4 ms·

At risk of sounding like a communist... When you consider just how much money $10+ billion is, from an ethical standpoint, does any individual deserve to have

At risk of sounding like a communist... When you consider just how much money $10+ billion is, from an ethical standpoint, does any individual deserve to have that much money/power? I can't help but think that it is really a grotesque thing for a single person to have more money than the GDP of a country like Cuba. There's just no way one person has contributed to society enough to justify that kind of wealth.

AVTizzle 14y ago
"Deserve" ? Except for thief, lottery, inheritance, marriage, or trickery, money is made when you've created value for others. Repeat and scale multiple times over, and you've not only made money, you've contributed and made others lives better, happier, more entertaining, or less stressful, etc. Using their businesses as leverage, most of these billionaires have made their fortunes creating billions of dollars worth of value for the masses. They deserve every penny of it.
- bjhoops1 14y ago
  "They deserve every penny of it?" I'm sorry, but there's no way that any person's individual contributions to society are worth 3-4 orders of magnitude more than most other people's. And if there are such individuals, they are the Teslas, Newtons, Einsteins or other true geniuses whose ideas have shaped the world and opened up new possibilities - not the oil magnates, plutocrats or Wall Street bankers that make up most of this list. The only way one could argue that all of the uber-rich deserve all of their money is if you subscribe to an incredibly simplistic, idealistic, optimistic Milton Friedman-esque economic and political philosophy which assumes that the earning of income directly corresponds to value added to the economy and society.
  - AndrewKemendo 14y ago
    >I'm sorry, but there's no way that any person's individual contributions to society are worth 3-4 orders of magnitude more than most other people's. Why not? Just because it was likely timing, doesn't make the impact less great. Your point seems to be that such a person isn't inherently that much better than someone else. Ok, but no one is inherently that great. 90% of "making it" in any of the senses is timing and placement, so it's really all relative. By being able to post on HN you are about the same magnitude "better off" in real wealth terms compared to a man in the Shomali plains than a billionaire is to you. Does that make your accomplishments better compared to that Afghani man's?
    - bjhoops1 14y ago
      >By being able to post on HN you are about the same magnitude "better off" in real wealth terms compared to a man in the Shomali plains than a billionaire is to you. Does that make your accomplishments better compared to that Afghani man's? Good point. I would say that no, my accomplishments are not. The fact that I spend more money on a nice dinner than some people make in a year is just another sign of the gross inequity in the world. Really that's all I'm saying - just pointing out that there is some sort of inherent injustice in the distribution of wealth, power and quality of life, and it is just much more plainly visible in the case of individual's with the purchasing power of entire nations. Just something to think about.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- incision 14y ago
  >Except for thief, lottery, inheritance, marriage, or trickery, money is made when you've created value for others. Creating value for others [1] or creating wealth? 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking
- jonpeda 14y ago
  Your exceptions describe most of the wealth on the list. "inheritance" isn't even controversial and it's a quarter of the list. "Trickery" is a rather broad brush that applies rather well to many billionaires.
jbigelow76 14y ago
>When you consider just how much money $10+ billion is, from an ethical standpoint, does any individual deserve to have that much money/power? How can there be an ethical standpoint to an arbitrary amount of money without the context of how it was obtained? 10 dollars would probably fall within your expectation of an ethical amount of money for a person to have but if they obtained it by mugging somebody else is having even 10 dollars ethical?
- bjhoops1 14y ago
  I'm suggesting that for amounts of wealth past some (admittedly arbitrary) point, there is such a high concentration of power that it raises ethical questions, regardless of how the funds was obtained. Just thinking along the lines of Dr. McCoy in Xmen: "And I worry about how democracy survives when one man can move cities with his mind." A billionare may not be able to move a city with his mind, but he could outright buy one! Just a thought. :)
  - martinced 14y ago
    "A billionaire may not be able to move a city with his mind, but he could outright buy one!" A tiny one then. About 20 000 houses in my neighborood would settle you for about $15bn. I'm not talking about a block on Wall Street or in the City with skyscrappers ; ) If one day you think you're rich, just go to N.Y. or Ginza (Tokyo) and look at the skyscrappers and ask yourself how many buildings you could buy. It's a humbling experience, even for very very very rich people. I mean, sure, he could buy a village in the U.S. or in Europe but some things are just too expensive. I also think you overestimate the power one billionaire has. The current U.S. debt is 16 trillions. You could take the money from the 30 first of these list and you'd only be paying back one trillion (back at the 30th position it's already "poor" billionaires who only have $20bn or so). In other words: you'd still have a 15 trillion public debt and you'd still be utterly and totally f*cked. I'd say there are much more pressing purposes to deal with than the personnal wealth of a few hundreds of billionnaires... Also, why does this get posted and upvoted on HN? So that the socialo-commie dudes can come out of the wood and start criticizing wealth creation and entrepreneurship?
