I was about to reply to this post and decided to make a new thread:


I keep reading this complaint about the "top 1%" controlling too much. How do we know this distribution is suboptimal? I personally have difficulties imagining an efficient human-controlled society where the "top 1%" does not manage large amounts of resources. Distributing large-scale resource management to over 70M individuals (1% of the planet's population) is not currently possible and managing resources in a non-capitalistic fashion leads to systemic degeneration. Most people currently alive are not educated enough for such a broad asset distribution to work.

The economy is not a cake that must be divided. We eat food cultivated, planned, farmed, transported and stored via markets that optimize through Capitalism. Wrecking the markets to try eat the dollars is not much of a plan. There are many problems for which more and less distributed solutions exist, with a different resulting wealth distribution and no simple answer on which is better. Take financial security: how much money should people hoard personally, how much should they pay to insurance? Insurance will give the insurance's manager tremendous power, hoarding will leave more to the middle class instead. But are they better off with the hoarded amount instead of insurance? Tail risks are bad, and you don't want to be the uninsured hospital patient who runs out of cash.

But more importantly, why is asset equality a goal? So people have no richer people to be jealous about? The problem of poor people is how well they can get out of poverty, not how the high-level part of society distributes wealth. Any redistribution in just Europe or the USA that decreases overall efficiency would just starve more people in poor countries. I don't remember seeing protest banners reading "We speak for the 1.29 billion", the people below the poverty line who are likely to die from lack of food and medicine. Is it not hypocrisy to call some exact distribution near the top "unfair" while neglecting over a BILLION people elsewhere?



A note on "slave labour" in the quoted post: Capitalistic slave labour in the West should be impossible by definition. Capitalism is roughly free voluntary human action; if a worker has no free choice of the best willing employer, this is not Capitalism. If he has that choice, he is not a slave worker. The only way to get classical slavery in Capitalism is to explicitly allow it. Poverty and slavery are not strongly connected: there could be a world with slavery but no poverty, as there could be a world with poverty but no slavery. It's not useful to mix up those two as they are totally different issues.