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this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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Leftism
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That misses, if I'm not mistaken, that that wealth is not in available money to use. It's in factories, equipment, structures, land, intellectual property, team cohesion, national reserves, loans to foreign countries.
If wealth were spread around evenly, then the market allowed to operate again, any one person could trade their 'wealth' for spending money and consume food/games/house/etc from it. But if most Americans spent it all as spending money, the country would collapse.
And practical advice: that's (related to) why, if you want to start building wealth for yourself or your children, it's important to put some of your money into 'assets' that are doing something. A new goat for your farm, an improved chainsaw, an educational course, or stocks and shares (which essentially means lending your wealth to someone else to make something with it and they give you back part of the profits). Rather than consuming it all.
Just... Try not to grow it into an empire that exploits the poor and needy for your further benefit.
We know that community ownership of those things causes them to perform better. The idea of the benevolent genius billionaires has been conclusively tested and disproved.
Every country, even the United States, already have laws that prevent individuals from hoarding those things to prevent competition.
We stopped enforcing those laws, once individuals had enough money to bribe their way past those laws. The billionaires have also seized control of enough media to convince many average people that what they are doing isn't a crime.
It's still a crime.
Do we? I don't think so.
Don't get me wrong, I'd definitely prefer community ownership of these things. But I think community ownership going better is very situational.
Meh - I haven't seen any of those around. Certainly wasn't expecting any.
But neither of those is the point. Saying, if wealth were evenly spread around, everyone would have such and such amount of money is, I think, misleading at best. It sounds like you'd have that much in available money, to spend on yourself. But you wouldn't - or if everyone treated it like that, the economy would collapse, and your wealth with it.
In a way, I think it actually highlights how 'little' billionaires have! That $400k or so is not really that much, when considering a house, car, children's education, healthcare - and don't say healthcare is provided by the state, because now the state's wealth is evenly distributed to you, so socialised healthcare comes back out of your pocket.
Take away the "reinvested profits": the factories, the machines, the "stuff we use to make stuff", and distribute only the spending money of America equally amongst Americans, and the median household will grow - by the sounds of things - much less wealth than I might expect!
That's not to take away from the manifold abuses and theft of the rich at the top of the economic pile against the poor (and the not-so-poor). Nor to say we don't need reform. And again I say, I would prefer the capital and means of production etc to be in community/shared ownership: even if that means new problems. Just that I think this particular claimed metric of shared wealth is misleading.
No they're talking the wealth of the 1%, which is not the infrastructure of the US.
It kind of is though, the wealthy don't keep those trillions of dollars in savings accounts, they keep it in assets, which in some cases are literally factories and warehouses and large machines and in other cases just proxies for those things. It's complicated but not untrue to frame it that way
That's called 'capital' and 'the means of production'. A guy once wrote a very informative book about that.
Ah, probably another dull, academic book no one read. No real influence on the world. Bottom marks. En' gels find it boring too.