What is this magical wealth you speak of? Who is ensuring it, who is guarding it? It’s a game that people play until they feel it gives them a reasonable chance to live. Once that’s gone all bets are off and your magical numbers on a computer don’t mean much.
a: all property that has a money value or an exchangeable value
b: all material objects that have economic utility
I'm not sure what' you're talking about with regards to "ensuring" or "guarding" it. But in general, wealth is produced in various forms by people. That's generally the goal of work! Just as important, wealth decays over time. And, like with everything else in this universe, everything related to the production and maintenance of wealth is unevenly distributed, including:
1) Physical resources
2) knowledge and skills
3) cultural and moral values
4) geopolitical landscape
5) personality and personal productive capacity
6) social circumstances
7) dumb luck
Given that none of this is evenly distributed between individuals, groups, nations, etc., it's absurd to expect wealth to be evenly distributed, even in a hypothetically just world. In fact, based on what we know, we should expect differential wealth to be a simple and indisputable fact of life.
In a functioning economy, people earn money by creating value for others. This generally means that even as the rich get richer, so do the poor. It is hardly disputable that capitalism has done more to lift more people out of poverty than any other economic system. Also, because wealth decays, to maintain wealth one must invest it to produce more of it. It is through this investment that society can benefit as a whole.
The problems with wealth redistribution include:
1) By taking wealth from people who know generally able to best produce it, you reduce their ability to invest wealth to produce more of it. All of society suffers for this as overall wealth decreases for everyone.
2) When giving wealth to people who aren't producing anything, they take the wealth and spend it without creating any more wealth. Overall wealth decreases for everyone. It is hardly disputable that welfare programs in Western countries have led to far more dependence and far more able-bodied people not working than before these programs existed.
It is not an accident that wealth redistribution makes countries poorer, ultimately harming the poor that the redistribution is meant to help. We should be focusing less on wealth equity and more on wealth production and maintenance.
Yeah go tell Jack Ma or any Russian “billionaire” how great their wealth is. There are people (police, army) that ensure ownership is respected. What happens when they refuse to do it? You have such a naive understanding of things I don’t know why I’m even having this discussion.
They're billionares. How much they have and how secure they are in keeping it are not the same thing. Countries with a stronger, more just, and neutral rule of law tend to prosper more than those who don't, all other things being equal. This is just another case of the conditions for maintaining wealth not being equal. I don't understand how anything I say contradicts anything you are saying.
There is no objective wealth. People use money as a record of bookkeeping until it serves them a purpose. Once people feel the system is unfair or they go hungry all your numbers on a screen mean nothing. Once a fascist is elected and everything is nationalized all those numbers mean nothing. Once birthrates drop, once a billion people start migrating, once you piss of somebody with actual power (guns, mob, crony system…) see if your money or a record in some ledger that you own something means anything. Unequality is one of the major signals for a system toppling down, people don’t say well I don’t have money I guess I’ll let my children starve, too bad
I'm not saying wealth == money. Look at my previous definition of wealth. And, I don't think anyone would argue with you that when governments and people take the actions you prescribe, wealth gets destroyed. What many don't realize, is that when you destroy the producers of wealth, you end up shooting yourself in the foot. When Stalin killed all the productive "bourgeoise" farmers, millions died of starvation. When the Spaniards kicked out the productive Jews and stole their property, the net result over time was that Spain became far poorer than before. In fact, what you are describing has happened time and time again throughout history and has resulted in greater poverty for theaggressors every time!
One of the preconditions of the level of prosperity we experience today is government stability and essentially British or Western European laws and cultural and Christian values. As those things erode, prosperity decreases. And, there is a great threat of worldwide prosperity taking a nosedive on many fronts, including the global ESG movement, WEF great reset, socialist/communist/fascist/authoritarian government movements, etc. We are very fortunate to have experienced the overall wealth that we do today, and, unfortunately, it's probably only going to get worse from here the way things are going.
Then don't respond. My goal is to convince you and other readers of something that I believe to be true and valuable to our society. If you have no similar motivation, then there's certainly no reason to respond. You're certainly not going to convince me of anything by making baseless statements like that I'm paraphrasing some non-existent textbook, and then failing to give me, or anyone else, anything meaningful to think about.
