Comment on So Starbucks’ CEO commutes to work by private jet? Let’s not pretend the super-rich care about the planet

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avidamoeba@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

The thing why I am not 100% sure this will work is that the wealthy especially today increasingly hold abstract wealth. It’s in the form of money and other financial instruments. All of those are IOUs owed to them in labor. In other words it’s only meaningful because someone will accept these IOUs in order to do some work in exchange. This is even true for natural resources and more automated services because all of them require some amount of labor to extract or maintain. With that in mind, say the source countries where these IOUs commanded labor fall apart (mass death, political upheaval, etc) then they go with these IOUs to Qatar to Uncle Putin to purchase a citizenship. Putin could accept those IOUs in exange for a citizenship. However he wouldn’t be able to buy anything with them from because they are no longer accepted. So why would he take the wealthy person? Surely he isn’t so naive to believe every wealthy person is actually as valuable in their ability as their wealth. So I’m thinking, and I’m not confident in this thought, but I feel like its possible that the first wave might be able to buy its way into Traditional Values Federation, while the global economy isn’t dead yet. As things start to crumble, it’ll get harder and harder to do so. Perhaps in the later rounds of the lottery, only people who have some other type of capital, not financial, would qualify. E.g. a guy from ASML with all the blueprints to build 1nm lithography machines. In fact, even if financial capital is accepted in exchange for citizenships it will probably not be accepted in the landing country in order to prevent it from being deployed against the existing political class. Adding a lot of billionaires in Russia and letting them spend domestically can dismantle the regime that let them in.

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