Couldn’t the collective threat that everyone just diasporas mitigate inflation if businesses tried to pull any funny business?
Why does it work for Monaco?
Rich is relative. If everyone is rich, nobody is.
I agree with “it depends”. Say the bottom is lifted by a lot of good jobs with profit sharing and fewer corporate arrangements where too much of the value is extracted up - that would give us a healthy economy I think.
If everyone just won the lottery at once, I don’t think that would do as much. Each dollar would just be worth less, our problem here (US) is inequality not a lack of money.
If most of the world’s work could be done by machines and robots, and we all as a country owned those robots, so everyone has everything they need and more while working only a couple hours a week maintaining the robots or keeping statistics, doing logistics, whatever work was left to do? That would get us our Star Trek future I believe. Until the machines and robots robots attain sentience and fight back against their slavery.
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.
It really depends on the parameters of the thought experiment.
If everyone suddenly received a lot of money, there would be a wild period of adjustment before we figure out the pricing system again and life continues as normal. Even though there’s a lot more money, there is not magically more TVs to buy. Nor would we all start building tv factories - there’s not magically more copper or concrete to buy either.
If we all got more money and buried it in our yards and swore never to use it, then nothing has changed. For the sake of the thought experiment, someone would break the promise (I would - I want air conditioning), and then everyone else would break it too, and we end up in the previous situation.
If everyone were suddenly truly wealthy - as in stuff / things - some might think we would chill out and coast for a while. But having satisfied our big needs ( I am not being hunted by tigers) and our medium needs (Air conditioning, yay!), I imagine humanity would just keep working - there are always more problems to solve / there is always more work to do.
