In aggregate, the 400 richest billionaires put together only constitutes 4% of the total wealth in America.[1][2]

Even if you assume that power correlates perfectly with wealth, there's not really evidence that billionaires control anywhere near enough money to become a "permanent ruling class".

[1]https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2019/06/25/six-facts... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth

Well, expand that category to include every billionaire and also everyone above 100 million, as an arbitrary figure that most people will never make throughout their lives. I imagine that percentage will go up immensely.

Two thirds of wealth in America is owned by the bottom 99th percentile, i.e. households with less than $12 million net worth.[1] A near majority of wealth is owned by the 90th-99th percentile, i.e. households with between $1-12 million net worth.

By far the biggest source of wealth inequality is the division between the top and bottom 50th percentile, who have essentially zero wealth. The uber-wealthy may be rich on an individual basis, but in aggregate they still hold constitute significantly less than run-in-the-mill retirees, dentists, and actuaries.

[1]https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

That seems like a confused way of saying that those who are at least millionaires have 80% of the wealth.

It's much easier for a billionaire to hire lobbyists to protect his latest exploitative venture than it is for some dentist to do so. That's why the 1% held 30% of the total thirty years ago and they hold 40% now. That is a dark trend.

Why "only". 400 people controlling 4% of the wealth of a country of 300,000,000 is massive.

Why 400

> Do you believe in meritocracy? Because ownership of that amount of wealth is surely going to skew the entire system.

Your focus is too narrow. Broaden the timeline -- the meritocratic spoils cascade across the generations, as they ever have. It's part of the motivation to achieve.

Is your stance that wealth in the hands of billionaires tends to do less good to raise the “common good” than if it were to be distributed in some way?

If so, what kind of distribution do you think makes sense?

You guys acting like democratic government has not yet been invented.

It's not like alternatives to billionaires owning the planet doesn't exist. Just America seems to be fairly resistant to the idea of public good.

And the other consideration is how the money of billionaires is actively used to make everyone else's lives worse, either through manipulating markets and commodities, raising our rent, or literally polluting and destroying the planet.

Or buying media and brain washing the population with their crazy ideologies. These are all highly negative events that come from a small group of people having control of too many resources.

No one yet has responded to me why it's such a great idea for billionaires to exist. I wonder if an argument could even be made that didn't even a personal fantasy/wish fulfillment scenario.

> No one yet has responded to me why it's such a great idea for billionaires to exist. I wonder if an argument could even be made that didn't even a personal fantasy/wish fulfillment scenario.

K, here's one, whether or not you accept it. I don't think the world would have SpaceX or Tesla were it not for the existence of billionaires.

Elon Musk already had a billion before founding/buying these companies. If he had "maxed out" and couldn't make any more money, I think there is a good chance he wouldn't have taken risks on these companies. I think we are better off with the existence of companies like these.

Even if you don't like Tesla or SpaceX, these are just examples. There are a lot of other companies that would not exist as well, especially if you consider the potential scarcity of funding in this scenario. And without their existence we would all be worse off.

There are downsides to having billionaires too, but it's pretty disingenuous to pretend there aren't upsides as well.

When you say we would not have Tesla or SpaceX, do you just mean the brand? Or that we would not have reusable rockets and electric cars?

That seems unlikely, considering the USSR produced the space launches, and electric cars existed before Tesla. Without billionaires, you'd also lose the Koch's making it hard to move away from fossil fuels, which I think would make electric cars significantly easier, rather than harder

If you just mean that we won't have those brand names, should I care? It's just a name

It's a mistake to conflate the work of entire companies with one man, and I strongly disagree about the state of progress in America if billionaires did not exist.

Someone else would have taken Musk's place. There is no inherent quality to billionaires that make them valuable outside of their wealth.

> especially if you consider the potential scarcity of funding in this scenario.

how is this an argument? I assume banks still exist in this world without billionaires?

Someone else would have taken his place? You mean another billionaire? But the thought experiment is there would be no billionaires.

Why would a billionaire by necessary?

As mentioned, there are other vehicles to obtain financing. Secondly, when billionaires disappear, their wealth doesn't disappear with them. Not sure what you are asking.

Because at least for big moonshot ideas, it's much easier for one billionaire to bankroll some crazy idea everyone else thinks is a waste of money.

And even if you could gather the funding, you now have to keep a few dozen investors happy versus just pursuing your idea however you want.

And sure the money doesn't disappear, but would you really expect an Amazon warehouse worker who now makes $70k instead of $35k to be investing in highly risky ventures? I mean, they wouldn't even qualify to invest.

