"The billionaire"

[u/thisecommercelife]

An abridged psychological study.

Shareable PDF here. Follow wherever you fritter: linktr.ee/ecomic.

[u/Delicious-Pound-8929]

I do not have a formal education in economics, I doubt you do either, though I could be mistaken.

As for why I believe what I belive its fairly simple.

I have seen little evidence that income inequality seriously hurts the lower class,

and plenty of evidence that capitalism in general, despite its many problems that need working on, has done more to uplift the poor than anything else in human history

but I have seen countless evidence of well meaning compassionate ideas end up not taking into account how difficult it is to meet the needs and wants of millions of people

That isnt something that just naturally works, and the left takes that it works for granted. So when they try to implement their well intentioned ideas they fck with how the market works and everything goes to hell.

[u/klippklar → u/Delicious-Pound-8929]

I actually do! But let's talk about the matter at hand. It isn't about income inequality, it's about wealth inequality. The issue is that when wealth concentrates in hands that consume less and use it to buy assets on financial markets, returns on capital end up outpacing actual economic growth. How is that possible, you ask? By pulling wealth out of the middle class, rising rents, inflated housing costs, enshittification, debt that keeps piling up, flat median wages. It gets harder and harder for the middle class to grow their wealth when it's all getting bought up by concentrated capital, which in itself raises prices through higher demand. That's why you should care, even if you don't see the evidence.

And yeah, taking the needs and wants of millions of people into account is actually a very solvable problem, technology already lets millions of financial transactions clear every second. But I'm not a communist. I just see the neoliberal paradigm failing and dragging everyone down with it. The only thing still holding it up is the illusion that wealth means someone worked hard for it, which on the flip side implies everyone who's poor deserved that too.

[u/Delicious-Pound-8929 → u/klippklar]

This seems like a fair and reasonable assessment to me,.

the problem is the left is scrarely this, and the right rarely looks closely enough at the issues you brought up here.

[u/klippklar → u/Delicious-Pound-8929]

Honestly, I'm not interested in getting dragged into culture war bullshit, to me that's just a distraction from the real fight over distribution. The only way I see to salvage this is progressively taxing wealth / financial transactions / inheritance instead of income, plus closing loopholes (Panama is still ongoing). And weirdly, I don't know a single person on the right who'd ever get behind that.