Safety Net

If you water a dying plant, it will drink. It's almost like people without enough money need it for something

It's also been known by economists for time immemorial that the best way to improve the economy is to give money to poor people, nothing else required. Literally just giving poor people money to spend skyrockets the velocity of money, whereas the hoarders just put it in an account to do nothing but gain interest.

It's not a fair comparison. Someone in poverty will use that million in order to lift themselves out of material poverty. Which means they will pay off debts, buy property, pay college tuition for themselves and/or their descendants, possibly start a business, and a whole bunch of other things I can't think of. That would easily cost half a million. Someone who's already rich will already have all that.

Lazyboy - Underwear Goes Inside the Pants

Steve Hughes?

I agreed! We can't just give them things, they won't be poor anymore! What's next, taxing the rich?

My favorite story was when a Karen told someone to not give money to the homeless man because he was going to use it to buy drugs and the man just that, "That's what i was going to spend it on anyway."

How dare those communist scum create a small business, and become independent of welfare! Steaming

While true, they are worried that people will spend money on drugs and those aren't taxable, that's what they're really talking about.

Many indigenous americans including the Aztec and Mayan cultural groups used cacao as currency. I can't say if it was intentionally a method to reduce wealth hoarding but it did have that effect.

I’ve had an idea for a book, where the protagonist is a “classic build your fortune” type dismayed at the way capitalism is failing, who ends up making a currency like this; wanting everyone to make money and then spend it by the end of the month; somehow allowing the recipient to get a new extended deadline.

I have some curiosity for where the concept would go. In the story as well it’s imagined that some oligarchs will find ways to abuse the system and hoard it, but in some other cases it might trigger interesting movements.

money kinda already does expire. if you just let it sit around for long enough, it will devalue over time, typically around 2% per year. It's called inflation.

Nobody really hoards wealth by hoarding lots of paper money. Except maybe foolish people trying to save up for retirement that way. (they will make bitter experiences)

Wealthy people invest all their money into company shares, houses/apartments, or gold. That's actually why we see the price of these things constantly increase: Because the wealthy don't know where else to put their money, and so they buy these things, which creates demand for these things, which constantly increases the price for these things (by the rule of supply and demand).

That's Adora, who turns into She-ra but is not currently She-ra. From the show She-ra.

That's Adora.

By the definition of money, that cannot happen. If all the money is owned by one person, then it is not money. If all of the money is owned by one group of people and another group of people have no access to it, then that will bifurcate the economy between those two groups and the second group will use something else as a substitute. No matter how little people have, there will always be some form of trade and commerce between them. Even North Koreans today (where private trade is largely forbidden) and enslaved Africans in the pre-Civil War US (who for the most part were not legally allowed to own anything) had some form of trade amongst themselves.

Each successive dollar (or euro, pound, yen...) gets successively more difficult to extract because as people have less and less to spend they get tighter and tighter with their spending. Without state intervention, there will always be a floor to how poor you can possibly make someone, because at some point they will realise that breaking the rules and risking the punishment is a better idea than continuing to play by them. And when enough people think this way, well... just ask Louis XVI or Nicholas II how that went.

Even if a communist revolution does not occur, this happens already to a lesser extent in the impoverished areas of cities worldwide, where people would rather turn to crime than work for starvation wages. So if you are someone on the side of the political spectrum which likes to talk against crime and socialism, the policies you should champion are those which prevent the poor from needing to resort to those things (not that any such people are likely to exist on Lemmy).

Neo-feudalism. People who don't live off of investments (i.e., most of us) need to sell our labor to buy the necessities of life. Once the rich own everything and everyone else is poor, we will continue to sell our labor to pay off debts and make the lives of the wealthy comfortable in new and innovative ways.

You give billions of credit to rich people companies and create inflation. Companies go bankrupt, they create new companies and the process repeats. You stand no chance.

Republicans will trot out the 'ol "give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day" line.

I mean, there's always going to be scams. You probably want to address that with education more than expensive "you're not allowed to buy salsa with your government money" stuff.