J. K. Rowling comes to mind.

Wikipedia had her at £600 million in 2016, so probably not a billionaire, but that's quibbling. I honestly don't think she did anything wrong, but I also think she got that rich because she wrote her books in a world built on exploitive systems. How much less would she have if every book shop employee, amazon employee, or factory worker in china making harry potter ephemera was paid fairly for their labour?

More importantly, if she only had £60 million would she be any less happy?

She was a billionaire. She isn't anymore due to a combination of $160 million and high taxes.

Oops – "$160 million in charitable donations" was what I meant

I just don't get the socialist views people have here.

Where do you think the moral cash limit should be? 10 million or 100 million? When does your success turn you evil?

I don't see how you can say those things when you live in such a nice capitalistic economy when the rest of the socialist/communist world is in such turmoil.

You're in the field that embraces capitalism the most, and it's beautiful. You can start a company in your garage and build an empire from nothing, and many of us have.

i think the moral limit should be set in a way that all citizens benefit from a growing economy equally. I view it as a moral failing of a society that the upper x percent are steadily increase their share of the output of the economy while a majority doesn’t benefit much from growth.

Some humans are lazy and some humans are greedy.

Capitalism exploits the greedy humans into generating wealth by rewarding them greatly, it also generates many jobs and assets for the economy. Yes that one person gets rewarded greatly, but many masses would not benefit if they never existed or were never motivated to do those things.

The lazy humans will fleece the system until there's nothing left. Some people need survival to motivate them to climb.

Socialism fails when you run out of other people's money. There's many examples of that.

Do you really believe that the billionaires are the virtuous ones and everybody else is lazy? My theory is that they have been able to focus the wealth the country generates on themselves instead of others. If all billionaires retired tomorrow I believe the country would keep working the same way and the economy would keep growing. Do you think e-commerce would be any smaller without Bezos? No way.

> Do you really believe that the billionaires are the virtuous ones and everybody else is lazy?

I literally called them greedy in my argument, not virtuous. I don't believe they are all virtuous, some might be. Some are seeking their passions. All are greedy in some capacity.

> If all billionaires retired tomorrow I believe the country would keep working the same way and the economy would keep growing.

I don't understand, we replace them with another person? Or would a government entity take over their assets they generated.

What I am saying is that billionaires get rewarded disproportionately more than their actual contribution. They also get listened to way more than they deserve.

There is absolutely nothing socialistic about any of the campaigns in the running. You're just creating a straw man.

Accruing capital almost never has anything to do with hard work or laziness. It's a lot of luck. What family you were born into, what area of the world, if you had parents growing up etc. You could be the laziest POS and have more money than you could spend in a lifetime.

Tax-funded education and healthcare is necessary to offset some of the insane luck a trust fund kid has vs kid with a single mother with debt and no inheritance in sight. So everyone can have a fair shot at participating in capitalism. Nothing remotely socialistic about it.

Bernie Sanders, one of the frontrunners, calls himself a socialist because he is one. At least he admits it.

He is not a socialist. Nothing he is proposing is socialism.

> When does your success turn you evil?

Maybe I can help. The view is that calling the accumulation of wealth "success" is a misnomer because there is hardly anything he as a person had to do compared to the collective effort of all of the people who labored to carry out the orders from above. The workers who made his "empire" what it is have been shafted, since the result of all of their work is that most of the profit goes to the few people at the top. It is wrong to say that Bloomberg did as much work. It is wrong to say that Bloomberg provided opportunity for those workers, because opportunity to be subjugated is not opportunity at all. Opportunity would be to earn 100% of the proceeds of your work so that you have the opportunity to achieve what you want. Employers unilaterally deciding how much money to pay their employees is fundamentally unfair by definition, courtesy of the word "unilaterally". Choice is a false concept in capitalism as you cannot choose from all possible options, just the ones that are graciously handed down from the plutocrats.

Also: the economy we live in is not "nice". It is if you have significant investments in the stock market, but relatively few people actually do. Of the total invested wealth, 90% of it belongs to the top 10% percent of the population. If you are not a part of this club, chances are you are hurting more than you were 15 years ago.

> When does your success turn you evil?

There are plenty of people making $100k/year exploiting labour and/or damaging the environment. But when you're one of the ~2000 billionaires in the world you are pretty much by definition responsible for such a massively larger amount of that harm than the guy making $100k.

> when the rest of the socialist/communist world is in such turmoil

There are plenty of degrees of socialism that could be applied before you end up in stalinist russia. Canada is arguably more socialist than the US, is that in turmoil? Various scandinavian countries are more socialist than Canada, yet they seem to be doing alright.

I'm not saying let's become communist, I'm saying:

1. force capital to respect labour by compensating it fairly

2. force capital to pay for the social and environmental damage it does

3. stop capital from using globalization to avoid doing #1 and #2

4. keep capital out of politics, so that it can't roll back #1, #2 and #3

If we did those things, you'd likely have a lot fewer billionares. Maybe none. But if there were billionaires, they wouldn't be standing on a horde of blood money like a goddamn dragon from a fantasy novel.

Have you ever ask yourself why the US generates twice as many billionaires than any other country combined?

(hint: it's because the economy generates so much wealth)

I don't think your Canada/Scandinavia economy argument is going to win any vote from any American.

I've literally described why I think generating billionaires is a symptom of a broken system. So the short answer is: because it's a broken system. A better question would be which country has the least inequality and the highest standard of living. That's the country I want to live in. Would be pretty nice if that was every country.

Also you're wrong: there are ~700 billionaires in asia and only ~600 in north america (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_the_numbe...)

I hope you are not posting this from an Apple or Microsoft produced device because if you are you fall as a hypocrite to at least half the things you decry in this post.

Yes, my point is completely undermined because I own a piece of technology that was produced by labour exploitation and environmental damage. It was pretty bad of me to choose the unethically produced tech, when there are so many ethically produced options for me to choose from /s