Why did a $154 billion CEO just endorse stripping most Americans of voting rights—and taking us back to the 19th century? | Fortune
23 days ago by Sunflier to c/politics
Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, whose company commands a market capitalization near $154 billion, told his social media followers this week that a tax-tiered voting system—one that would strip voting rights from anyone who pays no income tax—would be a “good system.”
That two-word endorsement, dropped into a viral thread, has reignited a debate over wealth, power, and democracy that most Americans thought was settled more than a century ago.
The proposal would invert the founding American principle of “no taxation without representation” into something closer to “no representation without taxation”—and specifically, high taxation. Reactions online split sharply: Some framed it as a provocative thought experiment about aligning fiscal responsibility with political voice, while others called it a naked attempt to legitimize plutocracy by giving billionaires and multimillionaires a formal, multiplied vote over the laws that govern everyone else.
But it also revealed that America is grappling with a political economy debate, as a frozen housing market and an entrenched wealthy baby boomer demographic have many, not just Lütke, arguing that something big needs to change
At this point, their necks practically beg for the guillotine's blade. They keep reminding us:
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of . . . tyrants.
-Thomas Jefferson in November 13, 1787, letter to William Stephens Smith.
i think thats his argument. make billionaires pay tax to compete for policies. basically calling bribes tax or real life p2w, which it is currently but legal.
My take is, sack all of these billionaires and idiots on an remote small little island and let them figure out how they wanna govern themselves.
Like atlas shrugged? i like it! If we use the Randian framing they'll probably eat it up!
"nooo dont leave whatever will we do without someone to boss us around noooo please dont isolate yourself on a remote island pleeeeeease"
and then just not let em back in if they try
The self-serving “anarcho-capitalist” whore that died dependent on Medicare and social security.
Me too, but you know, its probably because somewhere deep down they know it wouldn't work. Or maybe they did try, maybe that was exactly what epstein was trying to do on that island (+ the child raping).
They tried and failed.
Edit: there's also SeaLand, of course. Which apparently still exists and has one whole resident:
T. Rump is pretty much establishing the government for that timeline.
Its where they keep the sexiest children.
Yup. Trust me billionaires it is so great down there you should risk it all to get down down there!
That's not his argument. He, like all billionaires, think they pay too much. They still end up paying social security and Medicaid. It just ends up being less than 1% because it capped. He would still get to vote in his new proposed system.
Tobias Lütke is a German born Canadian. Why is he commenting about US elections at all? He has never voted in the US.
Because he makes money from it, capitalism and fascism have no borders.
Edit: and I'm sure he's voted with his dollars.
Because he hates democracy everywhere, and thinks the US might be the next to fall, if it hasn't already.
Yet another reason for me to dislike Shopify.
I already hated that all the small retailers I use have migrated to it and it pushes you to set up an account so that it can connect all my purchasing habits together from what should be independent retailers.
Yeah, billionaires should not exist
hell, I don't think people should have more than a few million at most. Just enough to perhaps buy ONE house and afford food. Billionaires have no place when there are people starving and barely managing to survive. They really are scum, aren't they :/
(gonna add me again, Admiral Patrick?)
The problem here is that we have confused "financial success" with "merit".
They are almost always mutually exclusive.
I want to make an analogy with cars.
Many people think that driving fast and being rude makes them good drivers because they can control their cars and possibly display how good their reaction time is. Like F1 drivers.
A good driver actually follows the rules, prioritize other people safety. But they look slow? They are even perceived as an obstacle.
Currently following the rules is seen as weak and unsuccessful for some reason.
Financial success should prpbably be measured as how good you are with your budget, paying your taxes... Etc. Dare I say employee retention if you are a business owner.
Instead it is measured with possibly the worse data point, total value of assets.
Honestly going back with my analogy it's as if we measured how good of a driver you are based on how fast you go from A to B while ignoring everything else.
In the game of money the simplest performance meter you could think of is the quantity of money you have. I doubt this can be changed.
??? The richest people wouldnt vote. They pay no income tax, famously.
I think he may be onto something.
Perhaps there's some way to tie the weight of your vote to the ratio of taxes paid divided by wealth?
So, if you have billions in assets+wages, but pay less taxes than a guy earning minimum wage, your vote would essentially be completely ignored.
Under that idea, what happens to the vote of people who make too little to pay taxes? What if they don't have taxes because they don't have a job? What if you don’t pay taxes because you're homeless and don't have an address?
I'd just cap the voting power bonus at ~1.5
If you pay taxes you should've higher voting power but not tremendously higher
Even simpler for me. Everyone gets one vote. You paying into social security? You get one more vote. We could break this down further to "is more than X% compensation social security payments", but let's keep it simple.
