Wealthy people who primarily engage in wasteful consumption become less wealthy over time. Those who maintain or grow wealth must be doing something else with it. You brought up slavery; the antebellum South required massive coordinated violence to directly maintain internal power imbalances, and state-backed territorial expansion to support its economic growth. This illustrates why we need detailed models of how extractive systems actually operate, rather than reducing everything to market mechanisms.
Wealthy people who primarily engage in wasteful consumption become less wealthy over time. Those who maintain or grow wealth must be doing something else with it. You brought up slavery; the antebellum South required massive coordinated violence to directly maintain internal power imbalances, and state-backed territorial expansion to support its economic growth. This illustrates why we need detailed models of how extractive systems actually operate, rather than reducing everything to market mechanisms.