Value isn’t something society measures or adds up by people’s bank balances; it’s just how much each individual personally wants something, and markets show this only through voluntary choices, not by declaring rich people’s gains more important than poor people’s lives.

If you have lots of money, you can spend lots of money. If you have no money, you can spend no money. Your demand is indeed wealth-weighted in the objective function of the market.

That's not really the problem, though. The problem is that rich people have most of the money and rich people care mostly about one thing: getting paid for being rich. That happens when assets go up.

Assets have a counterparty, so policy that pumps assets can do so by encouring genuine growth (difficult, unreliable) or by whacking the counterparty over the head (easy, reliable). Anti-consumer and anti-labor policy makes stocks go up, for example. NIMY policies make real-estate go up. Selling our industrial base to the Communist Party of China makes bonds go up.

Once rich people get all of the money (US gini is 0.83, are we there yet?) the objective function of the entire system shifts away from satisfying the needs of people and towards whacking counterparties of assets over the head. It's an ugly thing to see, once you know how to see it.

> bofadeez

Your name and arguments are both young-libertarian coded so let me take a shot in the dark at a personal appeal: the reason why houses are so damn difficult for you to afford is that you are the counterparty.

Except that it does declare rich people's gains more important than poor people's lives.

The purpose of a system is what it does.