protomyth 14y ago
Yes, yes they do. That money isn't sitting around, it is paying for things. I point you to the misguided luxury taxes put on yachts because people buying them "deserved" to be taxed more. Well, all it did was ruin the yacht industry in the US and put a lot of people out of work. These people were being paid good money. That is grotesque and wrong. There is no ethical argument for taking money from billionaires in higher share than anyone else that doesn't come down to envy. Limits on individuals place limits on society. Why hire more people and expand when you cannot enjoy the fruits of the work? Perhaps it is an indication that Cuba is doing it very wrong.
- matthewmcg 14y ago
  "There is no ethical argument for taking money from billionaires in higher share than anyone else that doesn't come down to envy. " What about diminishing marginal utility? The ethical argument would be that tax burden should be greater on those with a larger capacity to pay. (Usual caveats about taxing income vs. taxing wealth, etc. etc. etc.)
  - cousin_it 14y ago
    Diminishing marginal utility? Well, it's not like billionaires spend most of their money on personal consumption. Many ways of spending money also generate utility for others. The real choice is whether to let the billionaire keep the marginal million dollars (which he might choose to invest or donate to charity), or give that million to the government to do as it sees fit (e.g. distribute it among poor people). Which choice yields greater expected total utility? Are there any numbers on that?
  - protomyth 14y ago
    "What about diminishing marginal utility?" The billionaire's money is not in some vault. It is invested and being loaned as capital to other people trying to start companies. Since our system relies on capital, that money will create a lot more jobs being in their hands. Not many factory workers fund the next round of startups. "The ethical argument would be that tax burden should be greater on those with a larger capacity to pay." Why? Government is a service we have agreed to pay for. It has no divinity beyond a contract. The same rate is fair and just, but different rates or caps on earnings aren't. If I have ten dimes and tell a child 2 go to government as taxes, then show the child 10 $1 bills and ask them same question, I will get a fairer and better answer than most progressives. We the people give power to government and stealing more from successful people is wrong. I can see a base deduction to protect the poor, but the tax code now and any system that takes huge percentages from higher income is just wrong.
gebe 14y ago
Stefan Persson, #20 on that list, payed around 127 million USD in taxes in Sweden two years ago and his family all together (him included) payed around 200 million USD in taxes that same year. He has payed about 1 billion USD in total in taxes over the last 10 years. I would say that he and his family contribute a lot to the Swedish society at least.
ahomescu1 14y ago
To quote Clint Eastwood: "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it." They just had the opportunity to make all that wealth, and acted on it (regardless whether the actions they took were legal/illegal, easy and fast or required an insane amount of hard work).
martinced 14y ago
It's great that you mention Cuba. They have basically the same number of people as Belgium and Cuba is nearly four times bigger than Belgium... Yet their GDP is 1/8th that one of Belgium. And they're at these "high" levels only because Cuba wasn't doing bad at all before the communist took power and because, after the revolution, Cuba was heavily subsidized by soviet russia (they were sending billion of $ to Cuba). Thing is: if Cuba was a place of freedom where people were free to create businees, maybe Larry and Sergey's parents would have moved to Cuba and created Google there, say in Pig's bay which would have been the Cuban Silicon Valley. And Cuba's GDP would be closer to the one it should have. In my opinion people able to earn $10bn know much about creating present growth and future wealth than people admiring homophobic racist mysoginist slaughterers like Che Guevara. So, no, I don't find it unfair at all that a single person is more "wealthy" than the GDP of communist countries ; )
- tokenadult 14y ago
  I don't find it unfair at all that a single person is more "wealthy" than the GDP of communist countries ; ) I have read that before the fall of communism in Hungary, the inventor of the Rubik's Cube made more foreign exchange income for the Hungarian state than all the state-owned enterprises combined.
- philwelch 14y ago
  If you wanted to wave your hands and suppose that, as the hereditary dictators of Cuba, the Castro family owns the whole country, then they are the biggest billionaires of all. The GDP of Cuba is about 60 billion, but owning an asset that produces 60 billion a year is worth some multiple of 60 billion. And you thought Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway, Google, or IKEA were big fortunes!
- jonpeda 14y ago
  It's interesting you mention Belgium, which has 50% income tax, including inheritance taxes: http://www.belgium.be/en/taxes/ http://www.belgium.be/en/taxes/ http://www.taxation.be/content/view/28/37 http://www.taxation.be/content/view/28/37
