Wealth Redistribution Debate

Milton Friedman makes a good argument against the distribution of wealth that addresses your concern directly. Definitely worth a watch.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRpEV2tmYz4

Why is disincentivizing the accumulation of massive wealth in a small subset of the population bad for society? What is the advantage to society of an individual accumulating tens of billions of dollars worth of wealth?

Unless you are a multimillionaire, no it will not be your wealth being redistributed. The problem is not well-off people driving their Teslas around and taking two vacations a year, it is the relatively few people hoarding such obscene levels of wealth that their personal holdings dwarf those of entire lower economic classes of people. More than they could possibly need for 1000 lifetimes.

The rich aren't just sitting on a giant pile of liquid assets. Basically all of their money is invested. It's circulating right now. It's the infrastructure and businesses the poor are buying from. You can't redistribute wealth like that because if you do there quickly won't be services to buy from. You don't improve a poor mans situation by dismantling the grocery store he goes to. Even if you give him a slice of what you take, you've removed infrastructure th

The issue is the distribution of the wealth. Can one thousand people build the same amount as one million people? No. They can’t even build 1/1000th as much. So then why is a disproportionate amount of wealth given to people who are not the movers and shakers? Society doesn’t cease to be pump blood when leeches are peeled off.

no, but income and wealth have diminishing marginal utility, so those with excess should have it redistributed.

Money is a social construct. A person can only earn money because as a society we've decided to create the rules and institutions that allow that to happen. Our current free-market system that assumes money should be accumulated freely and its ownership preserved by default is based on ideology, not physics.Given the current massive wealth inequality, one really simple, effective, and ethical way to help people who are poor and suffering is to redistribute wealth. We don't do that b

apparently, because all the wealth somehow got redistributed to a small minority. that's what you're talking about, right?

not at all - i'm certainly not capable of developing a new economic policy in the hacker news comment boxes :) i was merely pointing out via an example why the up-front ability of some people to own the means of production inevitably means that wealth will pool in their hands, and that something needs to be done at a government level to redistribute that wealth.the bugbear of international competition simply means that everyone involved gets caught up in a race to the bottom; the fact is that

Perhaps wealth re-distribution?