> Wealth is not static and cannot be reliably hoarded.
I very strongly disagree with this—the more wealth you have, the more you can afford to manipulate society (both public and private spheres) to create favorable conditions for retaining or increasing your wealth. This is just the concept of Buffet's "moat" broadened to apply to the rest of society rather than a market segment.
> Real-life rich people invest their capital in (hopefully) productive enterprises. If they do a bad job, their wealth gets reassigned to savvier investors.
"Productive" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What actually might provide value to society and what might generate returns are wildly different things and are often diametrically opposed. Actual democratic control over the economy would yield a very different society than the one we live in, and it's very difficult to see how a capital-driven society doesn't create poverty and the long laundry list of associated evils (homelessness, illiteracy, substance abuse, widespread mental health issues, malnutrition, violence, etc etc).
Not to mention—more relevantly to our discussion here—technology's potential is woefully, woefully, woefully hamstrung by our insistence on using it to extract wealth from each other. Imagine what a smartphone could be capable of if it wasn't viewed as a profit center well outside the control of its users. Imagine what kind of internet we could have if people weren't obligated to sell ads to keep it running. Etc. This devotion to the "free market" (as if such a thing could actually exist outside of a textbook) has destroyed liberals' ability to imagine humanity's actual potential, and the demand for continual returns creeps into all our lives in the form of lower quality products, constant ads, drowning in plastic waste and roasting all summer. If the market is going to course-correct towards rational use of resources I have no clue what this would even look like.
> A common example of people trying to hoard wealth is homeowners who interfere with the free market by blocking new construction. This is going to work out great for them... until it doesn't.
The best way to make this argument will be to show when this fails (as it does, occasionally, do). Currently it's really only failing where global warming is literally washing real estate out to sea. Judging by who owns the real estate in this country—mostly, the richest generation to ever have existed and very possibly to ever exist—being a NIMBY is evidently a great way to grow your wealth. Crassus was known for making money by withholding his firemen from burning buildings until they handed the deed over. Joe Manchin's daughter makes money by exploiting an insulin monopoly at insane profit margins while people regularly have to choose between food, insulin, and rent. Etc. Markets are only able to correct these dynamics over the long term, much longer term than a human life. Hell, some of Europe's aristocracy are still clinging on to money and power that their family acquired a millennium ago for reasons completely lost to memory, and the "failures" famous in European history occur over centuries (e.g. see the Fugger family). The easiest way to make wealth is to already be wealthy.
> As another example of capital reallocation, if you're earning good money by working for an pre-revenue startup, you're enjoying the process of capital getting reassigned to you.
Of course! Trying to pass down what money I can is certainly why I took the job over, say, being a dishwasher. However, this is not an opportunity for most folks, and by any definition of making this an opportunity for everyone (not just a subset of society) is directly contradictory to the fundamentals of investment, which relies solely on using wealth inequality to drive productivity increases.
Look, all I'm saying is that investment is really useful for driving economic improvements... until it's not, at which point whatever service the invested-in thing provides should be nationalized and run at zero margin to avoid inevitable enshittification. I strongly, strongly recommend reading Schumpeter. For being the father of our industry I'm flabbergasted with how few people actually read him. It's easy to look at the 20th century and confuse the economic boom that came with industrialization and exploitation of virgin frontiers with the natural course of market forces, but the latter is coming to a close. Buckle up!