patrick.net

I'd like to see the math and the data. Sounds a bit high. I'd guess more like $14,285.71 off the top of my head, but that is a very loose guess based on a world wealth of $100 trillion and a population of 7 billion. And I'm guessing that the U.S. has about $10 trillion in M3 and that represents about 10% of the world's wealth -- although that's just a guestimate.

A little research later…

Some 39 percent of the world’s wealth belongs to Americans

As of March 2006, the Fed no longer tracks the M3 money stock as an economic indicator. That month, M3 totaled around $10.3 trillion

Now, all money isn’t USD, but could in principle be translated into USD. Granted, I'm interpreting money as a claim on wealth, but how else could I estimate. So if $10.3 trillion is 39% of the worlds currency value then the world currency value should be about $26.4 trillion or $3,772.89 per person in the world. That’s a bit off from your estimate. What’s the data you were using?

Dan8267 seems to have the correct numbers.

It's not all that much money per person.

The hidden wealth is held in many forms. gold, silver, diamonds, other precious metals. To name just a few.

Of course, the real answer is to increase the per capital productivity of the world and allow people to keep most of what they produce. That means investment in capital goods and infrastructure from roads to green power to hydroponic farming.

Economist should stop looking at people like pigeons and jobs like pigeon holes and trying to equalize the two. Economists should instead look at people as resources that are either fully utilized or partially or wholly wasted.

350 million per person is a low estimate

But lets answer the question regardless of the number

What are you going to do with your check?

It certainly would be nice if the per capital wealth of the world was $350 million, but I sincerely doubt that it is.

Of course, we could expand the money supply so that the per capital wealth was $350 million, but that would not change the purchasing power of the money. It would still be worth the equivalent of $3,772.89.

But let's pretend that the per capital wealth really was over quarter of billion dollars and that it was distributed evenly. I'd buy as many private islands in the Caribbean as quickly as I could before all that money starts chasing the too few islands. Of course, I'd have to save some money to build high on the islands in case of rising sea levels.

But that illustrates how implausible that the per capital wealth is really $350 million. Who would you be able to hire to build a house or grow crops? The only way for the world wealth to really be something high like $350 million per person is if you had a lot of robot workers doing all the grunt work in society.

please answer the question. what are you going to do with your check.

Cash it?

or tear it up becasue you oppose redistribution of wealth

sales says

350 million per person is a low estimate

But lets answer the question regardless of the number

What are you going to do with your check?

please answer the question to you first, where are you getting these numbers from?

sales says

please answer the question. what are you going to do with your check.

Honey, I did answer. Read my reply entirely. It's one of my shorter posts.

The numbers are not the point to the question.

sales says

or tear it up becasue you oppose redistribution of wealth

Everybody opposes the redistribution of wealth from them to others. Nobody opposes the redistribution of wealth from others to them. If that's your point, it's hardly a moral justification for redistribution, which happens all the time anyway. I'd might be in favor of getting every hot chick in the world drunk and having sex with her, but that doesn't make it moral.

The morality of redistribution is dependent on how the money is redistributed. Ideally, redistribution would not be necessary because every person would have the opportunity to be productive and to keep most of his own production as oppose to giving it to an employer or politicians.

The problem with the ultra-rich isn't that they are ultra-rich. It is that they didn't produce their wealth, but rather siphoned it from others. Sure, I'd be for redistributing ill gotten gains, including ill gotten gains from the housing bubble. But that doesn't mean I'm necessarily for your method of redistributing wealth.

Nor is your proposal socially just. It rewards reproducing recklessly when you cannot afford more children. And overpopulation is the primary cause of all ecological problems.

Now, when you redistribute the money, are you also going to confiscate everyone's houses? If not, then you are ass-fucking renters while rewarding those you participated in the bubble. And how would that be fair so a middle class person who saved for 10-15 years instead of living excessively like most other Americans?

"Nor is your proposal socially just"

Is it socially just to allow 6 million human beings (woman and children included) to starve to death every year becasue they cannot afford to pay for the food?

How moral is that?

sales says

The numbers are not the point to the question.

Obviously, the numbers were made up to trick people into saying yes to this particular redistribution and then guilt them into thinking they are immoral for not supporting redistribution with the real numbers.

However, the flaw in your moral argument is that it is not immoral to oppose redistribution under the real numbers, but it is immoral to oppose redistribution under your fake numbers.

Again, the ultra-rich are not moral, but neither is mass theft of the middle class. Furthermore, such a redistribution would not have the effects you want. It would simply make everyone poor. It would not ease the suffering of those in poor nations. To do that, you need to build up the infrastructure of those nations.

In particular, you need to make sure the population stays in check with the food and clean water supply and that the society gradually becomes more efficient so that it can convert itself from an agricultural based economy to an industrial one.

Nice trick attempt, but even had you succeeded, your argument would be flawed.

sales says

"Nor is your proposal socially just"

Is it socially just to allow 6 million human beings (woman and children included) to starve to death every year becasue they cannot afford to pay for the food?

How moral is that?

I could end poverty and starvation in three generations, hell, even immediately. But there is a cost. There is always a cost. If the problem of starvation were easy to solve then it would have been solved already. There are more than enough people who care enough to solve the problem that it would be solved if it were easy. Apathy is NOT the cause of world starvation.

If you took away everyone's right to have more than 1 child, then the population would decrease by a factor of 2 every generation. By three generations, the population would be 1/8th of its current level and current food production would be enough. But there's a cost. You have to take away people's rights to have children.

There are a dozen ways I could end world starvation if given fiat. But each way requires accepting something unpleasant. The real question is whether or not it is moral to impose these costs on people against their will. And all solutions require that the people are forced against their will to do or not do things.

