Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
8) No Bots.
Posts or comments from bots, LLM's, AIs, Neural Networks, Transformers, or Marvin the Paranoid Android are not welcome in AskLemmy. Real humans only please.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
I think the change is that today’s ultra-rich don’t act the same way the rich of the past did.
The “robber-barons” of the early 20th century were phenomenally rich and powerful, and they built schools, libraries, parks, and other public goods with a small fraction of their wealth because they understood that they had at least some tiny obligation to give back to the society that provided the conditions under which they could get so wealthy.
Today’s rich are actively preaching against the concept of empathy, and resisting any notion that they owe anyone anything. They are convinced that even a single dollar of their fortunes going to anything other than their own personal aggrandizement is a deeply offensive idea. And they are so willing to resist doing anything positive for the world that they spend enormous amounts of money to create propaganda networks to convince others that they don’t owe anyone a single cent of their fortunes. They buy ad campaigns to convince people that taxing them is bad, spending in some cases more money than the taxes would cost them… all because they firmly believe no one but themselves should see even the tiniest benefit from their money.
I feel like this is revisionism to some extent which inadvertently whitewashes their legacies; the real reason is they actually feared worker uprisings and did what they could to placate the population. Something not necessary now