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Thread: Hypothetical question: All of the wealth of the earth has been equally redistributed.

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    Default Hypothetical question: All of the wealth of the earth has been equally redistributed.

    Meaning equally redistributed to the entire population of planet earth. I'm not exactly sure, to begin with, how "wealth" would be defined here, other than natural resources, gold, etc.

    My question is how long will it be before most of those who were "wealthy" prior to this redistribution will have control of most of the wealth over which they had control prior to the redistribution? My own guess is about three years, or at most, five years.

    However, I'm not sure exactly what each person's "share" would actually be after the initial redistribution...does anyone know if such a number has ever been determined?


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    Default Re: Hypothetical question: All of the wealth of the earth has been equally redistributed.

    Most estimates are around 5 years. On the outside, 10.

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    Default Re: Hypothetical question: All of the wealth of the earth has been equally redistributed.

    Truly an ambitious and courageous effort and a worthy project but hypothetically speaking it would never work. To take one example that we are currently facing is the war in Iraq. Essentially Bush has stated that he intends on returning the confiscated monies and commodities back over to the people...that will be a problem.

    The government has no idea how to honestly run a new democratic party, let alone elect one; most of the people wouldn't be educated enough to make wise decisions regarding their new found wealth. The rich would eventually rise to the top while the majority quickly sinks back down the bottom of the economic food chain. I give it five years.

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    Default Re: Hypothetical question: All of the wealth of the earth has been equally redistributed.

    A key factor would be whether or not political policies were changed such that an individual's own efforts were allowed to result in an actual improvement in his own financial situation, versus increased individual effort being 'wasted' via heavy taxation, gov't confiscation, or a host of possible other ongoing wealth redistribution measures. Some people may be 'uneducated' but they are NOT stupid. Nobody is going to put forth double or triple the effort of his neighbor on a sustained basis in exchange for a 10% increase in relative standard of living.

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    Default Re: Hypothetical question: All of the wealth of the earth has been equally redistribu

    To kind of echo what Melonie said, the biggest determining factor would be what kind of economic system was put in place in each country.

    Look at Hong Kong. It has virtually no natural resources, yet because of its free-market approach it is incredibly wealthy. Compare that with Iraq under Saddam. Rich in oil, yet most of its people lived lives of desperate poverty. The biggest natural resource is not gold, diamonds or oil, its the unfettered imagination and ingenuity of the human mind.
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    Default Re: Hypothetical question: All of the wealth of the earth has been equally redistributed.

    A huge problem in many countries is their own internal control of people's right to enterprise. Capitalists and whatever they are called in feudalistic societies control the population and treat them largely as slaves to do their work and so the lower-class populations have no effective power to escape that grip. Even in democracies this cause of inequity still exists, though less so in the last 50 years.

    Say a land owner expands into buying bricks for construction, but he owns all the straw and can sell it at his carefully balanced price to the locals who make bricks out of mud (free) and straw (costly) and their own labor. The locals can largely only sell the bricks to him at his controlled price. The enterpreneur who controls the straw also controls the productivity and raw material cost of the locals as well as his brick purchase price. By keeping control over them, he assures that none of them have enough money to move out, grow their own straw, etc.

    In the US a similar position was enjoyed, as one of many examples, by the coal mining operations (company-owned housin [coal camps], company stores, scrip substitute for legal tender), at least until the union somewhat levelled the playing field. There are several more situations of such exploitation still existing in this "free enterprise" society.

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    Default Re: Hypothetical question: All of the wealth of the earth has been equally redistribu

    My guess is that we'd quickly end up with no one having anything... why attempt to be wealthy if you risk having everything you worked for redistributed?... why work if you're going to receive something redistributed to you for nothing? If we're all equal, we quickly end up equally with nothing. And forget that the population is increasing, so a minute after the redistribution you have another net number of newborns to redistribute to.
    (On average, right now there are 247 births each minute and
    107 deaths, for a net increase of 141 persons each minute!)

    While we're at it, redistribute all debt at the same time...

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