As much as we gripe, billionaires don't influence votes as much as we think (they simply lobby whoever gets in later). Politicians influence votes and focus on the demographic who votes the most. Who happen to be the people who don't need to plan around 8 hours of work in order to get to the polls. And those who won't be around to see the fruits of their labors 20+ years later. Let's reward those who work and need to face their future.
The problem is that combines with progressive taxation to fuck over the poor. It would prioritize high income low investment people
That's literally the problem, United Statesians just believe money is the only thing that matters. Rape children, bomb civilians, pollute water and air --- no, that's not a problem, we can look past that. If you make lots of money you are a good person, the more the better. That's just very literally how our society aligns itself.
Like it's so absurd, oh you took a sabbatical and had zero income, no vote for you! Like did the renaissance NOT happen? What is going on in our country??
If you make lots of money you are a good person, the more the better. That’s just very literally how our society aligns itself.
Gotta love the prosperity gospel. It is, in fact, God that makes you rich if you're a good person. Not exploitation of labour. And God makes you poor or gives you bad health if you're a bad person.
The shopify CEO wants to strip voting rights from people that don't pay taxes. So, 18-20 something year olds that don't have income and get claimed as a dependent. SAH mom's that get claimed as a dependent.
Fuck Tobias Lütke with a barbed wire wrapped dildo. Germany, Canada, please come pick up your trash.
It would also be people who make little enough to get a full return. That's who they really want to disenfranchise
Yeah the highly notable people Germany has been sending our way lately have largely sucked. The appreciation for Kim Petras can only go so far when we're also getting this guy and Thiel from them.
Nobody here sent them to you. They came because they could get away with such behaviour and even get rewarded for it in the US.
But it also revealed that America is grappling with a political economy debate, as a frozen housing market and an entrenched wealthy baby boomer demographic have many, not just Lütke, arguing that something big needs to change.
Ja, I agree! People like him need to vanish. That is to say, there must not be any billionairs. They only exist because they take away value from those that work to produce it. In other words, they steal from workers, both domestic and foreign.
By law or by guillotine - those bastards need to go.
But everyone pays taxes, even the unemployed. Every purchase has taxes on it. For this proposal to work as he wants, the entire tax burden will have to be transferred to the income tax. Enjoy the tax hike and labor crisis.
captain logical you got em.
There is no war but the Class War.
I agree. Working class produces and every other class lives off of them.
A “good system” would never allow billionaires to exist, and would entail a solution for the ones that already do.
that blood tank needs tyrant blood refilling
Because he's a Fascist worth $154B. Mystery solved.
Oh, you mean the citizen's veto?
Third box reform, if you will.
Universal suffrage was a mistake. Maybe a confederation of workers councils would be better.
Nah you're think backwards. Who votes and influences policy the most? Old people. Why? They have time to go to townhalls (which are often scheduled during the work week times), they have time to line up at the polls. Politicians famously only listen to calls and many haven't updated their communications for the 21st century to take in new forms of communication.
So there's two clear solutions here.
- Mandatory voting. This includes making voting days holidays (to give people time) and removing any current obstacles that keep people from voting.
- Citizens need modern, local forums. We really shouldn't be on a private social media where anyone can yell at a politician in order to get news on policy. Tie these forums to voter's state ID and monitor them for feedback on proposals and bills.
That's the bare minimum.
You are assuming that the outcome of American democracy reflects the will of the people and that voters react to politicians not meeting their needs by voting them out. That is absolutely not the case. Universal Healthcare is consistently the most important issue to voters, but no politician, not even the Democrats has ever lost their election for refusing to endorse Universal Healthcare. Additionally no politician has ever lost their job because they gave tax breaks to corporations even though there is no case where giving a tax break to Amazon, et al, improves any of their constituents lives.
Back to Healthcare, Obama Care made the insurance industry hugely rich, reduced the quality of care across all demographics, and caused the absolute healthcare crisis we are in today and yet every single idiot liberal will call it a win even if the outcomes were worse for everyone.
This goes a bit more into detail. https://www.politico.com/...
But the important part is that even though the bill did not do any of things it sought to do, Obama got to declare victory and the voters rewarded him for it. (not that they had a choice.)
voters react to politicians not meeting their needs by voting them out.
Yes, the old people do. You see the issue coming back up? If you piss off Gen Z, it doesn't matter if they are 25% of the population (made up numbers) if only 20% of them vote. Boomers being 15% but voting 70% of the time has more numbers.
no politician, not even the Democrats has ever lost their election for refusing to endorse Universal Healthcare.
