this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
978 points (97.5% liked)
Bluesky
1305 readers
901 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 6 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.
Fine then, create a mechanism that lets people spend shares at the grocery store. Some people will spend all or most of theirs and others will focus on accumulating more, which will result in a repeat of wealth inequity. I think dangling a big number with a dollar sign in front of it as a marketing tool is playing to the spending mentality, which bothers me. I would rather inspire people to look for an end of the scarcity era, when money will be either mostly or entirely irrelevant. I think making profits and greed obsolete through innovation is more realistic than proposing to take wealth away from the class that has almost all the power to resist that.
Sure, but you might be missing the point of the post in the picture. This isn't about solving wealthy inequality, it is about demonstrating how bad the inequality is.
You have to develop better tax policies to fight it, policies that takes more money from the rich and feeds it into the government, for it to redistribute where it is needed most, the social security and welfare services.
I know the point of the reposted post was to show how bad wealth inequality is, but I'm pretty sure the point of "This is how we should be selling redistribution" is about actually doing redistribution.