The fact that outright billionaires are choosing to spend their time being irate online commentators and podcast hosts rather than, like, literally anything else productive, seems like a sign of one of the most important and unspoken sociological facts about modern America.
Billionaires are poor.
Having more money doesn't make you wealthier or more powerful.
Apparently in America the purpose of having billions of dollars is to have job security for being a full-time podcaster or online commentator about the woke left, which, it turns out, has gone bananas.
Billions of dollars to pursue my lifelong dream of being an inflooencer.
My advice to billionaires:
Use your money to generously and widely fund crazy people with unconventional ideas. Not just their startup ideas to get A RETURN. Fund them without strings attached. Write a serious book.
Do not start a podcast. Do not tweet. Do not smile in photos.
If you only fund business ideas, you are only ever going to get more useless money. This is a terminal dead end.
If you want to change the world, you have to be willing to lose money. The more you lose, the better.
The modern billionaire will inevitably be expropriated by his hated enemies and lawyers. It doesn't take a genius of political economy to see this coming.
The only solution is to pre-emptively self-expropriate by giving away your money to people you actually like and support.
More tens of billions of dollars expropriated just through *marriage or divorce* have been used to fund intellectual and cultural movement than perhaps all of the intentional funding of all other tech billionaires combined in history.
MacKenzie Bezos and Laurene Powell-Jobs.
The reason civilization is declining and we aren't getting Martian Technocracy is that you won't pay for your preferred ideological vision of the future, but environmentalist degrowth billionaires etc. *will* pay for theirs.
It would cost no more than a few billion dollars at the absolute max, from start to finish, to reform modern society into an expanding spacefaring civilization. Cheap!
Europe is great because you can never find clear information about laws because we peasants are not intended to know them, and even if you do they are written in unclear, useless legalese, because the real law is just "whatever we don't like is illegal," which is "everything."
U.S. laws and regulations at least attempt to set clear, simple, and fair guidelines and punishments, but European laws are all deliberately written to be like "the fine can be between zero to one trillion euros" and "breathing in an unsanctioned manner can be an infraction."
I don't think the U.S. comes anywhere close to being as clear, simple, and fair as Americans would like, and that's not a minor problem to forgive, but it's edifying to see how Europeans just dispense with the illusion entirely and write themselves total discretion into the law.
Acquiring wealth may seem like a rational pursuit in the face of a system apparently too hopelessly broken to fix. But this is a catastrophic error because even if wealth is not confiscated or devalued, the things it could buy now or before will just disappear, at any price.
Eventually even the richest man in South Africa or Brazil or whichever parallel you may use will want nothing but for his grandchildren to be able to get a job designing space rockets, and this will be impossible, because there will be no space program and no money to build it.
The idea we can "out-grow" dysfunction like Elon Musk or other pro-AI people think is flat-out backwards, unless you think the AI will obsolete humanity in totality. The dysfunction literally lives off of growth! Growing the economy subsidizes it more and allows new injustices!
They aren't our rulers. Our rulers are career bureaucrats, journalists, nonprofit executives, activist jurists, university administrators, and progressive billionaire philanthropists. They are numerous, stay out of the spotlight, and don't bother commentating because it's weak.
To actually compete in any meaningful way with this vast organization of political coordination requires graduating from the diminishing returns of inflaming the emotions of the masses to organizing professional cadres financed by long-term-oriented philanthropy.
The real stumbling block seems to be the lack of any substantive vision or belief system that would motivate donors to coordinate with future cadres. There is literally no fleshed-out positive vision of governance and the destiny of our civilization to legitimize the activity.
A great form of non-progressive philanthropy would be to fund extra-academic schools of history taught by proven outsiders, of which there are many online with followings large and small, since universities are planning to just take history itself and throw it in the trash.
If the collectively giga-wealthy opponents of infinite woke cannot figure out how to fund a few independent schools of history to literally save the accurate collective memory of a world-spanning civilization that gives them identity and purpose...
...well, then "deserving to lose" would be a complimentary understatement. Do we still think the universities are reformable? Much quicker progress could be made by giving an endowment to the sharpest history-posters from here and other sites. I could write a list in minutes.
Outside of occasionally winning scheduled elections, it turns out that unleashing freedom of speech and allowing the masses to vent their frustrations with bad governance at maximal intensity has no discernible effect on governance quality, and may even worsen it due to spite.
There is not enough analysis or even awareness of the feedback loops that inform the month-to-month decision-making by the Western governing classes in bureaucracies. They clearly seem to close ranks and deliberately intensify unpopular policies in response to populist pressure.
This is the exact reverse of the "vox populi, vox dei" theory that maybe populist rhetoric and pressure will at least nudge governance in the right direction. There are also bizarre outcomes like the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 totally deflating pandemic restrictions.
Frenzied, desperate Boomers passing laws to ban young people from free speech, home ownership, or stable employment, while also berating them uhh this is just like WWII, so we are reintroducing military conscription too.
We are just looking at the process of total institutional breakdown. Dysfunctional institutions keep escalating demands on your time and money; rationally disincentivizing competence or participation; fewer resources available; more escalating demands; rinse and repeat.
All the taxes and demands being placed on young people should instead be placed on the old. It is the old who should see falls in living standards at the expense of the young, not the other way around. The default situation is accurately perceived as illegitimate and vampiric.