darrhiggs 14y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking It's not like their money hidden in a vault. Furthermore they may have spent it, thus converting their money into a non-monetary asset like a home, yet it still counts when calculating wealth.
jimray 14y ago
I'm not sure "deserve" is the right way to consider it, more like "what is the social value of billionaires?" Or, why isn't the marginal tax rate on $1B+ 100%. I don't have much to offer in the way of an answer, just something I regularly ponder. Furthermore, and I'd say far more indefensible, what is the social value of billionaires who inherited their net worth. Or, why aren't estate taxes on estates over $1B 100%.
Cushman 14y ago
I think you might find this line of inquiry more productive if you roll back on ethics, and don't give up either of "deserve" or "have" for free. Start by tabooing "property" and assuming consequentialism. We have a monetary system that abstracts the idea of value; ownership isn't necessary for that to exist. The question we want to answer is, if we give an individual control over some value, and through their actions they cause additional value to come into being, how much of that additional value should we, through use of violence, enable them to control? The answer may range from "none of it" all the way up to "all of it". Why would it be any of it? Possible reasons are at least twofold: First, that person may have demonstrated a unique ability to multiply value, which we wish to harness. Second, it may incentivize others who desire control to be more productive. But lots more questions fall out of that. How likely is this person to be unusually productive again? How much of an incentive is this control to others, and how does it affect the overall growth of value? How much of an incentive is necessary to maintain our desired rate of growth? What is our desired rate of growth? And on to more complicated ones: Say we decide to afford some amount of control. Should that amount be the same regardless of the value created? Should the scale be linear, quadratic, what? How should we respond to actors who fail to create, or actually destroy value? As if that weren't enough to think about already, we now have to consider the externalities, what you might call "ethical" concerns. A couple of major ones: Does our system unfairly determine the course of an individual's life based on the circumstances of their birth, making a mockery of the concept of freedom? Does our system perversely incentivize us to manipulate it in order to increase nominal value, without an according improvement to the human condition? This isn't intended to answer your question exactly, just to point out that 1) There are a lot of problems with the way we set all this up, but 2) We did set it up this way for good reasons, and 3) Anyone who takes all of this and gives you a "Of course they do" or "Of course they don't" has been indoctrinated.
- JoshTriplett 14y ago
  I agree with the principle you've used as a framing device, namely exploring some of the underlying assumptions while tabooing words that would bias towards particular conclusions. However, your entire argument seems to treat maximizing value to society as the only goal, which itself makes a major assumption that many people will disagree with. In short, there's the "they deserve it because they'll use it optimally" argument, but there's also the "they won't necessarily use it optimally but it's still theirs to use as they wish" argument. You've very effectively deconstructed the first, but you've made no attempt to address the second.
h0w412d 14y ago
I've agreed with this sentiment for a while now. I think the actual $10 billion number is not important/up for debate, but the point is that at some point, a very wealthy person obtaining more wealth is almost definitely bad for society. It's possible that in an economy, when the billionaires win, we all win, if the productivity gains are enjoyed by all. But as we're seeing in the US now, after some point in massive wealth, the wealthy inevitably use their economic power to buy political power, in order to influence laws that give them more economic power. Not to mention if someone has $10 billion, it's much more likely they've done immoral or illegal acts to obtain that wealth than someone with $10,000. Money attracts power, and power corrupts.
philwelch 14y ago
Probably the most convincing argument to you will be some variation of the notion that no, they don't deserve it per se, but it's an unavoidable side effect of some otherwise desirable freedoms that exist in our society, or that the opportunity to gain that much wealth is an incentive for people to create genuinely useful businesses (see Page, Brin, Bezos...). Put another way, for at least some billionaires, you can trace their entire fortune back to voluntary decisions by ordinary people to exchange their money for something else to the reasonable mutual benefit of both parties. If I can somehow voluntarily convince 1 billion ordinary people to give me $10 each, and every single one of those people can be reasonably said to have benefitted from the transaction, who exactly are you to come in and say "hang on a minute, you have ten billion dollars, how can this be legit?" Sure, you can't say this of every billionaire, maybe you can't even say it of most billionaires, but it's hard to imagine a free world where this kind of thing is utterly impossible. Also, if it makes you feel any better, a lot of these billion dollar fortunes are a little more illusory than you think--if you own 51% of a company that's worth 20 billion dollars on the stock market, on paper you might have 10 billion dollars but there's no way you're going to get 10 billion dollars worth of $100 bills in briefcases anytime soon.

