when someone says "minimum wage is a stepping stone to great wealth" they fail to take a lot of factors into account.

i want to talk about the concept of money.

roughly speaking, money is a stand in for useful things. it's not useful alone. if we stop agreeing on what it stands for, it's worthless.

gather up all the useful things in the world and stick them into a pie chart. the amount of money you have tells you what percentage of that pie chart you can use.

a dollar is only representative of a % of stuff. if there are more dollars, each one represents less stuff.

people with a lot of money command a really fucking big slice of that pie chart.

pie charts, like the world's resources (and i include working hours as a resource) are limited.

if jeff bezos' wealth represents 1% of all the resources on earth...

...that means all 7 billion of us can't be as rich as jeff bezos, because the earth doesn't have that many resources.

minimum wage CANNOT be a certain stepping stone towards a multibillion dollar empire. just by the nature of money as a concept.

and the more multibillionaires there are, the less chance you have of becoming one yourself.

"you can print infinite money, so that's not true."

this is called "devaluation" and governments have systems in place to make sure it doesn't happen.

why?

because money is only worth as many resources as you can buy with it.

remember: the more dollars there are, the smaller the slice of resource pie you can purchase with each one.

"of course not everyone can be a multibillionaire at the same time but it's possible for anyone to become one"

think backwards from this statement. how many multibillionaires can the world support? not all of us. so how many?

remember, governments need to function within their own systems unless you have a society without currency altogether. governments need money to pay for stuff.

so they have to own some of the pie.

and companies! don't forget those.

so now you have, say, 70% of the pie left. seems like a lot!

but hang on, what about all the money everyone has already? is there any money that belongs to nobody?

are there any resources that belong to nobody?

at some point, every resource on earth got claimed by somebody. we have a world economy.

so 100% of the pie belongs to someone. so for wealth to move from one person to another, it means that someone gets more wealthy and someone else gets less wealthy.

(this isn't strictly true? land can yield resources that weren't discovered or didn't exist before, e.g. mining and farming. but every piece of land is either owned or set aside for nobody to own.)

(i'm also not going to go down the peak resource road. i'm just saying that the earth isn't an infinite cornucopia.)

also, unless you want everyone to die you have to give each person a minimum allocation of resources like food when calculating all this.

so let's say you've done enough research and calculating to figure out roughly how much of the pie is left over when every other person, company, and government has only what they need to survive.

that's a finite number of multibillionaires.

and every time someone becomes a multibillionaire they push everybody else closer to the bare minimum.

and every time someone becomes a multibillionaire it's more difficult, because you have to apply more pressure, squeeze out more resources from everyone else.

i don't think it's possible as humans to divvy up resources completely equally. we're assholes and we like being "better" than other humans, as a species.

but we can put caps on how big or how small a slice of pie each person is allowed to take.

i've been trying to anticipate potential responses to this thread so i think it's best to simplify "resources" by saying i think almost every resource breaks down to land, time, or both.

food = land + time

labour = time