff, they'll use the same law to take our stuff.
1"Stone Age Billionaire" is confusing, but I might have understood "We're All Stone Age Billionaires." It's still under the five-word limit
1If you don’t hate anything then you don’t love anything either.
This seems false to me. I have made some conscious effort to not feel hateful towards anyone or anything, and did not experience diminished feelings of love as a result of this. If anything, my impression is that it might have made me love more intensely.
I have tried out various attitudes to billionaires over the years.
In my early twenties, as I was coming to grips with the fact that the mass of people spent a third of their lives in activities ("working") that they don't really want to do, I was aware that somewhere there were rich people with large amounts of money. I seem to remember that just taking their money did not cross my mind, but I thought instead of what we would now call printing money and handing it out to people, so that their choices would not be dominated by economics of survival. This would have been combined with a belief that there must be a way to organize society so that necessary things still get done, but not because someone was forced to do it.
In my early thirties, I suppose I had developed a more pragmatic attitude towards the existence of a society organized around working for money, a more nuanced attitude towards the psychology of work (e.g. that careers, or just earning money, can be psychologically fulfilling as well as actually constructive in their output), and so on, and so while I was still a transhumanist who believed in the liberation of humanity from survival-work as well as from d...
1I will throw my support toward a related position: Due process for all. Yes, even him.* To the anti-billionaires:
Is Brian Thompson culpable for mass murder? Great, try him in court and you even get the death penalty if you'd like. Is Luigi Mangione the one who shot him? Not yet proven beyond a reasonable doubt, if the state can't prove it, then I support him walking free.
The system prevents trying rich people for their crimes? Reform the system. You do not want vigilantism. It will not attack only people you hate, the ones you think are the cause of all the world's problems. Everyone has a different idea of who that is and open vigilantism means a lot of innocent people will die, including people like you!
An estimate of about 4% (1) of people executed by the state may be innocent. And this is after years of trials, appeals, and investigation! Do you think you can do better?
Love billionaires or hate them, fine, whatever, you can hate whoever you like. But flat-out advocacy for murder is not a door you want to open.
*what's great about a non-specific "him" is that there's so many people this applies to! Everyone will fill in their own "him".
From a consequentialist perspective, generalized skepticism of tech billionaires, and punitive taxation of tech profits, seems good from the perspective of passing AI regulation / discouraging AI investment.
For example the “Poor and Proud” and “March 4 Hundredaires” signs are sentiments that literally every Pro-Billionaire protestor would gladly endorse
See https://x.com/twocents/status/2020596821228388704
In particular, note the following exchange
> Interviewer: "Is there any ways you would restructure current incentives to make, to allow for, the protestors and the antiprotestors to like see eye-to-eye?"
> Pro-Billionaire Protestor: "I don't want to see eye to eye with them! I want to destroy them. [cut, apparently to later in the same answer] All manner of socialists and communists that are motivated by jealousy, I want to wipe them off (pause) of the political spectrum. I want to make it (pause) not allowed for you to support this."
There's a cut here, perhaps there's some intervening context that changes the conclusion I should draw from this exchange, but I really very strongly doubt it.
Thanks for doing this! I also find it disturbing how socially acceptable it is to call for the death of innocent people (or to actually murder them, if they're an insurance company CEO).
If you believe that the UHC CEO knowingly pushed a model that had a 90% error rate, being programmed to almost always just (illegally, incorrectly) deny health care coverage to people who were less likely to sue, then "innocent" is a big overstatement. That's pretty close to murdering people for money.
Similarly, I don't think you could claim that the executives who knowingly launched the Ford Pinto were innocent.
The UHC nhPredict lawsuit has not resolved yet, and I haven't done enough research to be confident about it one way or another. But my point is that the crux is more "are current billionaires actively getting people killed for money?", not "is it ok to kill innocent people because they're rich?"
"is it ok to kill people (or call for the killing or support the killing) who have not been convicted by any court and the killing does not stop any immediate physical threat to you?"
innocence is not required, it is presumed by our civilization. At question is NOT whether the victim was a bad person who we're perhaps better off without. At question is whether anyone but a court can decide what to do about it.
It's disturbing how socially acceptable it is to call for mob action in direct contravention of rule of law.
People call for mob action because they believe the rule of law isn't working. At the moment the fact that nobody besides Epstein and Maxwell that was involved in their operation got charged with any crimes is a good sign that the rule of law isn't really working well at charging people at the top.