The quicker you want to solve starvation, the greater the cost and the higher the moral dilemma.

Are you willing to accept that morality is a complex subject matter that is full of dilemmas and trade offs?

Much of the of the worlds unreported wealth is held by European families, heirs to fortunes passed down for hundreds of years. There are trillions of unreported assests worldwide held by relatively few individuals.

You might be a bit more outraged when you see how the world really works.

Here in the USA, the US census b cites "privacy concerns" and does not report the wealthiest families full assets publicly.

The purpose of money is to circulate through society. isnt it?

The antithesis to redistribution is hoarding. Which is more immoral?

My point is not about guilt or even about redistribution.

These problems cannot be solved within the framework of capitalism as an economic model.

heres a couple articles on the population myth argument.

http://socialistworker.org/2011/10/31/too-many-people-myth

http://socialistworker.org/blog/critical-reading/2011/10/26/overpopulation-myth

sales says

You might be a bit more outraged when you see how the world really works.

I know how the world works and am quite outraged. However, that does not mean I accept your proposal as the solution. The path to hell is paved with good intentions. One must also have wisdom.

sales says

Much of the of the worlds unreported wealth is held by European families, heirs to fortunes passed down for hundreds of years.

Much wealth is inherited and much of that wealth is ill-gotten. For example, all the wealth of the British royal family. But what are you going to do about it? Wealth and money aren't the same thing, so unless you are planning on storming Buckingham Palace, your money redistribution plan, even if you could get it pass, would not redistribute the wealth.

sales says

There are trillions of unreported assests worldwide held by relatively few individuals.

Then find out what these assets are, who owns them, and report it to Wikileaks. That actually would be useful.

While you’re doing this, find out the identities of the Federal Reserve board members – all of them. That would be very useful.

Pipe dreaming about worldwide currency redistribution is not useful. Hell, you can’t even get our government to stop killing civilians. What makes you think they would accept a currency redistribution that would effectively kill our entire defense industry? Try for something smaller first.

sales says

The purpose of money is to circulate through society. isnt it?

The purposes or functions of money, in no particular order, are

1. To act as a medium of exchange.
2. To act as a unit of accounting.
3. To act as a store of value.

Despite what Keynesians say, whether or not currency circulates is not important. Currency that does not circulate is in effect taken out of currency (temporarily destroyed). This has no effect on day-to-day commerce since it simply makes the remaining currency slightly more valuable. The actual value of the one dollar bill, that is what it would buy, is completely irrelevant. What’s important is that the one dollar bill has a constant value. Now our currency fails at that, but not because of savers, even rich savers.

sales says

The antithesis to redistribution is hoarding. Which is more immoral?

Hording cash is not hording material goods. The removal of cash from circulation actually makes you richer because it means your dollars can buy more. However, saving does not mean hording as one person’s savings can and is used for another person’s economic development whether it’s paying for college tuition, starting a business, or purchasing capital goods like tractors or robots.

What we need in America is
1. More savings.
2. An honest banking system.
3. A means for savers to make safe short-term and relatively safe long-term investments back into the community.

That’s not what we have, but your idea doesn’t move us any closer to it anyway.

sales says

These problems cannot be solved within the framework of capitalism as an economic model.

That all depends on how you define capitalism and what economic model you use.

All problems are solvable. The question is, which solutions are acceptable and can be implemented.

sales says

heres a couple articles on the population myth argument.

If you want, I can address the articles you linked to. However, they aren’t germane to the discussion of how the problem of starvation is caused by overpopulation. They discuss the ecological impacts of overpopulation, but even there they tell only a small part of the story. They live out the little bit about how we have to tear down rain forests to build the farms needed to feed people. But that’s another story all together.

The important thing is that the recent population explosion is a very serious matter. The following is a chart of the world’s population over the past 7000.

Notice how the graph goes vertical towards the end. That should scare you. If it doesn't, then you don't understand what you're looking at. The population of the world has increased from 1 billion to 7 billion in the past 160 years alone!

Obviously, this cannot and will not continue. The only question is what will stop population growth. Here are the possible options.

1. Global starvation.
2. Disease on a scale never before seen by man.
3. War.
4. Forced population control through serialization after one or two children per couple.
5. Forced population control through prison sentences and forced abortions limiting to one or two children per couple.
6. Discouraged reproduction through fines and/or taxation.

We can, by will, choose not to take options 3 through 6. We can, through science, minimize the chance of option 2. But then we force option 1 unto us. It is the default mechanism that nature uses to impose a population limit on any species. And there is nothing you can do to prevent nature from imposing that limit.

We can try to raise the limit of population that this Earth can sustain by increasing technology, but the limit will always exist. If people continue to choose to reproduce rapidly, then no matter what the limit is, the population will rapidly approach it and global starvation will occur.

You cannot address the problems of starvation, inadequate drinking water, or deforestation without addressing the problem of population growth. In order to have a sustainable society, population growth must be limited to what is allowed by technological advancement.

While you’re doing this, find out the identities of the Federal Reserve board members – all of them. That would be very useful.

That information was made public in 1976

http://www.save-a-patriot.org/files/view/whofed.html

sales says

That information was made public in 1976

Yes, and from a few very old documents like these, we know some of the families who were the original founders of the Federal Reserve. What we don't know are the current owners, although we know they are relatives of the families that founded the Fed, or the percentage of the ownership or who's making the decisions behind the Fed including what the interest rates are and what other financial interests and conflict of interests they have.

Good start, but it will take a lot more research to find out who are the current decision makers in the Fed.