“No More Billionaires!”

Ponder this meme.

The respondent, Couts Moseley, is an internet friend and he nails it. The OP, "End Stage Capitalism," is (we can presume) a critic of the wealthy being allowed to become or stay wealthy, and a common misconception is that the ultra-rich simply sit on their money, Scrooge McDuck-fashion.

The reality is that no one became a billionaire by stuffing mattresses full of money. In fact, doing so is how they would become not-billionaires, because idle money loses value. Thanks, inflation and Federal Reserve. If they are not reinvesting their capital in their own or others ventures (including stocks), their money - just like yours or mine when we put it in a bank - is serving a productive purpose.

Beyond that, in purchasing goods and services that he considers valuable to him (in this case, a lavish wedding), he is sustaining many businesses large and small. Many people are getting paid for the goods and services associated with staging that wedding.

The implied argument by Mr. End Stage Capitalism is that Bezos's $50M could be better used. I assume here, by the government taking it and handing it out to the non-rich.

Is a wedding the most productive thing he could be doing with $50M? No, but neither is you paying for a Netflix streaming subscription. The only difference is in degree, and if you argue that one is more acceptable than the other, you are simply imposing a personal value judgment, not engaging in economic rationality.

Every one of us spends money on leisure, entertainment, finery, and other things that go above our basic needs. There are 300M Netflix subscribers, each spending from $8 to $25 - a month. That's a hell of a lot more money than a one-off wedding, even when that wedding costs $50M.

Every other argument about billionaires and the wealth they earned falls apart on similar grounds. It always boils down to, "I believe you have more than you need, so I would vote to send people with guns to take from you all but what I think you should get to keep."

It's just arrogant envy, divorced from morality or respect for others, and it's an unfortunately commonplace attitude in both our politicians and in the public at large. NYC's aspirating mayor, socialist (and apparently racist and antisemite) Zohran Mamdani, has declared that billionaires should not exist.

I wonder at what level he'd cap a person's wealth, and whether he'd again go after the wealthy after he has fleeced them once and burned through all he took.

Actually, no, I don't. Sure as the sun rises, when his first taxation doesn't get him as much as he wants, or when he burns through all he took, he'll go after the rich again. As Alvin Lee put it, "til there are no rich no more." And, then what?

Poverty for all, of course, because that's how socialism always turns out. Except for the ruling class - the politicians in charge and the apparatchiks that work for them. They are the only ones that actually benefit from socialism.