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Comment by mrpopo | Hacker News Reader

Yes? That means billions of people could afford a bicycle to go to the local markets, a trailer to fetch water, tools for growing food.

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Congrats, you bought everyone a new iPhone or bike or shed. In a few years, it's ancient history and now you have no money left to loot. You're talking about a one-time distribution that would wipe-out all of the billionaires' wealth. As a one time distribution, it would be peanuts, completely forgotten, irrelevant, and unrepeatable in a few years. It's a nice little one time windfall and not much else.

Consider, the global economy produces $80 trillion A YEAR, and all the billionaires combined accumulated, total, over the course of MANY YEARS AND DECADES a current trove of $8.7 trillion.

But what happens if the people who you took the wealth from stop creating new wealth? If I am a rich person and I know my money is going to be stolen, then why bother accumulating more of it? I'm better off just going on perpetual vacation or moving all my money into cryptocurrencies or something.

> But what happens if the people who you took the wealth from stop creating new wealth?

Did Jeff Bezos create 100 billions of dollars in new wealth by himself? If Bezos was gone, would no one be able to create an other online marketplace and cloud services. No, and the fact is there are already multiple other competitors, that can't compete because Amazon obtained such amazing capital resources simply from being the first in the race.

Bezos is not simply some idiot who happened to be first. He runs a massive organization with extremely tight margins, hits targets year after year, delivers low prices from consumers, keeps a giant bureaucracy in check and prevents it from rotting and becoming complacent, and constantly launches Amazon into new ventures of its own. Very few people have that kind of talent. The wealth and wealth-producing machine this man has produced are truly incredible.

That's not to take away from any criticisms of Amazon and Bezos. I don’t care one bit for the man’s politics or his newspaper. But it's really ridiculous to say him and Amazon were "simply first." Most people would never even have the audacity to try what he and his partners have done, let alone the perseverance and skill. There are truly remarkable people on this world.

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