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Re:Why there's no such thing as a good billionaire by kthejoker2 on Sunday October 16, 2022 @01:23PM (#33225367)
More like ... we have lots of evidence that handing a small handful of essentially random people a large and disproportionate concentration of humanity's entire wealth tends to make them:

* act above the law

* use their wealth to attack and generally bully others to get their way

* exert disproportionate influence (relative to their actual insight or utility of their actions) on people's lives, government, and society as a whole

* choose other winners and losers in the market (this is not inherently good or bad, but when bad it is disproportionately bad)

* decide what things the rest of humanity should pay more or less attention to

* consume exorbitantly in the face of still-existent human poverty, disease, security, environmental concerns, and so on

and most directly

* decide how and to whom that wealth will be distributed long after they've "earned" it, thus continuing a cycle of haves and have nots

And so based on that evidence, all things being equal, having less concentration of wealth and more equity is better for society as a whole. (See: Friedman, Piketty, Smith, Keynes, George, et al)

Whatever argument you may have about this billionaire or that billionaire, hopefully it's easy to understand why we as a society should be exceptionally wary of the negative impacts of encouraging overly concentrated wealth versus the positive benefits of encouraging risktaking and entrepreneurial reward.

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