Edit: I did not literally mean going to rich people’s houses and rob the money.
But to just pass a law that takes most of their money and redistributes it.
In: Economics
It has been tried. It was called communism, and all that happened was that a few persons that ran the government got all the wealth, and the rest of the people became even poorer.
Those that ran the government used the army and police – who they paid adequately and disciplined harshly enough so they would obey – to prevent the people from rebelling against them.
Because the sheer organisation that would require is phenomenal, and incredibly easy to disrupt. Most people don’t really care about the wealth distribution itself, they just want to personally have money. The 1% can give select people money – ie pay them – to suppress the remainder of the 99%.
It also doesn’t help that the people who run the countries and thus the people who create the laws tend to be part of the 1%, or at least interested in maintaining the 1%’s wealth, and a large portion of the 99% are stupid enough to believe what the politicians say.
Basically, money + ignorance = corruption, and the developed world has a hell of a lot of money and a hell of a lot of ignorance. The 1% spend a lot of money on preventing the 99% rising up, and you gotta hand it to them, they do a damned good job. Indeed, despite the fact I’m being highly critical of the system right now, you and I both know that I’d never *actually* do anything about it, because that would be too inconvenient to me and I think it wouldn’t change anything.
Because the 99% are not one universal block of people that can all do… anything. If they were, they could.
Because those same ultra-wealthy people control all the levers of power, and they will *never* vote to give away their own money. The system is set up so it’s next to impossible for a person of average means to attain any real political power, and as a result, the people are charge of making the laws are the wealthy themselves.
Do prison inmates get to control a prison just because they’re the majority?
That would require a great deal of co-operation. The wealthy tend to own and control the means by which messages and information is mediated.
>But to just pass a law that takes most of their money and redistributes it.
Because a) that would solve nothing and b) the situation would return to the initial 1%/50% in two generations.
Because it’s not in physical cash that we could go take and there are a lot of people who make ALOT of money helping the rich keep and manage their money.
Laws and society?
Literally, I suppose they could, but they would be arrested, jailed, and sentenced in short order.
Because a majority of places have laws against theft, and there’s never been a concerted effort by the 99% to get it all.
Besides, doing it that way would cause the entire economy to collapse. Closing the wealth gap can be done by taxing the rich more, increasing minimum wage, and investing more in welfare.
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