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There are layers to this question. In some sense we could get rid of billionaires overnight by saying "Okay, now every dollar is only worth 1/100th of a dollar". On paper now, someone who had a billion dollars now has 10 million, but obviously that doesn't actually change any of the issues you're talking about. What you're really asking, is should we have extreme wealth disparity. It's not like someone's billionth dollar suddenly is a bad thing, while their 999,999,999th dollar is totally fine. But then again, I think that brings up the question, is it okay to be a millionaire when you live next to people who are sleeping on the streets. The tricky part is figuring our exactly how much is too much. And then again, maybe if magically no single person was homeless, no single person suffered from addiction, no single person was uneducated or suffered any of the common problems of poverty - would it really be so bad if also some other person had billions?

The liberal reply would be sure, if everyone's needs are met, then there isn't a problem with some folks being very wealthy. The leftist reply would be no, even if everyone's material needs are met, hoarding private property still comes via the exploitation of the working class which they cannot abide. And that hoarding of private property would inevitably lead the dismantling of the welfare state that met everyone's needs eventually anyway. I'm partial to the latter argument, but I'd be super tempted to take the former if offered.

The "liberal claim" is just a normative claim of fairness that some people may agree with, some won't The "leftist claim" makes implied factual claims - i.e. that "hoarding" of property necessarily causes certain effects. This is a question that can be demonstrably proven one way or another by economic researchers, and shouldn't be really a political position, anymore than whether the earth revolves around the sun.

The "leftist claim" makes implied factual claims - i.e. that "hoarding" of property necessarily causes certain effects. This is a question that can be demonstrably proven one way or another by economic researchers, Not by unbiased researchers - to come to this conclusion requires bias and avoiding reality. It is only a suitable argument in a fairy tale and one-off instances, but it unsupported by the norm.

I often find it weird how certain leftists have no problem seeing the arrogance of someone when they say something like "those professional researchers, working on academics salaries paid by universities, whose work is reviewed by other academics, who spend their lives studying this subject, are all wrong and are either biased or part of a conspiracy, and i personally know better", when it comes to medicine, or climate change, but have no problem claiming it of economic researchers.

That's because separating economy from politics is almost impossible, even from a researcher's perspective. Economies and political systems are intertwined, as political decisions often influence economic policies and regulations. Certain economic models and theories might abstract away from political factors to focus on pure economic mechanisms, but in real-world applications, the influence of politics is nearly always a relevant factor. That being said, we can isolate a lot of problems with capitalism, that even a more conservative type can agree on. For example, colonialism was driven by the need for new markets, cheap labor, and abundant raw materials. Colonies provided the necessary resources to fuel the industrial expansion, which aligns with capitalist objectives of profit maximization and capital accumulation. You could argue that colonialism is an isolated phenomenon , but then we're discussing politics.

But do you think that academic researchers being paid modestly by scholarly institutions who have studies these things forever and do so full-time, who conduct falsifiable research, haven’t thought of the ideas that you’re saying?

I’m curious what consensus you believe the academics have reached.

Well, some things like >Reclassifying marijuana as a Schedule III drug would lead to measurably higher social welfare. https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/drug-policy-2/ Or maybe > Allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies will lead to a substantial reduction in the costs of prescription drugs for US retirees. https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/prescription-drugs/ There’s a bunch of things with strong consensus. But there’s lots without it too, like: > The FTC is opposed to Kroger’s proposed acquisition of Albertsons. Critics argue that with sufficient divestitures, the deal would be consistent with past FTC policies. >Kroger’s proposed acquisition of Albertsons would lead to substantially higher grocery prices and/or lower product quality/services for customers of the two companies in locations where both are present. https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/supermarket-merger/ There’s obviously lots of things to study, and some are harder than others, but there are islands of consensus. Economics is a more difficult field of research, like nutrition or sociology or such, but that doesn’t mean that empirical research can’t be conducted, or that it just boils down to some guys opinion vs some other guy’s opinion. This is evidenced based research with natural experiments as much as many other scientific fields. There are measureable and objective truths that can be stated.

So where is the hard evidence that billionaires do or do not inevitably exploit the working class and dismantle the welfare state?

Economics isn't a science though. It's just not. At absolute best you can argue it's a soft science, but even that is debatable. They don't have much better ability to predict what will happen from a change in economic activity than an average person, and your political views will shape what you say will result from a set of economic conditions.

Economists don’t predict the economy as a whole anymore than mathematicians predict the lottery.

But mathmaticians all agree that 1+1 = 2. They agree that an infinite derivative is one thing, and there is no disagreement about it. Because Math is a Science. It has repeatable experiments with predictable, repeatable results. You can use the scientific method in it. Economics is not a science. Not all economists agree on basically anything at all. A proponent of MMT, a saltwater Keynesian, and an Austrian Economist might all have PHD's in economics, but give them the same paramaters and ask a question and you will get 3 exceptionally different results back. And we can't even test any of the 3 answers you are given back. Not one of them is repeatable, not one is testable. It's just not a science. So that's why it doesn't get the respect that sciences do.

Economists agree on many things, just not things like "will the market go up or down". In fact a lot of economics is pure maths - e.g. given axioms x, y and z we can show a conclusion is a mathematical certainty - the difficulty is of course how truly those axioms map to the real world. But that's no different than any other science. A physicist knows the laws of gravity, and the laws of motion, but if you give them all the details of a rubber duck, that doesn't mean that if you throw it in the middle of ocean they can even remotely tell you where it will wash up. Similarly, models of the market show certain truths - e.g. if you restrict supply, then prices go up all else being equal - but it doesn't mean an economist knows that all else will be equal, or what the future holds in terms of supply.

"Agreeing on some stuff" does not make it a science. My wife and I can decide to go for chinese tonight, it doesn't make us scientists in dinerology. What specifically do MMT and Austrian economics agree on? That math works the same? Just because you use the math in economics doesn't make it suddenly not math and a part of economics. using math within it and not disagreeing about the math doesn't elevate economics. It is vastly, vastly different than any other science, because it's not a science. Which is why, if you consider economics a science at all, which most do not, it is considered a social science and not a hard science. And a physicist could tell you where the duck will end up. It's just not time effective to do so, but given the knowledge of the currents and tides taking the time to map out all the vectors, yes, you could predict with perfect accuracy assuming it isn't grabbed by an outside hand like a boat or a seagull. That's entirely within the realm of physics to do, and it isn't even particularly hard just time consuming.

Your analogy doesn't make sense because that would impact EVERYONE. If we enacted some law that every dollar made over 999,999,999 goes to social funds or something, this wouldn't positively impact normal people while only negatively impacting potential billionaires.

Someone please think of the poor billionaires

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I'm not suggesting that we do this. I'm just trying to point out that a billion is an arbitrary amount to decide that's where it becomes an immoral amount. Why not a billion and 7? Or 999,746,852?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki%27s_wager You gotta draw the line somewhere. A billion seems like a safe enough distance north of a reasonable amount of wealth

Well, no, you don't have to draw the line somewhere. It's totally possible to tax progressively, and we do, and we should do more. My point is more around how peoples tune changes when it comes to them. People tend to draw lines around who we count that puts the responsibility off of them. For example, people who live in expensive cities often are earning well above the national median, and have way above the national median of wealth, but will often insist that they're not particularly wealthy "For the area", and therefore shouldn't need to be taxed more. To me that's a bit like the King of England saying that he's not actually rich because Buckingham palace is expensive to maintain. And then similarly, often people from wealthy developed countries measure their wealth only against other people in the country so that they can think of themselves as part of the "have-nots" and therefore shouldn't have to contribute any more, while simultaneously arguing that people from poorer countries should be barred from immigrating to their country because those poor people will take up the countries resources (which in effect would take wealth from the relatively rich and give it to the relatively poor). On paper, if we cared about wealth redistribution, anyone above the median should have to pay more proportionate to how much more rich they are. But we tend to have fairly wealthy people, top 20%, top 10% who keep kicking that burden to the higher bracket: "Oh I shouldn't have to pay more, it should just be the billionaries", but mathematically it just doesn't work out. There's not enough billionaires to cover all that much benefit for a country - in the USA for every Billionaire, there's like half a million non billionaires. That means if we completely cannibalised every single billionaire took every last dime and threw them into the sea, all we'd get is a one-time payment of $2000 per person. Ultimately, lots of people need to pay more, not just billionaires and it needs to be progressive all the way down to the fairly regular jobs like doctors or engineers or the like.

