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Comment by BadCookie | Hacker News Reader

Ha! It's not like they do it out of altruism. If the wealthy are trying to spread their wealth around, they are failing miserably.

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> If the wealthy are trying to spread their wealth around, they are failing miserably.

Are they? Most of the tech industry would stop existing without wealthy people investing in VC funds which in turn invest in the services we use all day.

I wouldn't be surprised if most of every industry would up and vanish without investors.

The wealthy used to hoard their wealth and not spread it around. You know what that was called? Feudalism and/or mercantilism, depending on which part of the system you look at. It has largely been agreed that this was a bad system because people generally do not enjoy being peasants.

Investors don't actually have to own the wealth to invest the wealth. Hence investment firms. So if Jack built a company from the ground up, and Jill inherits money from Jack, who then has Sam invest that money in the markets, Jill is suddenly being a productive member of society? Except for the ownership bit, it was Jack and Sam actually doing the value adding. Jill is just a rentier

And yet without Jill, Sam would have nothing to play with and all of Jack's wealth would be wasted as far as society is concerned.

Yes, some of it would have been used to fuel Jill's lifestyle and that is useful for everyone who profits from that. But the more of Jack's wealth that Jill uses, the more society benefits from Jack's wealth.

My point is, money hiding under the mattress benefits no-one. As much as you and I both resent Jill for having access to the kind of wealth that we do not, her most biggest possible contribution to society is in fact to decide to spread that wealth.

Heaven forbid she decide to get a real job and keep the wealth stashed away. Then she's contributing no more than the rest of us even though she could.

The subthread started by the statement "those that inherited the wealth from their daddy, who have their investor spread that wealth around, what do they do? They don't even clean for themselves."

It is being argued that she is doing something. She is spreading here wealth around.

My counter argument is that she is not infact spreading it around, her investment firm is. She adds no value. Her money does.

Nowhere in the thread does it appear the idea that money should not be circulated.

> And yet without Jill, Sam would have nothing to play with

And yet in the current system, without Jill's collaboration, Sam would have nothing to play with. Ftfy. This indicates a flaw in the system, if someone who isn't a productive member of society in any sense holds the nuts and reaps the lion's share of the profits.

You seem to be under the impression that for one person to receive wealth, another has to lose it. That's not actually how any of this works and is an incredibly dangerous way of thinking.

This isn't a sarcastic reply, please define "wealth" as you mean it and prove that it isn't finite on a planet with finite resources, time, and manpower. How is wealth created and not then transferred from one person to another? If the wealthy get wealthier through either extracting resources from their workers or rent seeking behavior, where does the extra wealth come from? In fiat currencies, while dollars may increase, that doesn't mean wealth increases and in fact, inflationary pressures can mean someone is continually losing wealth if they aren't moving their money. So I understand the argument of wealth expanding, but I don't understand how it gets around the laws of physics.

Nothing about my comment assumes that the "size of the pie" can't grow. It can, and it does. But if the wealthy take all of the increase in the pie for themselves (plus more!), then the poor and middle class still get screwed over, and that is exactly what is happening in the U.S.

For particularly shameful evidence that wealth in the U.S. is not being adequately spread around, see this article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-low...

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