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It is not money since he can't possibly spend it faster than he gains them. It is just power, the amount of control that he has over fellow inhabitants. Unlike

• throwaway894345 5y ago
  How does that work? Presumably people aren't going to do things for him without some reasonable expectation that he will give them money, and in order to maintain that reasonable expectation, he surely has to furnish that money? I'm not trying to challenge you per se, I'm just trying to understand because a lot of economics seems counterintuitive to me.
  • hzhou321 5y ago
    The money one doesn't spend does not have value in a economical sense, since it is not participating in exchanges and doesn't affect supply and demand. Thus that money is not the same as the money that most of us earn and spend. The $10 in that billions does not equal to the $10 I earn and used it to buy that burger. But what if there is not enough burgers to go around? If one owns as much money as 100 people, he can out bid the resource request of those 100 people. So when the critical resource is scarce, he controls those 100 people. The actual amount of money as in numbers is meaningless, subject to inflation and scarcity of the resource in question. Only the relative ratio is meaningful. If he has more money than 1 million people, he is more powerful than 1 million people. Of course the power only applies in the domain where free market is in dominance, and in America,and globally, that domain is quite large. Yes, one can choose to refuse to yield to the power, it doesn't mean the power is not there. The powerful people can choose to not exercise their power, it doesn't mean the power is not there.