Your Dad in particular is a moron.

Literally, definitionally, money is valuable because it is near universally exchangeable for any good or service.

Money literally is not money if basically everyone does not have at least some of it, to transact with.

Money is money because basically everyone has, uses, accepts it.

Money is generally functionally defined as money, at its most basic level, by the fact that a government requires it as some kind of tax or tithe or tribute; this definition holds for the vast majority of human history and civilization.

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If things were valuable by their rarity alone, their difficulty to possess…

Then the world’s last pristine mint condition pog or beanie baby or funkopop of some particular type… would be immensely valuable, universally.

A random fingerpainting by someone you know, the only exact one of its kind in existence, would be so valuable you could buy a house with it.

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I say your Dad in particular is a moron because his view represents a much, much more deepseeded misunderstanding of what money even is than your friend who is simply ignorant of the concept of inflation.

That is something you can sit down and explain the basics of in like 5 to 15 minutes.

Your Dad on the other hand … seems like he would require unlearning about 50 years worth of a horrendously malformed worldview.

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Money and taxation are inextricably linked in modern societies… and it is very, very well known that highly wealth lopsided societies are unstable, prone to collapse, and are less efficient in terms of actual real economic productivity than societies with a more equitable distribution of wealth.

The capitalist lie is that concentrating wealth upwards results in a trickle down effect that makes everyone wealthier overall.

We are way, way, waaaay past the point of wealth inequality where that could be theoretically possible, and it just literally is objectively false for at least the past 40 years in the US.

What actually would cause the vast majority of people to be more wealthy, and would then also make billionaires more wealthy also, in real terms, would be the trickle up effect that would occur if you taxed the fuck out of the wealthy, gave that money to the poorer, and then they would increase the velocity of money and thus actual economic growth considerably.

The wealthy do not want this, becauss even if they gain in absolute terms, they would not be as well off in relative terms.

They want to be better than everyone else.

Not just ‘better off’.

They want power, they want monopolies and oligopolies, to sit on their hoards of extremely low velocity wealth that generates no real material gains… because this dragon-like hoarding makes everyone else far, far worse off in relative terms.

They want the power differential.

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Billionaires do not need their excess money.

It just sits there, does nothing, other than destabalize the whole financial system by haphazardly seeking the greatest ROI, untill too many bad bets are made for too long and it all blows up (ie, what is happening right now).

After a billion, congrats, you won capitalism, 100% effective tax rate after that, dear god do we need to repair and upgrade our failing infrastructure, and mitigate climate change, dig in for its already baked in, now unavoidable, massive, massive future losses in the tens to hundreds of trillions of dollars over the next 25-50 years.

We are at the point now where it is basically either than, or literally billions will die in the next 25 to 50 years, from statvation and climate disasters, increased crime rates as people become impoverished, increased war and genocides as mass migrations from disaster areas are gunned down or enslaved, nation states fight over the last remaining bits of non cost prohibitive resources that can be extracted.