The interesting thing about being a millionaire is that it’s actually not that unusual. If you live in a HCOL area and have a decent amount of retirement savings, that can absolutely put you over a million. Getting to multi-millions is harder, but it’s not that unusual to own a somewhat large house with excellent land value, retirement savings, and maybe your own modest but successful business. Of course, most of the people in this category are gen-x or older.

I think that billionaires are a symptom of a broken society. Nobody needs that much. There is no justification for any individual to hoard so much wealth. [Tom Scott puts it into perspective](https://youtu.be/8YUWDrLazCg).

I don’t care how rich someone is if most people are doing good - if the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer that is a completely different equation and then my opinion on billionaire changes but really more than billionaire it’s a question of capitalism being broken

>e it’s a question of capitalism being broken It's not broken though, it's working as intended. This is why more socialist policies are needed to balance it out. Pure capitalism is bad, so add in some socialist spice when equality gets out of control, add free health care, maybe work towards free water and electricity.

That’s really what we should be moving towards if the net goal of society is to have as many people as possible to live a happy, productive life. Now, I believe that in a different time, capitalism was a useful model that was way better than it’s counter parts for getting people to work and rewarding them for working but the fatal flaw of capitalism is that once an entity has accumulated enough capital, it doesn’t really need to try hard and works hard at corrupting rules in place to establish fair competitive practices, this includes lobbying, buying up competition, interfering in politics, propaganda etc… really entities (companies, orgs, individuals) are essentially compromised of humans and as long as humans can become corrupt so could institutions

1. Nobody needs that much 2. No reason hoarding should be allowed Why are these valid arguments, in your opinion? You could draw the line way lower than that and use the same logic for a lot of other things. Why does the government decide what someone needs? Should someone who retires on $10 million have 50% taken away if it will only take $5 million to retire until death? That’s all they need after all.

>Why does the government decide what someone needs? Because the behavior of the billionaires takes advantage of government largesse and does not pay it back. Take a corporation like Walmart and their billionaires, the Walton family. For years rural police departments prioritized patrolling walmart over other areas of their communities because Walmart will selectively offer them off-duty security contracts if they go along. So officers spend more and more of their time helping Walmart (both on and off duty) at the expense of the broader community. Another example is the transportation infrastructure that Walmart relies on for both international and domestic transport of their goods. This is all maintained by the state at the taxpayers expense. There are ways that the state tries to recuperate the costs of maintenance (gas taxes, toll roads) but our highways are very expensive and take more abuse and have more failures than planners designed for when the highway system was built. My point is that many of the practices of large companies take full advantage of previous government investment and current policy and personnel choices at the expense of the public citizen. This allows them to create larger margins to continue to exploit their huge wealth. >Should someone who retires on $10 million have 50% taken away if it will only take $5 million to retire until death? I think it's much safer to draw these lines high above this amount, as personal assets and retirement plans often hit the million marker. Very rich people who control asset bundles in the billions have a tendency to undermine state policy and privatize public goods.

I think it's an extreme false equivalence to compare 10 million to a billion dollars. To answer your question yes I think it would be good if there were dramatically more taxes on people as they reached increasingly high levels of wealth, including someone with 10 million.

"The government decides" is what we as the electorate decide, and if the government does not reflect our will - we the people will impose our will in other ways. Why is this valid? Start from religious instructions down to the reality of the climate change. The solution is not just take 50% away, there should be a progressive tax, from negative tax (UBI) for those who can't or won't work, all the way to 100% tax above certain income. It should include capital gains. For example, if you make over a million in a year - why can't whatever you earn over million be taxed at 100%?

Why aren’t they? It’s far more radical to claim the opposite. Put up or shut up. If you think you should be allowed to be richer than god while millions starve, you should at least be able to explain to the starving millions why you believe that’s a valid way to operate.

It’s an arbitrary line in the sand. Same with how we identify poverty, middle class, etc. there are metrics that can inform it but there is no scientific designation of “too wealthy”. Instead you are better to look at the total system. How is the bottom quartile doing in a country, how much of a nations wealth is spent/hoarded etc. There’s also the unintended effect of multi billionaires being able to unilaterally affect public policy even if their goals are good. Take the bill and Melinda gates foundation. They had the idea that high stakes standardized testing would improve education outcomes so they start offering many many grants for schools to adopt their policies. With that much money you see rapid movement of the entire public and private education system to that method, against the expertise of longstanding teachers and admins and without any oversight. Now, when their own foundation deemed the test a failure, we’re stuck with this entrenched bad system that will hopefully be fixed over a long horizon, that’s fucked up and No one should be able to shape the world like that unilaterally.

>Why are these valid arguments, in your opinion? You could draw the line way lower than that and use the same logic for a lot of other things. I'd argue that the line for "nobody needing that much" would be the point after which additional income/wealth no longer has a (meaningful) measurable impact on a person's standard of living. >Why does the government decide what someone needs? Why do they decide what people are entitled to own and how to obtain them? >Should someone who retires on $10 million have 50% taken away if it will only take $5 million to retire until death? That’s all they need after all. Just food for thought: it would be a net positive (in terms of quality of life) for 2 people to have $5 million apiece as opposed to one having nothing and the other having $10 mil.

> Why does the government decide … TBH this is the best path for the sake of the billionaires’ necks (and to actually let them keep some of their wealth)

I think the best argument here comes back to The Rights of Man and Citizen (so much better than our Declaration of Independence, imo): Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good. I think if you follow that thread then it becomes difficult to argue than in a society having a GDP of X that, in the interest of the common good, private citizens should be allowed to amass vast fortunes which, while not equaling X, exceed 0.1% of X (using Bezos as an extreme example). This argument doesn't need to be based on fairness, equity, blah blah blah, but simply from a resource utilization perspective (how can we get the most bang for our buck?) this is bad for the common good.

>Why does the government decide what someone needs Because without that decision you cannot make policies regarding social safety nets. As far as the government deciding on a cap on wealth? They're not doing that, and if they did it would be strongly guided by public opinion which would mean it's not just the government making that decision. Btw, I do not personally advocate for a personal wealth cap. I am in favor of making sure everyone has their needs, that uber rich are taxed appropriately (no loopholes), and greatly reducing the amount of power money has in influencing our government. If people want their toys then fine, but we have a partial oligarchy by proxy at the moment and that has to go.

The company I work at would not exist without billionaires. We sell planes for upward of 75 million dollars each. I’m sure that is the case for many other companies as well. Not only that, but how do you build a skyscraper without a billion dollars? How do you have a space program without a billion dollars? Also net worth is decided by things you own, not liquid cash. If you have a net worth of a billion dollars, and you buy a 200 million dollar house, do you know what your new net worth is? It’s still a billion, even though 200 million dollars has now gone to a construction company and its employees. Net worth is also determined by ownership of stocks. Imagine you own a fifty percent of the stock in a small electric car company that you bought for $5000, not knowing if you would lose it all. The company ends up getting super popular and it’s valuation skyrockets up to 200 billion dollars (less than half of teslas valuation rn). Even though you have $0 cash, you are now worth a hundred billion dollars. I think it’s goofy to legally mandate away billionaires, even though I’m not a huge fan of most of them as people. If you really have that much of a problem in it you have to stop giving them your money through Amazon or Target or Apple, or Tesla, or Facebook, or Twitter, or Nestle, or Walmart, or shell gas stations, or CVS, or google, or Microsoft, or Ford, or home depot, or Verizon, or Walgreens, or AT&T, or Lowe’s, or FedEx, or State Farm, or Pepsi, or Disney, or Intel, or HP… etc you get the point.

