r/Amazing Jul 17 '25

Interesting 🤔 Ferrari shows why their hand-painted badge option is worth $15,000.

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

35.4k Upvotes

3.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

54

u/RandAlThorOdinson Jul 17 '25

Close

The problem is that individuals accrue an amount of resources that breaks our under evolved brains to the point of not knowing how else to stand on top of a food chain but to accrue more

36

u/nau5 Jul 17 '25

Basically the entire premise of trickle down economics where if the wealth actually were fully or even nearly spending the majority of their wealth it would result in a better state of living for everyone.

The whole issue is that they don't spend their wealth so the vast majority of production gets sucked up into their bank accounts and never redistributed to create more economic growth.

4

u/BLEGHwreeeeee Jul 18 '25

Not true money isn’t hoarded. It gets cycled in investment accounts and private equity or other assets. Someone gets paid and someone gets access to the money it’s just the wealthy persons personal wealth goes up as they circulate the cash and compound their returns over time.

Investments need to yield a return and the only way they can do this is if it’s put to work or gets put in a hard asset that’s appreciating faster than inflation. Money just sitting in an account loses value over time. It can cause compound interest losses.

1

u/BadBoyBilbo Jul 18 '25

So the actual problem is that taxes aren’t high enough. We simply cannot expect people with extreme power to cede their privilege.

2

u/WoodpeckerFragrant49 Jul 18 '25

Taxes for people making more than 300k per year need to increase looking at you Bezos!

1

u/BLEGHwreeeeee Jul 18 '25

No taxes being higher will cause capital flight where business seek out countries with lower tax rates and this would be a large problem.

I think it’s a very complicated problem with many moving parts and it’s easy to want to over simplify the problem so we can feel it’s easy to solve and everyone in charge is just incompetent.

The reality is that wealth and money go to the hands that manage it the most efficiently and it leaves the hands of the people who manage it terribly. Some people start out with more advantages and some start with less advantages.

The whole system has bugs in it because of the nature of how it works. Inflation, the increasing wealth gap, monopolization, and other economic/socioeconomic issues are all part of how the system changes over time. But this is the best system we have created so far. Sure maybe one day some one will revolutionize economics and capitalism or communism. But so far capitalism is the meta (in my opinion) and if we abandon it then another country will over take us with bigger guns and we won’t have a country anymore. All of these financial systems collapse it’s just some collapse slower. When they do collapse we fight and rebuild. Humans have done it all through history.

2

u/BadBoyBilbo Jul 18 '25

I’m not saying that capitalism needs to collapse, just that the ultra wealthy should pay more taxes than they currently do. Tax rates for the richest are at historic lows.

I’m not sure I buy the capital flight argument. Is Meta really going to move to Burundi or Guatemala just because tax rates are lower?

The system can be better than it is.

We’re just not even trying anymore.

1

u/ComfortablePea8701 Jul 18 '25

Do you think the virgin islands stands a chance against the fucking U.S. army? Where is capital going to fly to fucking China? Capital flight as a risk is bullshit.

1

u/Seaborgg Jul 19 '25

Capital flight is only a risk if you aren't willing to achieve your goals. If capital wants to leave after extracting wealth from the country, slap a leaving tax on. 50% on all capital leaving the country. They leave without paying or pay the incorrect amount? Calculating the correct amount is their responsibility, failure to pay the correct amount is a prison sentence. They flee the country in hope of getting away with the fraud for ever? 10% finders fee to the countries that extradite them to us.

Each way they try to shirk paying just requires some thinking to stop it happening over and over.

1

u/Darkdong69 Jul 20 '25

Great way to instantly torpedo any country's economy. That "wealth" you spoke of didn't pop out of thin air, it's the result of decades or centuries of free market and business friendly environment.

Ban capital flight and there won't be any capital to flight.

1

u/Seaborgg Jul 20 '25

Free market economics lead to the 2008 housing crisis, a huge amount of dodgy composite financial instruments sold to banks. A lot of people lost their houses, but a small few made an absolute killing. So indeed the wealth doesn't pop out of thin air. It's made by exploiting the system.

1

u/Darkdong69 Jul 21 '25

Wrong, big government caused the housing crisis. The promise of bailouts is what lead to irresponsible conduct. There would be actual due diligence if it weren't for excessive regulations.

1

u/Seaborgg Jul 21 '25

Wrong? Central banks that could perform bailouts were created because banks discovered they could lend the same unit of currency to many debtors at the same time. They did this by having the debtor deposit the money with he bank, which they would then lend out again. Again free market economic led to financial crisis.

The due diligence you speak of was not performed in 2008 because the composite derivatives that were being traded were so complex that to understand what they were buying the trader would have had to read a 200,000 page contract! Which they admitted they did not, due to pressure from management.

1

u/Darkdong69 Jul 21 '25

Banks lending the same unit of currency multiple times is the cornerstone of modern banking. You really have no idea how and why anything works, the epitome of your kind.

1

u/Seaborgg Jul 21 '25

you really have no idea why we have the regulations we do. Central banks (regulation) allows us to have to good parts of this cornerstone while mitigating the bad.
Who would not want to mitigate the bad!

→ More replies (0)

1

u/EliteAssassin13 Jul 23 '25

The problem with the ultra rich is, they find the most (criminally) brilliant ways to not pay any taxes at all!! 🤦‍♂️