Preventing the rich from getting richer does nothing in and of itself to help the poor. You might do things to help the poor that as a side effect make it harder to accrue absurd amounts of wealth, but if your goal from the outset is simply to eliminate all billionaires, there are lots of ways to do that that will only end up hurting the poor as well.
Can we reasonably assume that in the idea of "looking at the ultra rich to help solving poverty", there is fundamentally an idea that... well... it should be done in a way that will help poverty?
Or was it that unclear that I was talking about solving poverty, with the idea that all the money that goes for ultra rich could actually be distributed better?
Rhetoric matters, and you didn't say "looking at the ultra rich to help solve poverty", you said "prevent the ultra rich [from] get[ting] even richer". If you had said the former, I wouldn't have objected. What you actually said felt more like class warfare than a serious proposal to help poor people.
You can do us a favor and outline for us how doing that is a first step to solving poverty. Otherwise it seems like you just regurgitated a populist meme.
Ok, let's say you find a way to distribute the resources evenly between everybody. Haven't you solved poverty then?
Then if you want to solve inequalities, do you think it's easier to start by solving inequalities between the poor people, or is it easier to start by taking money from those who are insanely rich for no good reason?
Your first step is "take" and your second step is "figure it out". If you did figure it out, you wouldn't have to be forcefully taking.
Are you assuming we already have enough resources to solve poverty? Isn't the actual issue that even with perfectly equal distribution we don't have enough resources for every body?
If the pie isn't big enough, why is the communist's focus always on how to divide the pie, rather than growing the pie? Do communists have anything to add at all when it comes to increasing productivity so we can all have more?
Wasn't lack of productivity exactly what killed communism? Even China didn't wake up until it opened its markets.
Inequality isn't increasing because poor people are doing worse. Poor people are doing better. Poor people's conditions are improving faster than they ever have. It's true that the richest people's wealth grew even faster than that, therefore increasing inequality.
But if you really care about the wellbeing of the poor, then you wouldn't distracted by inequality when the conditions are improving. You'd interrupt the most successful ever for the worst system ever, driven by jealousy, bitterness, and moral indignation.
I can't really tell you how communists think, to be honest, because I am not exactly one. It's a weird thing (in the US?) that everyone who is not libertarian is considered communist (and not any communist: mostly the kind that is "the enemy" in cold war era video games, apparently).
There are many systems that would probably be considered communist in the US (at least by those of you who seem to have no clue about anything that is not libertarian) that work really well without genocides. But you'd have to open a book that is not US-centered to see that.
I'm not American, nor am I a libertarian. I'm a socialist Arab.
I still object to communism, and populist memes like "eat the rich." At best they're immature, at worst they're agents of chaos and destruction who actually harm the lives of millions when they get what they want.
I said "prevent the ultra rich from getting even richer", and you understood "murder tens of millions of people for the cause".
That escalated quickly. I would be tempted to say that you completely, absolutely hallucinated the meaning of my words, but then... well English isn't my first language, so maybe that's on me.
Because you think that no non-communist system has ever killed anyone?
The point of the parent is that the fact that USSR collapsed does not mean communism (or any kind of less liberal system, for that matter) is fundamentally bad. Just like getting a crash does not mean that the language is fundamentally bad.
What about this one, following your reasoning: "The Nazi were producing cars, and the Nazi brought us into a world war. Therefore no one should ever produce cars again".
Communism is bad because communists think the ends justify the means and (as you are demonstrating) shamelessly excuse tens of millions of murders (proving they've learned nothing and will do it again when given the chance.)
You obviously have absolutely no idea what communists think, and what "communism" means.
What you are demonstrating is that it is impossible to talk with you. Not sure if that is because you can't understand a basic sentence or just because you aren't open to even learn what a word means before making completely wrong conclusions, but I don't care. We won't have a constructive discussion, let's stop here.
Communists think that it possible to build communism by killing of «bad» (rich) people, until good people, liberated from burden of capitalism, will build communism. In their imagination, it's OK to kill 30% of population to build heaven for them.
Sounds like what I imagine when looking of a cliché about what people learn in the US. Are you from the US? And is it really what you're being taught there? Genuinely interested.
We've got a communist in this thread being dismissive of 30 million dead. Communism is morally an intellectually bankrupt. It's an ideology for the bitter and depraved.
Liberal capitalism prohibits that. Value of human life is equal to infinity, except when in war. Utilitarian or «wild» capitalism did lot of harm to peoples and environment. For example, selling of addictive drugs is very profitable business, which kills or disables people.
You do realize that reducing inequalities is not exactly equivalent to "pure communism theory", which is again not exactly equivalent to "USSR"? Or is that all the same to you?
The combined net worth of all billionaires in Portugal[1] is about 10% of annual government spending [2].
So to within a rounding error, no, it's a poor country full of poor people with an irrelevant number of billionaires. You could destroy all foreign investment and future growth by confiscating literally all of their wealth for 1 year of modestly higher government spending.
