So you're telling me we get 1 less Elon and 20,000 more dollars? You sure make a compelling argument.

That's quite a lot of money for some of us. Imagine how transformative it would be for those who desperately need it.

In your example where the money is literally taken & handed out, it'd result in short-term price surges, and probably have very little re-distributive effect (the money would end up flowing back up rapidly, and flow back down at the same rate as before).

But that's not the only possibility. It should be possible to perform land & capital reform: altering the ownership & organisational structure of companies, causing them to allocate resources differently, causing the prices of goods (and of labour) to change relative to each other, and this can increase equality & overall standards of living. For instance, elite populations tend to hoard land & buildings, leaving them idle to fulfil their higher-level psychological needs (i.e. a big private estate) whereas that land could house a factory that contributes to lowering the prices of goods (or, I'm sure you can think of some other uses). They also tend to order the overproduction of prestige goods, when the effort that went into producing those could have went into producing goods that more effectively increase living standards. The relative price of bread & champagne isn't fixed and when the gap is small, it contributes to inequality, but measuring how much is difficult.

Of course, actually figuring out how to do this is the hard part, but it has been done historically. Usually, the longer it lies, the bolder elites get with misallocations of capital, and the easier it is to come up with good suggestions. You are here (cough, datacenters, cough).

CoL crisis is more so the fact we've built our entire civilization around ratfucking and incentivizing gambling. combined the two essentially guarantees that actually spending $ is bad, you can make far more just playing with it on the stock/futures markets.

especially funny/sad is the multiple tax-breaks we have designed specifically to allow rent-seeking parasites to safely maximize their rents.

And if you took one dollar from each of those people, you could use the money to buy dozens of politicians. 20,000 times that, and you can buy almost all of the politicians for many lifetimes. It's not just a transformative amount of money for the people who are too cash-poor to risk searching for better employment, it's an ungodly amount of money that can easily sway power to support the cost of living crisis.

Another way to look at it: when the forecast says .5 inches of rain predicted, that seems like nothing across your entire city. Now imagine all of that landing inside your house, instead. Congratulations, you're now the billionaire of drowning in your living room.

The problem is the concentration of wealth into the hands of a few, so that sounds fine to me if the your hypothetical came true and we all gained $20,000. And that's ignoring all the other positive externalities that may occur with this redistribution of wealth, such as societal change.

$20,000 would go a long way for a lot of people, too. So yes, I do like to hear it. Very much indeed.

What about the glad handing and lobbying oligarchs? Did you conveniently forget about those?

How dare you be reasonable!?