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> the assumption is that you can't make $100 billion dollars without some kind of grave injustice occurring No one's hands are clean, rich or poor, to be sure,
by lo_zamoyski 4y ago
> the assumption is that you can't make $100 billion dollars without some kind of grave injustice occurring
No one's hands are clean, rich or poor, to be sure, but the assumption is unwarranted and aggressive in its broadness. One does not assume particular guilt based on broad assumptions. Besides, these aren't liquid assets. Do people think these guys have a $100 billion dollars just laying around in a Scrooge McDuck-style Money Bin? That's not how net worth works.
> a healthy society shouldn't allow people to become so fantastically rich
Allow?
> (or, correspondingly, so fantastically poor that they die of homelessness and exposure.)
This is unrelated. It construes wealth as a zero sum game. There is no such tension between wealth and poverty unless some kind of injustice was involved in robbing the poor.
- candiddevmike 4y agoTax codes, medical bankruptcy, loan sharks, and student loans sure have shades of injustice that rob or turn people poor.
- woodruffw 4y agoA clean moral record has nothing to do with it: I'm saying that, on a basic civic level, gross inequality is perceived as bad. It doesn't matter that said gross inequality is mostly in illiquid assets, because illiquid assets are just collateral for liquid ones (and people who aren't worth $100B understand this just fine.) And yes, "allow" is correct. Healthy societies don't allow their members to throw knives at each other in public places, or blow cigarette smoke in premature babies' faces, or do any number of basically antisocial things. The intuitive belief is that amassing wealth to the degree of hundreds of billions of dollars is essentially antisocial in the same way that being Mr. Marlboro in the NICU is.