If you want to reduce the influence of money on politics, you're not going to achieve that by punishing billionaires, or by destroying the incentive structure that allows them to exist. If you want to reduce the influence of money in politics, you'll have to understand the specific mechanisms that create said influence, and address them by law.

Wealth is good. People acquire wealth by adding value. We want to incentivize people to add value. Of course, the "billionaires shouldn't exist" crowd understand little and less, and would happily have us destroy this system of incentives without even achieving their stated goals, because they, much like the "defund police" crowd, are more interested in appearing virtuous than in actually solving problems.

  "People acquire wealth by adding value"

This incorrect view comes from objectivist thought. Namely, the trader theory of value. But it's false ideology.

Some wealth implies value add. SpaceX.

Other wealth was partly figuratively stolen due to incomplete laws that prevent market failure. Purdue Pharma, slave trader, hitman, oil company (global warming), sex trafficker, social media company (societal fragmentation), fast food company (costs on public healthcare), landowners (regulatory capture), porn company (victims of revenge porn), car company (health effects of tire dust).

I'd say it's more the norm nowadays that wealth is partly stolen, figuratively speaking. The distortions and market failures have become so large.

You seem to be suggesting that the mere existence of externalities somehow negates the fact that value was added, which is silly.

The existence of externalities doesn't negate the adding of value. Would we be better off without oil companies? Obviously not (just ask a European!) Hence it's impossible to say that they're not adding value, or that the people who create them aren't adding value.

> Wealth is good. People acquire wealth by adding value.

Those are axioms presented without evidence. It’s trivial to find counter examples.

I’m no radical redistributionist but the idea that wealth in and of itself shows added value is clearly wrong.

I suppose it depends on how you define wealth, but I can't think of many people who became really fabulously wealthy without creating value for other people, except when government was involved in a monopolistic or rent-seeking way.

It's trivial to steal somebody's lunch money. It's much harder to become a multi-billionaire without making something that a lot of other people wanted to spend money on. (If those other people were forced to spend money on it by the power of the government, it's a different matter.)

Regulatory capture is just the beginning.

Just because two people agreed to trade doesn't mean value was created.

First there's externalities. Global warming caused by oil companies. Stochastic terrorism and fragmentation of our polity caused by social media and news companies. Healthcare crisis caused by fast food companies.

Second the notion of voluntary trade is a fairy tail that's ignorant of the underlying neuro and psychological processes that go into decision making. The dopamine system is stupidly easy to game. It's like if we got a bunch of moths to kill themselves by flying into a bright light somewhere and we call that voluntary, as if we weren't merely hacking ancient circuitry. That's what's happening now with opioids, fast food, social media and more.

>Just because two people agreed to trade doesn't mean value was created.

Reminds me of that adage: "Economics is the idea that if I pay you a dollar to step on shit and you in turn pay me the same dollar to step on shit, that makes for a better world"

Money is just an arbitrary mean of distributing production. In a capitalist society (and at a lesser extent in a mercantile one too), having a lot of "things", in this case money and capital: we can call wealth, is power (this has implication for anarchist beliefs).

Democracy and in a limited way, socialism (pensions for the elderly, healthcare, subsidized public transportation, i know this is not the original meaning, but for this its good enough) counterbalance the power gap between wealthy people and non-wealthy people, but clearly in the western world (at least in my country), the counterbalance is weaker and weaker.

I don't think a random millionaire like Eric Finman should have more power than a random citizen, and yet he have.

I don't think the "billionaire shouldn't exist" crowd actually exist. But i'm part of the "billionaires shouldn't have this much power" crowd, since it feels like in my country, they own the press, the executive and 40% of the legislative power. The judiciary power is the only one that might be a bit free from influence, but i'm not certain.

Billionaires existing is ipso facto evidence of extreme inequality in allocation of generated wealth - so extreme that there is no feasible justification for it. Therefore, billionaires should not exist. A more verbose way to say the same thing is that society should be structured in ways that make it impossible to collect so much wealth produced by other people as economic rent.

Ok, i agree with the later point. I don't know yet if I agree with the first.

There are commenters on this very page who count themselves among the “billionaires should not exist” crowd.

Let me rephrase this: i don't think people saying 'billionaires shouldn't exist' are against their existence, but against the disproportionate amount of power they have.

Of course I see a difference between those two; I just don’t think it’s a problem. Over many decades, many millions of people transferred some of their power to Patagonia as a result of their belief that they’d rather have the Patagonia product than the amount of power that money represented. Millions were made better off, by their own value function.

This is actually a great way of looking at it.

Patagonia here is the exception, that's why we're all here talking about it!

I didn't want to give my bit of power to my health insurer, but guess what, I have to have healthcare to live and there's effectively one local hospital I can choose.

I didn't want to give my ~~~bit~~~ hefty chunk of power to the company that gatekeeps the patent on insulin, but I really didn't have much choice on that one.

I didn't want to give my bit of power to the telecom conglomerate, but did I have a choice? I need to be online to participate in today's society.

I didn't want to give my bit of power to Google, but... uhh actually I didn't give it to them, they stole it by spying on me.

The reality is that concentrations of power that are inherent to our system of free exchange inevitably congeal into something that looks a lot less free. All of these examples (and there are so many, most of our economy is like this!) don't really represent individual value functions, because when power gets concentrated enough, it becomes possible to take choice away.

Health insurance and medical care are all highly regulated industries with exceptionally high cost of entry; one could call it a broken market. It's not competitive at all. I always marvel at how much better the whole experience is when I take my dog to the vet than when I myself go see a doctor, and can't help but wonder if there wasn't so much state intervention (or even just wiser intervention) in medicine, my experience would be different.

Forms of insulin for which the patent has expired are affordable. The stuff under patent is expensive but objectively better at its job. One could argue that the forms in between (patent recently expired but not widely available as generics in the market) are again due to the result of onerous regulations keeping competition out of that market.

Telecommunications, at least the hardwired kind, is a natural monopoly and I wish some smarter incentive-structuring would take place in that market; maybe public ownership of the infrastructure with competitive private service providers operating on top of it. Wireless is generally more competitive and you can actually be online for less money than you think.

I'm not sure what your point was about Google? You certainly don't have to use their services.

I didn't want to seem long winded, but the market structures you describe are common to many if not most markets we have for goods and services, at least here in the US.

For example:

Food, agriculture, energy, media (print/radio/movies/home video), most commodities, productive inputs... there is little that you can buy that is not part of what I would loosely call a "conglomerate" -- that is, a concentration of capital so large and intense that it tends to influence the markets in which it operates. In fact, markets are today less competitive than they have ever been.

Those things that are (I would argue, seem) "competitive" here, like fashion, consumer products, and the like, are frequently as or more exploitative and influence markets (specifically, labor markets) abroad, up to and including slavery. Just because we don't feel that pain doesn't mean others are free of it.

This is because we have done nearly nothing, culturally, politically, economically, or psychologically, to stop the movement of power -- just as you described -- out of the hands of the many people and into the hands of the few entities that control such markets.

The free market, where each individual has the power of their dollar, is delicate indeed. Much more delicate than we have appreciated in the last several decades.

OTOH concentration of capital makes companies like Tesla and SpaceX possible. It also makes large, self-sustaining charities possible.

It’s a convenience for rich people to find their own ventures, but it’s not the only way for ventures to be funded. If the wealth was distributed among thousands more then those folks would still be looking to invest it, many in EV or space tech, and some might just pool their money into venture capital coops that perform the same function as individual rich folks etc. (allowing individual entities to be pitched to instead of each of thousands of investors.)