In the limit of a single individual wealth works in a naive fashion where such distribution is possible. But on the scale of the economy, such a thing is not possible without inventing a better distribution mechanism than capital itself. If you redistribute each peace of your car's engine to each passenger, you will be forced to walk. Even as a thought experiment, evenly distributing the wealth of the world is not possible. As the wealth is produced by the incentives inherent in gradients of inequality.
Thus the project of the modern socialist is to develop redistributive structures that maintain such incentives. There are echos of this in George and Harberger, but little in modern Jacobin-style socialism, whose proposals amount to gifting the means of production to the sorts of people that staff an HR department.
Back to the main point, we see someone worth $100b and we think there's plenty for everyone, but even in a best case scenario, where we can magically distribute an equal share of all the wealth to everyone and it all holds its value, there's nowhere near enough for everyone to have the standard of living we have become accustomed to in the richest parts of the world.
It's true that most people are more interested in absolute quality of life than they are in the relative status granted by inequality, but the one implies the other.
You can make a case for less inequality, of course; but now we're quibbling about the price, as it were.
Say just 25% are successful in re-investing that money by buying small businesses w/ cashflow off flippa, or buying rental property, etc... Or starting a SaaS business, and that 25% is able to increase their income to 1 million.
Then that 1 million+ * 250,000, means his investment of 100B brought 250B to the economy. The other 75% who weren't so lucky in business, maybe they also invested and still built up a nice nest egg for retirement, or maybe they bought a home so they had a guaranteed roof over their head if hard times hit.
Many of the 75% might be able to get their net worth to 250-500k because of the 1-time gift.
This is all speculation.... In the real world it might be more like 10% are successful, but maybe 1-3% are super successful (become billionaires themselves).
If we had a cap on how much capital you could hold, then that would at least guarantee it funnels back to the bottom echelons of society. Though, I think the best cap would simply be a CEO cap of 150x average salaries (including contractors/offshore/etc). The CEO could earn whatever they wanted, as long as they simply gave everyone on their payroll a raise to meet their new bonus.
The other fact is that 90% of the successful people ARE successful because they didn't have to worry about money. When you struggle to put food on the table, it's hard to think about anything else or work on a side project. There was a good twitter feed/conversation back and forth w/ some people in SV a few months ago that basically was about one person saying 'anyone can make it', and the others saying 'those same people started at their parent's basement, they weren't exactly homeless or struggling'.
Actually it was Paul Graham who said:"The next time someone claims that starting startups is for rich kids, remind them that Airbnb happened because its founders literally could not pay their rent,"
Matthew Prince, the founder and CEO of Cloudflare replied: "Oh Paul, you know better. I had to borrow money from my mom to pay my taxes when we were starting Cloudflare. But I certainly came from a relatively privileged background, and so did the AirBnB founders. It’s hard to take risks if you don’t have a safety net. #bereal,"
Source: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1129897694984646657
I'm not saying we can ever 100% make everything equitable. Not until we have robots doing 100% of the work and < 10% employment and the means to just let people have what they want or need to be happy, in a world where money isn't even a thing we value anymore, or even use.
But if we could just give everyone a floor, or safety net then we can see a lot more combined global progress. Imagine if every child had food on the table just in America and a roof, and healthcare, and could focus on being a kid and getting an education. Imagine if just doing this created 1 million new scientists over the next 50 years that wouldn't have originally existed.
What could they find or discover? The goal shouldn't be take everything but.. take enough that the game isn't forever slanted out of control. That's what GBI or a negative income tax would do. Hell just single-payer healthcare might be enough for some families -- if they didn't have to pay medical bills or copays.
Personally, I believe this is immoral.
Bring on the fully automated luxury communism!
Global money: $90,400,000,000,000
Global population: 7,742,131,000
Money per person: ~$11,650
But money gets spent it all will end up back in the top 1%'s hands. They have funnels in place to ensure that money funnels up into their hands. Which is why GBI makes more sense, by giving money gradually/recurring it keeps cycling. The poorer families getting GBI would spend 100% locally essentially keeping the money in the local economy.
In some parts of the US, 100k would make you crazy wealthy. In other parts of the US, it wouldn't even make you middle class.
If you have everyone money, they would buy and sell goods and services instead of hoarding it.
Their money are put to good work. They don’t just put the money under a mattress.
I agree that the numbers become meaningless past a certain point, especially where we're talking about valuations, where it's basically a bunch of people's vague agreement on a price and there are incentives to make it look one way or another, but we also have really bad intuitions about just how much wealth there is out there.