AVTizzle 14y ago

"Deserve" ? Except for thief, lottery, inheritance, marriage, or trickery, money is made when you've created value for others. Repeat and scale multiple times over, and you've not only made money, you've contributed and made others lives better, happier, more entertaining, or less stressful, etc. Using their businesses as leverage, most of these billionaires have made their fortunes creating billions of dollars worth of value for the masses. They deserve every penny of it.

bjhoops1 14y ago
"They deserve every penny of it?" I'm sorry, but there's no way that any person's individual contributions to society are worth 3-4 orders of magnitude more than most other people's. And if there are such individuals, they are the Teslas, Newtons, Einsteins or other true geniuses whose ideas have shaped the world and opened up new possibilities - not the oil magnates, plutocrats or Wall Street bankers that make up most of this list. The only way one could argue that all of the uber-rich deserve all of their money is if you subscribe to an incredibly simplistic, idealistic, optimistic Milton Friedman-esque economic and political philosophy which assumes that the earning of income directly corresponds to value added to the economy and society.
- AndrewKemendo 14y ago
  >I'm sorry, but there's no way that any person's individual contributions to society are worth 3-4 orders of magnitude more than most other people's. Why not? Just because it was likely timing, doesn't make the impact less great. Your point seems to be that such a person isn't inherently that much better than someone else. Ok, but no one is inherently that great. 90% of "making it" in any of the senses is timing and placement, so it's really all relative. By being able to post on HN you are about the same magnitude "better off" in real wealth terms compared to a man in the Shomali plains than a billionaire is to you. Does that make your accomplishments better compared to that Afghani man's?
  - bjhoops1 14y ago
    >By being able to post on HN you are about the same magnitude "better off" in real wealth terms compared to a man in the Shomali plains than a billionaire is to you. Does that make your accomplishments better compared to that Afghani man's? Good point. I would say that no, my accomplishments are not. The fact that I spend more money on a nice dinner than some people make in a year is just another sign of the gross inequity in the world. Really that's all I'm saying - just pointing out that there is some sort of inherent injustice in the distribution of wealth, power and quality of life, and it is just much more plainly visible in the case of individual's with the purchasing power of entire nations. Just something to think about.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
incision 14y ago
>Except for thief, lottery, inheritance, marriage, or trickery, money is made when you've created value for others. Creating value for others [1] or creating wealth? 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking
jonpeda 14y ago
Your exceptions describe most of the wealth on the list. "inheritance" isn't even controversial and it's a quarter of the list. "Trickery" is a rather broad brush that applies rather well to many billionaires.

jbigelow76 14y ago

>When you consider just how much money $10+ billion is, from an ethical standpoint, does any individual deserve to have that much money/power? How can there be an ethical standpoint to an arbitrary amount of money without the context of how it was obtained? 10 dollars would probably fall within your expectation of an ethical amount of money for a person to have but if they obtained it by mugging somebody else is having even 10 dollars ethical?

bjhoops1 14y ago
I'm suggesting that for amounts of wealth past some (admittedly arbitrary) point, there is such a high concentration of power that it raises ethical questions, regardless of how the funds was obtained. Just thinking along the lines of Dr. McCoy in Xmen: "And I worry about how democracy survives when one man can move cities with his mind." A billionare may not be able to move a city with his mind, but he could outright buy one! Just a thought. :)
- martinced 14y ago
  "A billionaire may not be able to move a city with his mind, but he could outright buy one!" A tiny one then. About 20 000 houses in my neighborood would settle you for about $15bn. I'm not talking about a block on Wall Street or in the City with skyscrappers ; ) If one day you think you're rich, just go to N.Y. or Ginza (Tokyo) and look at the skyscrappers and ask yourself how many buildings you could buy. It's a humbling experience, even for very very very rich people. I mean, sure, he could buy a village in the U.S. or in Europe but some things are just too expensive. I also think you overestimate the power one billionaire has. The current U.S. debt is 16 trillions. You could take the money from the 30 first of these list and you'd only be paying back one trillion (back at the 30th position it's already "poor" billionaires who only have $20bn or so). In other words: you'd still have a 15 trillion public debt and you'd still be utterly and totally f*cked. I'd say there are much more pressing purposes to deal with than the personnal wealth of a few hundreds of billionnaires... Also, why does this get posted and upvoted on HN? So that the socialo-commie dudes can come out of the wood and start criticizing wealth creation and entrepreneurship?