Nobody at HSBC got into prison for laundering drug money. Facebook getting away with 25% of their profit being facilitating fraud of their customers also seems to me like the rule of law isn't working.
The article you links essentially argues a strawman:
Most people named in the Epstein files are not being prosecuted for the simple reason that what appears there does not meet anything like the legal standards required for prosecution, let alone conviction. Being mentioned in an email, a contact list, or a flight log may be morally damning and emotionally enraging, but it’s not evidence of a crime in the way the criminal justice system is actually supposed to require.
You wouldn't persecute people who are just mentioned in an email, contact list or flight log. You would persecute those accused by the women who told the police they are victims. According to the lawyer for the victims there are at least twenty men against whom victims gave testimony.
Given victim testimony and the files we have I think it's also would make sense to say that Epstein was running a criminal enterprise that's subject to the RICO act. That means that plenty of employees like the pilot that was trafficking the girls to the island likely committed crimes. If you start you RICO proceedings you can offer lower level employees immunity for providing more evidence.
Of course calls for violence are bad and counterproductive. Yet for the broader question I highly recommend this video about reasons why existence of billionaires who pay very small (in proportion) amount of taxes is economically and socially really bad.
It may initially seem so, but in fact this strategy even gets called “buy, borrow, die”. In the end loan is practically closed without taxes as well, and feds don’t get their cut. Main factor seems to be that value of assets grows overtime, which hacks tax formula.
https://smartasset.com/investing/buy-borrow-die-how-the-rich-avoid-taxes
Or this explanation
… Actual “buy, borrow, die” planning is enormously complicated and involves dozens of tools and techniques implemented over the course of many years.
First, this type of planning is generally not economically feasible unless the taxpayer has a net worth exceeding around $300M. Why? If you’re worth less than that, you’re not going to be able to command attractive financial products from investment banks. …
One may say that such system is obviously flawed and is unlikely - but most probably it’s just a consequence of the fact that billionaires are heavily involved in law making process. (Lobbying, networking-corruption, etc)
Coming after those billionaires isn’t just bad for those billionaires. It is revoking the Code of Honorable Wealth. It is returning to Rule of the Violent, and slave economies, and grinding global poverty. Protecting the Code is incredibly important NOT because it serves some billionaires, but because it serves every single person in our society that lives above the level of a 16th century peasant.
In a nutshell, this is slippery slope argument. "First they came for the billionaires..." And I don't think this argument works in this case.
Slopes are slippery ...
I like the framing you puth forth in the paragraph containing:
So for the first time in our history, the bullies stopped stealing the nerds' lunch money.
I also like this counter framing (Piketty inspired):
When the return of capital exceeds the growth rate (r>g), wealth accumulate at the top. Without progressive redistribution, the populous belief in the very system that garuenties property rights is uncertain.
Redistribution is thus not charity, it is the logical way for the rich to buy an insurance policy on the respect for property rights via the continuation of popular support for democracy.
Some musings:
- Being a CEO does seem to require skills, commitment, and responsibility that normal professions do not, but it also seems to be rewarding in that it provides people a sense of adventure, fun, and meaning that normal professions do not.
- I do think that there are benefits to entrepreneurs, and that most people can't actually empathize with being a business person. I also think entrepreneurship lends itself to local-maxima-seeking effectual thinking, and that having a class of people (regulators and activists) who regulate billionaires' sordid beh
I was at the Pro-Billionaire march, unironically. Here’s why, what happened there, and how I think it went.
Me on the far left. From WSJ.
I. Why?
There’s a genre of horror movie where a normal protagonist is going through a normal day in a normal life. Ten minutes into the movie his friends bring out a struggling kidnap victim to slaughter, and they look at him like this is just a normal Tuesday and he slowly realizes that either he’s surrounded by complete psychopaths or the world is absolutely fucked up in some way he never imagined, and somehow this has been lost on him up until this point in his life. This kinda thing happens to me more than I’d like to admit, but normally it’s in a metaphorical way. Normally.
Sometimes I’m at the goth club, fighting back The Depression (and winning tyvm), and I’ll be involved in a conversation that veers into:
I am sad that this is not an exaggeration. Every bit is literally things I’ve heard people say and witnessed myself. It’s horrifying to see normal people you dance with turn into nazis so easily.
