> I'm talking about one person consuming as much as 100,000 others Most rich people, even very rich, have mostly normal things, just at the higher end of the s

> I'm talking about one person consuming as much as 100,000 others Most rich people, even very rich, have mostly normal things, just at the higher end of the scale. A Mercedes instead of a Ford - Restaurants instead of cooking at home. Etc. How many people really consume 100,000 x more than a regular person? That's impossible. A house that is 100,000 times as big? Cars and food that use 100,000 times as much resources? What! You make it sound common. For this to be real we'd have to live in a fantasy universe where some visible fraction of the populace drives things as big as the Titanic to work and park it in their house that's a skyscraper. Most people who are mega wealthy do not consume anywhere near 100,000 times more resources as everyone else. The planet doesn't have nearly that many resources. Just look around you - they live mostly normal lives. The difference between the average first-world person and the mega wealthy is smaller now in terms of life experience than it has ever been in history. Some may have 100,000 times more money, sure - but that's different. For people with that much wealth, it's not even liquid. It's locked up on paper as things like ownership of a fraction of a company. The times when massive amounts of money are spent on material goods privately often tend to be on things that are so far on the end of the spectrum that they drive technology for the whole world. The technology in Teslas flows to other developers, helping us fight global warming. The technology in even higher-end sports cars helps us discover new tricks of efficiency and engineering which also flow outward. Moving into spacious new apartments on billionaire's row develops new advancements in architecture, and also removes the super rich from competing for regular housing. And for the things that seem superfluous, like a $300M yacht, I would say, why do you really care? I don't know about you, but I wasn't brought up to be envious of the rich. (My parents never fed me any political opinions, which in retrospect I am incredibly thankful for.) But as a result, I know that things like yachts can exist, and I've always thought they were marvels of engineering, beautiful for their own sake. Plus to be built requires the employment of thousands. Luxury items that big are basically private wealth redistribution. The existence of an uneven spectrum of wealth is a good thing _precisely because_ of how it affects resource allocation. Taking that money from the marginal wealthy and giving it to everyone would only be an incremental increase for the rest of us. But its concentration and availability for things like starting Space X, starting Tesla, and, yes, fancy yachts, means that advancement can happen. The mega rich don't use more - proportional to their wealth, they use much less, but smartly designed. And those designs eventually help everyone else.