• SCB@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    All obscenely wealthy people are contributing to poverty through pathological hoarding of resources best used elsewhere.

    This isn’t how wealth works. Rich people don’t have Scrooge McDuck vaults, because then they’d get poorer every day

    • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I’ve never claimed anything of the kind. Still, that more and more of the world’s income and wealth are concentrated with just a few rich people while the rest gets poorer and poorer is a fact so well-known that you’d have to be wilfully ignorant to not be aware of it.

      • SCB@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I’ve never claimed anything of the kind.

        Still, that more and more of the world’s income and wealth are concentrated with just a few rich people

        This is you making that claim.

        • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          No. Back when all wealth was physically represented like the caricature your strawman is claiming, wealth and income concentration and inequality was much less severe than it is now. That you can’t differentiate between the hoard of Smaug and the hoard of Musk isn’t my fault.

          • SCB@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            That you can’t differentiate between the hoard of Smaug and the hoard of Musk isn’t my fault.

            This isn’t how wealth works, so I’m pretty good at differentiating between them.

            Did you mean to say “if I can’t see the similarities between them?” You’d still be just as incorrect, factually, but the sentence would make more sense.

            • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              What I’m saying is that it doesn’t have to be physical hoarding to be hoarding and detrimental to the rest of society.

              For example, wealth that stays with the bottom 90% wealth-wise circulate throughout society, benefiting everyone.

              Conversely, once it reaches the 10% wealthiest people, the vast majority goes towards nothing but accumulation of more wealth for the top 10%, effectively removing it from the larger economy and thus making the 90% poorer.

              • SCB@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                Conversely, once it reaches the 10% wealthiest people, the vast majority goes towards nothing but accumulation of more wealth for the top 10%

                How?

                Through investment. Meaning it is back circulating.

                  • SCB@lemmy.world
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                    11 months ago

                    That’s, by definition, not removing wealth from the economy.

                    What if I told you that you could support taxing wealthy people more and know how basic facts of the economy work.

                    Personally I’m for dramatic progressive tax increases on the top 3 quintiles. That doesn’t change basic facts.

                • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  To quote a self-aware billionaire:

                  I earn about 1,000 times the median American annually, but I don’t buy thousands of times more stuff. My family purchased three cars over the past few years, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. I bought two pairs of the fancy wool pants I am wearing as I write, what my partner Mike calls my “manager pants.” I guess I could have bought 1,000 pairs. But why would I? Instead, I sock my extra money away in savings, where it doesn’t do the country much good.

                  • SCB@lemmy.world
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                    11 months ago

                    Well I guess not everyone is good with money, but this is hardly an exception that invalidates anything.