[TheOtherHobbes]

No, because wealth is a monopoly over money, and holding on to wealth means someone else cannot make decisions about spending that money.

The problem doesn't just exist, it's very obvious and pressing.

And ultimately it leads to huge distortions in democracy and policy at every level.

There's a good case to be made for the assertion that any economy that prioritises the wealth of a very small number of individuals over eliminating poverty for most of the population is fundamentally and unavoidably unstable. At best it will be unable to operate as a functional democracy and at worst it becomes an oligarchy where inherited privilege trumps any real prospect of social mobility.

The fact that the US scores very poorly on objective measures of social mobility compared to more redistributive economies only reinforces this.

[WalterBright]

> No, because wealth is a monopoly over money, and holding on to wealth means someone else cannot make decisions about spending that money.

This implies that people become wealthy by taking money from others. This is not correct, people become wealthy (in a free market system) by creating wealth. The money supply automatically increases because of that.

There isn't a monopoly on money - anyone can create wealth.

[nicoburns]

This is more of an ideal than a reality. Anyone can create wealth, but it's not so simple to convince someone to give you money for it. A lot of value is generated and given away for free (Open source is perfect example. Other people might point to the work involved in raising children or running a home), and plenty of people manage to gain control of bootloads of money without providing any value (or even negative value).

A free market is an approximation of value at the best of times: at best it represents people's estimation of that value given the information available to them. But in real societies it's not even that good, it's distorted by power differentials. One of the most significant being wealth disparities. In a hypothetical society where everyone had equal wealth then a market does distribute wealth to at those people who others think are providing value. But as soon as there's a wealth disparity then people with more wealth have proportionally say over where money gets distributed and thus money accrues to what those people consider valuable. The greater the wealth disparities that exist the further away this gets from distributing money to those who truly create wealth.