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Originally posted by Brother Stormhammer
The problem with that (as good as it sounds) is what happens when the "rich peoples' money" is gone. At that point, your choices are limited....either the 'free' stuff starts costing money (which won't work because, by definition, the people in question can't afford it), the free stuff stops (which violates the basic assumption of your new society, since we now have hungry people all over again), or we find a new group of people to extract cash from. It won't take long to run through that money, either. Let's take Bill Gates (AKA Satan ) as an example. The highest I can recall him being worth was in the vicinity of $100,000,000,000. Presumably, that's too much money for anybody, so let's confiscate all of it, and give it to the poorest half of the US population. That means that about 150,000,000 people will be getting checks (irony of ironies, Bill Gates will get one. How's that for justice?). It works out to $666.66 per check (I told you he was Satan, didn't I?). Once that cash is gone, though, where do we get the next check? And the one after that? Your system relies on the very rich people it reviles...you need them to keep creating outrageous flows of cash that you can confiscate and redistribute.