| Baalzamon said: Just thought I'd ask you guys...what exactly do you think would happen if we would take all of the money in the world and split it evenly between everybody. I'm going to take an educated guess and say 90% (or more) of the current rich people would once again be rich people in 10 years. 90% (or more) of the middle class people would once again be middle class people in 10 years. 90% (or more) of the poor people who like to spend all of their money would once again be poor people who like to spend all of their money in 10 years. No matter how much you try to manipulate the system, you will arrive in virtually the same outcome every single time. Not to mention, if you have a smaller income gap, economic studies show that it simply results in everybody (including the poor people) to have lower incomes...so the sacrifice for being closer to the rich is that you will also be worse off, how good does that sound to you? |
I agree with you that the distribution of wealth would (mostly) return to its current level, and the reason for this is that the distribution of wealth (in general) is fairly rational.
First off, those individuals who can delay satisfaction today to have a better life tomorrow tend to be far more successful than those who can't; and this is true regardless of whether you are talking about how people manage their finances, their education, or their personal life. Since you have simply redistributed the wealth, those individuals who plan for tomorow will still have significantly better earning potential (due to having better education and more valued skills) and will be able to save money to recover their lost wealth rather rapidly, while those individuals who have impulse controll issues will "piss away" their new found wealth in a very short period of time.
At the same time, there are lots of people who can manipulate the system for their own gain and, since nothing was done to eliminate this manipulation, these people will soon find a way to mainpulate the system to take money away from others for their own personal gain. In reality I would expect that an attempt to redistribute the wealth would actually see this manipulation happen prior to the wealth changing hands, as individuals who manipulate the system would find a way to have their wealth protected from the redistribution.
