1. Billionaires* shouldn't exist. Their existence** is bad for society. Some people say, "Another's wealth doesn't hurt you- in fact you should be thankful to those great billionaires for stimulating the economy, creating jobs and investment opportunities, etc." I think that is bullshit, because there are several obvious ways that extreme wealth of a few individuals DOES hurt the general populace. Here are three:
a. Those with extreme wealth hoard and guard resources that could create more happiness for more people if they were shared and accessible. Waterfront is my favorite example of this. A huge portion of America's riverfront, lakefront, and oceanfront lands are the private property of a small number of rich, super rich, and ultra rich people, such that the 99% of normal, non-rich people like me are forced into fighting each other over a few tiny slivers of public access points. And in the most expensive waterfront areas the dang rich people who own the property aren't even HOME most of the time. Their gross mansions are empty, because they're off in some OTHER mansion somewhere because they're so stupidly rich they own like ten of them.
b. Extreme wealth inequality fucks up democracy. Democracy is based on the idea that every person has an equal, intrinsic worth - a soul that matters, regardless of if they're rich or poor. (And regardless of their body pigmentation and whether their gonads make eggs or sperm.) But the existence of a few individuals with massive piles of excess wealth, combined with a political system with few campaign finance restrictions, combined with how well lobbying and corruption work, combined with monopolistic media network ownership by said few individuals, makes it so that a very wealthy person's influence on government is many orders of magnitude greater than a normal person's influence. And this gets worse over time as laws get passed that allow the ultra wealthy to influence things in ever more ways, and disenfranchise normal voters. We need to fix this not only with reforms to protect democracy from undue influence by ultra rich people, but also with reforms to prevent people from becoming ultra rich in the first place. (I think a lot of people would agree with me on the first part of that, but I'm not sure as many are ready for the second part because we are often sustained by the fantasy that someday, somehow we, too could become ultra rich.)
c. Extreme wealth inequality fucks up rule of law. Rule of law is supposed to go along with democracy to ensure that individual rights and safety are protected for everyone, regardless of their wealth. But extreme wealth buys armies of lawyers, fixers, cronies in government, etc., so that rich people become ever less accountable to the rule of law, and instead can deploy it as a weapon to intimidate and harass non-rich people. Just look at how little consequences there have been for Jeffrey Epstein's associates, for example, and how much flaunting of environmental, trade, copyright, and labor laws today's ultra rich people get away with.
Sometimes apologists for the world's billionaires will admit that extreme wealth inequality is bad, but will make some kind of argument like, "It has to be this way, because the only alternative is COMMUNISM!" That is also bullshit. There are ALL KINDS of regulations, policies, and reforms to economic and social policies that can promote equality and protect democracy without being anything like communism. Getting the laws and regulations tuned properly to maintain balance is a challenging and never ending task, but it's better than just letting it go and having inequality get to the extreme emperor and slaves kind of level that its morphing into today.
2. Trillionaires are 1000 times worse than billionaires. A trillion is a thousand times a billion, so all the things that are bad about a billionaire existing** apply times a thousand to the case of the trillionaire.
*Since how much wealth a billion represents depends on the value of the currency, inflation, etc., there should be some independent definition of this level of extreme wealth, which won't go out of date. One way to do it is relative to the wealth of a median household in the country or the world. I saw one reference that in 2022 the median net worth of an American household was $193,000. If we take a billion and divide it by that median net worth ($1,000,000,000 / $193,000) we get 5,181.
Which means a billionaire is someone who has over 5000 times as much money as a typical person. Having even 100 times as much wealth as a typical person is hard to excuse, in my opinion, and I think its dumb for a society to let individuals accumulate more than that.
**On the issue of existence, what I mean is that nobody should be allowed to have that much money - not that the people with that much money now don't have a right to live. They have a right to live, because we all do. They just don't have a right to hoard that much money, because nobody does. I'm advocating for societal measures to break up their monopolies and trim their wealth down to less dangerous levels. I'm not advocating for a spree of assassinations. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
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