It’s Shopify’s Tobi Lutke.
A reminder that he’s behind Build Canada and Build Toronto, and that Build Toronto’s Eric Lombardi is running for the Ontario Librral Party leadership as we speak.
When you said “under fire” I thought you meant literally, as in there is a squad of soldiers currently training their machine guns on the lad’s home.
I actually find his idea of weighed voting based on tax paid a good idea. But then percentage wise based on wealth. So if you pay 2% wealth tax you get 2 votes, if you pay 50% you get 50 votes.
Awwww too bad billionaires don’t / barely pay taxes. No votes for those arrogant rich assholes. Now we can vote to arrest billionaires who don’t pay taxes, imprison them for tax evasion and take away their wealth which can be used to improve quality of life of the general public.
No one should vote. Representative democracy by popular vote isn’t an effective way to administrate a nation.
Bring back qualified sortition.
Has he considered that voting is free, but bullets are cheap? If he were smart, he’d be wary of taking the ballot box out of the equation.
Talk like this is almost like they are BEGGING for the guillotines to start rolling out.
Wealthy arrogance is suicidal.
My brother was one of the first 10 or so hires of Shopify so seeing the little company grow into the massive company it is now in the 2010s made me like this guy a lot. He seemed to treat the team with respect and recognized/rewarded them for their work.
Then he totally ended up being yet another shitty billionaire (MAGA supporter iirc).
Thankfully, my brother quit before Toby’s dickishness was made obvious, and so he remains the nicest, down-to-earth guy that I know.
Hang em
He’s right though. The oligarchs having to own news and social media to get the election outcomes they want, and then also having to lobby those politicians to enact the right policies is incredibly inefficient. It would be simpler if the politicians were unelected and simply payrolled employees of the owner class.
That sounds an awful lot like Feudalism in the making.
Pretty clear sign that democracy is an impediment to capitalism.
It used to be that only property owners could vote. The laws all favoured the property owners.
I used to work at Shopify. Wouldn’t recommend it.
Anything you can share without doxxing yourself too much?
Better idea - only the middle class can vote.
No, EVERYBODY can vote. It is your most basic right as an American citizen, and it should never be removed for any reason.
We should be automatically registered to vote on the day we are born, and that automatically validates on your 18th birthday. You literally have to do nothing, no IDs, nothing. You have the right to vote simply by being an American citizen, period.
And your right to vote shouldn’t be removed for any reason at all. Even serial killers in prison should be able to vote. Prisoners need representation as much as anyone, probably more.
The right to vote should be sacrosanct, and even the discussion of suppressing votes by candidates should be illegal. That is not a subject for debate.
OTOH, the idea that corporation can vote is an abomination, and politicians who attempt such nonsense should be dealt with harshly. Hear that Delaware?
True, but this is Canada
What middle class?
The middle class already decides most elections because politicians target the middle class as a voting bloc.
This is why housing prices always seem to trend up: middle class wealth is concentrated in their family home.
This is also why there’s so much government funding for universities (public universities). The middle class disproportionately benefit from it. Taxes on working class people to pay for higher education that their own children don’t benefit from are regressive taxes. Basically a wealth transfer from the working class to the middle class.
Monkey’s paw curls a finger
Only wealthy business owners who are not royalty can vote
I just want world wide wealth caps. 10 million is the max that any person canboen or control. Any additional income after that goes 100% straight to taxes.
This simple rule has wide spread implications from ending poverty to likely ending wars, removing power from narcissist politicians, and souch more
In the 1970’s, $1 million and you were rich.Today, it’s $10 million and even that is less than a lottery win. The limit would have to be $100 million.
The multimillionaires would end inflation very quickly.
On it’s own that won’t end poverty, but coupled with something like a basic income it could. It would definitely end all the extreme wealth stupidity, and if it was retroactive nobody could really flee with their wealth, like they might manage to with a lesser wealth tax.
You might want to go up to 15, though. There’s bound to be some sympathetic retiree couple with a house in inner Vancouver.
A 100% income tax means there’s no incentive to remove profits from a business beyond that income, since you can’t spend any of it, so it will just encourage increased accounting trickery to justify “business expenses” for things like purchasing private islands, sports cars, and luxury vacations.
80% is high enough; for every $10 million they withdraw for personal spending, they keep 2, and the other $8 million would go to pay for the services requested to run the rest of the country that enables them to produce their wealth. (Including all their employees and customers.)
Then we still benefit from the efficiencies inherent in the profit motive while having the ultra wealthy pay their fair share.
That was a wealth tax, not a tax on income. So, nobody would be worth more than 10 million, and earning 10 million is almost out of the question. That means you can’t own a huge business by yourself, to start with.
Get a high salary, “lose it” on crypto, retire in Belize.
I might argue that if any single individual is in the position to collect $10M+/year, the economic system is already dysfunctional. That individual is operating as a gatekeeper rather than a value center and the position they occupy needs to be broken up and reorganized.
I could imagine a top surgeon or pro athlete legitimately earning that much from their own labor alone.
a top surgeon
Tops are a dime a dozen. Bottom surgery is where the big money is at.
I do understand the frustration with the fact that people who are working have less time to be politically active than retirees, but I don’t really see any way around it. The flip side is that a lot of great volunteers retire into community service and have a lot of extra time to help the community because they no longer work.
Doing political things, like attending town hall meetings or party fundraisers, could count for tax rebates like donations do, and a certain amount of days off work each year could be required to be available for such things.
Election days could be national holidays, and local election days local holidays.
If being poor or being required to work is really that much of an issue, I’m sure a billionaire could afford 60k UBI for ten thousand people.
Having a day off for elections (or even a half day) feels like it should be a pretty low hanging fruit to really improve voter turnout
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but trillionaires should be forced to transition into billionaires, and billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
Financial obesity
I love it.
I just want world wide wealth caps. 10 million is the max that any person canboen or control. Any additional income after that goes 100% straight to taxes.
This simple rule has wide spread implications from ending poverty to likely ending wars, removing power from narcissist politicians, and souch more
I love that term
I feel like this is a copypasta from somewhere. I think I saw it before I need to start using it.
I throw it at any thread I find relating to financial inequality.
It’s lazy, but it’s honest work.
Billionaire people shouldn’t be able to vote.
They have power through capital already, they don’t need more.
