A Boring Dystopia

• Property taxes are not levied federally, but on the state level
• Buffett pays property tax too

Not sure what point you were trying to make here, lol. There is no type of unrealized gain that "normal people" are taxed on (federally or otherwise), but Buffett isn't.

Which is why our governments are trying to kill US Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides that platforms cannot be held responsible for their content. (Although, if you want advertisers, it needs to be brand safe, and its this that does most of the censorship) -- there are still some limits. You have to take down CSAM when someone posts it, and it's generally a good idea to moderate spam and hate speech. And when dealing with billions of posts or comments per hour, it's really hard to moderate at that scale.

Social media allows us to see the truth of what's going on, e.g. what it's really like on the Gaza Strip and what's really being done by the IDF. Police shootings and unnecessary SWAT and DEA raids were a problem before the internet got going, but now when someone dies, BLM and ACLU get videos of the incident, and that fuels discontent and unrest, and to our elites, that's a problem.

This is the very point of the Freedom of the Press in the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, to let people know when institutions aren't serving the public, rather are serving something else, usually plutocratic interests.

All the disinformation, the enshittification of big social media platforms, and heck, Musk's direct purchase of X are about neutering the power of the internet, which is how I ended up on Lemmy.

Exactly! I get all of my news from Facebook. /s

The uber rich spending is generally via “business expenses”.

For example: Elon doesn’t own his private jets, SpaceX does. When he takes it down to Hawaii for a 15 minute investor meeting followed by hanging out with them for the weekend at the nicest hotels with all the fixings and flys back, that’s all business expenses that he “derived no personal benefit from”, so SpaceX writes it all off as a business expense, thus reducing their tax burden and he never personally gets taxed for it.

A less egregious example that happens considerably more: a person has a rental property that resides between their normal living area, which they consider the “home office”, and an area of interest they travel too. They go to the area of interest, but make sure to stop by the rental on the way there and back. The milage from the home to the rental is business miles, and thus they can deduct the travel expense from any business incomes.

I am not advocating for any of those, but it doesn’t really matter if these business expenses are legal because the IRS doesn’t have a great way to determine these minor abuses, and certainly doesn’t have the people power to track it down.