Billionaires Build

Ah, we've reached the crux of the problem. You are not concerned with making things good only with making them even. This is just crab mentality[1]. Someone else has more than you, so you need to pull them down. Or perhaps you've conflated the two and think that if things are even, they will necessarily be good, or at least better than they are when they're uneven. Let me assure you, it is entirely possible for things to become more even and also have everyone be worse off than they were before.

> If you also pursue a more robust, less concentrated economy more generally, you could certainly invest the money in entrepreneurship, small farms, improved IT infrastructure, etc., etc.

Sure, we can invest in those things. We can also pursue policies (like antitrust enforcement) that would naturally result in less inequality without distorting the market by confiscating and destroying wealth when it reaches some arbitrary number.

> Won't somebody please think of the poor billionaire!

I stated early on that Bezos and other billionaires would be the people least hurt by what you're proposing. They're not who I'm concerned about. Bezos doesn't have $180,000,000,000 or however much he's currently worth. He has shares representing about 13% of Amazon. Now they're worth that much. Ten years ago they were worth a lot less. 20 years ago they were practically worthless. It's the same shares. The market just collectively decided they're worth a lot more now. He didn't take anything from you, do you see?

It's not clear when you're proposing that his shares should only be worth $50B instead of $180B whether that you mean you want to take away a portion of them, or just limit how much they can be worth, or what. Generally stocks are priced based on how much money investors think the company will make in the future. In the aggregate, the price of the stock market overall is our belief in how well the economy will do in the future. When you propose that the value of this should be limited, you're proposing that the economy - everyone - should be collectively poorer in the future. This does happen sometimes, we call it recessions, depressions, etc. It generally does not bode well for the poorest people (billionaires are usually fine though).

But hey, who cares if we're all poor right? As long as nobody has any more than anybody else it must necessarily be good.

> Again, we've done this kind of thing before, and the billionaires and their defenders ho-hummed the same tune, and all that happened was the emergence of the middle class and fairly broad economic prosperity.

It's true the New Deal happened and then a strong middle class emerged some years later, that doesn't mean one caused the other. There was a little thing called World War II as well, and the rest of the productive capacity of the industrial world being destroyed with only America left may have contributed to the abundance of high-paying manufacturing jobs, just a little.

> FWIW, there is historical precedent for passing a tax law targeting the single richest person in the country (John D. Rockerfeller at the time).

Yeah, there's a historical precedent for burning witches at the stake too, that doesn't mean it's a good thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

He's definitely right that it is valuable to society that people who have such insights are given the opportunity to build their solutions. We all win from being in a society where more of our needs are met.

What's perhaps slightly more dubious is the idea that, by bringing that insight, the person who has it deserves to own a billion times more of a vote in how our society is run than the average person.

Because that's what wealth, what a dollar, is: it's a voting share in how society spends its time and resources. As the owner of a dollar, you get to decide whether people spend their time growing and picking and shipping some plants and making them into some bread and then putting together a sandwich for you, or if you'd rather they dig up some rocks, extract some silicon from them, imprint it with complicated patterns, and then construct it into a device you can put in your pocket that lets you see photographs of influencers.

The pg thesis here is that instigating an idea, creating something that doesn't exist, is not inherently exploitative. That is true.

But what is perhaps arguable is, that in delivering on that original founder's vision, one which attracts many of those votes for how society should spend its time from many people, and thus accumulates billions of dollars of revenue - that many people other than the original founder end up creating the organization and building the factory and working the machines and writing the software and actually serving the customers to make that solution real - a bunch of people other than the founder are involved, and... well, if you choose to structure the rewards of that organization so that all those billions of votes in the future of society accrue to the founder, while only thousands of them accrue to the people who do the work of making it happen... that it's possible to construe that distribution of rewards as maybe slightly exploitative?

Old soviet joke:

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's the other way around!