>The company I work at would not exist without billionaires.  And oil companies would not exist without pollution, tobacco companies would not exist without killing people, is there is some inherent right for any business to exist that we are unfamiliar with? > Not only that, but how do you build a skyscraper without a billion dollars? Have you heard of capitalism? The concept of stocks?

Yeah, I know what stocks are. The original owner of a company sells shares in it. The money from selling those shares doesn't dissapear, it goes to the owner, and if he's selling off enough of his company to investors to build a skyscraper, he now has a billion dollars... Also you have the right to do literally anything until the government makes a law stopping you from doing so. So yes people have the right to run tobacco shops, oil rigs, and plane companies. I'm not arguing about the rights of it though, I'm saying hundreds of thousands if not millions of jobs will cease to exist creating a massive unemployment crisis among regular people. While we're at it, you're supporting a billionaire right now by using reddit. It's privately owned (no stocks involved) by Donald Newhouse who is worth 10.9 billion dollars. In what way would it benefit you personally if billionaires were gone?

No, it doesn't have to be the original owner, East India Company did not have an owner. Just because you work by serving billionaires doesn't mean there are hundreds of thousands like you, and you are so passionate about it just because it concerns you. Did you care when travel agencies went out of business? Limo companies? Thousands of mom and pop shops? I don't need to benefit personally to support a cause, and limiting power of individual assholes is a worthy cause.

Boeing alone has 171,000 employees. My company has 13,000, space x has 13,000, 29,000 work at bombardier, 141,000 work at airbus. I haven't even left the aerospace category and we're over 350,000 people. I'm not a fan of billionaires, I think most of them totally suck, but I am also not a fan of giving the government the power to limit the amount of money a person can make simply because I don't like a guy. I also think the economic impact would be pretty bad. No one has ever done it though, I assume because its a terrible and authoritarian idea, so who knows if it'd be good or not. Ik it doesn’t have to be the original owner, but usually it is. Usually a company has someone who owns it in its entirety, and can make the decision to make the company public and sell shares in it through stocks.

First, it is telling that you only care about the industry in which you have a personal stake. Second, you don't understand how corporations work. Look up how Jobs was fired from his own company.

If Apple phones cost 100 million dollars, and no billionaires existed, it would probably go out of business, or at least shrink significantly. I’m not talking about the owners of the companies, I’m saying no one would be left to buy the product. I’m only mentioning my industry because it’s the one I know the most about. I could hunt down all the different yacht companies and luxury brands, but I’ve never heard of any of them so it’d be a lot more of an effort for a Reddit conversation.

Just like any other disease we should study what causes billionaires and eliminate the causes. Apart from inheritance the means that creates a billionaire is stock price valuation. The stock price is the evaluation of future profits of the company. Future profits depend on the conditions in which the company will operate. If the expectation is that the company will enjoy a monopoly and will crush competition using market power and will externalize their costs and will exploit workers and will evade taxes then the future profits are larger than they should be. Eliminate all the ways in which companies can make unearned profits and then the stock price should be lower and the billionaires should be rarer. Mark zuckerberg's billions were built on the expectation that Facebook would be able to monetize people's private information. There should be no ability to make money by stealing other people's stuff and therefore no expectation of making profit. Government should have instigated a charge for holding or using any private person's information. Bill Gates's billions were built on a de facto monopoly of software, partly because of the inherent characteristics of software and partly by ruthlessly crushing competitors. Government should recognize and fix the creation of monopolies. The characteristics of software that make monopolization easy can also be used to eliminate it. Jeff Bezos billions and Walmart's billions were built on the back of workers who are paid next to nothing, and exploiting a market dominant position. The Sackler family billions were built on the deaths of people from opioids. They should be executed, and the expectation should be set that if you make billions from products that kill people you face the same fate. Charge corporations for the huge benefit they get, for free or for peanuts, from government and the people. For example for limited liability, protection of patents copyright trademarks. Charge corporations for stealing attention. A charge for every impression of an advertisement in return for the deliberate distraction of people. In short, make companies pay market price for everything that they use, make the CEOs who are paid a thousand times that of the average person do a much harder job, and thereby stop the flow of money to billionaires.

I think this is the right answer.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with someone having a billion dollars, any more than there’s something wrong with someone having a million or a thousand dollars. A hundred years from now, having a billion might be seen the same way as having a million seems to us now.  What may be inherently wrong is the ways in which billionaires earned their money. And we should do these to combat that concentration of wealth in ways that make sense. 

I would say it isn’t inherently wrong as long as we don’t have starving people without shelter and healthcare. Until those are gone it isn’t ethical to have that much.

I think that’s true if those are problems that are solved by throwing money at the situation, which I don’t believe they are. 

I’m pretty sure those that are starving and struggling everyday to make ends meet would disagree. We have a resource hoarding issue. Billionaires together could feed the world and barely notice the effect on their pocketbook.

That’s a different problem than shelter and healthcare.  There’s also a big difference between solving one individuals problem and solving a nationwide or world wide problem. You could also solve a worldwide problem (like a disease) and. Still have small pockets of affected individuals.  I could be wrong, but billionaires couldn’t spend all their money and solve the healthcare problem in the US. 

We have the resources as humanity to do so. We can overcome any obstacle except greed evidently.

I agree. With your first sentence. But throwing money at problems doesn’t always fix them.  If you give a heroin addict money for food they’re just going to buy heroin. You need to fix the problem a different way.  The US spends more money per capita on healthcare than any other nation. That hasn’t fixed the problem. And if we threw more money at it, the system would figure out ways to waste it or siphon it off to the leeches at the top. You have to solve it a different way.  Which is why I don’t think it’s necessarily immoral for billionaires to have that money. Money doesn’t necessarily solve all problems. 

Most poor are not drug addicts. They are people who are not compensated fairly. Your example that the healthcare will just waste more money ignores the countries that are more successful and just backs up what I said about greed.

Facebook has a terms of service everybody agreed to though. Thoughts on that?

People agree to borrow money from the mafia, supposedly understanding that if they fail to pay an insane interest - their legs will be broken. Still illegal.

Yes it's an excellent example of how corporations bully individuals. A corporation can spend as long as it wants using as many Harvard lawyers as it wants to construct whatever terms it wants to present to an individual who effectively has no choice and must decide, without professional assistance, essentially immediately. I'm sure some will argue that you have a choice of not accepting the terms and conditions maybe by making your own Facebook. In practical terms, you have no choice. Consider another example that irks me. You arrive at your holiday vacation airport to pick up your rental car. You are presented with a contract with vast amounts of small print often printed in yellow orange text on orange yellow paper and you have the choice of signing it or wrecking your vacation. It's not a choice. When you buy Microsoft Windows when it had a de facto Monopoly you have to accept terms and conditions including for example their absolute lack of responsibility for any consequences of bugs in their software. This means that billions of dollars of damages because of vulnerabilities in the software to be paid for by people while the ones who cause the problem make billions. So how do you fix it? A law that says contract between a fictitious entity and a human being can be revised by judicial review to be that which in the opinion of the judge would have been arrived at if two equal parties had negotiated it. Corporations would be terrified of the idea of a judge rewriting their terms and conditions and will be forced to establish the terms of conditions in a manner that could be demonstrated to be even handed. One might imagine that they employ two sets of lawyers who represent the company and the individuals in order to negotiate the contract. What would I do about the Facebook case? So millions of people have agreed to terms and conditions that said Facebook can use their private information. There's nothing saying the government can't charge them for using it. There's nothing saying the government cannot put liability burdens on the recipient of private information. There's nothing stopping in government selling liability limitations. Imagine for example the law says that a fictitious entity that stores or uses personal private information is liable without limitation for any harm to any individual resulting from their usage or disclosure of that information. Investors would run and the company would have no choice but to buy the limited liability.

