There is also a reasonable assumption that taking away people’s money would result in a decreased expected value from future money, leading to a decrease in the motivation to produce that we currently enjoy.
Let’s say a person goes from having nothing to having $1M in the bank. How does a person do that? Well, in a free market they do that by providing $1M worth of value to other people.
Should that person, who we know is capable of providing serious value, go on to try to have two million? It would be good for our society if they did, so we’d better hope they do.
But if our history includes a day when all the billionaires had everything taken from them, this means that they now have to ask themselves if there’s any danger of going over the threshold, become “evil” in the eye of society, and stripped of their rights.
Suddenly being rich is quite dangerous. It alters the incentives. Assuming a very straightforward connection between potential reward and motivation, it could be very bad for the economy to liquidate the richest people’s accounts.
It’s a fairly ahistorical assumption that wealth accumulattion is done mostly through wealth creation. Anticompetitive practices, rent seeking, and maximize value extraction are all common practices for incumbent market leaders.
You basically create precedent to give away excessive wealth in order to influence it’s effects on the world instead of reinvesting it purely in mechasms of control of wealth.
There is also a reasonable assumption that taking away people’s money would result in a decreased expected value from future money, leading to a decrease in the motivation to produce that we currently enjoy.
Let’s say a person goes from having nothing to having $1M in the bank. How does a person do that? Well, in a free market they do that by providing $1M worth of value to other people.
Should that person, who we know is capable of providing serious value, go on to try to have two million? It would be good for our society if they did, so we’d better hope they do.
But if our history includes a day when all the billionaires had everything taken from them, this means that they now have to ask themselves if there’s any danger of going over the threshold, become “evil” in the eye of society, and stripped of their rights.
Suddenly being rich is quite dangerous. It alters the incentives. Assuming a very straightforward connection between potential reward and motivation, it could be very bad for the economy to liquidate the richest people’s accounts.
It’s a fairly ahistorical assumption that wealth accumulattion is done mostly through wealth creation. Anticompetitive practices, rent seeking, and maximize value extraction are all common practices for incumbent market leaders.
You basically create precedent to give away excessive wealth in order to influence it’s effects on the world instead of reinvesting it purely in mechasms of control of wealth.