This is especially true if your wealth comes from capital markets.
If I buy a bunch of baseball cards at 1c each and later it turns out that the market values them at $100 each, I never actually "took" money from anyone. Yes it's patently unfair that I got that lucky, but it wasn't necessarily at anyone's expense.
Now, when I actually go to sell those cards then I do actually "take" money from someone else, but while those gains are unrealized it's just paper wealth.
In such a case it's also not clear who I am "taking" from. The person buying them off of me gave me the money, but you could also say the baseball card company was exploited and lost out on pricing their cards at $100?
Money has no inherent value; it is just a currency, an indirection, a promise. The economy must always bottom out at a physical good or service. You can keep trading promises of goods and services in various forms, but ultimately you end up with the inescapable tyranny of physical existence that is a closed system, with the one exception that we get energy from the Sun and stored forms of energy on this planet.
No wealth was created by "discovering value" or finding someone with money to buy something that was already there before. If this new person decided to spend $100 on a baseball card, then they didn't spend money on something else, so the market for those other things is naturally going to price them lower. So the $100 came from somewhere[1].
All of these open system chains of thought that assume any "non-zero sum game" either improperly account for devaluation of other goods or they assume accumulation of labor, and typically add a side helping of assumed exponential growth.
[1] Which is not say that money cannot be created from nothing. In fact, it is all the time. Debt--loans, stocks, bonds, IOUs--is money creation.
> you could also say the baseball card company was exploited and lost out on pricing their cards at $100?
The baseball card company is in the business of selling lottery tickets. If there wasn't a secondary market for the ones that get really valuable, they'd sell a lot fewer new cards to people looking for a winning lottery ticket.
It's a weird business for them because they're selling lottery tickets, but don't necessarily know which ones will be winners. Although with all the statistics and moneyball stuff, they'd sell a probably have a better idea now than in the past.
companies aren't baseball cards, their growth is tied directly to work that the humans in the company do, and they sure are paid for it, but if they were paid a fair share of the company's profits then that increase in share price would evaporate, because the workers would be getting the rewards from the productivity.
In other words, you owe taxes on the capital gains because someone is working to make those gains for you.
> their growth is tied directly to work that the humans in the company do
They're linked but it's not 1:1. The whole point of a corporation and a value-add economy is to do a force multiplier on the cost of labor. It doesn't matter how hard you work when digging with a shovel, a lazy guy with an excavator will create value faster than you can.
The guy providing the excavator is currently keeping the lion's share of the productivity gains, and that's not good. But it's also not quite the same as saying all of the wealth comes from exploitation.
The value of the stock is the value of the corporation, right? What’s the value of it if you don’t have humans to man the factory? The only reason Capital has capital is because they’re hoarding it since the beginning of human economics. If everyone shared equally then the guy with a steam shovel becomes a team who built, bought, or traded to get a steam shovel that they share to make their collective load easier.
So in my world view, yes, all wealth is exploitative. No one person can do enough work to earn millions and billions more than others.
it's not unfair since you took the risk of potentially losing your original investment; you also put in the time to learn about baseball cards, while other people were interested in antiques and studied and bought those, also with a risk that what they bought would decrease in value.
If I buy a bunch of baseball cards at 1c each and later it turns out that the market values them at $100 each, I never actually "took" money from anyone. Yes it's patently unfair that I got that lucky, but it wasn't necessarily at anyone's expense.
Now, when I actually go to sell those cards then I do actually "take" money from someone else, but while those gains are unrealized it's just paper wealth.
In such a case it's also not clear who I am "taking" from. The person buying them off of me gave me the money, but you could also say the baseball card company was exploited and lost out on pricing their cards at $100?