Again it's not about wealth, it's about people and power. Wealth has power attributes to it and is many cases a proxy to power.
However many government officials have incredible amounts of power but little wealth. Look at any communist party officials over the history of time you will see incredibly levels of corruptions without any wealth AND they aren't doing corrupt work for other people, they are doing it for their own benefit (To refute your idea that some wealthy person is behind their corruption).
your point is well taken, but i doubt the wealthy here in the US have the wherewithal to take it to bloodshed when their high status depends on mollified underclasses (diversification globally notwithstanding).
but yes, power corrupts. the more widely distributed it is, the more stable societies are. that's the aim.
Yes wealth can be turned into power, but you know what already is power? Political power. Wealth is a counterpoint to political power. This is why communist systems become authoritarian, because there is no counterpoint to the power of the politburo. View xi’s crackdown on tech in China as a elimination of a potential competitor, just like his earlier corruption purges.
If I understand you, you're saying that wealth brings broad powers, and it's only a small subset of those (like political corruption) that are bad.
The rest, which are essentially power over the natural world (curing diseases, sending people to Mars, protecting ancient forests, resurrecting extinct animals) are good.
Let's take an extreme case: every person in the world has their wealth increased by 10% over what they have today, except for one person who has his wealth increased by $1 quadrillion.
Everybody is better off, right? Except that wealthy person is going to rule the world, and stack the deck to help himself, and there's nothing that says he's only going to do it in such a way that everybody else keeps increasing their wealth too, or even keeps their wealth at all.
We can see this at work in the US where the political process has become pretty corrupted, to the point that half the politicians act like wealthy people in the US suffer under a tremendously high tax burden when they actually pay less as a percentage than the average person, and the other half pays lip service to getting the wealthy to pay more but only proposes weak measures that never go anywhere, and where systematic lawbreaking in the financial sector that led to a gigantic financial crises went completely unpunished, except for the one guy who made the mistake of ripping off wealthy people.
Agree - and from statistics we know the long-end of the distribution tail (i.e. smaller impacts) in aggregate can have power. To be clear I am not disputing wealthy people can be corrupt I'm saying that it's widespread amongst humanity and not one group of individuals.
Those who have power can freely take wealth e.g. taxation but those who have wealth cannot freely take power. Corrupt politicians might treat power as a free market commodity; but that's still corruption and not a market.
I am saying it concentrates wealth yes, and that this leads to corruption when the relationship between wealth and power isn't sufficiently tamed through various regulations.
Wealth doesn't buy power directly. In a democracy most power comes from voters, so the only way to buy political power via wealth is to affect the voting process by spreading misinformation or manipulating the people. For example in USA the voters are made to believe that they can only vote for people who has spent their lived taking bribes from corporations. That of course isn't true, but as long as people believe it then it money is power.
In nations where people don't believe such blatant lies money doesn't turn into power nearly as easily. And look, poor people in those countries are actually much better cared for and live better lives than in USA! The bottom 90% are 90% of voters and therefore have all the power to make whatever policies they want. And once the 90% makes a lot of policies it is really hard to stop them from continuing doing that, you have to work really really hard to keep them away from power and to continue keeping them away.
It’s not really about wealth or political power specifically. It’s about status and power generally. Some of the pseudo-elite may pursue wealth, others social status, others political influence, etc. These are largely fungible though, so the problem is when you overproduce the elite class generally, all of these go into deficit.
Wealth gives a person power. The people who get very wealthy (in our current system) are not generally the people who will do the best things with power. This seems like a situation which could be improved on.
Yeah, somehow I mistakenly read your “powerful” to mean elected government.
I suppose the main thing that makes rich powerful is the ability to influence government, which is only because power converts to money. If elected officials could not be influenced by rich malicious actors, those actors would lose much leverage.
The second thing is the ability to use money to secure popular support, which can hardly be eliminated unless people stop putting personal gain above true value… which is realistic in post-scarcity.
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