Re:Ten richest men have six times more wealth than the poore...
by quantified on Sunday February 20, 2022 @01:51PM
(#30408208)
Those big numbers do represent the potential things consumable if they were converted into new consumption. They’re not sitting as cash in the bank. But they are a great proxy for it. Cash gets borrowed nearly for free against it, for example. Absolutely not “imaginary”. Access to quality and luxury is not based on anything more imaginary than more money than someone else. Access to better land, to preferential treatment by politicians, police and health systems the same.
Wealth guards the opportunity to consume, as well. I really don’t understand what you mean by “not consuming enough.”
Re:Ten richest men have six times more wealth than the poore...
by 6510 on Sunday February 20, 2022 @10:16AM
(#30406334)
It is not the purchase power that needs to be distributed but the absolutely massive influence that comes with it for free in our system.
Our system is to have an elected government govern over a game of capitalism. By its very nature this combination accomplishes stuff by concentrating wealth in the areas where it accomplishes the most.
These accomplishments should be things like social progress, preservation of the eco system, quality of life, sustainability, resilience. We can trade some for something else for a while but the whole point of governing is to have a long term plan for everyone rather than a short term plan to expand gains for a hand full of people for a short while.
The current crisis we're in is not rooted in the financial system but one of underlying supply, though, and it's not possible to fix this by redistributing the resources the super-wealthy are consuming to ordinary people because they're not consuming enough. If you think of money as a claim on scarce resources, almost all the wealth of the super-wealthy is not real money. It's just an imaginary figure produced by multiplying their shareholdings by what the amount of actual money they could trade a single share for.