Me at Milk Bar in Denver, last year
I know why it happens. I don’t blame people for not understanding the complexities of a global economy that makes it possible to buy a nearly-magic artifact that no human alive can create on their own for just 16 cents.[1] It feels like there is a certain amount of Stuff in the world, and so if some people have a lot of Stuff that’s only possible because others have much less Stuff, and that’s unfair. If life is hard, it’s the fault of the people who took all the Stuff.
What shocks me is how socially acceptable it is to openly say that good people should support lynching strangers based on their wealth. Everyone expects that saying this will get you approval. The most racist nationalists keep their slurs to their friend groups, or behind an online buffer, unless they’re looking to start a fight. Proclaiming your hatreds among strangers is risky. Even the ICE cowards wear masks. But when it comes to revulsion for billionaires, everyone expects to be cheered.
I want this to change. I want people to think at least a tiny bit “this might be slightly socially costly to say.” In theory, one way to do that is to be public about the fact that real people exist that find that sort of unthinking hatred repugnant. A group demonstration of this could be one way to do that. I signed up for the Pro-Billionaire march in hopes that it could advance this sentiment.
II. You Get About Five Words
The previous section is aprox 500 words. As we all know, when trying to convince a lot of people of something You Get About Five Words. How the hell do I encapsulate all that in Five Words?
I want to point at the hate directly. My first sign attempt included “Hate is Ugly.” But that is cliche and doesn’t really communicate anything. Anyone could say it. More importantly, I don’t believe that hate is always wrong. It’s good to hate certain things. Nazis. Criminals.
Two-Boxers. If you don’t hate anything then you don’t love anything either. The problem is that blanket hate of billionaires is bad. I want to point at the fact that the hate is destructive and stupid rather than appropriately defensive.I did end up putting it on the back of my sign anyway
III. The Code of Honorable Wealth
The thing I want everyone to internalize, the thing that could let us talk about the future together, is the sentiment behind Paul Graham’s essay How To Make Wealth, which in my memory will always be remembered as Let Nerds Keep Their Stuff
You need to read the whole essay to get the emotional payload that makes this summary deeply salient. But that essay is nearly 9000 words! Not good for a marching sign.
The closest I can distill it to is this:
That’s less than 9000 words, but STILL won’t fit on a sign. ARGH.
IV. Stone Age Billionaire
Maybe a single vivid image can get across what I mean. From Paul Graham’s essay:
This isn’t just a “surprising number of people,” this is the default. The world is full of Stuff. When you do work for someone they give you some of their Stuff, and when you want something from someone else you give them some of your Stuff. The nature of specialization and global supply chains is such that almost no one sees new Stuff being built in a way that noticeably grows the pool of all Stuff, so it feels constant. For most people their labor adds to the global pool of Stuff the same amount their sweating changes the local humidity level. Technically non-zero, but not so’s you’d notice.
But if you take a longer view it’s obvious that humans have created a TON of stuff. By the standards of our ancestors, we are all absolutely billionaires. We are drowning in wealth, our lives are joyous and easy compared to our forebearers struggling in their caves. Every single one of us is a Stone Age Billionaire. If people stop to think about why we are billionaires compared to our stone-age grandparents, maybe they’ll remember the importance of the Code that created this world. Is there an image that sparks that? Can I convey this image with a sign?
Turns out that no, I cannot. My words not good! There is way too much of an inferential gap. No one got it, and to be totally honest I kinda knew this wasn’t gonna do it. But it was 10am on Saturday, 30 minutes before I was meeting my friends to carpool to the protest, and I was out of ideas. At best I could hope that someone would ask me about the sign. (Very few people did.)
V. At The Protest
Including myself and my friends, there were aprox 25 Pro-Billionaire protestors. Journalists seemed to be about 15? I don’t know if a ratio this extreme is good or bad. It was quite a sight seeing a gaggle of them rushing up around the side of the protest to get photos of us from the front.
What we saw
What they saw.
I believe these two photos were taken at the same place, less than a minute apart. The kneeling guy with the crown is a counter-protestor.
I counted 12 counter-protestors at the initial gathering point. It was hard to tell at first if someone was a counter protestor because the counter protestors didn’t seem to understand why one would be Pro-Billionaire and thus their signs were welcome among the protestors. For example the “Poor and Proud” and “March 4 Hundredaires” signs are sentiments that literally every Pro-Billionaire protestor would gladly endorse. But they (and a couple others) didn’t bother marching to the capital, dropping out once we started moving, which makes me think they were probably not actually there in support of the march. I think eight counter-protestors followed us the entire way, which made the march look a fair bit bigger in photos.
