Comment by pfannkuchen

Comment by pfannkuchen a day ago

Isn’t hoarded wealth a no-op? It just reduces the supply of whatever they are hoarding.

Would the people benefit from redistributing the things they are hoarding? Corporate stock that pays little to no dividends, mainly? It’s not like they are hoarding wheat. I don’t really get what people think will happen if we redistribute the stored wealth.

All wealth is, is a claim to direct labor and materials, the magnitude of which is relative to the total amount of wealth competing to direct those at present. If some portion of the wealth is locked away, the labor and materials are still being deployed, just the total pool of wealth competing to direct them is smaller than it would be otherwise. Unlocking wealth does not actually bring more stuff into existence.

Now, it could redirect labor and materials used to built yachts or luxury homes into more practical goods. But my impression is that the labor and materials used for those things are minuscule compared to the overall economy, and most of the wealth of the very wealthy is not actually used for those sorts of things.

enraged_camel a day ago

>> Isn’t hoarded wealth a no-op? It just reduces the supply of whatever they are hoarding.

It’s not. Wealth creates political power, which the wealthy wield to stack the odds in their own favor at the expense of everyone else.

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pfannkuchen a day ago

Is that the topic of discussion? I thought it was something along the lines of “tax the rich so we can do things with the money”. That is the area I’m saying it is a no-op in. Statements without context frequently don’t mean the same as what they mean with context.

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- luses 20 hours ago
  
  this argument ignores basic opportunity costs. taxing that wealth allows the state to redirect labor and materials production and distribution toward high-utility public goods: high-speed rail, dense urban cores, and affordable housing. instead of subsidizing insolvent suburbs, we could be modernizing the logistics network and actually growing the real economy.
  worse, you completely miss the political dimension. hoarded wealth buys the lobbying power to prevent these necessary structural changes. you are engaging in the exact kind of apologetics that has led to american infrastructure collapsing while the capital class extracts rent. thinking that resource allocation is a 'no-op' is economically illiterate
  
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  pfannkuchen 4 hours ago
  
  But by doing this you are just making everything else more expensive, that’s the point.
  Printing money and spending it on those projects would have literally the same effect.
  I’m responding to what I infer as the notion that people must have to say what they say about UBI, which is the implicit “we will pay for X and that will be it” not “we will make other goods more expensive in order to have X, and how we are happening to implement that is by taxing the rich”.
  Like how about we just eliminate corporate-government corruption? Like there are a lot of shit business people today with a lot of shit politicians in their pockets, and many of them did not legitimately earn what they have, but is it really better to prevent the accumulation of capital over a certain amount? Then the powerful in your society are <checks notes> people who won a popularity contest.
  
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  GOD_Over_Djinn 10 hours ago
  
  I can’t tell if the commenter you replied to is being deliberately obtuse, or if they were literally born yesterday
  
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  pfannkuchen 4 hours ago
  
  No, I believe your understanding of the economic mechanisms involved is just too shallow to reason accurately in this area.
  I’m certainly open to a direct counter argument, but all I’ve seen so far is tap dancing.
  
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