this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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What if the wealth you possess was created by you? Wealth isn't zero sum, it's created all the time (and at a rate literally not achievable simply by underpaying employees, to pre-refute the expected response). The implied premise of 'because they have it, we don't have it' just doesn't hold any water.
Also, it doesn't really make sense to call it 'hoarding' when it's largely/all invested in businesses that run within the economy. To hoard something is to keep it isolated--investments in publicly-traded companies can never truly fairly be called "hoarding". You could only fairly call the funds kept in back accounts etc. unspent 'hoarded'.
Explain. In a very basic sense wealth is created by acquiring resources (some of which are finite), then adding value through labor. So, the way I see it, the workers are creating the wealth, then the business/owners/investors/shareholders take a significant portion of the employees' surplus value of labor. I.e. there is a pie of value/wealth that an employee creates, and the more of that pie the business/owners/investors/shareholders get, the less the workers/wealth-creators get.
It is "horded" in that it is wealth that does not circulate within the local or regional economy and has no loyalty to these communities it is extracted from. It is a social and regional version of a trade deficit. This isolation prevents others from accessing social mobility and opportunity through the exploitations of foreign regions and people. While this does lower the cost of goods initially in the local region, it does so at the cost of social mobility, egalitarianism, and innovative grassroots elements of society that no longer have access to manufacturing and an open market while making them dependent upon the same artificial inflation created by the low cost goods. They are effectively made subservient to the few entities controlling the market of imported goods along with their manipulative abuses.
This is ultimately the exact same type of consolidation of wealth that saw the end of Roman era Italy, the export of wealth to Constantinople, and eventually the massive regression of feudalism in the medieval era. Democracy requires autonomy and a far more egalitarian society. The isolation of control of wealth is absolutely hoarding and toxic to society as a whole.