Absolutely none of society’s problems can be solved through power and wealth concentration.
In the metaphor of an economic system being a living thing, money is blood. Blood circulates, and keeps the organism alive. Blood pooling in one spot and not circulating well can be fatal.
I think the shortness of human lives fosters short term thinking. If people lived long enough to deal with the long term consequences of their actions I think the world would be a very different place.
When hasn’t this been the case?
We should unrich them
So Trump’s declaration of wanting the stock market to crash is a coded phrase to make the rich lose? Trump wants to suck the rich dry!
M->C->M
When the stock market crashes, those with the lion’s share of money in the system will take their money out and convert it into other capital. Maintaining their competitive edge over markets that are actively growing value.
Meanwhile C->M->C
Those who have stocks in order to afford bills when they retire will take the brunt of the blow, since they can’t freely remove their capital from the stock market due to legal restrictions on how their money can flow through the system. The ones who will lose the most are those who are currently retired and have no choice but to eat the losses without any recompense.
When the stock market crashes, those with the lion’s share of money in the system will take their money out and convert it into other capital.
They sell low? I don’t think so.
I wonder what might cause the trend to turn in one direction or another. For example, if 8% of equities are owned by one group while the other 92% are owned by another, then I suppose I’d expect both “shares” to grow proportionally to one another. In other words, if the market as a whole gains 50%, then I’d expect the ratio of shares owned by each group to remain stable… the only thing I can think of that might explain the difference in outcomes is perhaps a difference in portfolio composition, which could reflect a gap in investment preferences, or perhaps some opportunities are available to one group while excluding the other. Seems likely to be a mix of the two.
The non-owning classes need a different tool for tracking debts than the fiat currency we’re used to.
If there is a way to cooperatively track value created by working within your neighborhood, say fixing a neighbors deck, delivering food, etc, outside of macroeconomic trade, we could figure out how to live without the hoarding pigs.
The difficult part is accountability. Commodities and fiat currencies are what they are, but trying to implement some other fungible measure of value created before the representation of that value already exists is what has me scratching my head. If there are 100 people capable of doing work within their community but only $10 to go around them, it doesn’t make sense to exchange work for money that doesn’t exist. But if those 100 people can agree to compensate one another by exchanging work without using the currency, they would all be unblocked and industrious.
Hasn’t that always been the case? People with the most wealth always own the most assets.
Aside from when they sell at the top before economic downturns anyhow
