> I don't think that story means what you think it does. It's a tale of wealth and power. Money is just one part of the equation.

You automatically take me for a fool when all I did was present the story, not my interpretation of it. Fiction can be interpreted in many different ways, independent of the author. I think the story is saying that there is more to wealth than just money; that you can't just throw money at things or people and magically get the equivalent amount of wealth.

How is it about power? Scrooge recouped his money by just working on a farm and selling the produce. If it was about power and/or assets, he would have recouped it through his businesses (of which he owns a considerable amount of), as I hinted at in my post.

> It also perpetuates the right-wing myth/prejudice that poor people are lazy and can't handle larger amounts of money than they "need", which has been proven wrong repeatedly.

Maybe it does. I think it has more to do with the fact that you can't just inject money (or redistribute it) into an economic system that is more-or-less closed (there is a more or less fixed amount of labour in the system and so on) and get the desired effect. Without some restructuring of the system, you're probably going to get a lot of undesirable effects like inflation, which might just return you to where you were (or leave you in a worse state). Scrooge had been hoarding all of that money for decades... to put it back into the system has the same effect as to print money.

If the story was motivated by some right-wing philosophies, I think it was more motivated by the simplistic model of human motivation for wealth and and incentives (everyone immediately goes on vacation when they have met a windfall). Scrooge is more motivated by money itself than wealth so he was able to buckle down and get his money back.

But I'm not an economist so my opinions might be wrong. Nonetheless I don't consider myself a "right-wing", which is a rather vague concept in this discussion since you're from Brazil and I'm from Norway.

I'm sorry, I got the impression you were corroborating the parent comment's idea that money is better kept within the rich.

The whole economy could go bust and society revert to bartering, yet Scrooge would still come out ahead because he owns the means of production (the farm/businesses) - assuming he has the power to uphold his ownership either by force or politics.

Re. motivation, I wasn't implying it's intentional, cultural/social context is carried into everything we do. An alternative ending would have people starting their own businesses, producing value and growing the economy as a whole. If written by a norwegian, maybe Scrooge would have found oil within the city borders and distributed the proceeds to all residents :)