This is not am issue with wealth inequality. This is an issue with using your wealth poorly. Small, on the ground charities and mutual aid are indeed better than big ones. A single person with a lot of wealth can usually best use it by creating things with it, investing in profitable, ethical enterprises, et c. Inequality, I don’t care about. It’s not a causal mechanism here. That misses the point. Creation of what you best understand in the most value-productive way is the point. Taken to the extreme, that is called selfishness because what you best know is yourself. What’s good for you. And that is a great thing. Charity that focuses on being more in line with individual responsibility (as is selfishness) is far superior to these billionaire altruist actions, and that kind of thing takes good people and good incentives. That ends up looking like mutual aid and small private initiatives with no bureaucratic structure.

A lot of the wealth in society is in the hands of people who have not earned it, because of malinvestment from fiat money and fiat regulations or transfers. It is precisely the results of forced giving which cause people who have this wealth to not be good stewards over it and to effect less than great changes on the world, rich and middle class alike.

If they enter the primary economic market, they also skew it. There is no way to spend highly-concentrated wealth without destroying market pricing somewhere. We can even see this in the US stock market, the largest financial market in the world. For example, if Apple buys back its own shares, its shareprice skyrockets and everyone tries to jump over and ride the wave up.

Also, many of the people spending the money charitably were not integral in earning it. They do not know how to run a productive business or are too old or infirm for it. They are attempting to spend part of their personal windfall before they die and it gets passed on to someone even further from the original source. An example of such a case (in German) below. His grandfather sold a chain of stores and he’s now effectively drowning in money he has no use for and that he would rather be rid of.

https://www.handelsblatt.com/finanzen/steuern-recht/reichtum-der-millionenerbe-der-die-millionen-nicht-will-03/100204748.html

Yeah, Bezos stimmies would have the same inflationary effect as the Trump stimmies did. The money came primarily from monetary inflation. If spent, it is merely to release this inflation onto a market with no way to absorb it calmly.

The only reason we don’t have $100 loaves of bread, already, is because the Cantillon Effect meant the excess money went to people who didn’t spend it on consumer goods; they spent it on houses, stocks, gold, etc. So we can still afford bread, but not housing.

If they try to spend it by donating it, they flush their inert money into the larger market, increasing monetary velocity. So, they try to release it in drips and drabs, but even that blows everything up.

It’s complicated.

Yes, but they have the money now.

You don’t destroy market pricing by spending wealth like that. You simply affect it. This could be good or bad. Most people are not very careful. The root cause was their choice for how to spend their money, and before that, how they got that money. You brought up very interesting and important dynamics to be mindful of, I like it! I think it’s important to take from this that we can try to be more systematic, more careful, and maybe save more (in hard assets like bitcoin preferably) and spend over time on more decentralized things, more down to earth things, more individualist things.