Thomas Piketty’s Radical Plan to Redistribute Wealth

You would be able to use the alternatives though. The Ayn Rand idea of the entrepreneur or the investor as as the only true value creator is complete and utter BS. By value created, Linus Torvalds and RMS should be the world's largest billionaires (or Norman Borlaug, or any other example that comes to mind). But they aren't, because actually, we don't live in a meritocracy. Power exists, broken incentives exist, corruption exist because less than 200 years ago we had a whole society running on dynastic wealth and oppression, and acting like that just went away is the ahistorical naivety that the work of Thomas Piketty and other historians and economists are contributing to dismantling.

Elon Musk impulse bought Twitter and has been bullshitting the public for years on the Teslas, bought himself the "founder" title and has become the main marketing tool of Tesla. Going by merit and wise business decisions, I do not think he should have the billions, I think Gwinneth shotwell should.

inequality matters because people who can't afford to contribute to society eventually grab pitchforks.

see also charlie munger's famous quote - 'inflation is how democracies die' - and inflation is something that makes poor poorer and rich richer.

I feel like this approach can run into some problems:

1. Some people physically or mentally can't contribute to to disability or some other disorder.

2. Some people can't contribute because they were not provided with/are not provided with the opportunity to gain those skills.

3. It's very, very hard to quantify how much one contributes to society, especially when a task requires lots of people doing small things, or few people doing big things. Pay offers some signal for this in some cases, but at best it's talking about the economy - itself a proxy of society which layers on its own incentives.

I'm raising these three points because I know that if I were to respond with "That seems unfair and it's not the sort of society I'd like to live in" the counter response to that would likely be "we should aim for equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome". The point of my comment is to effectively say that it's very hard to measure opportunity and outcome when one takes into account individual circumstances, and it's even harder to get to the root of what we mean by 'equality' (mathematical equality? qualitatitve equality? quantitative equality? equality before the law?).

I'm not necessarily taking a position here but this feels you are saying only rich people make things like Starlink and Tesla which I feel is true but also wrong. If there were no billionaires people would still be making companies but you currently only see things like Tesla and Starlink from people like Elon because only he has the money to fight the uphill battle that legally entrenches conglomerates in their position.

StarLink? Teslas? ... Impressive technology but I think you're really overstating their contribution to society ...

Which, if you accept that, rather undermines your entire point.