protomyth 14y ago

Yes, yes they do. That money isn't sitting around, it is paying for things. I point you to the misguided luxury taxes put on yachts because people buying them "deserved" to be taxed more. Well, all it did was ruin the yacht industry in the US and put a lot of people out of work. These people were being paid good money. That is grotesque and wrong. There is no ethical argument for taking money from billionaires in higher share than anyone else that doesn't come down to envy. Limits on individuals place limits on society. Why hire more people and expand when you cannot enjoy the fruits of the work? Perhaps it is an indication that Cuba is doing it very wrong.

matthewmcg 14y ago
"There is no ethical argument for taking money from billionaires in higher share than anyone else that doesn't come down to envy. " What about diminishing marginal utility? The ethical argument would be that tax burden should be greater on those with a larger capacity to pay. (Usual caveats about taxing income vs. taxing wealth, etc. etc. etc.)
- cousin_it 14y ago
  Diminishing marginal utility? Well, it's not like billionaires spend most of their money on personal consumption. Many ways of spending money also generate utility for others. The real choice is whether to let the billionaire keep the marginal million dollars (which he might choose to invest or donate to charity), or give that million to the government to do as it sees fit (e.g. distribute it among poor people). Which choice yields greater expected total utility? Are there any numbers on that?
- protomyth 14y ago
  "What about diminishing marginal utility?" The billionaire's money is not in some vault. It is invested and being loaned as capital to other people trying to start companies. Since our system relies on capital, that money will create a lot more jobs being in their hands. Not many factory workers fund the next round of startups. "The ethical argument would be that tax burden should be greater on those with a larger capacity to pay." Why? Government is a service we have agreed to pay for. It has no divinity beyond a contract. The same rate is fair and just, but different rates or caps on earnings aren't. If I have ten dimes and tell a child 2 go to government as taxes, then show the child 10 $1 bills and ask them same question, I will get a fairer and better answer than most progressives. We the people give power to government and stealing more from successful people is wrong. I can see a base deduction to protect the poor, but the tax code now and any system that takes huge percentages from higher income is just wrong.

gebe 14y ago

Stefan Persson, #20 on that list, payed around 127 million USD in taxes in Sweden two years ago and his family all together (him included) payed around 200 million USD in taxes that same year. He has payed about 1 billion USD in total in taxes over the last 10 years. I would say that he and his family contribute a lot to the Swedish society at least.

ahomescu1 14y ago

To quote Clint Eastwood: "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it." They just had the opportunity to make all that wealth, and acted on it (regardless whether the actions they took were legal/illegal, easy and fast or required an insane amount of hard work).

martinced 14y ago

It's great that you mention Cuba. They have basically the same number of people as Belgium and Cuba is nearly four times bigger than Belgium... Yet their GDP is 1/8th that one of Belgium. And they're at these "high" levels only because Cuba wasn't doing bad at all before the communist took power and because, after the revolution, Cuba was heavily subsidized by soviet russia (they were sending billion of $ to Cuba). Thing is: if Cuba was a place of freedom where people were free to create businees, maybe Larry and Sergey's parents would have moved to Cuba and created Google there, say in Pig's bay which would have been the Cuban Silicon Valley. And Cuba's GDP would be closer to the one it should have. In my opinion people able to earn $10bn know much about creating present growth and future wealth than people admiring homophobic racist mysoginist slaughterers like Che Guevara. So, no, I don't find it unfair at all that a single person is more "wealthy" than the GDP of communist countries ; )

tokenadult 14y ago
I don't find it unfair at all that a single person is more "wealthy" than the GDP of communist countries ; ) I have read that before the fall of communism in Hungary, the inventor of the Rubik's Cube made more foreign exchange income for the Hungarian state than all the state-owned enterprises combined.
philwelch 14y ago
If you wanted to wave your hands and suppose that, as the hereditary dictators of Cuba, the Castro family owns the whole country, then they are the biggest billionaires of all. The GDP of Cuba is about 60 billion, but owning an asset that produces 60 billion a year is worth some multiple of 60 billion. And you thought Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway, Google, or IKEA were big fortunes!
jonpeda 14y ago
It's interesting you mention Belgium, which has 50% income tax, including inheritance taxes: http://www.belgium.be/en/taxes/ http://www.belgium.be/en/taxes/ http://www.taxation.be/content/view/28/37 http://www.taxation.be/content/view/28/37

darrhiggs 14y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking It's not like their money hidden in a vault. Furthermore they may have spent it, thus converting their money into a non-monetary asset like a home, yet it still counts when calculating wealth.

jimray 14y ago

I'm not sure "deserve" is the right way to consider it, more like "what is the social value of billionaires?" Or, why isn't the marginal tax rate on $1B+ 100%. I don't have much to offer in the way of an answer, just something I regularly ponder. Furthermore, and I'd say far more indefensible, what is the social value of billionaires who inherited their net worth. Or, why aren't estate taxes on estates over $1B 100%.

