"The rich don't have everything because they don't bid for everything,"
No, they can't bid for everything. It's a critical distinction to understanding how the economy works. It is impossible to create a single entity that buys everything, or a single entity that has all the money, permanently. It's literally nonsensical; the result is a form of "money" that may have the name on it, but no longer has any of the properties we associate with money.
You appear to be proposing a model where the rich are voluntarily not buying everything up for some reason. Which is probably just an element of your model that you haven't examined, because my guess is that as soon as you consciously examine that, you'll experience some cognitive dissonance because I bet you also model rich people as intrinsically greedy, and thus having no reason to voluntarily not grab resources.
People are really bad at following through the implications of models. They make a model, figure that the model touches reality in one or two places, then decide the model must be correct. But reality is pretty darned big, and it's really, really hard to fit "reality" into a simple model. Correct models must match reality everywhere, not just a few points. Useful models must match reality in more than just a couple of places.
Follow the model's implications through.... if Rich Bob really can outbid Poor Alice for a glass of water, then why isn't the world actually full of dehydrated poor people? (Not that some people do occasionally dehydrate to death, often for reasons only loosely related to wealth issues... all the poor people should be dehydrated because the rich people are, after all, constantly outbidding them for water, apparently.)
The very act of answering that question must, with mathematical force, also demonstrate why the model that produced the question in the first place is irredeemably broken. If the model is that irredeemably broken, then the question is also broken, and what it is trying to imply is also false.
(Which, again, is why this result is not "well known". It's, well, not true. The fact that markets are not perfect does not mean that all criticisms of the market are automatically true.)
I think you misunderstood my comment. Yes, the rich don't bid for everything, and yes it's because they can't. But that's still consistent with what cousin_it said.
The main flaw with your argument is that "if Rich Bob really can outbid Poor Alice for a glass of water, then why isn't the world actually full of dehydrated poor people?" is 1) a non-sequitur, and 2) doesn't make any sense because the if condition is false.
> No, they can't bid for everything. It's a critical distinction to understanding how the economy works. It is impossible to create a single entity that buys everything, or a single entity that has all the money, permanently.
So, because there cannot be faster than light cars, all transit laws are essentially pointless?
Maybe every pedestrian ran over by a car ever had it comming for daring to set foot outside of their homes too...
No, they can't bid for everything. It's a critical distinction to understanding how the economy works. It is impossible to create a single entity that buys everything, or a single entity that has all the money, permanently. It's literally nonsensical; the result is a form of "money" that may have the name on it, but no longer has any of the properties we associate with money.
You appear to be proposing a model where the rich are voluntarily not buying everything up for some reason. Which is probably just an element of your model that you haven't examined, because my guess is that as soon as you consciously examine that, you'll experience some cognitive dissonance because I bet you also model rich people as intrinsically greedy, and thus having no reason to voluntarily not grab resources.
People are really bad at following through the implications of models. They make a model, figure that the model touches reality in one or two places, then decide the model must be correct. But reality is pretty darned big, and it's really, really hard to fit "reality" into a simple model. Correct models must match reality everywhere, not just a few points. Useful models must match reality in more than just a couple of places.
Follow the model's implications through.... if Rich Bob really can outbid Poor Alice for a glass of water, then why isn't the world actually full of dehydrated poor people? (Not that some people do occasionally dehydrate to death, often for reasons only loosely related to wealth issues... all the poor people should be dehydrated because the rich people are, after all, constantly outbidding them for water, apparently.)
The very act of answering that question must, with mathematical force, also demonstrate why the model that produced the question in the first place is irredeemably broken. If the model is that irredeemably broken, then the question is also broken, and what it is trying to imply is also false.
(Which, again, is why this result is not "well known". It's, well, not true. The fact that markets are not perfect does not mean that all criticisms of the market are automatically true.)