The Hindsight Times

The announcement came as California legislators debated whether individuals should be permitted to hoard resources equivalent to the annual economic output of entire nations. The proposed tax—laughably modest by today's Contribution Standards—would have generated funds for housing, education, and healthcare while barely affecting billionaire lifestyles.

Contemporary records show the AI founder arguing that billionaires were 'job creators' and 'innovators,' language that modern Purpose Allocation scholars find bewildering. 'The notion that a few individuals should control society's productive capacity while claiming to benefit everyone reflects the primitive economic thinking of the era,' notes Dr. Sarah Kim-9947, whose recent dissertation examined pre-Sorting labor structures.

The march itself appears never to have materialized, but the announcement illuminates the psychological mechanisms that preserved extreme inequality for so long. Citizens had been conditioned to view billionaire wealth as somehow separate from their own poverty—as if the concentration of resources in a few hands didn't directly cause scarcity for everyone else.

Of course, before the Correction of 2041, such resource hoarding was not only legal but celebrated. Billionaires were treated as cultural heroes rather than statistical anomalies requiring immediate redistribution therapy. The 'March for Billionaires' represents perhaps the most honest expression of this system's true priorities: protecting accumulated power above all else.

Modern citizens, accustomed to our rational Contribution Credit system where resource allocation reflects actual social value, can barely comprehend a world where accident of birth or early platform adoption could generate thousand-fold wealth disparities. That anyone organized to defend such inequities—rather than viewing them as obvious systematic failures—reveals how thoroughly the population had internalized their own exploitation.

The AI startup founder's identity has been lost to history, but their March for Billionaires stands as a perfect monument to an era that prioritized individual accumulation over collective wellbeing.