He wasn't a billionaire when he started SpaceX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#:~:text=In%20October....

There is always more wealth to create.

r > g, where r is the rate of return and g is the overall economic growth of the economy.

It means the rich capture a growing portion of productivity, and in modern days it is on the strength of the financialization of productivity, not necessarily people actually doing work.

How is this an optimal system? How is it even a functioning system? What we are doing as a species, today, right now, is not working and our ability to live on this planet is increasingly in danger.

So? I already said that I have utmost respect for those who create wealth. I am in full support to letting people create wealth as much as they want.

What I firmly oppose is someone who has a birth lottery of being born to such wealth creators - they don't deserve to inherit a vast fortune and all the power and privilege that come with it.

Familial wealth disperses and collapses pretty quickly, eventually being split up between 2 to the n heirs thereabouts.

Irrespective, the wealth is the property of an individual who earned that wealth through voluntary exchange. If they want to give it all to their kids, to a charitable cause, or just destroy it, that should be their right as owners of that property, it is not just for the state to steal that property because some people don't like it when the parent decides to give that wealth to the child. Focus taxation on things that harm an unwilling third party, not things that involve only two consenting parties where nobody is made worse off.

> Irrespective, the wealth is the property of an individual who earned that wealth through voluntary exchange.

Hard disagree. We won't see eye to eye on this point, and it really invalidates the rest of w hat you are saying.

If I'm a fitness coach charging $60/hour, all my customers are there because they think I'm providing a service of value greater than $60/hour. Perhaps their subjective value is $80/hour, so they get $20/hour benefit and decide voluntarily to engage in this transaction with me. This is a positive sum voluntary transaction where all parties are better off (except for the carbon pollution which we expelled to drive to the venue, which I think should be taxed!).

I find it hard to believe that anyone could disagree with the above, which means you must disagree that the fruits of this exchange should be my property. Well let me ask you this: the customer made $20 in utility by engaging in this transaction with me. Why should they be able to keep the $20 utility but I must give up part of the $60? And what right do you have to reach into my pocket? If my customers instead traded groceries for my hour of training, should I not be able to keep these groceries?Is it only money that makes the difference for you?

No one is trying to take the $60 an hour you make coaching. The way Bezos or Gates or Zuckerberg make their wealth is not at all similar to how you or I do. If you want to take the conservative argument, Gates taking my tax dollars by selling his computers to the government is not a voluntary transaction. He then takes that money to lobby the government so that I have to give him even more of my tax money.

If I provide significantly large value to enough clients (i.e. I make a lot of money) then the state will take 53 percent of my marginal profits.

As far as pushing back against crony capitalism and corporatism goes, we are in total agreement.

This is a common hard-libertarian talking point.

Consider point 13.6 of Scott Alexander's (Slate Star Codex) Non-Libertarian FAQ:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta...

If you assume that "individual property earned through voluntary exchange" is the ultimate value to be upheld, you may end up having to defend a hellscape world. You need at least to temper it with something along the lines of the Lockean proviso.

I fully agree with this, I see it as one value to be upheld among many others in a Pareto-like trade-off. Optimizing for only a single value is going to lead to pathological outcomes as you rightly point out.

But I do consider it an important value since a lot of the motivation behind redistribution is self interest and jealousy (this is a finding in social science research), benelovant compassion only explains a small proportion of the variation.

"voluntary" is pulling a lot of weight here. Let me know when food and water become voluntary things for people

I made my money by creating software and engaging in voluntary transactions with people (mostly wealthy people) who wanted to transact with me and would've been worse off having not done so. It was totally positive sum with no harmed third party. A very large proportion of transactions (plastic surgery, sports cars, entertainment, holidays, restaurants, personal trainer, Netflix, etc) are of this nature where the rebuttal that "it's not really voluntary" doesn't apply in the least.

Good faith line of questioning. Promise.

1. Who do you think decides what rights an individual has in a society, and on what grounds do they hold that right? 2. Why grant property rights

1. As for what decides the individual's rights in a society, this is a pretty complicated question but the answer is going to be rooted in evolutionary psychology, cultural evolution and memetic evolution.

On what grounds do they hold that right? I'm not religious so I can't appeal to an ultimate moral authority. See (2).

2. If you grant and enforce property rights you stake the individual, and the overall outcome is a more prosperous world. Removing property rights is a good way to collective starvation, it's been tried before. So it's moral in the sense that enforcing property rights minimises human suffering through the above mechanism.