How does someone having wealth stop anyone else from acquiring theirs? You may start out with less but there's nothing stopping you. Also all those capital investments are helping the companies and funds they're invested in, one of which could be your very own employer/startup/pension fund, etc.
> How does someone having wealth stop anyone else from acquiring theirs?
The wealthy person (a) does not need a 9-5 job to subsist and can devote all their time to a launching a business, (b) has a lower tax burden via capital gains, (c) can afford to fail multiple times, (d) can buy their way into a top school if they don't get in on merit, (e) tends to have better family connections, (f) etc.
Then the question is then whether startups exist in a competitive environment, which of course is true. Tech, and the web especially, often approaches a zero-sum game.
"Tech, and the web especially, often approaches a zero-sum game."
Why do you think that? Since 2000, how many brand-new companies and brand-new industries have been created, from scratch? Doesn't look very zero-sum to me.
>How does someone having wealth stop anyone else from acquiring theirs?
Through lobbying of laws that increase their wealth more than others. Tax breaks that give scraps to the poor while giving massive benefits to the wealthy. A legal system that only the rich have a chance of truly navigating.
Ideally it shouldn't matter. One person being rich doesn't make another person poor. But politicians have been for sale for some time, and even basic concepts such a free speech and the open exchange of ideas are strongly tied to wealth in a way that ends up being bad for the little guys.
How does someone else controlling resources prevent you from obtaining resources?
Well, because they control the resources.
The entire concept of rivalry in economics is about this. Only in the case of resource that are not rivalrous does pre-existing wealth become a non-factor.
If you just redefine the word then there's not much of an argument. Resources are constrained, wealth isnt. You can create value somehow and generate wealth, regardless of what someone else is doing.
Wealth is a measure of assets. Assets are, for the most part, rivalrous goods.
Ownership's most fundamental quality is the exclusionary right to prevent others to use or occupy the asset in question. Owning lumber, for instance, has value because it lets you prevent other people from walking off and building their houses with it.
Accordingly wealth is exclusionary by nature.
Part B) You might think that wealth isn't constrained, but it is.
You can't own more lumber than the sum of all of the forests and cut planks in the world. You can't output more human labour than the sum of the population on the planet can provide, and you certainly can't build an object which is composed of more minerals than our race can obtain. Will those limits increase over time? Sure. But that doesn't mean there's no hard top-end limit.
Even if we jump to non-rivalrous goods and you say "but I can create intellectual property at an infinite rate - those rights and assets aren't bound to physical constraints" - you'd be wrong again. The capacity to create and define non-tangible assets susceptible to ownership requires human labour. If you wanted to produce ideas for comic books, for instance, you wouldn't be able to produce a database containing the brainstorming of 10 billion people in a year. Because you don't have 10 billion people on the planet.
So even at your value maximizing best, applying the best possible combinations of resources, labour and opportunities, you still won't be able to create infinite wealth for all asset classes.
If you mean that wealth isn't constrained because you can inflate the value of the denomination it is traded in, that doesn't change the value of the asset itself - that's completely orthogonal.
A lot of them create their wealth specifically by destroying the ability of others to create wealth for themselves. There are human consequences to automating away entire industries in the time it takes someone to train for them.
Wealth insulates the wealthy from it, at least until millions of people can't find work for long enough that revolution seems like a good idea.
How is that actually stopping anyone? It seems you're referring to "ability" as in skills and talents to meet some demand for work, but that changes as it always has throughout history. The world marches on, that is inevitable and we must all adapt, wealthy or not.
Someone is going to make progress eventually and it's often just a worker who creates automation or other innovation to change their industry, and as a result creates massive wealth for themselves. This is exactly the competition that the OP seems to think doesn't exist. That's before getting into details like how many new ventures take investment from the wealthy to become viable in the first place, thereby helping everyone involved.
I fully agree that the pace of change and inadequate societal policies can create harsh conditions at times, but the perspective that that the wealthy have taken everything and nobody else can have it is just a simplistic, inaccurate, and unhelpful outlook on capitalism.
> How does someone having wealth stop anyone else from acquiring theirs?
Through regulation and corruption.
Accredited investor regulation in the startup world makes sure you can't participate in the future, even if you see it coming. Income tax to make sure a good year doesn't let you stop working. Capital gains tax to make sure you can't outperform the stddev for your socio-economic class range.