VI. Building Bridges
The best part of the march was the occasional opportunities to talk to the counter-protestors. Over the course of a forty-minute walk it’s hard to stay completely alienated from those you’re walking with unless you retain strong distance-discipline. One counter-protestor commented to me “I bet you can’t wait to accelerate the AIs down onto us.”2 I told him no, actually, I want them to pause all development immediately so we don’t all die. He was surprised that we agreed, saying that he didn’t expect long-sighted opinions like that from someone who was so short-term focused that he wanted to protect billionaires. This is exactly the sort of thing my Jehovah’s Witness upbringing had prepared me for! (I cannot believe that training actually came in useful!!!)
I began with “I think we agree on a lot, actually. We both want to protect the long-term future, and we think the other side is being very short-sighted and destroying the long-term future for short-term gain.” Then I launched into my opinion on The Code that has created the society we have today, and how that Code means that we will have billionaires who came by their fortunes Honorably, and that we must stand true to the Code and allow those billionaires to retain the wealth if we want to remain a Just and Wealthy society. I drew attention to the fact that we are all Stone Age Billionaires (and pointed out my sign) and that this is because we have kept faith with the Code. Our descendants can all be billionaires by today’s reckoning, if we don’t destroy the thing that let us create this level of cooperation and coordination in the first place.
He listened, and seemed to be contemplating. When he nodded and walked away, I felt like I’d managed to actually bring this idea into his consideration. Maybe there’s a seed that’s been planted there, which will grow over time.
Equally importantly, two of the highly-costumed counter-protestors were directly behind us as we talked. I believe they overheard us, because they stayed quiet the entire time, which was unusual for them. Likewise, later in the march I saw the crown-wearing counter-protestor talking with Aella, and having a similarly open-exchange discussion. I am hopeful that they all will have new perspectives on why good people might really care about property rights.
VII. The Counter-Protestors
There were about 8 counter-protestors, to roughly 25 protestors. However at least some initial media outlets tweeted that the protest was “swamped” by the counter-protestors. I’m not surprised, because the counter-protestors had a VERY outsized presence.
For starters, most of them were in elaborate costume. Fancy suits & crowns, or royal garb. One had the Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show on her back as a giant marionette, and was dancing the whole time while feeding mock human flesh to anyone who would take it. This sounds horrific in text but her vibes were great, she absolutely had the air of someone you’d love to party with. Next time I’m gonna wear something far more visually interesting. Maybe full goth gear.
More importantly, they were extremely energized. They stayed together near the front and shouted at the top of their lungs at every stoplight. The Pro-Billionaire protestors were rarely able to drown them out. The counter-protestors had fury and righteousness on their side, they were here to Smash Evil, and the rest of us were struggling to figure out how to fit Paul Graham’s nine-thousand-word essay on the Code that gave us modern society into a five-word chant.
Their chants did a good job of demonstrating (and spreading?) the mental hellscape they live in. Their favorite one was “Eat The Poor,” showing the “there’s only X amount of Stuff” fear. I tried “Don’t Eat Humans!” for a while, which was OK I guess, but not catchy.
In comparison to their chants, ours were pathetic. “Grow The Pie” just doesn’t have any emotional heft to it. It feels made-up. “Build More Housing” was good, but not directly relevant. “Property Rights Are Human Rights” requires an essay of context to understand and isn’t Inspiring out of the box. We didn’t have any unified rallying cry to respond with.
But most important of all, they had the power of social approval on their side. Maybe there were three times as many of “us” as there were of “them” marching down the street, but they had every single resident of the city on their side. The media was on their side. The cops were on their side. On any given day on any given street corner, if someone were to stand up and yell “Fuck the billionaires, kill them all!” they would get cheers from at least half the people around, and no dissent. The amount of intimidative power this gives you is impressive to watch in action. It felt like most of the protestors didn’t have the willingness to rise against that. It obviously felt very good for the counter-protestors to get to exercise that power.
VIII. Final Speeches
The worst part of the march was the period of final speeches outside the capital building. The speeches themselves were OK, the second one in particular was exceptionally well delivered. The counter-protestors, however, got to demonstrate who owned the streets and what this really means.
