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While that may be true in some sense there is a very important caveat. Capitalism maximizes giving people they want in proportion to the capital they have.

The fact that the distribution is skewed by capital ownership and that agents other than people can own capital creates a powerful distortion and an entirely different systematic effect.



Remember that capitalism works in favor of big numbers. 1 person has to earn as much as 1000 people in order to have the same power as them.

So while your point still stands, if you have a decent middle-class then it will be much more powerful than any billionaire will ever be.


The problem isn't power, it's the behavior generated by rules of the system. Because agents only receive output proportional to the capital they possess, they are incentivized to accumulate capital and the system ends up optimizing for capital instead.

As the system progresses, agents get the choice between loosing their allocation or using it to accumulate capital. This is unfortunate since, theoretically, the whole point of capitalism is to maximize long term consumption.


But what is capital but investment in the long term?




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