The plaintiffs in the case claimed that the "mandatory quarantine," along with interstate travel restrictions listed in an earlier version of the order, violated their rights to both procedural due process and substantive due process.
"But those liberty interests are, and always have been, subject to society's interests—society being our fellow residents," said Court of Claims Judge Christopher M. Murray.
That is a terrifying precedent. Thinking due process depends on society's interests? WTF? I can see rejecting that case for other reasons, but holy crap not that one!
Bezos' wealth
Yes it's a ridiculous amount of money for one person to have. But what do you really want to do with it? You can't even really forcibly take the wealth of Bezos - most of it is just his stock holdings. If you nationalize his stock, you don't get any benefit from it unless you sell it; Amazon doesn't issue a dividend. So you'd have to nationalize enough stock to re-appoint the board to issue dividends. Otherwise the government would have to sell the stock, and $139B is not even 10% of the US budget anyway; so they could completely sell the entire stock every year and not really notice.
Hell even if the government owned Microsoft with its current $1T market cap, and sold every single stock at that price, it would not even be the entire budget, and you could only do it once.
Yes it's a good talking point to talk about taxing the rich, but it's not actually going to do anything you think it's going to do. The system is just set up in such a way that
it doesn't even matter.
You'd have to completely restructure the entire economy to deal with inequality - you can't solve it by the methods generally proposed.
So yeah wealth inequality sucks, but it is really hard to fix it by taking wealth from the top - you have to figure out how to generate more wealth at the bottom and keep it from moving up; you can't solve the problem by taking it from the top.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4221660 times)