A few random points: 1) Guillotines require extreme discomfort. The French Revolution, commonly cited as the example here, was not about income inequality. It

A few random points: 1) Guillotines require extreme discomfort. The French Revolution, commonly cited as the example here, was not about income inequality. It was caused by the fact that the French were practically, in some cases literally, starving while the government flailed about ineffectively, accrued tremendous debt seemingly to no end largely driven by fruitless wars, and ultimately turned to taxation to try to sustain a failing state. It was not an otherwise comfortable people suddenly deciding to start lopping off people's heads because wealth inequality rose beyond some acceptable level. The current situation in France emphasizes this. They have an arguably horrible and out of touch government with presidential approval ratings headed towards the teens. And there are active protests on the streets each weekend regularly featuring violence from the police. If France, as a whole, wanted to - they could depose their mostly despised government. But, for the most part, they're comfortable enough to remain apathetic. 2) I don't think even the wealthiest of the wealthy are personally consuming anything like you're referencing. 100,000 times more would be e.g. $5 billion a year compared to somebody earning $50k. I doubt even the richest of the rich would ever get remotely close to that level of consumption spending in their entire life, let alone per year. Stereotypical ultra high end luxury purchases such as artwork are also frequently appreciating assets. That means they're effectively free as they increase a person's wealth, rather than reduce it. In the worst case their 'real' cost is a fraction of their paper cost. In any case those sort of things are also just shifting wealth from one ultra rich family to another. Personally, I can live without an original Monet in my 'study'. 3) Finally, wealth isn't "money." Jeff Bezos is worth $140 billion or some other insane number, but almost none of that is in cash. It's in various assets and especially Amazon stock. The thing is, if he tried to liquidate even a substantial portion of that, the price of the stock would go plummeting. It creates this interesting sort of paradox where it may be true that somebody is 'worth' $140 billion, yet in reality they have nowhere near $140 billion in 'real' money or assets. On a macro-economic scale this is an extremely important point as asset prices are extremely inflated relative to what they could be liquidated at, which in turn provides extremely inflated measurements of wealth. ---- All this said I'd agree that huge wealth inequality is not a great thing. However, my one nuance there is that I think every method we have for combating such inequality tends to be even less desirable. So like many social or political issues, it comes down to picking bad or worse.