• NateNate60@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    By the definition of money, that cannot happen. If all the money is owned by one person, then it is not money. If all of the money is owned by one group of people and another group of people have no access to it, then that will bifurcate the economy between those two groups and the second group will use something else as a substitute. No matter how little people have, there will always be some form of trade and commerce between them. Even North Koreans today (where private trade is largely forbidden) and enslaved Africans in the pre-Civil War US (who for the most part were not legally allowed to own anything) had some form of trade amongst themselves.

    Each successive dollar (or euro, pound, yen…) gets successively more difficult to extract because as people have less and less to spend they get tighter and tighter with their spending. Without state intervention, there will always be a floor to how poor you can possibly make someone, because at some point they will realise that breaking the rules and risking the punishment is a better idea than continuing to play by them. And when enough people think this way, well… just ask Louis XVI or Nicholas II how that went.

    Even if a communist revolution does not occur, this happens already to a lesser extent in the impoverished areas of cities worldwide, where people would rather turn to crime than work for starvation wages. So if you are someone on the side of the political spectrum which likes to talk against crime and socialism, the policies you should champion are those which prevent the poor from needing to resort to those things (not that any such people are likely to exist on Lemmy).