You Are Jeff Bezos

>"Do you think there is no moral limit to the amount of wealth one person can have in society, while millions around him suffer?"

This is an intriguing premise. My personal answer is 'no'. This is because I see this as a personal value judgement and not something that can be applied as a moral standard. It is analogous to the question of taxation and what counts as "someone's fair share", because you will never get an agreement as to what constitutes a "fair share" of someone's income. We can certainly agree that people should contribute something via taxes, but we will never arrive at a satisfactory rate of fairness.

Compounding the problem is the second part of the question, "while millions around him suffer". Maybe I'm just too influenced by Buddhist philosophy, but I see suffering as an inescapable aspect of life itself. It could be said that my personal wealth, as modest as it may be for a middle class American, is of a similar magnitude of inequality to the average Burundian citizen. In practical terms, I'm basically a billionaire compared to the world's most impoverished individuals.

This only applies in the very limited scenario where you personally own the shares. What's to stop someone from setting up a trust, shell company or similar and then giving them all of the "wealth" while maintaining a controlling interest? From there, the individual simply extracts what they need when they need to. We're basically back to the original scenario only with more steps added in between.

I assume there isn't going to be an argument against companies "hording wealth."

> End homelessness in the United States (-$20 billion)

The problem with this way of thinking is: we've already spent this amount of money on ending homelessness. California plans on spending $4.8 billion next year [1]. HUD has a budget of around $2.7 billion [2]. In 2019, the City of New York spent $3.2 billion [3]. I haven't bothered to do a full accounting of how much we've spent on homelessness over the past 5 years, but from those three data points it seems safe to extrapolate we've spent over $20 billion. This is also in the context of the larger War on Poverty, which has spent an estimated $15 trillion since the program started in the 1960's [4]. It seems that simply throwing money at problems is insufficient.

> "The options are stark reminders of public good we forsake in refusing to redistribute wealth." - Newsweek

One could just as easily make a game that did something similar with the US government's budget. The overall budget is something like $4 Trillion. Just the annual interest payments are on the order of $250 Billion. If we had a more fiscally responsible approach to budgeting and therefore didn't have to make interest payments, according to that game we could "repair Puerto Rico," "hire 100,000 new teachers," and "end homeless in the United States." We already redistribute wealth on a grand scale.

It's also not like the wealth of billionaires is just in a Scrooge McDuck-style money vault that they swim in all day, nor are they like Smaug, holed up in a cave sitting on vast amounts of gold and precious stones. The wealth is invested in various things, which in turn serve the public good.

1. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-07-16/californ... 2. https://endhomelessness.org/ending-homelessness/policy/feder... 3. https://datalab.usaspending.gov/homelessness-analysis/ 4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty

I think the most salient part of this is the remarking that being a billionaire is immoral.

I don't think being a billionaire is necessarily immoral, but I definitely think it's incredibly difficult to do so without being immoral. I think the closest examples I can think of are people who weren't even trying to become wealthy - I doubt anyone whose goal was to make fat stacks of cash would, for instance, start writing young adult fiction on napkins in a pub in Britain, or start writing a voxel-based crafting game in Java. And unfortunately even these two individuals aren't remotely close to paragons of virtue.

That said, I think the biggest sin of Jeff Bezos' is just being complicit in the whole system that keeps our tax code a disaster. I would feel a lot better about the wealthy, and mega corporations, if I felt like they were appropriately paying for the community resources they use, for example:

* public universities and education that educate (and train, to some degree) their workforce * public services that cultivate the kind of safe and secure society that allows people to focus on things that aren't subsistence or physical security * infrastructure that makes their existence possible - roads their employees drive on, DMVs that their employees register their vehicles at, water systems their employees drink at both work and home, power systems that provide stable electricity, etc etc etc * And it's not just your employees, it's your customers too. If we didn't have all of the above, people would have a lot less psychological, financial, and physical safety to need anything Amazon sells. * And something that I think really goes under-noticed: the world's best-regulated, safest, most reliable, most well-understood, and most liquid securities market. Both private and public. So much goes into making all of that crap (I say this semi-affectionately as someone who used to work in the sector) work, and it's where an enormous percentage of both these companies weath both lives and came from.

I think you see where I'm going with this. All of the wealth that's generated here is entirely predicated on, and a product of, this incredible foundation we've built collectively as a society. And the bigger you are, the more wealth you generate, the more of this system you've taken advantage of in one way or another (with some of the secret sauce of these companies being that their employees and company take a relatively small amount of it, while their reach scales to so many more customers, that they disproportionately (compared to other companies) take advantage of huge swathes of the customer side of "benefiting from the social foundation".

This is the main thing that irks me. They would be nothing without all of this, and yet they can use their wealth to skirt out of paying their fair share, even though it really seems to me that paying their fair share - paying back into the system they benefitted from - is probably better for them in the long run (50+ years) as they'll have more educated employees, more stable customers, and so on. It's a giant feedback loop that they're short-sightedly intentionally not paying back into.

> I assume there isn't going to be an argument against companies "hording wealth."

Mm, I dunno. Why not? Maybe Apple shouldn't be sitting on a massive pile of cash which could be put to some useful purpose.