Nobody "needs" to "spend" anything. And nobody bathes in a pool of ducats either. When a family or a person owns, say, 20% of a luxury goods company, that "mone

Nobody "needs" to "spend" anything. And nobody bathes in a pool of ducats either. When a family or a person owns, say, 20% of a luxury goods company, that "money" is not available for anything else (like say, buying islands). It is displacing an equal amount of other money that you are then free to invest in a local coffee shop. Perhaps even found a luxury goods company yourself. All that ownership is not dead money. It's held productively. Keeping thousands of skilled workers producing billions of dollars' worth of, erm, gold-pressed trinkets. Basically none of any of the various amounts of money spread around these five lines is dead. And the little that is dead - is irrelevant to you or me (because when divided by the world's population, it comes down to a few coffees.)