Why money obsession is keeping you poor

People seem to have forgotten that money is only a marker to exchange for assets and if you can't buy any assets because you're getting outcompeted by wealthier people then it's pretty much worthless.

Anyone who’s played Monopoly for long enough knows how it ends: one player ends up with all the money, while everyone else goes bankrupt. I remember one game where I got lucky early on—I bought up all the property, stacked it with hotels, and hoarded all the cash. But we didn’t want the game to end, so I started handing out free money just to keep everyone playing. Our real-world economy isn’t much different. A small group holds most of the assets, and every so often, they inject money back into the system—not to fix it, but to keep it going.

Gary as a Canadian and member of the First Nations of Canada I'm reminded of a quote " only after the last tree has fallen the last fish has died and all the rivers have dried up will you understand you can't eat money"

‘People have confused money for real resources’ 🎯

It was very enlightening when I first heard Gary articulate that a wealth tax isn't just for getting money from the rich, it's for forcing them to sell assets. Allowing assets, and especially money making assets, to go on the market and have their price driven down would give ordinary people something to invest in. I imagine this democratizing of asset ownership would alleviate geographic inequality between rich and poor areas of the country, and between rural and urban areas. It would mean more and better businesses serving the local communities and the money staying in the area, and the fact that middle and upper middle class small business owners have a propensity to consume a higher percentage of their income than super rich people means that a thousand people with a net worth of 1 million is much healthier for the economy than 1 billionaire.

I forget about money but my landlord doesn't

13:25 my favorite point from the video. In the short term, it is a zero-sum game, because it takes resources to build more resources and it's not being done. What's being done is shuffling around numbers in ledgers.

Absolutely! One thing which always puzzled me as a youth was the presence of large, unoccupied office buildings in the centres of all our cities, whilst people are sleeping rough. I eventually concluded that these represent a stockpile of resources owned by the very rich. There are numerous similar examples of unused resources lying around everywhere you look, but if you try to use them, you get forcefully removed. Redistribution may not be the only answer, but it's a morally and practically excellent one.

As a Economic layman I've never thought the idea that you can't spend for resources without taking from something else. It makes so much sense to think of it in those terms. It's like the laws of physics, you can't have an action without a equal and opposite reaction but with money and economics

That line about people confusing pictures of god for god itself being similar to how people view money / resources just rewired my brain….