The thousands of people employed, directly and indirectly, by those same casinos will have employment.

so what? Should we all have the same, or similar? I would've thought the focus would be on lifting up the poorest, not bringing down the richest. If you bankrupted every billionaire in the world you could give everyone on the planet about $1000, and that's presuming that a) net worth estimates are accurate and b) liquidating a billionaire's net worth would actually result in that amount of cash (it wouldn't). Ultra-rich individuals hoarding money aren't exactly emptying out the economy.

I disagree with the premise that some unelected individuals should control such a disproportionate amount of ressources, and therefore power, yes.

OK, but the primary reason billionaires are so rich is from running or founding companies that produce much more value than the billionaires extract. Take away the idea that a successful founder can keep maybe 1% (at most, probably a vast overestimate) of the value they generate, and you'll have vastly fewer founders unless you find another way to motivate them.

In terms of power, ideally there would be a clean separation between money and political power. Some countries are better at this than others. Extremely wealthy people can wield a lot of power internationally, and that's bad. But them having more resources is not a bad thing in my mind unless they can use those resources to hurt people. As far as I'm aware, most don't.

> OK, but the primary reason billionaires are so rich is from running or founding companies that produce much more value than the billionaires extract. Take away the idea that a successful founder can keep maybe 1% (at most, probably a vast overestimate) of the value they generate, and you'll have vastly fewer founders unless you find another way to motivate them.

You are contradicting yourself. The value is generated by the company, i.e. the workers. Not the founder. The founder just extracts this value and makes themselves more powerful.

There can be no clean separation between money and political power. Politics is the struggle for the power to allocate ressources. Money is ressources.

> You are contradicting yourself. The value is generated by the company, i.e. the workers. Not the founder. The founder just extracts this value and makes themselves more powerful.

This is just ideological rubbish. It's not either-or. Workers perform the manual labour and such, but management plans, organises and directs. Labour can't exist without management beyond a trivial level, and the founders (or more realistically, the executives) design and direct the whole company's strategy. If you look around you can see plenty of examples where incompetent direction can kill a company and strong direction can build an extremely valuable one. Founders also accept the risk of failure, and are expected (in any sane workplace) to make more sacrifices than the employees while the company is still small. In essence, the company is the vehicle for the founders' will. Labour is fairly interchangeable compared to that.

> There can be no clean separation between money and political power. Politics is the struggle for the power to allocate ressources. Money is ressources.

You know what I mean. Elections should be won on the strength of the platform, not the size of the budget won from super PACs or wealthy single donors. Of course politicians, when in power, shuffle money around.

> It's not either-or. Workers perform the manual labour and such, but management plans, organises and directs.

Both of these things are work, yes. But one is not thousands of times more valuable than the other. The income of the owners is derived from their ownership of the company. Not from the work.

>You know what I mean.

Yes, I know what I mean. But what you mean doesn't actually make sense. Money in politics is a problem, because it gives some people more power over the politics, i.e. how ressources are allocated.

Billionaires who control a similar amount of ressources as a government through ownership aren't any better though. They have just as much power, and they don't even have to go through the trouble of fixing an election for it.

> The income of the owners is derived from their ownership of the company. Not from the work.

The company isn't going to be worth anything unless the founders turn it into something valuable. In that way, the income of the founders is derived from their ability to create value. That's an alignment of incentives if ever I've heard one. Investors derive their income from their ability to gauge risk and value, and allocate resources to founders who will create the most value with them.

> Yes, I know what I mean. But what you mean doesn't actually make sense. Money in politics is a problem, because it gives some people more power over the politics, i.e. how ressources are allocated.

To be honest my preferred solution is to minimise the ties between money and politics in general - the state shouldn't be given free reign to dick around in the economy, but only regulate and redistribute when it can be shown that a specific industry is broken in a specific way (negative externalities, natural monopolies, etc). I don't have a solution to this problem, but I think it would work better than what we have right now. When the state can basically do what it pleases there's a lot more room for backroom deals and loopholes.

> Billionaires who control a similar amount of ressources as a government through ownership aren't any better though.

But they are, because they don't have a military or police force to wield as a weapon against people they don't like. They can still be dicks but they are limited in their ability to harm others. Governments have no such restrictions, and have shown their propensity to use violence over reason on plenty of occasions.

>To be honest my preferred solution is to minimise the ties between money and politics in general - the state shouldn't be given free reign to dick around in the economy, but only regulate and redistribute when it can be shown that a specific industry is broken in a specific way (negative externalities, natural monopolies, etc). I don't have a solution to this problem, but I think it would work better than what we have right now. When the state can basically do what it pleases there's a lot more room for backroom deals and loopholes.

That is still politics deciding how ressources are allocated. Your solution is to give over the power over ressources to private individuals, instead of controlling them democratically. I think this process gives too much power to a few individuals.

> Your solution is to give over the power over ressources to private individuals, instead of controlling them democratically.

The idea that we democratically control the government is basically a myth. Once we elect a party based on some loose promises, they have free reign to do whatever they want. We're basically voting for one of 2 sets of ideas that we dislike the least, and then giving absolute power to the people who parrot those ideas. Those that aren't part of the elected party (department heads outside the cabinet) are also effectively unelected leaders and will continue to hold power after a new party is elected. What I want is a limit on absolute power, for anyone. Currently the state apparatus is a form of absolute power, and thus a magnet for the kinds of corruption we're talking about. I'd much rather we kept a balance of power between the economy, the individual and the state such that each has its own power and none can force the hand of another. But that's just idealism really, I just think that for now billionaires are the lesser evil compared to the state.

That is a very specific description of the american voting system. I am not american. I agree that the current models of democratic control are severly and fundamentally flawed. But it's frightening to me that you think giving the power to private Billionaires with no democratic legitimization instead is a better solution.

This is what people mean when they say Capitalist Libertarianism is a form of Authoritarianism.

I'm also not American, I'm British. We had a direct democratic vote very recently, which (regardless of whether you like the outcome or not) was surrounded by the most irrational propaganda I've ever seen, from both sides of the aisle. If you want more democracy, expect more of that. I'm also not a libertarian nor particularly a capitalist (I prefer syndicalism on a conceptual level), so your characterisation is both incorrect and reductionist.

OK so if giving private citizens more power (though I'd phrase it as axing bad regulations) is "scary", what's the worst outcome? Compared to giving more power to the state? Because as far as I'm aware, almost all historical atrocities have been committed by states. The first three billionaires who jump into my head immediately (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos) pioneered personal computing, founded one of the most impactful charities in existence, vastly improved the portability of computing, and commoditised online shopping and started a private space agency. Can you think of anything billionaires have done that doesn't involve political corruption that is really really bad compared to the good that said individual has brought to the world?

(without diving into the intricacies of whether people like Carl Icahn provide a net benefit, but I'm pretty against Wall Street and the public stock market anyway).