Initially the Pro-Billionaire protestors attempted to unfurl the large banner and give a few quick speeches in front of it. The five most zealous counter-protestors pushed their way in front of it to take up the space and prevent anyone from speaking. When the banner moved they just moved with it. At this point the protestors were kinda stuck, because what exactly are you supposed to do? Whatever in-roads we may have made chatting during the march, the counter-protestors weren’t going to listen to words right now, they were just here for maximum physical disruption. In theory we could push them aside, but by the rules of polite society that would make us the aggressors. It would give them exactly the media attention they want. It seemed that either they could just shut down the final speeches indefinitely with heckling, or they get media coverage of being assaulted by violent billionaire-lovers, and either way they win. NGL - it was legit embarrassing.
Then my friend Ben realized that this is a giant game of “I’m not touching you” for adults. Which is the stupidest dang thing IMO, but is pretty symetrical. A few of us just stood close together in a line, and we moved the speeches to the other side of that line. The counter-protestors would have to walk through us to block that speech, and we just didn’t move. When they tried to go around us we shifted to be in front of them. And they couldn’t actually touch us because that was against the rules, so this worked?? It was bizarre. It made me feel again like I have absolutely no social awareness or acumen. This is a stupid way to win a stupid game.
It didn’t work perfectly. We didn’t have any structure or leadership, no one had foreseen this, so there wasn’t any way to actually coordinate the cordon. Only like four of us actually did this, entirely ad hoc. I’m frankly surprised it was enough. Also we were actually interested in the speeches, so we didn’t keep a sharp eye on the hecklers and a couple of them edged around to get close to the speech-givers. They continued to shout heckles between lines of the speeches. At least once I turned around to nudge someone back again, and I heard the ominous line of “Don’t touch me.” There’s a small spike of adrenaline that comes with those words when you realize they are a warning that we’re on the verge of an escalation that can only benefit them. All in all it was poorly executed, like if a gay pride march had Fred Phelps with a “god hates fags” sign edging into every photo of the final speech, while yelling slurs between lines from ten feet away.
IX. How’d It Go?
IMO the march had a couple problems.
The first was that there was no unified message. Ostensibly it was about the California Billionaire Tax Act confiscating 5% of billionaire net worth. And yes, that’s fucking nuts.
But that’s a symptom of the real problem, which is breakdown of the social code. I didn’t come here because of that one Act, I came here because, as outlined in Section 1, I’m horrified by how much of the population talks about lynching people to take their stuff, and that this is viewed as normal or good! I refused to repeat Derik’s words when he said “Thank you Billionaires.” I’m thankful to the social code that created this, not to individual men. There was a lack of unified message that made it much harder for everyone to be enthusiastic together.
On the one hand, maybe this helped. The march was thrown together with just one week’s notice and it needed to gather the biggest tent possible. If the march was just about the California Billionaire Tax Act, I probably wouldn’t have come. Since it was about the right for billionaires to exist honorably, I did.
On the other hand, the ambiguity meant that when opposition showed up there wasn’t a central unifying core that everyone could rally around. We were easy to overwhelm with just a third of our numbers.
The second was that there was no preparation. It would have been good to have everyone ready with a few chants that we could all practice before we left and really get behind. Some thought of what to do if hecklers showed up would’ve been good. Ideally there should be several people picked out beforehand, who had gathered the day before to practice linking arms to create a cordon, and were instructed in whatever is best practices when running into this sort of harassment. People that the march-leader could look to when in need of back up. Things turned out surprisingly well given that no one had any idea what they were doing!
All that being said, this was all thrown together in a week over a group chat and got a surprising amount of media coverage. I’m very pro-people-doing-things. The default is that nothing happens, and for someone to actually try something and get this going on such short notice is amazing! The world is better than it was the day before, even just a tiny bit, because a few people were willing to risk failing publicly at something hard. They cared enough to do it anyway, and maybe now a few people are a little more interested in how it is we’re so much better off today than our ancestors ever were.
We’re all Stone Age Billionaires, and it’s not because any one of us works a billion times harder at picking berries and hunting deer than our ancestors. They all worked far harder than we did, and they would weep with joy to see how rich we are. To see how few hours we need to work to feed ourselves, how we don’t wear out our bodies from grinding labor and harsh environments. We can weep with joy at how wealthy and happy our great-grandchildren will be. If we keep true to the Code of Honorable Wealth that makes this cooperation and creation possible, our great-grandchildren can all (yes all) live life as 20th Century Billionaires.
Which includes the cost of having it brought to your door within two days! But you gotta buy 2 dozen at once.