You speak as if almost all these societal benefits are not paid for by willful trading, and by taxes.

Did this particular billionaire evade taxes? used tons of governmental subsidies, or government-granted monopolies? Does this company look like it did not pay its fair share back?

Isn't that the point? The current rules allow, even encourage such individual wealth. That is the policy failure.

Outcomes for the median person in places where rules do not allow or encourage such individual wealth are almost universally poorer than places that do. The very system that allows billionaires to exist also incentivizes the creation of wealth that benefits everyone.

Source please.

The research I've seen on this shows the opposite, eg the scandinavian model.

Once you get past a certain level, the money itself no longer has any meaning, it's more about keeping score. We should look for ways to satisfy that drive without sucking wealth out of the rest of society.

All Scandinavian countries have billionaires. Sweden and Norway even have more billionaires per capita than the US. Scandinavian countries don't treat billionaires as policy failures. They merely have higher taxes across the board. In fact, the US tax system is actually more progressive because we don't have a VAT and much lower low and middle income tax brackets.

Moreover, the Scandinavian system locks in economic stratification much more than the American one

Hæ? How is that? Kind regards, bewildered Norwegian.

I tried "gini coefficient vs per capita GDP" and "gini coefficient vs per capita GDP" in wolfram alpha, but it just looks like a random scattering (other than the notable absence of high gini coefficient, high per capita income countries).

Clearly I've missed something, would you mind elaborating?

Taking a look at the raw data on Wolfram Alpha, it seems like a lot of the super low income countries are muddying the data. There are many low income countries with Gini coefficients all across the spectrum. I don't have the time to do it now, but you might find a pattern in the data if you filter out countries with GDP/capita <$5000 or <$10000.

For some reason, the plot defaulted to log for me. If you put it in linear mode, you can probably eyeball it. I mean we're looking for an obvious trend and it appears to just be completely random.

The socio-legal conditions that permit the building of wealth, like strong property rights and free markets, are necessary but not sufficient; so you wouldn't expect to see a correlation between them.

There are only a few countries that have a low Gini coefficient (more income equality) along with a high per capita GDP (more overall wealth) in north or western Europe such as Finland, Norway, or Belgium, which are very much the exceptions; for the most part, they all have a strong cultural background of being industrious, and in the case of Norway have a lot of oil.

According to the Wikipedia page on the Gini coefficient, the top 20 lowest Gini (highest income equality) countries are: Slovenia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Iceland, Norway, Belgium, Finland, Kazakhstan, Algeria, Kyrgyzstan, the Netherlands, Denmark, East Timor, Sweden, Kosova, Malta, and Iraq. You'll notice that besides the northwestern European exceptions, they largely fall more on the "everyone is equally poor" side of the spectrum.

The US is in the bottom half of income equality, yet has one of the highest GDP per capita and the highest median household disposable income, which many agree is a very good way of measuring how wealthy ordinary people are.

To summarize, obviously having high income inequality does not cause a wealthy nation; but instead (going back to my original thesis) the factors that permit the building of a wealthy nation can cause high income inequality, which isn't a problem as long as the rising tide is lifting all boats. The few countries that are both wealthy and have low income inequality are virtually exclusively monoethnic societies that have a strong cultural emphasis on both the factors that are conducive to wealth-creation (like education and delayed gratification) as well as factors that forbid egregious displays of income inequality (like the Scandinavian Law of Jante).

I may go one step further and theorize that the same global factors that led to the rapid increase in wealth around the world in the past half-century or so did much to hide the failings of more egalitarian, "socialist" economic policies, much like the period of very low real interest rates of the last twenty years hid the failings of unprofitable VC-backed startups; and now that it looks like we are entering a more turbulent period with geopolitical instability and energy shortages, we may very well end up seeing a sharp reduction in the standard of living in countries like France or Spain as the ever-increasing redistribution of wealth in response to one crisis after another make it harder and harder to actually produce wealth.

Are you representing that conclusion as based on your set of axioms (which is fine and I can’t argue against) or suggesting that those axioms are universal?

I don't think there's much to assume here.

Governments around the world have rules about companies, salaries, taxes and so on.

There exist a large number of billionaires.

Therefore, assuming most of them follow the rules, the rules allow such a concentration of individual wealth.

I'm not against innovators getting relatively rich, that's often the incentive to innovate, or at least to push through the 'perspiration' part of that activity, but there should be balance.

Sorry, I was unclear. I was referring only to the last point (that that amount of individual wealth is a policy failure) when asking about axioms.

I completely agree that the current rules at least allow such wealth accumulation, which if applied across 8 billion people means that many will choose that path.

Well of course we can disagree whether or not billionaires are good or bad. I realize people at one extreme subscribe to the 'red in tooth and claw' natural law view of how society should be organized, and others to the opposite 'we're all in this together' view.

Personally I think the existence of billionaires is a systemic failure, is morally suspect to say the least, and that such extreme inequality is bad for society and slows progress, ultimately.

Indeed, they did not create all that value alone. They also provided stable jobs for many thousands of employees along the way. We should also celebrate that and I was remiss to not mention it originally.

Are you sure it's not rather thousands of workers who provided stable labor that enabled the owners to realize their goals?

And in the context

Created a billion dollar company that people buy from to enjoy the outdoors (at least some of the time for a large portion of the customers)(or at least signal)

I dont believe Patagonia uses slave labor in their factories

Exactly.

Hey, since I played a roll in your success, can you please send me 10% of your paycheck every month? No doubt you won't protest since "the entire structure of society enabled" you to gain such wealth.

We call that “taxes” and people who are not billionaires pay more than 10% of their income a month

Billionaires also pay more than 10% of their income in taxes.