Fade said:
Fluffy, you have the worst case of "rich envy" I've ever seen.
I guess the three principle problems evidenced by Fade-like thinking:
1) A failure to understand mathematics
2) A failure to understand economics
3) A failure in awareness of reality
.1.
The failure in mathematics is that there seems to be no understanding of the difference between millions and billions and it's partly due to human psychology and the way we represent large numbers. 1,000,000 appears to be twice as big as 1,000 (when written down) and similarly 1,000,000,000 appears to be half as big again as 1,000,000. The fact is that 1,000,000 is three orders of magnitude greater than 1,000 and 1,000,000,000 is three orders of magnitude greater than 1,000,000 - the written length of the numbers only grows logarithmically and so people tend to underestimate the real size of a number. 1 millimeter (mm) is less than the thickness of a penny, 1,000 mm is 1 meter or roughly a yard, 1,000,000 mm is 1 km which can be walked in about 10 to 12 minutes and 1,000,000,000 mm is roughly the distance from my house to Eureka, Northern California.
Most people would feel pretty good if they came into a thousand unexpected dollars. They would feel great if they came into 1,000,000. But a billion dollars is a thousand times more than that and most people would have a hard time spending that kind of money.
.2.
People seem to think that the forces of economics when left to itself will cause money to naturally cycle round and round but it doesn't. The very fact that you can park a large amount of money in an investment account and have it grows shows that money accumulates to money. Once fortunes get large enough sufficient money can be attracted to provide for a nice lifestyle without doing a stroke of work (but by having other people do the work to pay back the loans) - this is indistinguishable from slavery - one person does no work simply because he owns the wealth, the owner receives the benefit of the work of the people who do not own the wealth.
With compound interest the wealth of the owner will grow exponentially. This is another failing which sits under 1), i.e. that people do not understand exponential growth and tend to underestimate it.
Once the wealth imbalance grows too large the economy cannot function efficiently, in fact it often fails to function at all. John Kenneth Galbraith recognized that this sort of wealth distribution lead to collapse and even the father of economics, Adam Smith, recognized this problem. When the poor don't have money to spend then they don't spend money. When only the rich have money to spend they also don't spend it except on things that don't have utility for the population as a whole. The utility equation means that champagne showers get made but loaves of bread don't. Once the poor aren't spending then the investments of the wealthy start to collapse because there is no longer an economy that can create the wealth to cover the loans. Adam Smith favoured that the non productive income from investment should be taxed to prevent this sort of imbalance from growing and destroying the productive economy. Modern "Conservatives" like to praise Adam Smith favour the reverse - tax the workers, give breaks to the investing classes.
.3.
People don't realize how lopsided the system currently is. The wealth distribution of the US has the profile of a third world country. The rich control an obscene amount of the wealth of the US - the wealth distribution in the US is even more lopsided than the wealth distribution in Egypt.
Have a quick read of this for some quick sketches of what the US wealth distribution looks like
