That is a bad argument - you're starting with an internationally absurd hypothetical and drawing conclusions based on it without drawing it back to the real wor

That is a bad argument - you're starting with an internationally absurd hypothetical and drawing conclusions based on it without drawing it back to the real world on the key points. We need to know what form the wealth is and why it is divided up in such a lopsided distribution before the argument gets interesting. Eg, maybe the septillionaire has a magic coin that everyone agrees is worth one septillion just because. He can't give a trillion dollars to everyone in the world because his wealth is indivisible and apart from the magic coin there aren't any real resources to divvy up. If the "wealth" is money in a bank account a similar problem occurs - if he gives out cash payments, there aren't more real resources so the only thing that happens is lots of inflation. Real living standards might not change. You can hopefully see the logical issue here with the argument - we can both just pick absurd premises and point out that we could get our preferred moral outcome from them. Although my hypothetical isn't as absurd as it might seem on its face. Zuckerburg's wealth is divorced from physical goods for example. Facebook's real consumption is only a couple of server farms worth of stuff. We could seize all the servers but it is hard to see what resources could be freed up for better uses in the real world. > I think we all agree that wouldn't work for a functioning society--we have to have some limit. No we don't. If the highest living standards (in a for-everyone sense) resulted from infinite inequality, we should go with that.