this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
417 points (76.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43940 readers
736 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Its important to remember that rich assholes buying expensive things is not a reason to hate them: that's envy. Rich assholes spending their money on expensive luxuries fund the luxury economy, which finds its way to the regular economy. That's how economies work, the money moves. The spending isn't the issue. It's the hoarding. You can't spend a trillion dollars. You can't spend a billion dollars. But you can keep it out of the economy. That's what keeps everyone else down.
It's like if the top 70% of the ocean was just fucking cement.
When their expensive luxuries are actively harming the planet, I think their indulgences offer us plenty of justification to hate. Private jets emit the same amount of CO2 in two hours that an average car does in a year. This frivolous waste poisons our air and warms our fragile seas. Iโm not envious of private jets or yachts; it would be unethical for me to use them no matter how much wealth I had.
The word you are looking for is investment, while what you've described here is consumption. Investment is far, far better than consumption. One is adding to the market, and the other is removing things from the market that could otherwise have been put to much better uses.