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this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2024
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Disclaimer: Theoretical Speculation
If everyone was rich, money would become useless..
I don't think that's true. I think if everyone was rich, nobody would be. Everyone would be "middle class", if you can even talk about class any more. Doesn't sound too bad tbh.
It would only be a temporary fix. Robert Nozick gives the example of the famous basketball player as a critique of John Rawls’ veil of ignorance argument.
Suppose everyone had equal wealth but we remained different individuals with our own personalities, abilities, etc. For simplicity, assume everyone has $100 each and there are a million people in total. Now suppose one person is actually a legendary basketball player (Nozick uses Wilt Chamberlain as an example) and he decides to play basketball in the NBA to entertain everyone else. But he doesn’t do it for free, he charges each person $1 for a ticket to see him play.
If everyone pays to see him play basketball, he becomes a millionaire while everyone else becomes $1 poorer. In effect, the balance of total equality has been broken.
How do you solve this problem? You might say that he’s not allowed to charge $1 for people to see him play basketball but then what you’re really saying is that everyone is not allowed to spend their $1 to see a basketball game. So it’s actually not possible to preserve the state of total equality without taking away people’s economic freedom (that is, the freedom to decide how to spend their $100).
Thus you either gradually revert to inequality or you make all money worthless by taking away people’s choices on what to spend (and so you might as well just have a ration system instead).
Economic freedom in this example is pure nonsense. I don't want the freedom to overpay for something. The price point is also completely unreasonable. There are alternatives that could be implemented, like setting limits. Your example has a clear goal of promoting a certain world view that the existence of slavery is what makes us free. If that's not a paradox a don't know what a paradox is.
I like the way you described it. 👍
There would still be class, but it would be based on things like social status and education instead of financial status.
Perhaps, but the way that those classes would affect people would be very different from how economic classes affect people today. But this is all a hypothetical situation, I think it's very hard to say any specifics about it.
You’re assuming that everyone would be equally rich.
I feel that is implicit in OPs question - I mean if it's not equally rich, how is it different from what reality is right now? Anyways maybe OP can clarify.
Internationally. The entire nation can be wealthy in relation to other nations, but not necessarily equally.
Buddy?
m8?
I think that statement would be true if we solved scarcity, perhaps.
More accurately there is no reality where "everyone is rich". If everyone had equal wealth there would be no financial distinction that would allow you to classify "rich" or "poor".
So...its like audio equalization if you increase or decrease to the exact same proportions.
Ironically, I have a heavy preference for reducing treble so am I doing in my audio what society should do economically? Lol
Umm, something like that, I guess..
Again, just speculation, but if everyone had roughly the same amount of money (assuming the concept of spreading the butter equally), then nobody would want to earn money, and nothing would get done.
How many people are rich and continue to amass wealth even though they have more money than they really know what to do with?
How many important projects are done by volunteers?
How many old people work jobs they don't need just to keep themselves social and busy?
And in that hypothetical scenario, money still exists, it's just equally distributed. There'll still be people who want more, people who waste what they have and need a top-up, etcetc.
How might this apply to countries/places with sovereign wealth funds?
Why do we even have borders? Who invented money in the first place? Did they even think things through when they started the whole system?
I'm sure back when all these sort of modern society things we've become accustomed to sounded good on ~~paper~~ clay tablets, but it's making less and less sense by the day now.
Animals tend to survive on their own, no money, no clothes, blah. We invented money. But to what end? Why? Now we're in the process of replacing humans with artificial intelligence?
If all the jobs go to robots and AI, then how the fuck are humans supposed to earn money to survive?
Oh that's right, animals don't need money, they're smarter than us in that regard...
The 1% of their era needed to divide the people against themselves
The 1% of their era wanted to amass more wealth with their gold deposits
Those in power did as they wished, and those who were not suffered what they must. Same old same old.