So, question: when the billionaire dies, does their wealth transfer according to local laws? So an entire lineage could instantly turn inside out, including bastard children on the fringes of inheritance, with only an estate tax to save them?
The traumatic shock of any one person personally possessing a billion dollars or more in wealth being Dr. Manhattan’d would eventually lead people to realize that they need to redistribute wealth.
The potential number of potentially innocent people killed by this process is infinitesimal compared to the deaths and uneccessary harm caused by the general hoarding of wealth.
The new, hard mandated moral norm of the planet would be that possessing over a billion dollars gets you functionally smote by god, obviously the universe has imposed a hard cap on wealth accumulation and thus it is actually bad.
You can quibble about inflation, and I can quibble about making some more precise measure based on a formulation revolving around proportion to the median wealth of 100 miles of where the ‘billionaire’ is currently standing.
We are talking about magical superpowers here, presumably there would be a magical way to force actual transparency of hidden assets and what not, account for non liquid investements, all that.
A sane world that exists after this paradigm would put in place basically the reverse of overdraft protection, it would automatically stop any desposit that would make your net wealth exceed the magic number, it would automatically disperse shares of stocks or CDs or bonds or whatever to some kind of public pool or random people such that no individual ever singly has over a billion bucks or whatever the magic number is.
If you did not create a world like that, then ‘random’ people would keep liquifying whenever their net wealth exceedes magic number.
Every incentive would thus exist for all but the literally suicidal to carefully manage their investments and basically create something like the above mentioned system.
… You could probably make a decent anime or show out of this idea.
Its like a Death Note on autopilot, and if it is actually emmenating from a single person, doubtless a number of oligarchs would attempt to hide their wealth, as well as probe the system to figure out its rules, figure out who the actual person with this ‘superpower’ is, and kill them.
This person may not even know it is them, and then they may figure it out on their own, or may be prevented from being assasinated by some other group that did figure out it is them, and wants to protect them because billionaires bad.
Tons of dramatic person to person character dynamics, as well as larger scale social conflict plot setups here.
Logically since all billionaires die, their lineage would be gradually wiped out.
Where it gets tricky is how they would manage the money. If the money is not directly controlled by them, are they billionaires? So does the CFO of a multi billion dollar company also get turned inside out?
It would be a heck of a monkey paw without stipulations that would make the point worthless.
Every 12 hours, the richest person in the world turns inside out. Just one, every 12 hours. The only way to stop it is if capitalism ends and people no longer hoard wealth.
So, question: when the billionaire dies, does their wealth transfer according to local laws? So an entire lineage could instantly turn inside out, including bastard children on the fringes of inheritance, with only an estate tax to save them?
Counterpoint:
Who cares?
The traumatic shock of any one person personally possessing a billion dollars or more in wealth being Dr. Manhattan’d would eventually lead people to realize that they need to redistribute wealth.
The potential number of potentially innocent people killed by this process is infinitesimal compared to the deaths and uneccessary harm caused by the general hoarding of wealth.
The new, hard mandated moral norm of the planet would be that possessing over a billion dollars gets you functionally smote by god, obviously the universe has imposed a hard cap on wealth accumulation and thus it is actually bad.
You can quibble about inflation, and I can quibble about making some more precise measure based on a formulation revolving around proportion to the median wealth of 100 miles of where the ‘billionaire’ is currently standing.
We are talking about magical superpowers here, presumably there would be a magical way to force actual transparency of hidden assets and what not, account for non liquid investements, all that.
A sane world that exists after this paradigm would put in place basically the reverse of overdraft protection, it would automatically stop any desposit that would make your net wealth exceed the magic number, it would automatically disperse shares of stocks or CDs or bonds or whatever to some kind of public pool or random people such that no individual ever singly has over a billion bucks or whatever the magic number is.
If you did not create a world like that, then ‘random’ people would keep liquifying whenever their net wealth exceedes magic number.
Every incentive would thus exist for all but the literally suicidal to carefully manage their investments and basically create something like the above mentioned system.
… You could probably make a decent anime or show out of this idea.
Its like a Death Note on autopilot, and if it is actually emmenating from a single person, doubtless a number of oligarchs would attempt to hide their wealth, as well as probe the system to figure out its rules, figure out who the actual person with this ‘superpower’ is, and kill them.
This person may not even know it is them, and then they may figure it out on their own, or may be prevented from being assasinated by some other group that did figure out it is them, and wants to protect them because billionaires bad.
Tons of dramatic person to person character dynamics, as well as larger scale social conflict plot setups here.
Bro casted familicide
Unzip failure on all of humanity
Logically since all billionaires die, their lineage would be gradually wiped out.
Where it gets tricky is how they would manage the money. If the money is not directly controlled by them, are they billionaires? So does the CFO of a multi billion dollar company also get turned inside out?
It would be a heck of a monkey paw without stipulations that would make the point worthless.
Every 12 hours, the richest person in the world turns inside out. Just one, every 12 hours. The only way to stop it is if capitalism ends and people no longer hoard wealth.