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I think its more a "we shouldn't have billionaires right now" rather than a blanket prevention of billionaires. They are being a cancer on our politics in the bribery scheme we have from Citizens United in that they are paying politicians to prevent the American people from getting their basic needs met. The existence of billionaires isn't inherently wrong. Hell, if we ever figure out asteroid mining, there'd be quadrillionaires. But, its the psychotic system we have of having billionaires is by them bribe the politicians to deny the people their basic needs. At this point, such behavior is parasitic.
So what level of wealth inequality are you okay with?
Some because not everyone creates the same value or works as hard as others. We should have things that motivate people to willingly take on riskier or more challenging work. We shouldn’t hope that someone is going to show up and be willing to do brain surgery when we need it.
Its not a measure of the level of acceptable inequality by measuring how excessive the top is. The measurement of intolerability is how we treat billionaires at the expense how we treat those on the floor. It's that we have billionaires AND homeless. It's that we have billionaires who control Congress for profit at the expense of universal health insurance when all other developed nations have it.
I'm working through my own thoughts on this so please bear down with me here: If we replace the term 'billionaire' and just say 'rich' (since the 'billion' amount is incidental to the times), and replace 'money' with 'access to resources' (which is what money represents), then I would contend that the rich have access to more resources precisely because the poor have little to no access to resources. If the poor were to have access to more resources, it would then be because the rich have less access than they did prior. So I guess what I'm getting at is this: It is intolerable that they are rich, regardless of what they do with the power and access that comes with extreme wealth, because that wealth is directly the same wealth(and thus access to resources) that the poor do not have. [I'm not sure how I myself would even answer 'what level of inequality am I okay with' but I'm thinking it through]
That makes sense in the old market before the assembly line (and now AI), but it doesn't make sense in the post-scarcity world we live in today.
Not necessarily. The poor having access to resources would actually increase the wealth at the top because then there would be more customers that can pay their bills.
Sort of. Some resources are scarce (take uranium as an example in a situation where people bid on uranium to build a nuclear plan). However, some are not (like medicine and health insurance or housing (we can easily build more condos) or transportation (we could build metros for transit to work, but we can't have that because the car industry bought our politicians)).
*Edit: Here's a simplified way to think of it. Pushing down on the ceiling of the house could potentially cause it to sink into the mud. However, if we raise the foundation by putting it on stilts, it would raise up the ceiling (we even have skyscrapers in cities).
We absolutely still live in a world of scarcity. Im not sure why you think otherwise.
Money is the scarce resource. If people don't have money, they don't get access to any of this post-scarcity food.
Yeah, and then it gets stuck up there.
Billionaires are not just a funny artifact of the system, they are the leeches draining it of all its blood. They are giant reservoirs collecting our river water and keeping it from the water cycle.
You're essentially defending the market as it is today by pointing to how it was 40 years ago. We could fix it, roll time back and lift the house, but then we'll be dealing with this again 40 years from now; it's not just citizen's united, the house is sinking.
How do you have billionaires in a system that doesn't pool money into fewer and fewer hands? This is a contradiction.