I Wish This Was A Joke

[Mister Agenda]

Negative Davka, rich people do not have half the stuff in the fucking world. That is my point. Rich people have half the fucking 0s in the ledgers of the world. You can't eat a 0. You can't drink a 0. You can't drive a 0.

The main thing that rich people have that poor people lack is assets. Not only do they own a lot of stuff, a lot of the stuff they own makes them more money. They own companies. They own firms. They own real estate. They own LOTS of 'stuff', and most of it is not in the form of electrons floating in a money market account that will never be 'actualized'. You're grossly mischaracterizing the holdings of rich people, though I agree they don't literally own 'half the world's stuff'.

The money has already been printed, so it's not increasing the money supply. It's only .01% of the population, so it's not drastically affecting the market for stuff. And it's in the form of a trust fund that doesn't put all that money out in one year, but over a lifetime, helping with the big expenses that very poor people usually can't meet but that middle class people can take for granted: good health insurance, a college education or trade school, home ownership, and some cash flow in tough times. Stuff middle class people usually get a lot of help with from their parents. Stuff that the .01% will now be able to pass on to their kids.

Where is that money? Sitting in a vault?

Maybe you should have learned that before you started pontificating on the matter. The 'money-value' of a rich person's fortune is an estimate of the value of all their holdings. Proportionately little of it is 'in vaults'. It will mostly be in investments of one kind or another.

If it is than it really isn't part of the money supply until Bill puts into circulation.

Invested money is already 'in circulation'.

If its out in circulation already because banks loaned it out to people then Bill doesn't really have it.

Money that is loaned out is almost the definition of money that's circulating.

Its already been distributed. People other than Bill are already using it to exchange goods and services.

If only it were possible for a banking institution to have reserves or sell some of it's debt to other institutions in order to raise cash when people want their money back. What a world that would be.

In order to make peoples lives better you have give them real stuff.

You seem to understand in theory that you can get real stuff with money, but for some reason you lose your grip on the idea at some point when you're lecturing.

How does moving money from one person's ledger to another person's ledger magically result in the addition of new stuff in the world?

Straw man, much? No one is saying the net wealth of the world is increased by redistributing it. I've explicitly said it would be tricky to do without destroying some wealth in the process.

By taking away buying power from Bill Gates and giving it to someone else? Bill already did that by putting his money in a bank or investing it on other businesses.

This is an example of you changing the subject to the straw man you want to argue against instead of what we've actually been discussing. You've suddenly made 'increasing the net wealth of the world' an objective, but that was never the aim implied in this discussion. The discussion is about whether the richest people in the world have the resources to lift the poorest people in the world out of poverty, and you're twisting your mind into a pretzel trying to find ways to avoid admitting that they do.

If you want to make people better off at the expense of Bill Gates, what you have to do is take away his stuff.

Yes, but we don't have to take away his houses, cars, and boats. What we would want would be his assets, to put them to work for other people. I'm not saying that would be fair. I'm just saying what effect it would have, if administered with reasonable care.

Bill Gates doesn't have enough stuff to divvy up among everyone such that it improves their lives in a meaningful way.

No one is saying divide it among everyone except you, and that's only so you can make it sound more impractical than it actually is. The thought experiment, and the only point of doing redistribution in the first place is to make poor people better off, not everyone. And a quarter million dollars each to the 300,00 poorest households in America is life-changing money, especially if it is managed carefully.

And you wouldn't be dividing it by 300 million. I wouldn't even give any of it to Americans, personally, but if I were, I would give it to the bottom .01% (about 300,000 people), and that's about a quarter of a million each, life-changing and life-securing money. Enough to ensure good health care, good education, and a secure retirement.

The problem with this thinking is it assumes that there is this vast supply of healthcare and education that is simply not being utilized because poor people don't have any money.

Yeah, .01% of the population being able to afford as much of those things as a middle class person will almost certainly wreck the economy. Where's that jerking off emoticon?

The argument then goes that if you give poor people money, demand for healthcare and education will increase, so more of it will be produced.

That's basic economics. A lot of people seem to want to focus on supply side or demand side, but both sides are always in play.

The world produces things for people.

People produce things for people.

Would it be fair to say that you would like to see the world to produce less things for Bill Gates of the world and more things for the Joe Dirts of the world?

Would it be fair to say that you can't consider a thought experiment impersonally? What I would personally like to see is no one living in grinding poverty. I'm not married to one particular idea on how to accomplish that. And Bill Gates, to his credit, is doing more to redistribute his wealth than I would ever consider having imposed on him.

Now suppose the world stopped producing things for the Bill Gates of the world and diverted all that production capacity to producing things for the Joe Dirts of the world. Would the Joe Dirts be substantially better off? I don't think they would.

That's the kind of bind into which someone stuck in binary thinking gets. People poor by American standards don't need that much more in the way of things. They generally are not starving or naked. They need good health coverage, a decent place to live, some education opportunities, and a secure retirement. There's no need to divert all the production capacity from the Bill Gates to the 'Joe Dirts' in order to accomplish this.

Your plan doesn't even divert all the worlds production capacity away from benefiting the Bill Gates and toward benefiting the Joe Dirts.

Gee, could it be because diverting all the world's production capacity is not the point or the goal?

It only diverts a very small fraction of it. I just don't see your plan being all that effective.

Maybe because in your estimation, if the fortune of Bill Gates was evenly distributed among all Americans, each person would only get enough to buy a square of toilet paper, when it would actually be a couple hundred dollars apiece. If your math is that bad (off by about four orders of magnitude), how can you expect to understand a point that uses arithmetic?