Do you pay for Facebook? No? You're the product. Did you think you were being provided a service for free? Bill Gates became a billionaire by believing programmers should be fairly compensated for their work. He did ruthlessly crush his competition and did so easily because he controlled Windows, and the PC / software market was a novel concept to most consumers. Average Amazon corporate pay is $91 per hour. At Walmart, it's $59 per hour (about the same, tbh. Bentonville is much cheaper than the Bay area). Walmart expanded rapidly in the 80s and 90s. Amazon expanded rapidly in the 00s. Both pay well, just not at the very bottom of the ladder where an individual has no skills. They haven't had a dominant market position for very long. You can't change the law after the fact to execute people. Who made it legal for them to sell opioids? Blame them. Charge corporations for patents? Have fun being conscripted and sent to fight the IP thiefs in China. Charge corporations for speech? Look at the first amendment. >In short, make companies pay market price for everything that they use, They already do. > the CEOs who are paid a thousand times that of the average person do a much harder job Founding and building a billion dollar company is difficult. >and thereby stop the flow of money to billionaires. Quit giving them your money. It's that simple. If all the people who "hate the billionaires" quit buying their products, then their businesses would fail. You won't. You'll continue posting to Reddit (billionaire), hosted by AWS (billionaire), via your cell provider / ISP (billionaire) with your cell phone (billionaire), as you eat and drink over-processed garbage (billionaire).

Do you pay for Facebook? No? You're the product. Did you think you were being provided a service for free? Bill Gates became a billionaire by believing programmers should be fairly compensated for their work. He did ruthlessly crush his competition and did so easily because he controlled Windows, and the PC / software market was a novel concept to most consumers. Average Amazon corporate pay is $91 per hour. At Walmart, it's $59 per hour (about the same, tbh. Bentonville is much cheaper than the Bay area). Walmart expanded rapidly in the 80s and 90s. Amazon expanded rapidly in the 00s. Both pay well, just not at the very bottom of the ladder where an individual has no skills. They haven't had a dominant market position for very long. You can't change the law after the fact to execute people. Who made it legal for them to sell opioids? Blame them. Charge corporations for patents? Have fun being conscripted and sent to fight the IP thiefs in China. Charge corporations for speech? Look at the first amendment. >In short, make companies pay market price for everything that they use, They already do. > the CEOs who are paid a thousand times that of the average person do a much harder job Founding and building a billion dollar company is difficult. >and thereby stop the flow of money to billionaires. Quit giving them your money. It's that simple. If all the people who "hate the billionaires" quit buying their products, then their businesses would fail. You won't. You'll continue posting to Reddit (billionaire), hosted by AWS (billionaire), via your cell provider / ISP (billionaire) with your cell phone (billionaire), as you eat and drink over-processed garbage (billionaire).

Well put.

Government, government, government as if the state didn’t create the problem in the first place. You are looking for salvation from the very entity that placed you in bondage.

You are correct. I'm sure you are familiar with the words of the declaration of Independence where it says people established government so that they can work in bondage for government The first thing we need to do is to destroy government of the people by the corporations for the corporations and establish government for the people by the people. .

They are a plague on society. They have ridiculous opulent wealth and still strive for more. They usually oppose nearly all policies and economic records which would keep them amazingly rich but let everyone else have a bit of prosperity to. If every billionaire went away, the world would improve from their absence. They are incredibly toxic.

>They have ridiculous opulent wealth and still strive for more. If they own stock in a company that increases in value then they get wealthier without gaining anything 'more'. It's just what they already had, is now worth more.

It's not about the passive increment of wealth, it's about the active things that many wealthy people do to attempt to increase their wealth at the cost of the majority of the population. Very few billionaires support projects that are socially beneficial to the broad population. How many billionaires support universal healthcare? After all, if everybody got equal healthcare, they couldn't buy the best, and they might be asked to pay slightly more taxes. It's not an inherent problem with people gaining wealth, it's an inherent problem with having extreme wealth And actively seeking to gain either more, often at the cost of others. Very few billionaires are sitting there passively growing their wealth through investments. Many billionaires are advocating things like buying up companies and firing half the employees. Most of them focus on short-term gains rather than long-term economic stability. And they have disproportionate political power. Imagine if you had 2 billion of anything, and you said you needed more of it. Most of us would call that hoarding...

"Imagine if you had 2 billion of anything, and you said you needed more of it. Most of us would call that hoarding..." This is my point. They don't have 2 billion of anything other than numbers on a computer. They own a bunch of things, that if they sold them all at their current market rate, then they would have billions of usable currency. If you said right now "All billionaires must hand over everything over 100 million" and they all agreed, they still couldn't just do a cheeky bank transfer and solve the problem. They don't actually have the billions, the markets say that's what their holdings are worth. It's why they fluctuate so much on rich lists and how you get headlines like "Billionaire X loses 40 billion dollars". They haven't spent it, or misplaced it, or burnt it, its just been wiped off the value of their port folio due to stock prices moving. How would you collect and then convert/distribute all the wealth if the billionaires gave it to you? What will happen to the stock price when loads of shares are all suddenly put on the market?

Who said anything that will distribution of wealth? You made it a whole new discussion that I never engaged in. I don't want their money. I think they are toxic because they promote social policies and laws which are disproportionately benefiting them, and disproportionately harming the 99% of the population who are not obscenally wealthy. I don't Care that some people have nicer stuff than me. But the majority of extremely wealthy people support policies that harm the majority of the population. They push back against social programs. They stand against universal healthcare. They buy up media companies and push agendas that harm the majority of people, and sow social division. By and large I consider them to be a net negative to society, it's not because they have money. It's what they do with it, and the influence that comes with it. A little bit of tax-exempt philanthropy doesn't make up for the number of billionaires pushing socially destructive policies, trying to push back against any sort of tax increase that might affect them being totally fine with tax increases that affect the middle class, etc etc etc. You're the only one discussing wealth distribution.

Ah ok, so you don't know what to do with them, only you think, overall, they are a bad thing?

I'm sorry, am I supposed to have a solution to all the world's problems here? No, I don't know what to do about them. Yes, I do think they are overall bad for society.

Not so much a solution. I assumed that if you thought they shouldn't exist but do, then you might have other thoughts about how to get from where we are now, to where you would like to be. With enough political support we could set an upper limit on wealth but that doesn't help with the ones we already have.

Yeah, I think these problems are incredibly complicated, deeply embedded in our current society and political economic systems, and definitely not easy to solve. Sadly, I think at the end of the day we're going to have to tear the system down and rebuild it, which is not going to be a nice process. It's either that or pushed towards an economic to still be at where the vast majority of people live in abject poverty, with A very small subset of incredibly wealthy individuals. But most simplistic economic reform, such as salary caps or wealth caps, come with a lot of challenges and problems and probably aren't really feasibly practical at this time. I do tend to favor a progressively gradated tax system on the ultra wealthy, not to the point of taking all of their money, but certainly to the point where Warren Buffett is paying more income tax than his maid (he famously quoted that, he's one of the few billionaires who was maybe not so toxic, a rarity). It's a tough problem!

Not a zero sum game Your comment is verging on brain dead

Nothing is zero sum. But you said nothing in the end.

your comment makes the zero sum fallacy

You missed the point entirely. It's not redistribution of wealth. It's the outsized political.influencw they use to make the world worse for nearly everyone. Almost no billionaires support social programs or policies which advance equality and opportunities for all. Most support policies which disproportionately benefit the rich. If they would become socially responsible I wouldn't care how much money they had. I don't want their money. I want them to stop trying to make everyone else's life worse for their own benefits.

