In the current day an age, when Rent Seeking is a massive fraction of the Economic structure, people with tons of wealth are actually the main problem since they’re using that wealth to take limited resources away from the reach of the rest (with their higher wealth they can outbid the rest on price) to then rent those resources to the rest, extracting money from them - so for example, they can buy residential and commercial real estate and then rent them to people who need a place to live or conduct business.
I mean, in a way he is right: taking money away from the rich would damage the Economy as it is now and as measured by GDP because so much of what is counted as GDP nowadays is some people extorting money from the rest because they own assets which the rest need in order to merelly survive. If the big asset owners doing most of the Rent Seeking were forced to pay taxes on assets owned, they would have to divest from at least some of those assets, thus reducing their rent seeking activities which in turn would make the GDP number go down (at least at first) simply because the money flows from asset renters to the asset owners would be less and or in other words, there would be reduced trading in the Economy (that this is unecessary trading is irrelevant for this number).
However, less rent seeking would actually be better for everybody else, so the median quality of life would go up even whilst the GDP number would be implying that the Economy was getting worse.
In the current day an age, when Rent Seeking is a massive fraction of the Economic structure, people with tons of wealth are actually the main problem since they’re using that wealth to take limited resources away from the reach of the rest (with their higher wealth they can outbid the rest on price) to then rent those resources to the rest, extracting money from them - so for example, they can buy residential and commercial real estate and then rent them to people who need a place to live or conduct business.
I mean, in a way he is right: taking money away from the rich would damage the Economy as it is now and as measured by GDP because so much of what is counted as GDP nowadays is some people extorting money from the rest because they own assets which the rest need in order to merelly survive. If the big asset owners doing most of the Rent Seeking were forced to pay taxes on assets owned, they would have to divest from at least some of those assets, thus reducing their rent seeking activities which in turn would make the GDP number go down (at least at first) simply because the money flows from asset renters to the asset owners would be less and or in other words, there would be reduced trading in the Economy (that this is unecessary trading is irrelevant for this number).
However, less rent seeking would actually be better for everybody else, so the median quality of life would go up even whilst the GDP number would be implying that the Economy was getting worse.