[ExI] thought experiment part 3

[Adrian Tymes]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2025 at 8:54 PM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> OK cool, now let’s think about the extreme case where one guy somehow ends up with all the damn money in the world.  He somehow ended up with Elon’s string of money-haulers, and all of Larry’s and Bill’s and all the other biggies whose money is heavy enough you know who I am talking about with just a first name.  One guy has it all, along with all the rest of the money, one guy.
>
> Naturally most of the humanity starves within a few days for they have no wherewithal to purchase food.  Some can forage, so they take longer to starve, but if one guy owns everything, then he can stop all commerce if he wishes, and nearly everyone dies.
>
> Is that really what happens?

Of course not.  If one person owned literally all the money in the
world, that money would immediately become utterly worthless for
anything beyond scrap value.  People would invent other money, or
barter.  Owning the money doesn't stop commerce, even if it does
frustrate things.

Going beyond that, if one person "owned" all the real estate,
factories, et al - that person's claims would likely immediately
become null and void.  Power such as that is given, and while there is
sometimes a lot of extraction and coercion, it can only go so far.  If
neither lieutenants nor minions could own anything and neither could
the general public, there would be no incentive to honor that
"ownership".

Money, and ownership of capital, is only useful as a tool, and even
then only if it's possible for other people to receive some of that
ownership in trade for things.  If it's not - if that one person
"owns" everything, and any trade or lending out is immediately yanked
back so that one person still "owns" everything - then that ownership
ceases to be recognized.  This comes up in small scale, where a small
number of people try to set it up so it is effectively impossible for
most people in an area to "own" anything even informally.  (In
medieval times, a peasant might not legally "own" their house and
their land, but in practice the lord and the lord's minions rarely
bothered to intrude so the peasant did not care much.  Further, the
knights and others who enforced the lord's ownership did themselves
own things the lord could not simply take away.  If the lord tried to
own everything, the knights would have common cause with the peasants,
not the lord, and the lord's life was usually quite short at that
point.)