> No single human needs a billion dollars. The end.

Does one single human have a billion dollars or do they have ownership shares in companies which generate jobs and economic value?

Big difference if you ask me — this is what I like to call the Scrooge McDuck Fallacy.

I don't think that's a meaningful distinction. At the billionaire level, they can easily convert one into the other and do much more complicated things. I'll note also that you're ignoring an important category of wealth, which is rentier activity, where people with money don't create jack, but instead get control of something other people need so as to extract cash from them.

Either way, should that person become unhinged, or is a bad person, they can do enormous damage to the world, unilaterally, or jeopardize democracy by bribery and influence, as the Koch brothers (buying Supreme court seats) and others (Trump, insurrection) have done.

Both bribery and insurrection are already illegal.

Are we punishing Future Crime now?

We are heading into feudalism. A few people hoard all the properties, companies and services. Antitrust laws are ignored, corruption is the norm. Student loans, medical bills and mortgage cripple common people without possibility to pay them off. People become economic vassals

It's weird how when this topic rears its head there's always someone who tries to educate others about how they confused liquidity and wealth.

Someone who has all their wealth tied up employing thousands of people and making the world a better place is a lot different than an anonymous billionaire who just lives off their savings and does nothing for society.

Whenever this topic rears its head people always assume the latter and try to convince others to do the same.

No billionaire has all their wealth tied up like that. None. Zero. Their wealth managers would have kittens if they did, because from a wealth management perspective, it's inefficient and too risky. Above a certain level of wealth, you're going to "take money off the table" so that you can do important things like guaranteeing your comfortable future and paying your wealth managers.

But even that's conceding too much to your fantasy. The gauzy notion that a billionaire owning shares in something means they're "making the world a better place" is sus in all sorts of ways.

One, a lot of shares in things are making the world worse. The fossil fuel industry alone is worth trillions of dollars, and they're vigorously exacerbating an existential threat to humanity. There are trillions more tied up in finance, most of which is not serving anybody, but instead is parasitic on actual productive work. And don't even get me started on private equity's vigorous (and profitable) destruction of value.

Two, another huge chunk of richie-rich money is from rentier activities. Look at all the shitty landlords out there, for example. Are they making the world better? No, not at all. They're going to buy a thing that people need and squeeze those people for all they can get, generally doing the minimum (or well less) in terms of maintenance.

And three, the productive stuff would still happen in a world where we didn't have billionaires. The magic power of the market would still be there to organize flows of value. Indeed, I'd be glad to argue that it would work better. Billionaires face very little in the way of market discipline. Look, for example, at Elon Musk and Twitter. Even he admits he burned $24 billion so far. Has that slowed him down? Nope. He's still stepping on rake after rake. While his car company also isn't doing so great, having lost $500 billion or so in value.

>No single human needs a billion dollars

And no human being needs however much you're earning, as people in third world countries survive on far less. Life's about more than "need", and if you give the government enough power to prevent people having more than they need, you inevitably create a horrible dystopia, probably accompanied by genocide, like happened in Russia, Chinaa and Cambodia when they let the government make the final decision on how much wealth people are allowed to have. Because when the people in the government have that power, they'll inevitably decide that they're the only ones who should have wealth.

That is regrettably low on data. Take a look at countries sorted by Gini coefficient (a measure of wealth inequality): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

Note, for example, that the Nordic countries do very well by this measure. I'm no expert, but why do you think Denmark is a "horrible dystopia, probably accompanied by genocide"?

You know there is a wealth gini right [0] which has Sweden actually being higher than the US and Denmark 4 spots below it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...

Those are very dodgy numbers. Created by one company from patchy and suspicious data, and then just SWAGging the numbers for most of the countries. No peer review. Source data and code both unavailable. And even they say their numbers are "based on the view that wealth inequality is likely to be highly correlated with income inequality", so I think the numbers I used are the better ones for this case.

This is quite the slipper slope fallacy.

We can absolutely have surtaxes on personal wealth that effectively limit people to a billion dollars.

We could for example have a 100% surtax on building a superyacht or buying an island in Hawaii or any political donations above $50,000.

These taxes could then just offset payroll and income taxes for lower wage citizens. Pure redistribution, tied to work.

Taxing superyachts isn't Cambodia.

Do we care more about the fact that she contributed certain amount or any particular impact she had with her contributions?

No. Every billionaire is a policy failure, and cloaking wealth with "altruistic spending" is a distraction.