This seems like an uncharitable statement. In many cases (although maybe not the majority), the wealth generated is additive to society and and not "taken" because it might never have existed otherwise.
Consider PayPal. Did the development of PayPal take or give to society? It seems to me that it increased the wealth of everyone both in a direct sense and also indirectly through the enablement of large scale secondary and long-tail economies in Ebay.
This statement isn't to suggest a reason for "tax breaks to the wealthy," only to offer an alternative theory to "taken disproportionately."
Amazon for example - how much wealth has Amazon created for everyone else? A lot and many, many factors more than Bezos' net worth.
Granted not every wealthy person creates wealth this way - some influence politics to get unethical things done that put them there. But we shouldn't clobber the idea of wealthy people because some people cheat.
How big that chunk should be, and what the process(es) should be used to decide on its disposition are open for debate, certainly. But the idea that because $X flowed towards Amazon, and everyone did that voluntarily and feels good about it, now Bezos gets to decide how the accumulated sum should be spent - I don't consider that a sensible view in any way.
> Wealthy people have taken disproportionately from society
And I just don't think that's true at all. Yeah, we can figure out how to better tax extreme wealth, but this wave of sentiment I see more and more of that wealthy people are evil, or parasitic, is just wrong in my opinion.
Let's say I do a really hard physical labor job, and I work at it 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year. As a result, I make $45k (or $60k, or $80k or $100k - at this scale, the numbers don't really matter)
Is there any possible rationale for how any amount of succesful "business-ing" could ever justify why a person doing that for a year should end up with an income in the tens or hundreds of millions?
We could concede that perhaps the business-ing has results that affect far more people in a positive way than the manual labor ever will. But the notion of people "taking disproportionately from society" could really be stated as "I don't care what you did last year, there's no possible activity you could have carried out that justifies you earning US$200M". That's a position that could continue to be held even if every cent of that US$200M arose from conscious, voluntarily, beneficial transactions. You don't have to agree, but there are people (I suspect I am one of them) who just don't believe there can ever be a justification for incomes at this level.
Yes - imagine that job was cutting down trees and the amount of hard labor it took to cut down a tree was very high. You decided to invent chainsaws. Now each person doing this labor (which is now less hard) can cut down more trees and you need fewer people overall to cut down more trees and you can pass the savings on to your customers who now get lumber more cheaply. This gets passed onto people who build things with wood so now there are more people "business-ing" across these larger industries and fewer people doing the tough work. People have more options now. And more people can build things out of wood opening it up to a larger and larger number of people creating more happiness than before.
So this 1 invention not only created great wealth for the person who invented it but also created much wealth for society as a whole. the guy cutting down trees before the chainsaw couldn't afford much but now because his productivity is increased he too can afford lumber to build things because the price of it has diminished.
The whole game is to find inefficiencies in things, make them more efficient so you can lower the price of it and make it available to more people. This has happened in consumer goods, food, travel, and just about every other industry. So as income inequality has grown, access to life enhancing things has grown. And we've more or less eliminated poverty along the way.
That's a viable argument if the domain of the argument is only economics.
Some people want the domain to be restricted to economics only, of course. Some of us think that morality / philosophy plays a role too.
So we can recast your example in more general terms. Suppose that what society "said" about invention was along the following lines:
"We want to see productivity increase, and so we value and cherish invention, particularly invention that enhances the efficient use of human labor. People who manage to invent tools and processes that increase efficiency can expect to see some part of economic value of their inventions accrue to them. So, if you want to be richer and improve the wealth of our society, please go ahead and do so with your creativity and imagination and organizational skills. But if you imagine it as a pathway to unimaginable wealth, understand that this will not happen. To be blunt, just because your invention creates US$200M of value to society, you will not be US$200M richer under any circumstances."
In the end, it depends on what you think really motivates people.If you think that chainsaws get invented because people dream of being unimaginably richer than their neighbors, you will likely think that any limitations on how wealthy someone can be will cause us to miss out on possible improvements. But I don't believe that (and I could cite lots of evidence that money is almost the worst possible human motivator for most Americans), and I think that we can cap income and wealth without destroying innovation and productivity gains, while still leaving room for some people to be substantially richer than others.
For the record, we’re no where near a breaking point in America. For as much complaining you see on HN and reddit and twitter, people in real life are happy.
Amazon, Walmart, and Microsoft have added tremendous value to the world.
all that money could have been invested into people who actually spend it in the economy, instead of hoarding all that excess wealth.
Although I think they should probably be taxed more, those hyper billionaires tend to give huge amounts to charity too. And it's not always for shamefully self-serving/partisan purposes such as Bezos propping up the Washington Post.