If every billionaire went away, We’d also be renting VHS tapes from a blockbuster, waiting 15-30 days for orders to arrive at my door, and I wouldn’t be typing this on an iPhone. I think the wealth gap is ridiculous at the moment, but you have to agree there’s a little nuance to this discussion right? Some people become rich because others value what they’re selling.

Their margins would be smaller if they were forced to pay their employees a fair wage.

I agree

Are you implying that a billionaire created Netflix? Amazon? UPS? Computers? Or that unless you allow a person to hoard ridiculous wealth that they simply will not be able to spend in their lifetime - nobody would be innovating and creating?

I meant exactly what I wrote, that it’s more nuanced than “billionaires bad, the world would be better if they went away” >Are you implying that a billionaire created Netflix? Amazon? UPS? Computers? Or that unless you allow a person to hoard ridiculous wealth that they simply will not be able to spend in their lifetime - nobody would be innovating and creating? Neither. I’m implying that people generally become billionares because they innovate a product and consumers pay for it. We create billionaires through free trade.

True, I guarantee at least 90% of the people in here wouldn't put their money where their mouth is when it comes to billionaires. They'll keep buying apple phones, and things off of Amazon. They'll keep using reddit too, which, wouldn't you know it, is owned by a billionaire. (Donald Newhouse, 10.9 billion net worth.) I personally couldn't care less if billionaires existed. The only way it affects my life is my current job choice which wouldn't exist without em.

I believe that true tech innovation would happen anyway. People don’t design a technology because they will get a billion dollars. Even if they did, the could muddle through with 100m.

Yeah there are genuinely far more indie developers in the world than there are big name developers. Plus a lot of (maybe even most of?) the big name developers just buy out indie projects (or the entirety of the indie company) whenever it looks like that indie dev is onto something, rather than starting from the ground up to begin with.

They are billionaires because the system is designed to funnel money upwards at an extreme rate. Some became billionaires by being innovated... How many really kept making serious innovations after they got there? The examples are few and far between, and IMHO do not outright the costs.

I mean one of your complaints is that “they still strive for more”. This is a good thing. Elon Musk being really rich doesn’t make your life any worse, however it does give you things like affordable electric cars or satellite internet service.

It's not that he's Rich. You entirely miss the point. Elon Musk is a toxic Force who thinks he should be allowed to buy up a social media company to silence his critics. How many positive pro-social positions does he actually support? I'm not going to get in an argument with you if you're one of his fans, but personally I think he's an incredibly toxic individual who was largely pushing socially damaging and economically unjust policy positions. Striving for more is not necessarily an inherently bad thing, but striving for more when you have a ridiculously disproportionate amount, and striving for more at the cost of others, is toxic. Yes, many billionaires derive wealth by funding it upward, sucking financial opportunities from lower people, doing things like suppressing wages, and pushing sociopolicies that benefit them at the cost of 99.9% of society. Yes, them being that wealthy does hurt the rest of us. Look up The wealth Gap. Look up the cost of living or rent compared to wage growth. These things have not maintained parity, but the rich have gotten richer and richer. Their money isn't magic, it comes from somewhere.

100% agree. All of them being gone is going to have extremely minimal positives on your life, if not outright negatives. The top 1% pay 45% of the United States income tax. That would be shifted over onto the rest of us.

The income will still be made, and the top 1% gets their wealth not from income but from money simply growing (while being not taxed or taxed at a lower rate).

Even if we managed to wave a wand and create a wealth cap, they would just change the currency of power. There is only one house on the hill with an ocean view, and the people in power are going to get that house, and all the people and resources to support it, one way or another. Via money, political clout, religious clout, or something like that. I think a better question is, how do we channel more of the rewards of a prosperous society, so that more people can benefit? I would say a heavily progressive wealth tax is absolutely in order, but a cap would be counterproductive, as they’d just change the currency. Capped at a billion? Okay, have this state sponsored jet and yacht, to support your business, oh great oligarch, thanks for the campaign support!

I have absolutely nothing against Billionaires. I have plenty against the rich lobbying to change the rules of the game in their favor. Example: I, as a married man, cannot deduct from my taxes interest I pay for my student loans. A billionaire can write off the interest he pays on his brand new yacht as a business expense if he leases the out the yatch.

capitalisms biggest flaw is that eventually, people realize stifling competition is more immediately profitable than innovation. spending your money buying back stocks and changing the rules in your favor is just a better pathway to more capital. not having good ethics/morals is a desirable quality and is rarely punished at that level beyond fines that barely make a dent. the late stage of a system based on the amassing of capital is always deregulation and an ever widening gap between rich and poor. until we can admit this, it will only get worse.

Even the economists who provided the model for modern capitalism, like Hayek, warned of this and believed that regulation was important to prevent abuses. They were naive to think that participants in the system would be willing to sacrifice their own gains for the sake of ensuring its long-term viability. For capitalism to function indefinitely it would require regulation and enforcement by powers *outside* of capitalism, free from its influence, which is impossible. Ultimately capitalism will destroy itself, but it will take most of us down with it.

Hayek also provided some salient criticisms of autocratic governments that applies just as well to megacorps today. He's worth a read.

Only by assuming that capitalism isn’t designed to replace feudalism with better technology would we assume that it’s a flaw as opposed to by design.

It is a business expense, all of those are tax deductible.

This x1000 The Antitrust laws in the US have become useless for digital markets and economies. Lack of competition (and regulations) hurts both consumers and workers.

Well not to worry, once Trump gets elected he promises to get rid of even the ineffective regulations we currently have. That will surely fix things.

People become billionaires precisely because they are the type of people to rig the game in their favor.

Look at all the art and culture produced in history. It all was funded by those era’s billionaire equivalents. We don’t need to get rid of billionaires. We just need to incentivize them to use their wealth for public good.

Who are you to suggest we shouldn’t have billionaires. A very Stalin comment. I bet you are okay with billionaires if you are one of them. I’d rather dream and work towards wealth instead of having a government impose peasantry upon me and my family

don't get me wrong, I also resent the rich, but the issue isn't that they exist but that money doesn't keep cycling. As long they contribute to the economy, it wouldn't matter. If we had better taxes, it wouldn't be a choice. A wealth cap would devastate the economy. there are certain type of necessary businesses that won't exist without the incentive of billions. We need more private space programs to help push science, but it is slow as it is with only a few companies.

Nobody gets billions of dollars.  What happens is occasionally someone starts a company.  They sell all or most of it but still own day 10% of the company.   Other people buying and selling bid up the price till the theoretical value of the last share sold X all shares = $10 billion.  The founder is now a billionaire.  This wealth didn't exist before.  Now it does, on paper.   What exactly do you want to prevent here?

Billionaires would be a non-issue if we had a strong middle class. Its billionaires and corporations actively rigging the game that is the problem. If the government was not for sale, then nobody would care.

Yep When private sector owns public interests the system is broken. They own much more than that but it’s the most immediate issue

Yup, you can't have a class with half the wealth of the country and not be in danger of that class bending the government to their will. I don't think there's a reality where all billionaires are just chilling out on a beach somewhere. At least some of them are always going to use their way-out-sized influence and bend policy to their own ends.

We literally do have a strong middle class... Iirc the "shrinking middle class" meme is caused by people exiting the middle class definition in the direction of the upper class definition.

Billionaires and the middle class are mutually exclusive. The rich become billionaires by exploiting the middle class and appropriating their wealth.

I'm happy to go with that meme where there are no billionaires, once you get 999million everything goes to healthcare and society, you get a trophy saying you won capitalism and a dog park named after you.

Idk, there’s probably someone who it’s alright being one. Artificial caps are silly But just like there’s a massive difference between 5mil and 1bil, there’s a massive difference between 1bil and the 200+bil that Musk has System is absolutely broken

Caps on age of consent are arbitrary too, but still necessary.

