Wealth isn’t fungible like that. A lot of recent wealth inequality was stocks rising.

That doesn’t mean that food production went up, or that more houses get built cheaper, or that new doctors are cloned, or anything of the sort.

It just means stocks went up.

Most of the economy is people providing stuff to other people, or working to import stuff. If people don’t work, you don’t get the stuff they provide.

To a certain extent you can sell off assets abroad and import stuff using a trade deficit. But that doesn’t work forever, and you can’t import haircuts or clean floors or construction labour or nurse shifts. At a certain point work is needed.

Oh, so maybe we should fund UBI by just stripping out the capital gains exemptions that allow insanely rich people to get insanely richer.

Some people have more money than they need, it can be removed from them - the intricacies of how they got that money should be very carefully considered when it comes to structuring how UBI would be funded - but they clearly have more money in absolute terms. And that wealth is transferable.

Also, in the western world, we have enough of everything. No one starves in America because there isn't enough corn, they starve because they don't have enough money to afford it - no one is homeless because no homes could be built, they're homeless because nobody wants to pay for the home to be built.

These are all solvable problems.

I think the point is you cannot go infinitely far with that concept. Wealth allows you to get a share of the productive capacity of the world. Giving everyone a billion dollars does not automatically mean we have enough production capacity and land to have everyone live in a mansion.

Now we can certainly say that "hey maybe if these guys all didn't have such a big mansion or as many cars everyone else would be better off", but you have to be explicit about that. It's about taking away things people like and to put that effort elsewhere.

How do you transfer it though? If some businessman has all his wealth tied up in stock in his business, how do you convert that to money? Some other person has to buy the stock. All this does is move the wealth around.

Wealth taxes have been discussed in the modern political stage - but I'm a bit :shrug: about them - I think it'd be fine to continue to only tax capital gains when they're realized - so as long as that businessman can't effectively use any of his wealth he doesn't pay taxes on it - as soon as he benefits from his wealth he pays taxes on the accrued gains.

It doesn't matter. You bleed them through inflation, VAT, whatever. The finance may be abstract, but at the end of the day money is claims for (future) economic output and you can dilute that as needed.

Some ways are better than other, but this idea that the powerful can hide their power through accounting tricks alone is a failure to think at multiple layers of abstraction.

In other words, asset values are entirely conceptual and depend on a raft of parameters.

Unfortunately the people at the top will do everything they can to stop this.

Getting this done may be quite a challenge, but it's a good thing to get done.

It's why this article is from the CBC, since Canada (while not perfect) is much better than the US in pursuing good things even if it hurts the powerful.