Is money and wealth evil?

[swansont]

5 hours ago, LuckyR said:

 Well wealth inequity definitely huge in the US today BUT in my opinion, it is an error to treat every dollar of "wealth" equally. For example, if Musk has $429 billion and Bezos only has $241 billion, is Musk twice as wealthy? A statistician would say yes. To me they're equally wealthy because the amount of money they can spend in their lifetimes is essentially equal.

True but completely beside the point. Did you really think anyone was think wealth inequality was Musk vs. Bezos?

5 hours ago, LuckyR said:

In prior eras, with huge peasant classes and small merchant classes, wealth inequity was much greater, even if a statistician tells you that the sums involved were smaller, thus the difference between "rich" and "poor" weren't in the same realm as a Musk situation.

And again, it is not obvious to me this is true. Merely asserting it is not sufficient 

Must can buy basically anything he wants, that can be bought, and there’s much, much more that you can buy these days. A person who can buy almost nothing, but nothing is still nothing - that hasn’t changed.

[dimreepr]

21 hours ago, Phi for All said:

If you can't figure that out, just be lunch.

One day, one of us will be wrong...

[Phi for All]

1 hour ago, dimreepr said:

Everything is lunch for something, how does it help to know something one can't change?

Nothing can help the uninformed except luck or information. Best of luck!

35 minutes ago, dimreepr said:

One day, one of us will be wrong...

Probably because we'll be in the dark.

[LuckyR]

18 hours ago, swansont said:

True but completely beside the point. Did you really think anyone was think wealth inequality was Musk vs. Bezos?

And again, it is not obvious to me this is true. Merely asserting it is not sufficient 

Must can buy basically anything he wants, that can be bought, and there’s much, much more that you can buy these days. A person who can buy almost nothing, but nothing is still nothing - that hasn’t changed

Musk vs Bezos illustrates the point, it isn't itself the point.

Musk, Bezos and their ilk are invoked when statistics such as: "the top 0.001% owns more wealth than the bottom blah, blah percent ". It's a great headline but when talking about those few individuals, most of their wealth includes huge numbers of dollars that I referred to (and that you apparently agreed with) that aren't as valuable as the dollars Joe Schmo uses to fill his car with gas (since those dollars will never be spent by their owners in their lifetime).

As to your comparo between eras, homeless people in the US have access to goods and services that Alexander the Great couldn't acquire with all of his accumulated wealth.

Edited 4 hours ago by LuckyR