Why money obsession is keeping you poor

Comments · 4.4K

• MA

  @mahfuzx10 · 1 year ago

  Anyone who’s played Monopoly for long enough knows how it ends: one player ends up with all the money, while everyone else goes bankrupt. I remember one game where I got lucky early on—I bought up all the property, stacked it with hotels, and hoarded all the cash. But we didn’t want the game to end, so I started handing out free money just to keep everyone playing. Our real-world economy isn’t much different. A small group holds most of the assets, and every so often, they inject money back into the system—not to fix it, but to keep it going.

  3.9K

• MA

  @matthewmassago3599 · 1 year ago

  Gary as a Canadian and member of the First Nations of Canada I'm reminded of a quote " only after the last tree has fallen the last fish has died and all the rivers have dried up will you understand you can't eat money"

  2.4K

• LA

  @lalala-lt8fe · 1 year ago

  I stopped talking about how much stuff rich people have. Now I talk about how much work they command us to do. That yacht is a result of 10 million hours of people working. 10 million hours we could have been building homes, cooking meals, teaching kids, treating sick people.

  1.6K

• MR

  @mrtacos705 · 8 months ago

  As a Economic layman I've never thought the idea that you can't spend for resources without taking from something else. It makes so much sense to think of it in those terms. It's like the laws of physics, you can't have an action without a equal and opposite reaction but with money and economics

  94

• HE

  @HerrSpoons · 1 year ago

  People seem to have forgotten that money is only a marker to exchange for assets and if you can't buy any assets because you're getting outcompeted by wealthier people then it's pretty much worthless.

  4.6K

• HO

  @HoichiNeedsEars-l6h · 1 year ago

  ‘People have confused money for real resources’ 🎯

  1.3K

• LI

  @LizbetNene · 1 year ago (edited)

  Medieval history is vital to understanding this - you are a peasant and you always have been. The rules are designed to keep you in your place. There are plenty of resources to go around but policy can't distribute them any other way because it wouldn't keep you obligated to your overlords. And the rich really do think they have the divine right to own anything they can get their hands on, which is why they consider taxing them to be theft even as their countries collapse around them.

  1.3K

• RY

  @ryanmocerino7698 · 1 year ago (edited)

  That line about people confusing pictures of god for god itself being similar to how people view money / resources just rewired my brain….

  63

• AS

  @asahdo · 1 year ago

  Yes! They always say “where is the money going to come from?” “There is no magic money tree” or they say something like “even if we took x amount from the richest it would only be able to pay for y percentage of the government welfare spending”<br><br>But that’s not how it works. Money has no value of its own, it is just the means by which we distribute and exchange resources/goods and service. The real question is not “is there enough money?” The question is “do we have enough resources?”<br><br>Are there enough resources to make sure that everyone can have enough food, adequate shelter, clean water? Are there enough resources that we can provide all children with a decent education and the population with adequate healthcare? <br><br>If the answer is that there are enough resources yet some people are struggling to get by then this means someone must be taking more than their fair share and children and people are suffering as a result. <br><br>If the answer is no, there are not enough resources to provide this for everyone then the fact that there are some people who have such a huge share of the resources that they can own multiple properties and private jets and entire islands is even more disgusting and deplorable.

  2.8K

• TR

  @TristanBWV · 1 year ago

  This is what drives me nuts about people talking about &quot;Generating Wealth&quot;. They aren&apos;t generating wealth, they are finding some new way to skim money from everyone else that is usually just some kind of rent-seeking.

  38

• TO

  @Torus2112 · 1 year ago

  It was very enlightening when I first heard Gary articulate that a wealth tax isn&apos;t just for getting money from the rich, it&apos;s for forcing them to sell assets. Allowing assets, and especially money making assets, to go on the market and have their price driven down would give ordinary people something to invest in. I imagine this democratizing of asset ownership would alleviate geographic inequality between rich and poor areas of the country, and between rural and urban areas. It would mean more and better businesses serving the local communities and the money staying in the area, and the fact that middle and upper middle class small business owners have a propensity to consume a higher percentage of their income than super rich people means that a thousand people with a net worth of 1 million is much healthier for the economy than 1 billionaire.

  458

• DO

  @dorinda9183 · 1 year ago

  We in the US are living in &quot;Idiocracy&quot;. Nobody remembers the story we were taught in school about how worthless money was in Germany after WWI.

  36