What would Earth be like if everyone were millionaires? (NOT VIA INFLATION)

[LittleWolfie]

There's am excellent demonstration of an answer to the spirit of the question if not the literal question.

Compare life in the UK to Kenya. Even the homeless have full health care in the UK. There are phon3s at £30, Wi-Fi areas in towns and places with free charging, so even some one with no money could get online.

Now that's only possible due to the value add of the infrastructure in the UK. If everyone had a first world income level, expenses would rise, they would likely be a lot better off though and so would society.

So then why isn’t the price of gas higher in the US than it is in Zimbabwe?

And I didn’t say ‘retired millionaires’... whether or not their retired would make a huge difference though. Most people don’t retire when they become millionaires. Like MJ claims that he retired after Limos.com, but I’d argue he’s doing his most important and impactful work now. I’d argue that the work he’s doing now is adding far more value than ground transportation.

I think to understand the difference between this society and a society of millionaires, you’d have to look at the difference between a country that makes ~700/yr per capita (ethiopia) and a country that makes ~70K/yr per capita

post-719023 - What would Earth be like if everyone were millionaires? (NOT VIA INFLATION)

Assuming no one retired, I think it would be that difference, only on steroids.[/QUOTE

Gas price is low because the US subsides it since the 70's oil shock.

And no, I definitely don’t think that it’s some type of utopia. I just don’t think it’s fair to universally categorize socialized nations as broken. There are plenty of nations where it doesn’t/didn’t work (China, USSR, Cuba,) but there are some where it does work, like European nations. Honestly, it seems to have less to do with the actual policy than it does other things. In other words, socialist policies generally work in already wealthy nations, but fail in poorer nations. European nations have historically been among the wealthiest in the world.

Me personally? .
That’s a libertarian view. You should just pay for the services you use, that way money isn’t wasted and is allocated where necessary. If people care about the public library, they can pay to use it Why? Because otherwise the library is paid for out of tax money. Capitalism works because resources are allocated to places where they are wanted. Another example, I believe that the money used to pave roads should be rolled into gasoline taxes, that way the people who actually use the roads are paying for them.

So don’t take my statements as support for social policies. I just disagree when people try to paint them as wastelands that universally don’t work.

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Some of the eastern European countries are both poor and socialist,yet it seems to work for them.

i think redistribution is like chasing your tail anyway, because poor people just spend all their money on junk (sorry, but I’m too tired to be politically correct).. they have little self control and at the end of the day, the producers are going to control everything. the producers are the ones who control what your products cost, what wages you earn.. so i wonder if redistribution really has as much of an effect as people say

what i mean is... if we took the the all wealth in the world and handed it out evenly... in a year or two people would have roughly the same amount of money as they do now

it’s the same way that lottery winners almost consistently go broke

the thing about money is that it’s just a placeholder for reciprocity (I’ll do this favor for you, you do this favor for me) so i don’t know if you can really ‘trick’ it by screwing with things artificially

it seems to come back and bite people in the a$$

Yet poor people contribute to open source software, there's that guy in Africa who made soda bottle lamps for shanties that's massive value add and from a poor person. All the universal income studies have shown increased learning and childcare and community involvement. Too much or too little seems to be where the problems come in.

 

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