| When you find yourself proving that 2 + 2 = 17 this is your cue to examine the chain of logic that got you there. The idea that one person can own everything and everyone is equally well off as if they all owned equal shares is wrong on its face. In practice in an environment that isn't deeply unequal the landlord creates value by investing capital in maintaining housing stocks that renters may lack or not want to invest. They trade both current money and foregone future wealth for increased flexibility and predictable costs. In an increasingly unequal one renters have no options because nearly 100% of the value they create for society is captured by others including the landlord or go to pay for their increasingly lackluster survival. In many cases they may end up creating less total value for society and themselves because they can't invest the time and money to maximize their own value. Your 9 renters example is too small in scale. Back in reality some portion are pushed onto the street, some live substantially poorer lives, families barely see one another because one party or both is gone 60-70 hours per week, people die sooner due to substandard health care, people don't go back to school because they can't work 60 hours to support their family AND go to school. People don't take chances that would improve themselves because they can barely afford to live now. They live in the ghetto because that's all they can afford. Having an increasing share of the wealth means trivially mathematically that others have less. Only for the upper middle class does that mean they have just as nice a house in a less desirable neighborhood. Meanwhile in reality in the last several decades 25% more than previously, people take a look at life ahead of them and put a gun in their mouth,forego going to the doctor and end up dying of an infected tooth, or ration their insulin and wind up dead. |
You say that, but it your counter is also obviously wrong. It would be trivial to have a system where everyone owns equal shares of everything - dissolve private property rights and nationalise. On the face of it that isn't a bad idea but when it is tried it fails spectacularly. I'm not aware of any surviving examples where equal ownership has worked without becoming hopelessly corrupted.
So in practice we know that some level of inequality which, if dropped below, does result in everyone being worse off.
As an interesting aside, ~90% of Canada is owned by the Crown [0]. It isn't obvious that this inequality is their biggest problem w.r.t. living standards.
> Back in reality some portion are pushed onto the street ... and end up dying
Yeah all that stuff does sound awful, but you are not going to the meat of what I was asking. Assuming we aren't creating new wealth (because that would be something that could be done now) then the wealthy will have to give something up so that the poor can gain. What is it? If wealthy people stop going on holidays then retrain the hotel receptionists as doctors? Are wealthy people taking more hours of doctor time than they need and so we make them live with shorter appointments?
I don't believe the wealthy are using enough raw resources for to make a difference; there'd need to be a massive redeployment and upskilling program training new people to have higher skills. That isn't obviously an equality issue, it might be an education problem or related to government healthcare policy.
> Only for the upper middle class does that mean they have just as nice a house in a less desirable neighborhood.
You haven't changed the number or quality of the houses, so you're basically suggesting the middle class and the poor swap houses. If the poor persons prior home wasn't an acceptable dwelling, why would it be acceptable to put a middle class family in it? Is there something wrong with the poor persons house? Is the issue that the wealthy are using too much building material so the poor can't do home repairs?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_land#Canada