i saw this cool side-scrolling web page the other day that showed how much money i'll make over my lifetime; more accurately, how much i won't make compared to someone like jeff bezos

ok that's fair bezos has billions, hundreds of billions even, which will blow your goddamn mind if you can actually picture how much wealth that is

so this web page is basically talking about how unfair this is and if we took some percentage of bezos' cash, we could "omg cure malaria" or we could "omg fund my pet program"

he doesn't stop there--it goes on to show how much wealth the top 400 people in the world have and how badass the world would be become if we just ripped a couple measly percentage points away from these people

and really, branching off my last post, the dude behind this page misses the goal by a mark--if you make all that money move, you'll have awful inflation and everyone gets poorer

see money is a proxy for power/goods/services/time and the latter only exist in finite supply so just magically having more cash floating around doesn't mean you'll suddenly be able to buy everyone in the third world a toyota sequoia. but what it does mean is that your money is now worth less because there's more of it

money is like gravity and it attracts other money so wealthy inequality will always manifest itself given enough time unless you're constantly redistributing; of course if you're doing that you have central planning, which fucking sucks and it means a lot of people are starving

it's childish to think that adding zeros to the right bank accounts suddenly means infectious disease specialists, water sanitation workers, farmers, etc all suddenly going to solve all of your problems

this will not work

but inequality is still a problem; mostly because i see no evidence to indicate wealth is correlated to intelligence--in fact there's good evidence we have stupid or evil people at the top wielding undue influence

want to solve society's ills? remove their power. we can explore how in a follow-on post