Imagine we collected all billionaires’ and millionaires’ wealth and redistributed it equally among everyone.
Worldwide, that would be about $213 trillion, which, divided by 8.2B people, would make about $26,000 per person.
Yey, everyone’s wealthier! Or are they?
The problem is that the number of houses, roads, doctors, etc., didn’t change, and neither did your access to the goods and services you need to be prosperous. If your problem was that your town didn’t have enough houses for every family who wants to live there or not enough doctors for everyone who needs to see one, well, that problem is still there.
Of course, for the most disadvantaged, things improved a bit. How much exactly, though? The key is to look not at money but at goods and services. People’s situation improved at most by exactly the goods and services the millionaires hoarded divided by the population. If the 58 million millionaires in the world own an average of, say, four cars each, that makes 232 million cars to redistribute: that’s a mere 0.03 cars per person. If each millionaire owned forty cars, that would still not be enough to give everyone a car! Redistribution cannot give everyone a car; only producing enough cars for everyone can.
But wait! Isn’t everyone $26,000 wealthier thanks to the money we redistributed? Can’t they all afford a car now? No, they can’t, because there aren’t enough cars. The only way for everyone to have a car is if there are enough cars. Again, the path to prosperity must pass through producing enough goods and services so that there is enough for everyone.
Then, on top of that, there can be some redistribution – but only on top of that. No redistribution will help unless our nation produces enough for everyone in the first place.
Hence, the key question is, did those 12 wealthiest people help the nation produce more?
X/Twitter
I can't quite put my finger on why this strikes me so much. I think it gets at what I see as a big problem. A lot of people want more government intervention to solve our many problems. This requires more taxes to fund the government programs.
The thing I think people miss is, we aren't that good at creating things we need. We aren't good at creating good grade schools, we aren't producing enough doctors, we're not teaching counselors how to help people.
My friends say, "We don't have good schools/enough doctors/ counselor education because we aren't funding these things."
In many areas these things are underfunded.
But if we don't know how to create good grade schools, or more doctors, or master counselors it won't matter well they are funded.
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