Remix.run Logo
nfw2 4 hours ago

I think the deeper issue is a chronic misunderstanding of what wealth is. Most people engage with wealth in the form of usable goods and services. A banana is wealth. A house is wealth. A dollar in my bank account or a share I own is, at the margin, entirely fungible into things I can consume, so they aren't meaningfully different.

This is an illusion. A share has value because it represents the hypothetical future productivity of an abstract entity that may or may not even exist in the future.

At the margin, you can take an Amazon share and buy bananas with it. However you absolutely can't take the entirety of Amazon and exchange it for a trillion bananas. Those bananas don't exist.

More importantly, you can't take the entirety of Amazon and transform it into housing supply. I think people are often too careful about "missing the forest for the trees" and then conceive of problems as overly abstract. The affordability crisis is, first and foremost, a housing shortage.

Young people can't afford homes. Millennials are hitting 40 and realizing they may never afford one. Being secure in housing is pretty damn low on the Maslow hierarchy of needs. Sure maybe we need a more progressive tax policy, but this myopic focus on billionaires distracts from the real problem which is a housing shortage.

_factor an hour ago | parent [-]

1T dollars allows you to corner the best contractors, maybe most of them, for your own projects while houses remain unbuilt.

nfw2 42 minutes ago | parent [-]

1. You think Amazon has the market of contractors that build houses locked down?

2. A $1T market cap is not $1T of spendable cash. This is exactly the point I was making that people don't understand the difference.

_factor 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

1. The contractors move to where the money is. They will migrate to specialized work that will not benefit those who can’t afford “competitive” prices.

2. You can borrow 1T dollars in cash, effectively maxing out what the physical world will allow you to spend it on.

nfw2 29 minutes ago | parent [-]

You can borrow 1T in cash? From whom?