Comment by ryandrake
3 days ago
When it comes to what actually matters, people's standards of living, what matters most is percentages, which are zero sum. In a simplified economy where 10 people have $100 each, everyone is worth 10% of the economy, have about equal buying power, equal standards of living, equal political power, and so on.
If one of those people suddenly "creates wealth" and now has $100,000, then the average value of the dollar goes down and the cost of everything goes up. Person X can trivially afford the increase, but the other nine now have lower buying power, lower standards of living, and the $100,000 now can exert coercive control over those with less.
We are all slightly worse off every time there is a new billionaire.
> We are all slightly worse off every time there is a new billionaire.
I responded to the zero sum theory in another reply.
I'll just say that every country that decided to get rid of its wealthy people wound up poorer, a lot poorer.
For a specific example, Massachusetts has a luxury yacht industry. The government decided that they wanted to tax the wealthy, and slapped a hefty tax on yachts. The billionaires simply took their yacht buying elsewhere, and the yacht industry collapsed, costing thousands of highly paid jobs. The government rescinded the tax.
> I responded to the zero sum theory in another reply.
You have ~40 responses in this thread in defense of billionaires, not sure which one exactly you're talking about.
See my posts saying that wealthy people create wealth, they do not transfer it. The transfer theory is the zero sum theory.