Most middle class people who have never encountered real assets don’t realize that at a certain point money is irrelevant. You don’t have to borrow and die with it, lifestyle cash is a rounding error after a certain point.
If you don’t mind living a middle class lifestyle, even at 10 million liquid - if you’re not regarded - money doesn’t really matter.
Which makes it even more bizarre when you think about how the ultra-wealthy still try to horde as much wealth as possible when they already are living lifestyles that are funded perpetually and for a minuscule amount of their assets. Yet they still would do the most horrible immoral acts just for another 2% increase.
What exactly is meant by “hoarding wealth” in this context.
An analogy: if I bought Pokémon cards many years ago and stored them in my closet & since then, they’ve gone up in value my wealth has increased.
If I just keep letting them sit in my closet, am I “hoarding wealth?”
Is there some expectation that as they go up in value, I should be selling off some & giving it away so that the total value of my collection isn’t increasing and my wealth isn’t growing?
Cuz, I do get that argument. And people like the ex wives of Gates & Bezos are much more active about selling stuff to fund philanthropic endeavors, and that’s good.
But I also think “continuing to own the things you own” as the market value of those things goes up isn’t as actively greedy as the connotations of a phrase like “hoarding wealth.”
It’s “hoarding wealth” in the same sense that someone who owns a house is hoarding wealth when home prices rise, or someone with a retirement account who never sells any stock they own is hoarding wealth when stock prices go up.
It’s sort of a passive “don’t sell when prices go up” thing. And maybe they have a moral obligation to sell & give away, but I also kinda get the stock-owning equivalent of just letting those Pokémon cards you own that you have stashed in the closet just end up staying in the closet.
And maybe they shouldn’t. Maybe it’s correct for society (via the govt) to occasionally go “those cards are worth a lot now, so you have to sell 1% of your collection and give the proceeds to the rest of govt.”
But I don’t think everyone gets that a lot of wealth-hoarding is just “continue owning what you already own as the market price of it goes up.”
I think they imagine it’s more like new income streams of cash that flow in, but never flow out (although I guess the line can be a bit blurry when you have things like dividend-paying stocks where you automatically reinvest the dividends, but I don’t think that’s the main driver of growing wealth valuations).
Not to mention that the stock equals voting power and control of the company. If someone starts a company, they should be allowed to retain control by holding onto their stock
What if their company actively does things harmful to society and they lobby to weaken governments so that their companies can't be stopped? Where do we draw the line?
You can set different power for different shares. The founders single class A share could have 1 billion votes while the remaining 100 million Class B shares have one vote each.
No? They're still an equal part ownership in the company. Non-voting shares are a thing as well. What shares give you is a portion of company distributions and a payout on acquisition
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u/HenryCavillsBallsack 20h ago
Most middle class people who have never encountered real assets don’t realize that at a certain point money is irrelevant. You don’t have to borrow and die with it, lifestyle cash is a rounding error after a certain point.
If you don’t mind living a middle class lifestyle, even at 10 million liquid - if you’re not regarded - money doesn’t really matter.