Wealth isn’t just money. That’s the thing. Destruction of wealth is greater than a loss of currency. It’s a loss of material and energy, seen and unseen. The loss of human capital in terms of workforce, loss of time, loss of finished goods, loss of capital goods, as well as consumer goods, loss of raw materials, even loss of indefinables such as the will to work and the drive to innovate, these are all cases where it doesn’t matter how many billions or trillions in currency one owns, or can be redistributed from one to another, because in the end, the process of reproducing what was lost will be worse than producing it in the first place. So, yes, the fat, greedy children can sit atop their fiefdoms, but as real wealth disappears, so also eventually go their quality of life and access to the materials they use to sustain themselves. They may never starve or suffer in the streets, but they’ll not live in the splendor they imagine.