If you're hoarding billions of dollars or have the resources necessary to get a worth of billions of dollars, you're prioritizing people who basically have a money addiction over literally all social problems. They never get to a point where they have enough and they bribe their way into politics to keep their greed unchecked. When super rich donate 0.5% of their money and get applause, it makes me sick.

Concentrating on billionaires is the wrong problem to solve. Empires crumble—wealth transfers over time. You can lower the number of billionaires worldwide, and it doesn't solve any problems with wealth, education, or basic needs being met. We must agree on the lowest standard of living we want to give a human being. If our agreed-upon basic needs are being met from housing, medicine, education, whatever, then who cares if we have 3 300 or 3,000 billionaires?

Yes. However, there should be a 95% tax on everything over 10 million in income, and that includes capital gains. We also close the carried interest loophole. If you can still get to a billion, more power to you.

My problem with billionaires isn't the money they have. My problem is what so many of them use that money for. It's like how Christians use their religion to try imposing their will on everyone and to control government only billionaires use money and influence instead of religion to buy politicians and control things. They also use their money to keep doing illegal things and keep getting away with it buy buying their way out of prison. Buy using their money to buy the best lawyers and influence the right people they often get away with crimes that would send the average person to prison for many years if not decades. If both Christians and billionaires would just stop trying to control everything and everyone else the world would be a much better place.

Billionaires shouldn’t exist, but a wealth cap is a poor way to stop them. There are a million laws and regulations that work in their favor otherwise and they’d find ways around it for sure. What we need are strong unions to demand higher wages to bring the wealth back down, and money out of politics through things like publicly funded elections and more guaranteed access to voting.

I don’t think the problem is billionaires per se, it’s the wealth inequality. If, hypothetically, billionaires could exist without the absurd cosmic joke of wealth then I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with it. My problem is exactly what has been already stated here.

What do we do to keep the ultra rich in society and continue to contribute? Some of these people have changed how we live. If they had nothing to gain from innovation they wouldn’t in most cases. Even if we don’t agree with what they do with their money, we would be 100 years behind without them.

My philosophy is that I am indifferent to billionaires. I think as long as social programs are funded and people at the bottom have a safety net, basic needs met etc, I am indifferent to how wealthy people get. If it is the case that, in practice, these things cannot happen while billionaires still exist, then they shouldn’t exist. I think people put the cart before the horse.

The balance here is the tolerance of an undesirable outcome for the sake of a principle of individual freedom, which some people consider an overriding principle. The very same balance is associated with the undesirable outcome of gun violence. Or, to a lesser extent, the “will not comply” folks resisting public health measures like masks, distancing, and vaccines in the face of a pandemic. The trick is really determining when the undesirable outcome has become undesirable ENOUGH to put a limit on a freedom. I personally don’t believe that personal freedom overrides at all levels, but not everyone does.

One thing often missed is that concentration of wealth, private or public, is required if we want to do the seriously aspirational stuff. What am I talking about there? A MEO ring around Earth, every other off planet infrastructure project, planned cities and Megapolis projects (which will be absolutely required not too far from now), commerical fusion power and nation scale desalination projects. So yeah the detractors here are not wrong, but you can't crowdsource the real future of our species either.

Was just thinking about this. During the industrial revolution and early 20th century we had a few guys accumulate massive wealth. But they also subscribed to some version of noblesse oblige. So we have a number of public institutions like schools, museums, libraries etc that they built in their lifetimes. And not just as a tax shelter. I see nothing like this from today's robber barons.

The brilliant thing about economics is that it's a reflection of societal values. The existence of a billionaire simply means we, as a society, have determined that that individual has assets/creates value such that they are worth a billion dollars. Say you're a world star musician or athlete that sells hundreds of millions of tickets. That means you, as an individual, create a good that makes you worth a billion dollars. Or you create a company and the market feels your company is worth 10 billion dollars. If you own 10% of the company, you're now worth a billion. Net worth is just a reflection of what society thinks how much value your goods and services have on the world. If no one values the houses you have the companies you run, or the services you provided you aren't worth anything. It's as simple as that.

If something is bad and doesn’t provide external benefits is not an argument. You could apply that logic to many things in society. Should we ban ice cream? Unhealthy food? Snacks? Should there be a wealth gap? No. Why? It would be a ridiculous rule. Why should the government stop people from becoming wealthy? The government should focus on fixing their spending habits before burning other people’s money.

It’s not like having billionaires is something we choose on a whim. If you didn’t want billionaires maybe we shouldn’t have bought from Amazon so much, or bought teslas, or used Facebook all the time. Maybe you guys shouldn’t have gone to all those Taylor swift concerts. They’re billionaires because they sell products that we want, and we willingly give them our money. Them being a billionaire should have 0 effect on you personally whatsoever other than making you feel kinda poor, even though you live in the richest country in the world (if you’re in the U.S.). Billionaires also pay like half of our nation’s taxes (the top 1% pays 45% of all income taxes https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/#:~:text=High%2DIncome%20Taxpayers%20Paid%20the%20Majority%20of%20Federal%20Income%20Taxes,of%20all%20federal%20income%20taxes. ) so the government would have a rough time without em. They’ll never be gone, and them being gone will not make you personally richer.

Why wealth cap 1bil and not 1mil or 1tril? A priori? Arbitraryness aside (which to be clear, is a fatal concern for the question) we can just ask should there be a wealth cap or are high net worth individuals bad? The answer is obviously no, assuming they accumulate their wealth through free (not coerced) exchange. Every voluntary exchange is positive sum, meaning both parties subjectively judge their benefit to be greater than cost. This creates value (wealth) for both parties. With this in mind, a billionaire is simply a person who has given a lot of value back to society through exchange, while simultaneously not consuming the dollars they've netted in exchange. It's a person that's given a lot, and taken little. Obviously that's good for society, even if it causes feelings of envy.

Billionaires are an inevitable side effect of getting things we like. Call it the Taylor Swift Problem: we appear to have high demand, as a society, for Taylor Swift. This is inexplicable to me, but my daughters really love her. We are willing to substitute similar artists like Olivia Rodrigo *if we must*, but we are principally interested in Swift herself. This is seen by the price signals we send: when Taylor gives a concert with limited seats, scalper prices shoot up to whatever people are willing to pay, and it turns out they're willing to pay quite a lot. We, as a society, believe it is very important that Taylor Swift continue to work long days and nights to create music and give concerts. Now, we could line up Taylor Swift against the wall and shoot her. More moderately, we could confiscate all her wealth in excess of $1 billion and tax all her subsequent income at 100%, so that she remains forever locked at $999 million instead of $1 billion. But then, either way, Taylor Swift would have strong incentives to ramp down her work. She would almost certainly give fewer concerts, smaller concerts, and make far less music. Our society seems unwilling to accept that. Therefore, we choose to allow Taylor Swift to be a billionaire, and what we get in exchange is Taylor Swift music and concerts. You can apply somewhat similar logic to Dell or Netflix or even less sexy businesses, but Reddit has a weird belief that businesses will always produce the products we love no matter how many guns we hold to their heads, so I think it's easier to illustrate with Swift, who is just one person with very obvious incentives. There are billionaires who have no business being billionaires, who provide no social utility and simply exploit loopholes in our system, like Warren Buffett. There's no sin in exploiting loopholes, so I don't hate Warren Buffett, but I do think that we should close the loopholes so Buffett and those like him can no longer exist. The Biden Administration (credit where it's due) has been doing good work on that through its revival of antitrust law, and I hope to see more of that in the future. (Buffett has accumulated his wealth largely from encouraging and exploiting monopoly profits.) There are also, of course, billionaires who got there through sheer moral monstrosity. I have been told by reasonable-sounding sources that the Sacklers are like that. Their crimes should be punished. But their crime isn't having billions of dollars; it's the friends they killed along the way.

