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Like atoms/matter, money/wealth cannot be destroyed. It can only be redistributed. For one group of people to go into a serious economic depression, there will be others doing extremely well. I believe the economic burden can more easily be managed than the technical if enough thought is put into it.


Perhaps just a picky point, but wealth can be destroyed and is destroyed all the time. The obvious example is destruction of infrastructure in war. Sure, that can be rebuilt, and sure the rebuilders will be compensated, but real wealth has been lost; those rebuilding it could have been working on something new. Natural disasters destroy wealth. While a depression may affect populations unevenly, it is NOT correct to assume that one group's losses are another's gain.

The idea that wealth is a constant and can only be redistributed is the core mistake of modern "soft socialism". There isn't a pie of a fixed size that gets divided either "fairly" or "unfairly". Wealth is *created* by human effort, and can be destroyed by negligence (or worse). Part of the cause of this confusion is that most people equate money and wealth, and they are very different things.

The reason why some say that if you distributed the wealth equally around the world it would end up right back in the hands of those who have it now is not, for the most part, that wealthy people have learned how to very effectively screw everyone else. Its that, in general, wealthy people have learned how to create wealth (or manage the creation of wealth). Of course there are some exploitive ways to acquire *money* that don't involve creating *wealth*, but those are the exception. There are also people who would create wealth but lack any sort of means. Those things are true, but the idea of a fixed amount of wealth that gets shuffled around is a horribly mistaken idea, and the conclusions that are frequently drawn from it are very dangerous.