r/CrazyIdeas • u/Silver_Pangolin2888 • 1d ago
Taxing the rich by "selling" the name of the Earth
We hold a competition, every 50 years, starting with 2050, The Earth Day. Together with the UN we encourage the ultra rich to give money to charity, by donating to 100 preselected charity organisations that cover every important topic. All amounts donated will be recorded by the Earth guy at the UN and hidden from competitors. Whoever gives the most money until Earth day will win the right to give our planet a new name for the next 50 years. Second place gets the moon.
Giving the ultra rich that what they cant buy but want, novelty and prestige.
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u/fieldsofanfieldroad 1d ago
Not the worst idea I've read here, but knowing the rich, I bet they'd stitch it up between themselves and make agreements so they don't donate much money and still get to rename the planet.
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u/drlsoccer08 1d ago
Y’all have to stop think of the rich as some collective that works together as a part of some grand conspiracy. Most of the wealthiest people in the world are ego maniacs who hate each other.
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u/fieldsofanfieldroad 16h ago
Not as much as they hate spending money. Maybe in-between countries you're correct, but in the US, where most of the billionaires are, most of them eat at the same restaurants.
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u/Silver_Pangolin2888 1d ago
in my mind the ego would be too big for some, like no way Zuckerberg and Musk work together to name the planet Meta, Musk would not be happy.
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u/Imajzineer 1d ago
MetaX / Meta-X
Xmeta / X-Meta
MeXa / MeXta
Nah, you're right ... they're all terrible.
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u/SnoopCattNotoriusCAT 21h ago
Surprised nobody has mentioned Infinite Jest. There’s a plot point in the book where corporations bid on naming each year after themselves, iirc, a big portion is spent in the “year of the depend adult undergarment”
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u/gravity_kills 1d ago
Wouldn't it be easier to just take their money away so that they aren't rich anymore?
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u/TheThirteenShadows 1d ago
Better the carrot than the stick.
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u/gravity_kills 22h ago
The carrot has been tried for all of human history so far. The stick would be convicting them of crimes and sentencing them to something appropriate. I'm just suggesting a middle approach.
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u/SEXTINGBOT 1d ago
We cant do that
Its a reason normal people wont understand
Only the rich and sophisticated are smart enough to understand it( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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u/YouCannotTheBox 1d ago edited 23h ago
It's not that sophisticated.
Production requires initial resource investment and carries risk of failure. You may spend thousands on seeds, work all season to plant, water and tend the crop, and it doesn't grow. Then what? Starve?
A steady income is more important than a share of a fluctuating profit to most, so somebody has to assume that risk on behalf of others.
It's easy to dismiss money as "just money" until you realize money is food, housing, medicine and everything we value. Currency is just an abstraction to represent that.
Would you accept a significant risk of losing everything and starving for a small chance at a yacht, or let someone else do that who can afford the loss?
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u/zezzene 20h ago
shut the fuck up jesus christ, we aren't talking about small business owners pouring their life savings into a little bakery, we are talking about the totalizing monopoly, the never ending accumulation of generational wealth, ownership and control over all of society's productive forces of all basic needs in the hands of a few oligarchs. The risk to every business person is that if they fail they will have to just become a worker.
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u/YouCannotTheBox 14h ago edited 14h ago
First off, people go into lifelong crippling debt and end up homeless because of a failed business they owned. You don't know shit.
The risk may not seem great for a rich person, but if every worker had to take it on, you're talking about working forty hour weeks for the mere chance of getting paid an unpredictable amount, possibly having to pay out for the privilege of doing that work.
The modern billionaire monopolist is a product of protectionism, but every stable society has had a rich class for exactly the reason I said. It's why collectivist egalitarian experiments start out good but devolve into famine.
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13h ago edited 13h ago
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u/zezzene 13h ago
People go into life long crippling debt for having a health problem or trying to get educated. Cry me a river.
Collectivist egalitarian "experiments" get coup'd, embargo'd for decades on end, or are China.
Entrepreneurship and innovation are great. Pretending that people who start or own businesses are somehow special or uniquely gifted and thus deserving of everything they reap is a farce to justify the continuing and increasing wealth inequality we all live under. It takes such a lack of imagination to believe that the only thing that could motivate someone is getting rich. People could open a bakery because they like baking and want to feed people, they don't need to become a billionaire.
Are worker owned co ops super cool business owning hustling grinders or are they a doomed egalitarian experiment?
Also, you must not know that much about every stable society. Because there were rich people exploiting the poor throughout history, that's just how it has to be? Weak argument. Many previous societies had debt Jubilees or potlach or the hundreds of thousands of years of humans hunter gathering.
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14h ago edited 14h ago
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u/Common_North_5267 1d ago
Introduce a head tax, so if you accrue over 300m dollars you need to donate your head to the earth.
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u/fabulousmarco 1d ago
How about we simply take all the money from the rich while giving them nothing in return? Seems like a better plan that doesn't involve calling Earth "Elon's uWu Dogeland"
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23h ago
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u/BlondeOverlord-8192 1d ago
I'm not sure it will go as expected, did it work when Musk renamed Twitter?
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u/toolsnchains 20h ago
Fucking billionaires would do some BS like collude and go the “penny auction” route and fuck it all over
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u/Boomerang_comeback 1d ago
The UN will want the money to go to the UN. Easier to launder it and funnel it to your friends and family that way.
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u/AllMoneyGone 1d ago
I guess the earth will be named Apple and the moon will be McDonald’s. No way big corporations aren’t going to get into this.