One could argue that everyone has the same responsibilities to society at large. Thus for every Chuck Feeny and Bill Gates, you, personally you, have an obligation to create many billion dollars of value and give it away. If you don't do that, you're worse than any evil billionaire you care to name. They at least are paying millions of dollars in taxes for any money they pull out of investments. How many millions in taxes have you paid?
This seems like a strange argument since someone who is say, running a large conglomerate, benefits much more from society's infrastructure and organization than a layperson. It then seems reasonable for their obligation to be proportionally greater.
In the US, according to the CBO[0], the people who are in the top two quintiles of income pay for all services and infrastructure. Saying that these people benefit more from this infrastructure than a middle income household is very odd. It's like I decide to be a farmer and need more water, so I dig a well to water my farm. Then my neighbor sees the well and asks if they can get drinking water from it and I say sure. Then they tell me I get more benefit from the well and I have to pay to maintain it.
Their large incomes are made possible by infrastructure. The analogy doesn't make much sense to me since even the most prolific billionaire didn't build much of this infrastructure.
As a class they did. Some of it was built by billionaires past, but is maintained by the current generation of the well to do. Regardless, the middle income household certainly did not build it.
Oh, I didn't know that "billionaires as a class" digged roads, erected buildings, manned trains, stores, telephones, farms, factories... "The low income households didn't build it", you have a very twisted definition of what that means.
You're ignoring that there is more to creating something than just paying for it. Someone had to exist and sacrifice their time and also their body (construction is dirty and taxing work) to build the infrastructure. By saying "Regardless, the middle income household certainly did not build it." you are not only disrespecting the work, you're also failing to understand what money really is about. It's one thing to be, narcissistic, ignorant and rude, it's another to be plain stupid.
I can trivially mint my own currency and become a billionaire yet I am unable to build infrastructure. When a street is about to be repaved I don't see any billionaires around, all I see is workers doing their job. Money on its own is worthless, it's just a convenient fiction that functions as a lubricant to make trade easy. Without a second party accepting your money on the other side you can't do anything with it. The power of a billionaire doesn't lie in their money, it lies in the ability to steer thousands of people to work for the billionaire. The middle class IS the wealth of the billionaire.
People are weird and think the abstraction is reality. Maybe it becomes clear when you look at a retirement scheme. Many of them are based on the idea that you contribute to a pension fund while young and that pension fund is immediately paying out to retirees. Doesn't this sound odd? Isn't this a pyramid scheme where we need more young people than old people? Why aren't people saving up their own money and then use their own money during retirement? Because that can't work. Imagine a closed community with 10 people who do not have children but are working and saving up money. Now all of them have retired and each of them has $1000000 saved up. Everyone is a millionaire but there is no food because everyone retired, nobody is working on the farms. The money only had value because there was a community of people working in exchange for money. Once the workers are gone, so is the value of that money.
Money and labor are tied together because all material goods are the product of labor (including infrastructure). Each dollar you own is just a promise that someone else will work for you. Billionaires just managed to get a lot of people to promise to work for them. That's why they don't have to work themselves.
In that argument you assume that the net effect to society of their winning billions of dollars is zero, which is obviously nonsense. For instance the net effect to society of somebody like Charles Koch is, undeniably, absurdly negative. He has (not even being hyperbolic here) the blood of thousands on his hands, with his pushing of climate change denialism. We could even argue about the net impact of Bill Gates (is Microsoft a net positive to society or negative? it's at least not obvious, and one can argue).
> One could argue that everyone has the same responsibilities to society at large.
Yes you could argue that.
> Thus for every Chuck Feeny and Bill Gates, you, personally you, have an obligation to create many billion dollars of value and give it away
Now that is a big jump. It does not follow that we all have the same responsibility that we all have a specific responsibility.
Historically some rights were tied to the ability of the upper classes to fulfill some base responsibilities that the lower the classes could never possibly meet. Such as being able to afford a full set of bronze armour and a spear. Thus achieving both moral and social superiority.
This is a good turnaround of the previous statement. It is incorrect to assume there is only so much wealth, and subsequently, billionaires need to be taxed in order to maintain our standard of living. Most billionaires have created something entirely new, not hoarded some scarce resource from the rest of us.
"To maintain our standard of living" is not even close to the reason we need to tax billionaires.
Let me put it to you this way: I couldn't give 2 shits how many mansions, yachts, and Ferraris anybody has, but, when there are people[0] who literally have the ability to spend an amount of money greater than the entire GDP of a small country[1] to influence my country's elections, then I have a problem with that. Put another way, it's not the amount of money that certain people have accumulated that bothers me. It's the amount of undue influence those people get because of it that's the problem. It's not 1 person = 1 vote. It's more like $1M = 1 vote, when you take that $1M and apply it in the right places (such as directly into the pockets of politicians by way of lobbyists).
Find a way to fix that problem, and then we can talk about allowing billionaires to exist. Until then, America isn't a republic: it's a de facto oligarchy. And that, I have a real problem with.
$1M 1vote is no problem. So even a big short billionaire cannot influence much since 50,000 votes would be $50bn. Ok, this might effect Slovenia. One time. And then its a former billionaire.
Perhaps, but only to an extent. It is not as if, if only average people were clever enough, we could all become billionaires, and the GDP could be 10,000x higher than it currently is. There are, in fact, scarce resources – including land and minerals and other natural resources, but also labor. Most billionaires become that way by being in charge of a large company, one with a lot of workers. Well, you can't be the ruler without people to rule over. And if not for you, those people would still exist and would be making some other contribution to society.
