After a certain point, personal wealth is nothing more than a highscore showing how good you are at the capitalism game. There is no need to accumulate an ever-growing pile of money - you could just spend it on stuff and let trickle-down economics do its job. It's not like you are going to need it when you inevitably die.
It creates the incessant need to offset those losses. This turns housing into an investment and prices everyone out.
> After a certain point, personal wealth is nothing more than a highscore showing how good you are at the capitalism game.
What? No. Money is a form of power. It's hard for mere mortals like us to even comprehend the extent of the power wielded by the truly rich individuals and corporations.
With enough money, you can buy laws by lobbying the government. If that doesn't work, you can often just ignore laws and buy yourself out of trouble once it catches up with you. Fines? They're nothing.
Want to see something happen? Just invest some money into it and things will start happening immediately. Want to change things in the world? Just buy whatever you want to change and remake it as you see fit. Use money to incentivize the behavior you desire.
There is no point after which it's enough. The more you have, the more powerful you are. You're limited only by your dreams and ambition. There are rich people out there who bought military fighter jets just to fly around in a highly maneuverable aircraft. How many children out there dream of doing that?
> It's not like you are going to need it when you inevitably die.
My children will. My parents worked hard to give me a good life. I consider it my personal responsibility to honor that effort by going even further in life than they did. I want my children to be even more successful than me.
Because of inflationary currencies that punish anyone that simply accumulates money instead of investing it. They want to make everything "efficient" by incentivizing everyone to either spend their money or lend it out so that someone else can spend it. Under such a system, people must allocate their capital just to break even. To fail to do so is to lose money to inflation.