"If you had all the money in the world, it would be worthless."
At the risk of ruining the appearance of sagacity, I will 'splain my thinking.
If "money" is defined as "gold" or
"cattle" or something else which has use value as well as value as a
medium of exchange, then the statement in my "status" would not be
true. If you had all the gold or cattle in the world, it would be worth
something. But money, qua money, has value only in its role as facilitating
exchange in a functioning economy. If it became TOO concentrated, it could no
longer fill this role. Most people having no money, they would have to acquire
goods and services they didn't produce themselves in some other way (e.g.,
barter or rapine), or they would have to introduce some other medium of
exchange in lieu of "money" (e.g., cigarettes in prison or post-war
Europe), which of course would then technically be money, in which case the
people who had concentrated the official "money" in their hands would
no longer have "all the money in the world".
In any case, my thought experiment ran that IF you had
"all the money in the world" its extreme scarcity would make it
useless as medium of exchange, and it would no longer be "money". Of
course, social disruption and change (of the political system, or economic
system, or both) would happen long before that that time. The relevant
questions, to our own radically unequal national and (even more) world
societies are: "What kind of change?" and "When?"
