Now I need to do the math on space karen/ henery ford 2.0 aka Mr my autism makes me prone to outbursts of fascist apologia.
I did the math recently and if you took the assets of the wealthiest 1% and divided only half of it amongst the remaining 336.3 million Americans it would be a check of approximately 68,000 for every man woman and child and those bloated blood sucking leaches would still have an average remainder of just under 6 million dollars each.
Your Dad in particular is a moron.
Literally, definitionally, money is valuable because it is near universally exchangeable for any good or service.
Money literally is not money if basically everyone does not have at least some of it, to transact with.
Money is money because basically everyone has, uses, accepts it.
Money is generally functionally defined as money, at its most basic level, by the fact that a government requires it as some kind of tax or tithe or tribute; this definition holds for the vast majority of human history and civilization.
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If things were valuable by their rarity alone, their difficulty to possess…
Then the world’s last pristine mint condition pog or beanie baby or funkopop of some particular type… would be immensely valuable, universally.
A random fingerpainting by someone you know, the only exact one of its kind in existence, would be so valuable you could buy a house with it.
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I say your Dad in particular is a moron because his view represents a much, much more deepseeded misunderstanding of what money even is than your friend who is simply ignorant of the concept of inflation.
That is something you can sit down and explain the basics of in like 5 to 15 minutes.
Your Dad on the other hand … seems like he would require unlearning about 50 years worth of a horrendously malformed worldview.
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Money and taxation are inextricably linked in modern societies… and it is very, very well known that highly wealth lopsided societies are unstable, prone to collapse, and are less efficient in terms of actual real economic productivity than societies with a more equitable distribution of wealth.
The capitalist lie is that concentrating wealth upwards results in a trickle down effect that makes everyone wealthier overall.
We are way, way, waaaay past the point of wealth inequality where that could be theoretically possible, and it just literally is objectively false for at least the past 40 years in the US.
What actually would cause the vast majority of people to be more wealthy, and would then also make billionaires more wealthy also, in real terms, would be the trickle up effect that would occur if you taxed the fuck out of the wealthy, gave that money to the poorer, and then they would increase the velocity of money and thus actual economic growth considerably.
The wealthy do not want this, becauss even if they gain in absolute terms, they would not be as well off in relative terms.
They want to be better than everyone else.
Not just ‘better off’.
They want power, they want monopolies and oligopolies, to sit on their hoards of extremely low velocity wealth that generates no real material gains… because this dragon-like hoarding makes everyone else far, far worse off in relative terms.
They want the power differential.
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Billionaires do not need their excess money.
It just sits there, does nothing, other than destabalize the whole financial system by haphazardly seeking the greatest ROI, untill too many bad bets are made for too long and it all blows up (ie, what is happening right now).
After a billion, congrats, you won capitalism, 100% effective tax rate after that, dear god do we need to repair and upgrade our failing infrastructure, and mitigate climate change, dig in for its already baked in, now unavoidable, massive, massive future losses in the tens to hundreds of trillions of dollars over the next 25-50 years.
We are at the point now where it is basically either than, or literally billions will die in the next 25 to 50 years, from statvation and climate disasters, increased crime rates as people become impoverished, increased war and genocides as mass migrations from disaster areas are gunned down or enslaved, nation states fight over the last remaining bits of non cost prohibitive resources that can be extracted.
I love how hard this comment goes
I am, among other things, an econometrician.
Fucking with the money is one thing.
Fucking up the concept of what money is… is another thing.
Easily triggered? Yeah, dad’s point was, more to the point, “if everyone had a bunch of money”, which was kinda the theme of my post. And I gather you understand inflation quite well. Would have hoped you could tease the theme from a couple of sentences.
This fucking place. Everyone ready to go off on the “bad guys”. No wonder it’s the worst echo chamber I’ve ever participated in.
Yes, you apparently are.
I mean, please refer to my comment that has triggered you to see an explanation as to how a far too lopsided distribution of wealth actually affects a society.
Inflation, price level rises, don’t just… happen perfectly evenly across all elements of the economy at exactly the same time, to exactly the same degree.
Broadly speaking, those closest to the recieving end of the proverbial money spigot, well they get to spend or invest that money first, and then the rising price levels slowly trickle down, spread out to other segments of the economy.
Basically, bubbles start to form in usually specific economic/market sectors or segments, and then those effects spread, complexify, compound through the whole system, if not well counteracted by very effective and hands on monetary and fiscal policy.
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You don’t seem to get the idea of variable velocities of money, and how they work in a debt based, fractional reserve monetary system.
It is actually private banks that mechanistically do the vast amount of ‘inflation’, ie, multiplying of money.
Roughly, ever 1 dollar that gets deposited into a bank becomes 10 dollars, through being loaned out to other people and banks, which are then loaned out again, and again, etc.
But, different sectors of the economy have different multiplying factors, different velocities at which those multiplying factors occur.
You can say, print a fuckton of money and throw it at CDO holding banks to prop them up from going bankrupt.
(Basically the 06-08 GFC)
This is a huge amount of low velocity money, its not moving anywhere, its there to shore up failing assets.
Or, you could print the same amount of money, but distribute it in small amounts directly to the broad populace, who will then basically immediately spend it or deposit it, the velocity and multiplication factor of that money will be much, much greater than the former scenario.
(Roughly, Covid Era Stimulus Checks)
Or or, you can achieve something similar in terms of stimulate the ground level economy by taxing the wealthy and giving to the poor, which in net takes slow, low velocity money, and makes it fast, high velocity, without ‘printing’ any new money.
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This is all actually a lot more complicated than you seem to think it is.
I don’t know that you are a ‘bad guy’, but I do know that you are an overconfident and misinformed guy, who is flailing when their innacurate, vague aphorism is actually fully explored.
Sorry you don’t like being held to an academic level of rigor and scrutiny?