this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
976 points (97.3% liked)
Bluesky
1388 readers
13 users here now
People skeeting stuff.
Bluesky Social is a microblogging social platform being developed in conjunction with the decentralized AT Protocol. Previously invite-only, the flagship Beta app went public in February 2024. All are welcome!
founded 7 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Except the wealth you're talking about is ownership, not actual money. Redistributing it won't give everybody a pile of Scrooge McDuck coins, it will give them stocks and other asset ownership worth half a million. To spend any of that, they would have to sell shares to somebody for cash and spend the cash, which they can only do once. After a flurry of liquidating and spending, you'd end up with a lot of people who have more stuff but are otherwise back where they were, and other people who spend less and gradually accumulate a ton of shares to become rich.
Well, if everyone has equal shares, and trading them becomes as common as exchanging money, you could just use your shares (or fractions of it) to buy something at the grocery.
I am sure that people will find solutions for what you describe, if they want to.
But sure if you don't effectively prevent developing wealth-inequality after you redistributed it, it will slowly move back to a similar situation, but not sure what your point here is, you cannot simply fix capitalism by redistributing wealth one time and not changing the underlying incentive structure. But that is not what is expressed here.
His point is that a lot of people are really stupid and financially irresponsible and it doesn't matter if you give them the wealth in stocks or assets or cash it's going to be used up fast. Meanwhile those who are smart with their money will use it to accumulate more and in a few years you'll be back at square one.
Are you saying the solution for this is to continually redistribute wealth? Do you understand what you are saying?