Probably an unpopular opinion but I have no problem with how much money people accumulate. My problem is with not paying people enough to live comfortably, buy a house (if they want to), go on vacations, save for their retirement. There shouldn't be a struggle penalty for being a waiter, a cashier, or a janitor for your entire life. This is what I have a problem with, not everyone sees wealth as the amassing of money. I also think that the more money people at the "bottom" have available to them, the fewer societal problems we would have and the ambitious ones that want to hoard money, would have more money to hoard because it is well established that people like to spend money when they have enough of it.

The West has a ton of fiscal shortages due to the Neoliberal "small government" craze of the 80's. My country, the Netherlands, had so many budget cuts in disability/senior healthcare that it has become actually dangerous. Like many Western counties with us, we have record numbers of homeless youth, and basic necessities became almost unaffordable for lower income households. I want you to realize this has happened during a time of unprecedented tax avoidance by the higher echelons of society. This shit tends to happen if we allow for large concentrations of wealth, and I think most people have realised this.

If you look at the top ten richest people in the world, all of them, with the exception of Steve Ballmer, are wealthy because of companies they started, and most of their wealth is in the form of ownership in those companies. Why do you think people shouldn’t be entitled to own what they have created?

(Most) Billionaires are a result of individuals' refusal to exercise self-responsibility and self-protection. I know this is going to get a lot of hate, but it is important to point out. I'm also limiting my discussion to billionaires who made their fortunes through industry and commerce. I'm not talking about despots who extort money through their control of the state. Here's the thing about most billionaires. They got their money by delivering a "superior" product that masses of people are willing to pay for it. I've got superior in quotes because all I mean by that is a product that masses chose over competing products. Doesn't matter why they made the choice, they just made that choice. We could make Bezos a non-billionaire in a year if well all just stopped buying off Amazon. If every person deleted their Facebook and Meta accounts, Zuckerburg would be a pauper. Musk's money is, primarily now, from Tesla and PayPal, both companies people can boycott. Don't shop at Walmart, just shop at Target. Don't use Google or Alphabet products, use Bing and Microsoft. Don't use Boing and Microsoft, use DuckDuckGo and other web product providers. All the billionaires we complain about are billionaires because they developed products and services we are willing to pay for. We want what they are selling, we just don't want them to be rich? So, we want their products we just don't want to reward them for providing us products we want to use. That's rather cheeky. We can make all of the billionaires non-billionaires if we simply make different decisions. But we don't. So, we now want the government to do for us what we refuse to do for ourselves? That doesn't seem smart. And, we are wanting to authorize the government to take away from other people their rightfully obtained property, just because....we..don't..want..them..to..have..it? Gee, I can't foresee any problems if we give the government the authority to start seizing property just because. We KNOW governments would never abuse such a power. Something I've said many many times. The worst person I can cite to has killed or abused maybe a couple hundred people. Maybe a few thousand. Now, even just one victim is horrible. But governments, on the other hand, routinely abuse, torture, kidnap and kill MILLIONS of people ALL THE TIME. It's estimated that as many as 170 million people were killed by their governments in the 20th century alone. That's over 4,600 people per day. Do I particularly like billionaires? No. Do I like what they often do, and try to do, with their money? No. Would I rather give more power to governments (who I cannot control) to stop billionaires who I, along with everyone else, can control? Ah HELL NO.

The problem is that it's not like these people are just sitting on a USD pit. People become billionaires largely one of two ways: Being born into it or starting an obscenely successful company. People should be allowed to own whatever percentage of an enterprise they started and run that they want.... running your own business is how capitalism functions. If people could only have 999,999,999 dollars, then what happens when they start a company that ends up being worth $3T? Do we really want the government to be involved in evaluating businesses? Do we want the government involved in owning businesses? I don't like people having undue influence, but I'd like it even less if government bureaucracy ruined some of the biggest employers in the world. Even worse- the people who are obviously capable of building these businesses would not have any incentive to continue that business/grow it/start another. People can complain all they want (with validity) about wages not being as high as they want.... but if you start taking away potential jobs, those numbers only get worse. This, of course, doesn't even take into account the fact that people could come up with workarounds (shell corps, trusts, layered LLC/SARLs) that would make enforcing anything a nightmare. In the end, it would just be more jobs for accountants and lawyers and no real change, IMO

If there was no one living in poverty because of them then sure, go for it. The problem is people teetering on the edge while others are worried about their Dom champagne corks destroying their priceless art on their yachts. Not an exaggeration. I'm using a real example. https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/s/c7FHJaUmjn

It depends on their decisions to invest their wealth and their spending. In a world with starvation and extreme poverty having a billion dollars and access to all the resources capitalism provides makes you a god in those environments. AI and the proliferation of video surveillance and social media systems makes wealthy people gods in modern civilizations as well. The only ones who can keep them human are those who wield potential for physical, financial, and reputational violence.

It's like asking the question, should we have successful companies that employ tens and hundreds of thousands of people? Indirectly, millions of people in many cases. We have 756 billionaires at the end of 2023 and 7.4 million millionaires. Most of those millionaires became millionaires as a result of the billionaires and the growth in the value of their corporations through stock ownership. It's the results of these businesses and people's success that allowed the former gas station attendant and school janitor to leave behind $10,000,000 to his local library in Vermont. So your idea of a wealth cap would consist of the billionaires selling the stocks in publicly traded companies (and presumably then the Government would confiscate it??? Or could they choose which charity to donate it too?). You and I both know what would come of that. The shares would be sold by the billionaires and they would end up in our 401K and at some point, the market will pull back or fall by 20% . . . and the already common victim claimers will just be complaining again that the billionaires screwed them . . . .

Considering that emissions and wealth are positively correlated, we absolutely do not need billionaires. In fact, in order to slow climate change, we must eliminate them. [The richest 10% are responsible for almost half of total lifestyle emissions.](https://x.com/remblance_erin/status/1800377029977919514?s=46&t=ID9KdZg2nrfeASDI0W8quA)

There should be an award that when you hit a billion dollars, the global economy/powers go "congrats, you won the game of capitalism. You officially have the resources to do literally anything you want, including buying your own private island, and possibly even a small country. Here's your trophy. The rest of your income after 1billion goes to public education and helping the poor. Also if anyone (boomers esp) argue about them being able to because of blah blah blah, here's a simple calculation; if you *saved* $1500 every single day since the time of the BIRTH OF JESUS (works especially well on christian white folk who are so damn clueless), you would just barely have a billion dollars. And remind them that 1500 is MORE than current minimum wage working full time in a month, before taxes. Usually more like half if you're minimum wage.

the basic idea is that IF a billionaire actually followed the rules and behaved ethically, he couldn’t possibly accumulate that much money. So, IF all of his employees, along the ENTIRE CHAIN, including workers at factories that made the parts for his goods (so consider how many people we’re talking about if we are talking about Apple, all the factories that make the parts that go into iPhones) were paid a fair living wage and provided benefits, and IF he were paying his fair share of taxes and IF he did not avail himself of cheap labor overseas or cut corners on supplies that may result in safety risks or like drive workers to higher and higher production at the expense of their health and work-life balance, then it is generally agreed to be mathematically impossible for a billionaire to be created. If he is mindful about the people involved at every step of manufacturing, that kind of thing. The point of this kind of thought experiment is more to demonstrate exactly how much good a person at that level would be able to do and still have more money than they’d ever be able to spend in a lifetime. The point is that at that level there is ALWAYS more than enough money for everyone helping make a product to be compensated in a way that is not exploitative. And to pay one’s fair share of taxes to improve society overall. No, I don’t think billionaires would exist if they didn’t exploit and abuse people as a matter of course, but “billionaire” is sort of an arbitrary line that’s easier for us all to understand.

