> But ARE the likes of Bezos and Musk actually buying housing complexes in the first place, nevermind ones that anyone who isn’t already rich are able to afford?...
One of the bigger ways this plays out as opposed to your example is:
Tons of property is locked up as short term vacation rentals that are only used a tiny percent of the time and only by the rich. There's a spectrum of how rich but we know the bottom 50% almost never use them for example
Similarly the amount of resources locked up in industries that 99% of the time only cater to the very rich is quite a lot and more importantly the trajectory is going more and more that direction.
You could have a world where the work is done mostly by robots and a few million rich people use the world as their playground and then what happens to everyone else?
> Tons of property is locked up as short term vacation rentals
You might not want to dig too closely into who exactly owns all these short term vacation rentals. There's a non-trivial number of people who aren't conventionally what we picture as being "wealthy" who own a lot of them. It was a very popular Covid-era life hack to buy a house at an absurdly low interest rate and rent it out. And that's not getting into people who just managed to buy a house at the right time. For example, I'm just a software engineer in a MCOL area but I bought my first house in the early 2000s and paid it off a little under 20 years later. I sold to fund the next house, but I could've easily bought something more modest and rented the old one out. This is not an uncommon occurrence.
> that are only used a tiny percent of the time and only by the rich. There's a spectrum of how rich but we know the bottom 50% almost never use them for example
Are you under the impression that you have to be fabulously wealthy to rent an AirBNB for the weekend?
> Similarly the amount of resources locked up in industries that 99% of the time only cater to the very rich is quite a lot and more importantly the trajectory is going more and more that direction.
Sources?
In any case, what you say seems to suggest that consumption taxes would be the way to go.
One of the bigger ways this plays out as opposed to your example is: Tons of property is locked up as short term vacation rentals that are only used a tiny percent of the time and only by the rich. There's a spectrum of how rich but we know the bottom 50% almost never use them for example
Similarly the amount of resources locked up in industries that 99% of the time only cater to the very rich is quite a lot and more importantly the trajectory is going more and more that direction.
You could have a world where the work is done mostly by robots and a few million rich people use the world as their playground and then what happens to everyone else?