How many rich people need to be assassinated to change the balance? Looks like it's about 3: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/11/08/billionaires...

In any case, assassination is probably not the most effective means of wealth redistribution.

Just reverting the tax cuts for the wealthy would already do a lot of good. I also think a steep inheritance tax for inheritances over a certain amount (1 million? 10 million?, 100 million?) to preventing these concentrations of wealth from creating a new aristocracy.

But 3 billionaires owning more than the bottom half of the country doesn't have to mean if the bottom half owns nothing:

>> "Their $264.1 billion in holdings outstrips the combined net worth of an estimated 160 million people"

Simply redistributing that would mean that everybody in the bottom half gets $1600. That's not going to fix poverty. It only underscores just how little that bottom half really has.

The problem with high inheritance tax is that it only hurts the rich when it catches them off guard. In otherwise free economy there are so many legal ways to circumvent inheritance tax for the lowest rate tax that is available.

That's true. My point is just that inheriting massive fortunes is a problem because it keeps wealth concentrated across generations. But there are so many loopholes around inheritance that it's not trivial to address this.

Hypothetically, if assassinating Gates, Buffett, and Bezos were a viable method of wealth redistribution, I don't think the idea would be to give everyone $1600. It would probably be more like "we're going to look at the median and top everybody up to that level."

I'm just looking at what the bottom half of the population gets. There's on average $1600 per person available. And that's apparently also what the average person in the bottom half already has, since together they apparently own as much as these three billionaires.

So that means if you completely equalize the wealth of the bottom 50% of the population after redistributing the wealth of these billionaires, the average person in that bottom half will still only have $3200.

So maybe they can get their car fixed, but they still can't send their kids to college.

> Individual assassinations don't change the system.

Franz Ferdinand’s assassination changed a whole lot of systems.

It was the spark that ignited the fire, but the kindling was already there. It probably still would have happened without his assassination, though possible a few years later.

There's also plenty of kindling in the world today. Plenty of current top players and upcoming top players butting heads(China and Turkey being the most news worthy to Americans), plenty of players that are sour about past/present conditions (Britain with Brexit, Germany/France over their influence in the EU), and players that are seeking allies to become an upcoming top player (India being the easiest to point out).

Plenty of friction indeed, but the big difference is that (almost) nobody wants to go to war. Just before WW1, everybody was itching for another war. China definitely does not want war with the US; they want to expand economically. Nobody in the EU wants war over anything. The US has always been the most eager to go to war, but even they seem to have learned that wars are expensive and have little benefit. Russia wants to control (pieces of) their neighbours, but again without an actual war the EU or NATO. Turkey is primarily interested in crushing anything that might start to look like a Kurdish state, but also doesn't want a war with a big player.

Wars today are mostly cold or proxy, and rarely direct.

WW1 was going to happen anyway, it was just the first good excuse.

First, the military did eventually do quite well vs. isis, once proper resources were directed.

Second, look at history to tell you what will happen if the rich get disappeared. This happened in many communist nations. Doctors, lawyers, professors, bankers, wealthy landowners were mostly murdered and their wealth stolen from them. Did it work well for those nations? Are they thriving today?

France did quite well after killing the aristocracy. Most 'communist' nations on the other hand did a lot more than kill the rich and take their wealth. Compared to the vast economic, social and political changes that happened in Soviet Russia or China etc., it seems that the part about what happened to the rich is unlikely to be very consequential in its impact.

Huh? How can you just write off the unrealized potential like this?