An action doesn’t have to be illegal for us to condone it. Do you like income inequality? No? Then let’s take measures to stop it.
People need to be able to cover their needs. Food, housing, healthcare, and I'd be open to arguments in favor of education. But I don't see income inequality as bad necessarily. I see massive amounts of people unable to cover those needs as bad. Fix the problem that people can't cover their needs--not that fact that some fortunate entrepreneur got richer faster than me.
There is an essence of truth to that, but it certainly does not tell the whole story.
Consider what happens with Amazon. When they put a family-owned store out of business, those people need to work somewhere. They then turn to the only place left that has any jobs in their area: the Amazon fulfilment center. They then get a minimum wage job there. It is clear those people have directly lost wealth as a result of Amazon.
In some cases the "creating wealth" argument holds up, but in reality what is mostly happening in the age of globalism is wealth consolidation, not wealth creation. Amazon is not creating new wealth, they are simply taking all of the customers and wealth away from all of the smaller businesses and consolidating it into a single huge entity.
This obviously has strong negative consequences for the people who are losing wealth. There is a reason wages have remained stagnant for over 50 years while corporate profits keep on growing to record highs.
I get where you're going with this... and I'm not in favor of monopolies and anti-competitive behavior... but Amazon is a hugely innovative company, and I do not believe that they've merely consolidated wealth without creating any. Think of just AWS as an example and all of the companies (and their employees) who've created more wealth as a result of it.
Amazon doesn't "simply" take others wealth. It wins by providing a better service
Yes, there is. It is not limited, we can do more of it, but of course it is finite. It is also important that, the more wealth you have, the easier it becomes to make more of it. So, indeed, the rich obtaining more of it does mean there's less for you and me.
Even if I had to buy the wood from someone else, I took a $1 piece of wood and turned it into a $20 spoon. Wealth was just created without anyone loosing it. Wealth is infinite. Sure the amount of currency in circulation is finite, but currency isn't wealth.
> It is also important that, the more wealth you have, the easier it becomes to make more of it.
I agree--once you get to the point that you can make your wealth make more wealth for you, you've hit the point that you can scale beyond your time. Generally speaking having your wealth make more wealth requires investing your wealth, which is a good thing.
> So, indeed, the rich obtaining more of it does mean there's less for you and me.
This simply isn't true. See wooden spoon example above.
Even if the pie keeps growing for everyone, the rich are taking a bigger and bigger proportion of the pie, and proportion is what makes you poor. If I have 10% of a $10M the pie today and you have 90%, and tomorrow I have 5% of a $20M pie and you have 95%, then you have proportionally taken from me, and I am worse off, despite having the same absolute dollars "pie equity".
How do you look at this history and think the right way to approach it is as a fight over who gets what part of an existing pie? That was the standard conceptualization in the beginning! It can't be the key to the 50x change. The recent headwinds against equality have also been a period of relative stagnation in productivity growth. Shouldn't we look really earnestly into how the hell progress happened in the first place?
Yes, we also have a big problem in that poverty should not exist in a society this rich. But this is genuinely a first-world problem. Job 1 is to not screw up what got us here in the first place.
What matters is purchasing power.
Non invested savings are zero sum. This is just macro economics. If one person has a savings surplus, the other person has a savings deficit (unemployment). Buying existing housing isn't an investment. Building new housing is. Buying an existing company isn't an investment. Starting new companies or growing old companies is.
Non invested savings are growing, just look at treasury bond yields and interest rates. If you buy $100 worth of treasury bonds the government has to issue $100 in debt, otherwise yields drop. If the government doesn't issue additional debt it cannot invest the additional money on behalf of buyers of the treasury bonds. Conventionally, inflation would rise immediately because more money is circulating in the economy but it doesn't, implying excess savings that are not being invested.
yes it is - because the person you're buying it from now can invest the proceeds of that sale (to something else).
Buying shares off the sharemarket is investing - not because you're directly giving the company your money, but because your buying is the end of a chain of investment that directly leads to the IPO at the other end. Same with housing.
Your way of seeing only direct investment as "true" investment is too shallow, and lacks the actual nuance of how the financial markets operate. If you sell your shares to somebody else after an IPO, the IPO might not ever have happened, or that the raising of money costs more (to account for the risk of having to hold the bag till the company profits). By strata-ing the risk out to different people, the financial market allows all levels of risk to be bought, by all manner of different people.
The direct "investment only" method is as primitive as bartering for goods/services.
A degree of struggle is good for us. It pushes us to become more than we could without it. Don't take this to mean I want everyone in poverty--that's not what I'm saying. But being motivated to work towards a financial goal is a good thing. I do not believe a life without struggle is a good life.
There are struggles outside of financial struggles too. So I understand that even if you remove the financial struggle by giving everyone the same amount of money some struggle will remain from other factors in life. But in general I've found I grow the most in difficult times. It's painful. But it's richly rewarding when you come out the other side of the struggle. Robbing life of struggle will rob you of a rich life.
