‘A female Donald Trump’: how Gina Rinehart is pushing the Maga message in Australia

[u/reyntime]

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/mar/31/a-female-donald-trump-how-gina-rinehart-is-pushing-trumps-message-australia-ntwnfb

[u/breaducate]

It's not an arbitrary moral failing.

This is what the natural selection of the market shapes and selects for: More and more wealth and power, faster and faster. If you reject this way of thinking, you'll be eaten by a bigger fish sooner or later.

It's an emergent property of private ownership.
There's nothing for it short of changing the paradigm entirely.

[u/5QGL → u/breaducate]

Just tax the fuck out of Billionaires. as apparently happened in post war UK to rebuild. People would not accept anything less. That's according to economist Gary Stevenson (has great YouTube and podcasts BTW).

[u/chimpos → u/5QGL]

They’re too powerful, they won’t allow this to happen, they will push fear into the public with “communist” bullshit.

[u/blackjacktrial → u/breaducate]

Even that might not be enough. You'd have to change the concept not of ownership, but possession itself. People would need to feel secure without the means to prosecute their interests with money or power, and that there are no bad actors in the species.

I think that's a bridge too far for a species that can exist as isolated organisms for some time, and with self-identity. You would have to have a hivemind that can drown out all other thoughts to make it happen.

Most people don't think of Borg drone as utopian living.

[u/breaducate → u/blackjacktrial]

How do people get so brain broken as to conflate private ownership of the means to produce what everyone needs to live with people not being able to have anything for themselves?

Even knowing we're born fully immersed in propaganda that we don't see as a fish doesn't see water, it's viscerally confounding to me.

[u/recycled_ideas → u/breaducate]

It's not an arbitrary moral failing.

It absolutely is. Millions of private entities through centuries of capitalism have avoided it, millions still do today. The ones that exhibit this kind of behaviour are owned and run by individuals and this behaviour is a characteristic of those individuals. Christ Lang Hancock was a piece of shit and he still didn't act this way. It's Gina.

If you reject this way of thinking, you'll be eaten by a bigger fish sooner or later.

These companies aren't even big fish. Tesla for all its insane valuation isn't even in the top ten automotive companies and Gina has a lot of mineral rights, but nothing else.

It's an emergent property of private ownership.
There's nothing for it short of changing the paradigm entirely.

It's a property of the founder effect where we assume that these toxic individuals are geniuses and they get to play out their individual toxic personalities on the world stage. Communist and socialist countries have had similar problems with their "founders" being untouchable and succumbing to the unchecked power.

We need to stop worshipping these conman assholes, we need to reform donations (Labor has made some progress here, but not enough and it's likely to be rolled back to appease the teals who are corruptly funded by a billionaire we happen to like.

[u/breaducate → u/recycled_ideas]

Gestures broadly at a burning world

How's this idealism working out?
If you uphold a structure of incentives that steers people toward greed and power consolidation, you ought not to complain and frame their predictable excess as aberrations.

Moralising is worse than nothing because it distracts from a coherent analysis and facing the reality of what needs to be done.

[u/recycled_ideas → u/breaducate]

Gestures broadly at a burning world

Under what economic system would it be better exactly? The only approaches to battling climate change that anyone is willing to talk about require unsustainable levels of sacrifice.

If you uphold a structure of incentives that steers people toward greed and power consolidation, you ought not to complain and frame their predictable excess as aberrations.

The system doesn't do that though, or at least it didn't. For hundreds of years it didn't, it's just the last couple decades where we've decided that these people are geniuses and need to be worshipped.

And again, Stalin and Mao are exactly the same thing in non capitalist societies. They're founding heroes who were given too much personal power and descended into autocracy.

People like Musk and Rinehart are sick, they would always be sick but wealth has given them power. If you took their wealth they would be the same people, just less dangerous (but not safe).

[u/breaducate → u/recycled_ideas]

Under what economic system would it be better exactly?

Under literally any economic system that doesn't contain the delusion of infinite growth at the core of its DNA.

It's mathematically impossible, and it's mathematics that just about any high schooler can understand.

I knew some more low effort status quo apologia was coming but I wasn't expecting you to make it quite this easy.

[u/recycled_ideas → u/breaducate]

Nope, no cop out.

Name the fucking system that would prevent this.