The ultra-wealthy make too many of the decisions about how resources will be allocated in the system, i.e., which goods will be or won't be produced, and they try to rig the system to direct to themselves most of the economic gains of the system, to break and suppress labor unions, and to undermine and destroy the social safety net that the article authors (and myself) support, either to produce a desperate worker base willing to do anything, or just for ideological reasons.
It's not about redistributing their money per se, it's about breaking their concentrated power. Money is power. This is why the ultra-wealthy continue to accumulate money far beyond any amount they can possibly spend on themselves/family/friends for material goods and services.
I would say that 8 billion people each having 8 economic "votes" is vastly more democratic (small "d") than 1 person having 180 billion economic votes. Democracy itself is endangered by concentrated economic power.
The ultra-wealthy don't have a lot of choice in how resources are allocated. As just pointed out, Elon Musk has power of about $8 per human - relatively speaking that is an insane amount of power. Absolutely speaking it is not that much. Consumers and regulators have most of the power there. The ultra wealthy mainly control which people sit where in the social pyramid, but not what the pyramid then does.
If people allocate resources in a way consumers don't like they go broke really quickly. That is one of the reasons free markets are so successful - they punish people quickly and effectively for bad decisions no matter how much economic power they used have.
> Democracy itself is endangered by concentrated economic power.
Democracy is a tool to enable concentrated economic power. The most democratic successful society in the world is the US, ie, one that has consistently voted for lots of capitalism. The people who wanted to decentralise economic power were the communists and it turns out committees and big groups suck at making good economic decisions and lots of people literally starve.
> ...we are largely talking about redistribution from ourselves to ourselves...
On this point the article descends into nonsense. The authors believe this is a thing and will be proven wrong in an experiment.
Regulators can be purchased.
> If people allocate resources in a way consumers don't like they go broke really quickly. That is one of the reasons free markets are so successful - they punish people quickly and effectively for bad decisions no matter how much economic power they used have.
That's not true. In fact, the wealthy are uniquely able to lose money for long periods of time, producing "loss leaders" to drive all competitors out of business and monopolize markets. In recent decades, this money-losing strategy has been weaponized time and again. It's practically a badge of honor for VC-funded startups to brag about how much money they're spending and losing.
It's also crucial to note that consumers are not an undifferentiated mass. They're not all the same. To go back again to your example of Musk, he become the wealthiest person in the world by selling a luxury brand to well-off consumers. Needless to say, Teslas are not cheap. It turns out that the wealthy catering to themselves is quite profitable, even if it doesn't help the non-wealthy much. And to look at another example, Apple became the wealthiest corporation in the world by selling luxury brands, iPhone and Mac.
> The most democratic successful society in the world is the US
I'm not sure I would agree with that characterization.
> The people who wanted to decentralise economic power were the communists and it turns out committees and big groups suck at making good economic decisions and lots of people literally starve.
Communist countries are not decentralized, nor are they democratic. To the contrary, they're extremely centralized. All power is in the hands of a small group of unelected (or sham elected) political party leaders. And you'll have noticed that both Russia and China have migrated from communism to capitalism while retaining their totalitarian governments. It turns out that political and economic systems are separate. There are plenty of other countries in the world as democratic or more so than the US but with significantly more socialism and social safety nets. The US is practically alone among industrialized nations in failing to have national health care, for example.
> On this point the article descends into nonsense. The authors believe this is a thing and will be proven wrong in an experiment.
I'm not sure what you mean by "will be proven wrong in an experiment", but it sounds like, uh, nonsense? It seems like a strange response, because you've already said multiple times that redistributing money from the ultra-wealthy won't get us very far, so doesn't it follow by your own logic that any significant redistribution of wealth in society and social safety net will have to come from the 99% rather than just the 1%?
