Yesterday someone posted a video and it had a classic capitalist propaganda argument that if Jeff Bezos massively liquidated his Amazon stake he would end up with less money than the current valuation of it. Which of course means that the stake is less valuable than it's valuation.
Why do these people never look at the opposite case though? Say you end up with the money ammount of Jeff Bezos Amazon stake in your bank account and you try to get the same stake as Jeff has now. As soon as you massively start buying up Amazon shares, the price is going to sky rocket. After you use up all of your money, you will probably have less than half of Jeff's shares. And at this point the value of his stake would double too. Same logic but opposite conclusion.
Now you may think that we haven't proven anything here, right? But which scenario is actually the realistic one? As far as I know total stock market liquidations happen only in one case and that is if the company is going to shit. But corporate takeovers through stock market are incredibly common.
It's the smooth brained take of thinking of wealth in disposable consumer products. Ownership of logistic and distribution network gives you influence that surpasses money. It's Homer Simpson finding money when he wanted peanuts. "The means of production can be leveraged for goods and services."
Yeah the whole argument is a total sophism. They use this sophism, because according to basic economics and conventional capitalist thought what Jeff Bezos has is super valuable. It's a productive capital in one of the most influential and profitable companies on the Earth that is only going to increase in value because Amazon is too big to fail as well at this point. Meanwhile the value of money in a bank account is just going down thanks to the inflationary monetary policy. So they make up an insane scenario where Jeff is liquidating his whole stake on a stock market for no reason whatsoever and that actually proves that what he has is not so valuable. Well if Jeff just burned down every one of his warehouses he would end up with nothing, so check mate leftist.
Yes. It's funny using the same logic the whole neoliberal project is revealed as a failure. The logic of financialisation driving the gutting of labour rights and perks in order to increase the dollar amount.
If it was just a matter of how many consumer products you could buy, it would be meaningless because after a certain level of wealth which is lower than a billion, you can buy any quantity of consumer products you could realistically want.