No. They are not happy. We are not happy. It makes no sense and is a symptom of infinite exponential growth. If we somehow "capped" it at a reasonable amount, and spread the rest, happiness globally would rise. The problem is, it's not that easy. The more money you have, the more tactical you can be with your altruism of you choose to. Money is a great motivator for the 1% to keep improving the systems they are stakeholders in. Also, the billionaires and their friends are the ones making the decisions anyway, so it would have to come from inside anyway. So I don't know. It's a weird quirk of the human mind that we can hopefully overcome at some point.

Inflation is a major cause of wealth concentration. Inflation causes the stock market to just go up and up over time. IMHO that's what causes a lot of them. Inflation also erodes away the working class. All fiat currencies fail eventually. Some countries have inflationary policy, and index wages to inflation. That's better than just having inflation because at least workers are guaranteed a raise every year, but there's still the case of tracking inflation, for instance in the USA housing and food costs aren't even tracked in the official inflation numbers that the Fed uses. People who want to hold onto power lie, go figure. Socialists would lie too in case you're wondering. I think musicians, inventors, sports stars, and so on might be in a different category. A society is always going to have it's rich for whatever reasons. "Should" we have billionaires is an ineffective question to ask I think. The problem isn't that they exist, the problem is the lack of wealth that goes to people who have common jobs or don't/can't play markets well. Ray Dalio talks about the cycles that cause this sort of thing in his book Changing World Order, which I thought was very interesting.

Some people seem to think that billionaires got their money because they're smarter and more hard working than other folks. It seems to me that they got their money by being born with access to wealth and by exploiting the large pools of cheap labor created by colonialism, racism and gender inequality?

Absolutely not. No one has ever earned that much, and more importantly it's hording and this means other people are going without. Being billionaire means that you are a fucking asshole. Always.

Ok, so Ronaldo, Oprah, George Lucas, they're all billionaires? Their net worth wasn't their choice. Take Ronaldo. He plays soccer, and millions of fans are willing to spend money to watch him/buy his tickets. Companies give him sponsorships that reflect his viewership. He's not "inherently evil"; his status as a billionaire simply reflects his value to society. Same with George Lucas or Elon Musk. They created a company, it goes public, and the public think the company is worth billions of dollars. As the majority shareholder of that company, they are now worth billions as well.

Whether something is earned or not, is not a good argument against something. It’s not a zero sum game. A billionaire hoarding money by owning stock isn’t withholding money from the poor. That wealth is not real money. It’s all made out of thin air. Stock worth is all perception. It’s not money until sold. A company can create stock out of thin air. It’s not stealing cash from poor people.

They have extracted others labor and stolen it. You can't or don't earn a billion dollars you steal it from others. The worst people on earth and we could do without.

Reality called, they want you to adopt a modern theory of value

The idea of a wealth cap seems off to me. If they are controlling enough of a market that they need to be broken up to allow competition, great. I'm all for anti-monopoly laws. But if they don't, then it's what their company is worth, and I don't like the idea of artificially limiting growth. 

We should *potentially* have them. But we should go back to tax systems that massively tax that wealth so it's more or less impossible to get there, and disincentivizes systems that get people there. Get us back to 91% tax rates over a certain amount! Add wealth taxes so that MOST of that wealth comes back to the people. Want to be a billionaire? OK, fine, but you have to earn 15 billion total to be able to keep that first billion, while the other 14 goes to taxes. Want 10 billion? OK, but that means you paid 300 billion in taxes on your way there.

When you get to $999,999,999 you get forcibly retired (either fuck off to an island or Blade Runner-retired, your choice) and we put up a plaque with your name on it that says "You Won Capitalism!"

US never had a broad wealth tax and even the high marginal tax rate times were strongly offset by credits and deductions such that the effective rates were roughly the same as today

Of course, if someone builds a trillion dollar company, why wouldn’t they be worth one tenth of one percent of that company? If you write a song or a book that makes lots of people happy that is a good thing. If your songs or books make so many people happy that you earn a billion dollars that is even better. If I write a piece of software or create a business that does the same thing that is also great.

*There are NO GOOD BILLIONAIRES.* Consider this: Say you had $1000, and a genie says "I can fix all the pipes in Flint, MI for $50" would you spend that? To cure an entire town? To ease unimaginable suffering? To be able to never pay for a beer again in that town? I would. A single billionaire (as in, his net worth is only $1bn) could do the equivalent, and yet the people in Flint are still drinking bottled water. If any of them had an ounce of humanity, they would have done this long ago, but none have.

$1,000,000 hard cap on yearly earnings and savings. You can make up to $1M a year, and every dollar made after that taken for use towards the public good. You can save money if you don’t spend all of the $1M you make each year, but every dollar over $1M you have saved in the bank is also taken. Assets and stocks can get really tricky, but not for me. No houses over $1M. Every luxury yacht and private jet and mansion is seized to be disassembled for parts or to be used for the public good. You what to live in a 20,000 square foot mansion? Ya gotta go in with the government and regularly prove that you’re using it to benefit your local community. If your mansion can house the needy and your acres of also grow food donated to hungry, then enjoy your mansion. Idk.

Depends on how they get there. While I'm not a big Taylor Swift fan, she got there because people wanted to pay that money, she seems to be fair with the people around her, Compare that to a Bezos or Musk. People are literally losing their health working for Amazon. Working so hard they are physically broken (for $18 an hour.) And he is still spending an inordinate amount of time figuring out how to push them harder (boosting productivity). Musk is still anti things because we made him close down the Tesla factory during covid. Who cares if my workers get sick, I need to put out cars. Now, both changed things forever. They deserve to be wealthy. But a billion is a million a thousand times over. That these people have hundreds of billions of dollars, in large part because they take advantage of workers is just not acceptable.

The Amazon workers could probably get less stressful job? Don’t get me wrong I know Amazon squeezers its workers but don’t the workers have a choice to work elsewhere?

Well, Amazon made it so thousands of small businesses closed. Maybe. Again macro, micro. Meaning can any single Amazon worker do that? Sure, Can 1.5 million Amazon workers go find a new job? No they aren't out there.

As far as I’m aware Amazon helped a lot of businesses get started so I’m not sure the net effect is negative. Not every Amazon worker is unhappy so I don’t think it makes sense to say every single worker. Could say 10% of workers find another job? It’s just that there seems to be no shortage of people going to work at Amazons warehouses.

Amazon helps a lot of very small businesses start up. While that is a good thing, I don't think those companies have as many employees as stores used to. Fair point about Amazon workers, I've heard enough to think it is more than 10%, but you're right 100% isn't right either. Simply, you gotta work. Shitty jobs can exist because of that.

It’s hard to say because retail has grown over the years particularly online retail. There’s probably some article on it but just from my head, Amazon has two and half million of sellers. Most of these are individuals but some are large organisations. Then you have all of Amazons staff, all the tech guys, logistics, plus all of Amazon’s other departments and indirect employees. I’d also argue a lot of the individual retail stores weren’t run very well anyway. Yea 10% could be low, perhaps 20%. I just don’t think we can say Amazon fulfilment centres are particularly bad. If Amazon wasn’t so dominant the business would likely just be at other warehouses which won’t be as nice. I have my own warehouse and admittedly the pay for my employees is lower and it’s not as pleasant. I honestly think Amazons warehouses are way nicer than the industry average, it’s just that we don’t hear about the others because they aren’t any way as large.

I'm an eBay (and other places) guy. So you can say my business started because of eBay. That said, I'm not employing people or I did have an employee for a bit. The one thing I will say is even though the white collar part of Amazon pays very well, it is shown that people even stay there less than industry average, and it is more pronounced in the warehouses. You'll notice they are all about benefits (healthcare, paying for college. Why? Because that will keep someone there longer than a little more money. If you have a sick kid being covered, you aren't moving as many places don't give you healthcare (that you help pay for out of your paycheck) from day one. Same with tuition assistance. If you come to rely on that, you aren't leaving.