Cushman 14y ago

I think you might find this line of inquiry more productive if you roll back on ethics, and don't give up either of "deserve" or "have" for free. Start by tabooing "property" and assuming consequentialism. We have a monetary system that abstracts the idea of value; ownership isn't necessary for that to exist. The question we want to answer is, if we give an individual control over some value, and through their actions they cause additional value to come into being, how much of that additional value should we, through use of violence, enable them to control? The answer may range from "none of it" all the way up to "all of it". Why would it be any of it? Possible reasons are at least twofold: First, that person may have demonstrated a unique ability to multiply value, which we wish to harness. Second, it may incentivize others who desire control to be more productive. But lots more questions fall out of that. How likely is this person to be unusually productive again? How much of an incentive is this control to others, and how does it affect the overall growth of value? How much of an incentive is necessary to maintain our desired rate of growth? What is our desired rate of growth? And on to more complicated ones: Say we decide to afford some amount of control. Should that amount be the same regardless of the value created? Should the scale be linear, quadratic, what? How should we respond to actors who fail to create, or actually destroy value? As if that weren't enough to think about already, we now have to consider the externalities, what you might call "ethical" concerns. A couple of major ones: Does our system unfairly determine the course of an individual's life based on the circumstances of their birth, making a mockery of the concept of freedom? Does our system perversely incentivize us to manipulate it in order to increase nominal value, without an according improvement to the human condition? This isn't intended to answer your question exactly, just to point out that 1) There are a lot of problems with the way we set all this up, but 2) We did set it up this way for good reasons, and 3) Anyone who takes all of this and gives you a "Of course they do" or "Of course they don't" has been indoctrinated.

JoshTriplett 14y ago
I agree with the principle you've used as a framing device, namely exploring some of the underlying assumptions while tabooing words that would bias towards particular conclusions. However, your entire argument seems to treat maximizing value to society as the only goal, which itself makes a major assumption that many people will disagree with. In short, there's the "they deserve it because they'll use it optimally" argument, but there's also the "they won't necessarily use it optimally but it's still theirs to use as they wish" argument. You've very effectively deconstructed the first, but you've made no attempt to address the second.

h0w412d 14y ago

I've agreed with this sentiment for a while now. I think the actual $10 billion number is not important/up for debate, but the point is that at some point, a very wealthy person obtaining more wealth is almost definitely bad for society. It's possible that in an economy, when the billionaires win, we all win, if the productivity gains are enjoyed by all. But as we're seeing in the US now, after some point in massive wealth, the wealthy inevitably use their economic power to buy political power, in order to influence laws that give them more economic power. Not to mention if someone has $10 billion, it's much more likely they've done immoral or illegal acts to obtain that wealth than someone with $10,000. Money attracts power, and power corrupts.

philwelch 14y ago

Probably the most convincing argument to you will be some variation of the notion that no, they don't deserve it per se, but it's an unavoidable side effect of some otherwise desirable freedoms that exist in our society, or that the opportunity to gain that much wealth is an incentive for people to create genuinely useful businesses (see Page, Brin, Bezos...). Put another way, for at least some billionaires, you can trace their entire fortune back to voluntary decisions by ordinary people to exchange their money for something else to the reasonable mutual benefit of both parties. If I can somehow voluntarily convince 1 billion ordinary people to give me $10 each, and every single one of those people can be reasonably said to have benefitted from the transaction, who exactly are you to come in and say "hang on a minute, you have ten billion dollars, how can this be legit?" Sure, you can't say this of every billionaire, maybe you can't even say it of most billionaires, but it's hard to imagine a free world where this kind of thing is utterly impossible. Also, if it makes you feel any better, a lot of these billion dollar fortunes are a little more illusory than you think--if you own 51% of a company that's worth 20 billion dollars on the stock market, on paper you might have 10 billion dollars but there's no way you're going to get 10 billion dollars worth of $100 bills in briefcases anytime soon.