They don't need to. Republicans can kick the can down the road and say "we'll think of something" and that's good enough for a campaign. They try to cut healthcare, and even this abomination of an administration gets flak.
But yes, I get what you're saying. Campaign trails are rarely about the most eloquently explained policy plans. It's much more superficial and that's how we get Trump. There's unfortunately this weird cognitive dissonance between what someone talks about and what someone in office does. And thars why approval ratings almost always start highest and slowly declines.
I suppose my most charitable interpretation here is that Boomers still think we live in a time where congress isn't constantly in gridlock, and a time where politicians would occasionally try to run bills that help the people. But newer generations only see broken promises and compromised bribe holders.
yet every single idiot liberal will call it a win even if the outcomes were worse for everyone.
Because it was watered down by conservatives and lobbied further by Healthcare. Yes. It's not a great plan, but it's the most that could get passed in 30 years.
This goes beyond my point because I'm not talking about how well executed plans are. I'm talking about who those people got into the position to begin with. You're complaining about policy makers and I'm saying "who put them there"
Do you honestly believe that if every millennial voted in the 2010s that no results (local, state, national) would have changed? And thus it would have changed the effectiveness of policy?
So long as there are councils for those unable to work for any number of reasons. At the very least a disabled council and a reserve labor force (unemployed but willing to work) council
Because the rich think they're better than us and have stopped fearing us
He's asking for a Mario Party.
How about no vote if your net worth is above 100m and you pay less than 25% in tax annually
I've always liked the idea of once you hit $999,999,999 net worth, everything above that is 100% taxed and you get a little trophy that says "Congratulations on Winning Capitalism" and you get your name of the wall of a local bar.
I don't hate this, but my main concern has always been I don't think people who own companies should be forced to sell their shares in what they built.
Maybe there are other fixes like taxing loans against equity as if the shares were sold (at whatever rate, like you propose)... That way you can hold more than a billion in net worth, but you can't really access it.
When we claw back power, and there are social programs to cover healthcare, college, day care, etc., it will be necessary to harshly punish Sociopathic Oligarchs for their ongoing crimes (they won't be able to stop, they are mentally ill, they can't help themselves), up to, and including full confiscation of their wealth, leaving them penniless, homeless, and naked.
They will not be eligible for those social programs. They can live on the streets, and eat pigeons.
Most "nouveau rich" want to keep their wealth forever and will burn everything down to make it possible. The "I got mine!" is strong with this group. The "old money rich" will eventually extract that wealth from them over time because they are "players" and this is old hat to them.
I'm reading this as taking power away from the ruling class, not giving it. Rich people don't live on income, they live on loans guaranteed against their companies and off shore wealth right? They purposely keep low to no income, so they don't have to pay income tax. This way, if they do that, it will take away their vote.
Tax wealth, not work.
Technofeudalism is real.
Because thats how the rich see the 99.8% that isn't them, duh.
Whatever. That guy is a never nude.
Dozens of us!
A what?
Because the Ouroborus of capitalism has eaten around to the point it can see the back of its own head, and now it only has two solutions left.
maximize short term profits at the expense of everything else, and secure their position via buying governments/overthrowing governments/becoming government, in order to secure the constant flow of money and goods upwards to them.
Why? Because he's a "CEO". Capitalism, including surveillance capitalism, will not save us.
I think most of us would be willing to try this if the more money you had, the further you are kept from politics.
wouldn't matter. these dudes don't pay income tax anyways and Lutke is a fucking moron, always has been.
Remember kids, there's a reason you shouldn't use Ruby on Rails. Lutke is one half of the reason, DHH is the other.
So when we gonna start tracking the movements of these evil people so it easier for people to Luigi them?
LOL, why?
Because all of these assholes think they are just going to fuck off to Galt's Gulch or whatever.
Why is a big dick acting like a dick?
You might be right, because I'm dumb enough to not know if I'm a bot according to many of these cloudflare verifications.
Checks box...spins.... Error, fuck it I didn't care that much anyways.
Wild thing to say while living in a flammable house
"Why did a $154 billion CEO just endorse stripping most Americans of voting rights—and taking us back to the 19th century?"
'Cause the ultra wealthy don't see the rest of us as being real people, and they should be (legally) killed.
The finest trait a CEO in a capitalist world could have,
brah can't maffs so he just avoided big numbers.
the better suggestion is "no voting rights for people that don't pay their fair share"
"pine"?
As in "their necks pined for the guillotine"
an entrenched wealthy baby boomer demographic
Ah, there's the razor in the apple. All too predictable and boring to blame a certain age demographic now.
@lemmy.world
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
go to feed...
@lemmy.world
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
go to feed...
So he's in favor of stripping the voting rights of billionaires?
save