> Consumers can pay a bit more, and Jeff Bezos can be a bit less wealthy. Bezos' wealth is in amazon infrastructure/capital goods which delivers consumer good

> Consumers can pay a bit more, and Jeff Bezos can be a bit less wealthy. Bezos' wealth is in amazon infrastructure/capital goods which delivers consumer goods to millions of people a day, and crucially, cannot be converted to food. How are you proposing to transform the market capitalization of amazon into a higher standard of living for the average person? > Many developed countries have a reasonable minimum/living wage, According to whom? I'm sure there are millions of wage laborers in those countries who would prefer to make more money and consider their preference to be entirely reasonable. Workers in the United States have a reasonable living wage, therefore nothing need change. > World’s smallest violin. Right, read an economics textbook please. People can't eat money. (responding to your edit) > The wealth exists. Tax it. So return on investment goes down, which lowers marginal profitability, meaning fewer firms are solvent. Then people have fewer places to work and fewer places to buy goods. People who worked at those businesses are now out of work so the few remaining businesses have more labor to choose from, justifying them paying even less. Everyone who doesn't get a job can just get public assistance, meaning they aren't contributing with their labor but they still bid for goods, causing the price of goods to go up. Thats a terrible idea. > This isn’t about monetary inflation (as your quote attempts to conflate with wealth), Per Krugman, monetary inflation is intended to drive down real wages. > it’s about redistributing existing and future wealth You can redistribute it so people can have a higher standard of living momentarily by purchasing consumption items. Thats exchanging capital for consumer goods, which results in a lower standard of living over time because there is less capital. Additionally the profits from those sales of consumer goods accrue to the people who still hold productive capital, i.e. the wealthy. You're describing a process that causes the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer.