Billionaires created the goods and services they did DESPITE government, not because of it.

Red tape and regulation has second-order effects, many of which keep you employed. By all means, you should leave America if you have any hope for a nation that eschews regulation in it's entirety. You should stay if you want to get paid to build roads, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization

The government on the other hand, can just tax you (often without cause or justification) and offer nothing in return for what they took by force.

Yet you'll find many people decrying billionaires as the great evil while silent on governments who are in many ways, far far worse.

Now you're right that they have more money and they can spend it. Some things like hiring a lawyer to sue someone are too expensive for an average person but accessible to billionaires. Rich people can do things with taxes loopholes that aren't practical for the average schmoe.

It is true that they often have power at their company and sometimes they use it overtly or covertly. But even this can be limited because they have to work with partners and other shareholders. The CEO of a big publicly traded company can't just break the rules because they're on a power trip.

Don't be obtuse. The people we're talking about don't go to the Post office, or the grocery store, and they certainly don't queue up. They don't even queue up at the airport, they have private planes, private security, private everything.

And "they only get one vote each election day". Voting is the least amount of political influence that a person can have.

There's this mythology built around great wealth and it's largely false. They can't just snap their fingers and make things happen as if by magic. There's no special magic power that only they get. They have to pay for what they want and just like normal humans, they can only spend the money once.

Just like how someone who has $200k can get a mortgage to buy a house, whereas someone with only $20k cannot. That's economic power that comes from having wealth to leverage.

NASA, like it always has.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

p.s. The best and most HN-good part of your comment here was "I build roads".

Strawman.

No one is claiming "without utilizing".

However, they are part of the public that paid. Moreover, if I let you use my pen to take a note, I'm not entitled to all of the gain that you get from taking said note.

> No one is claiming ...

> I'm not entitled to all of the gain ...

You put up two more of them to counter one.

I agree everyone should pay taxes, including billionaires, but this is like saying if my neighbor doesn't give me his couch, he's stealing from me. It's just logically (and morally) wrong.

For simplicity we only do this when a sale of an asset is made.

Claiming that adjusting this timing is theft is ridiculous, Larry Page has a debt that hasn't come due for his profits is all. Adjusting the timing on the payments of that debt isn't theft.

Per capita the rich get the best deal BTW as billionaires don't exist by a few orders of magnitude without the benefits of society. Sure they pay more taxes but they also benefit massively in comparison to most people in absolute terms of benefit.

In tax code sense I am not even sure the effects of buy, borrow, and die have even been settled.

EDIT: can't respond but "pay no taxes but at least your kids do" isn't exactly a fix

Forgive me if I do not accept the proposition that the non-wealthy had equal influence in the decision how to fund the government. The wealthy decided 'wages earned' would be the determining factor to fund the government, not wealth. I guess I would have done the same if I had so much wealth I didn't need to earn a wage.

However it is accomplished, all citizens should share the same impact on their lives ( wealth being the best approximation I can think of ) in contributing to the annual cost of funding the government.

Put another way: it is immoral for the wealthiest and most powerful in society to shift the burden of paying for government away from themselves and onto the rest of society.

Unfortunately everyone realized the stock market is a shell game where there is no price limit and capital gains doesn't kick in until you sell and even then at a reduced rate...

Better neighbor analogy: your neighbor asks for small favors all the time, and you provide. One day you ask him for one and he leaves the neighborhood entirely instead of obliging.