This is emotional pleading, not a serious argument of any sort, based on the core premise of "this person has more money than me, and I don't like that, therefore I should get some".
Wealth and income inequality has well-studied negative effects on society.
The ability for a single person to own over $100m in assets is not a human right. It's not a protected class or status. It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake.
And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth. This completely insane $100 million figure is so small to those men that you would have to earn $100 million every single year for over 30 lifetimes to get to their level of wealth.
It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy. That's a shallow way to think about it. It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this.
Think for a second what would happen to you if Jeff Bezos banned you from using all Amazon products. Would the Internet even work anymore for you? You know, every company has the right to refuse service to anyone. This one man can basically cut you off from television, e-commerce, Internet, employment (if you do engineering work on AWS), even Thursday Night Football.
Because, factually, the statement "Well when you have over 100m in assets in your pile of gold in the dragon lair, its time to be extractive." is emotional and meritless. There's literally zero value here. It's an opinion. In fact, you doubled down on this throughout your response.
> It's an abhorrent misappropriation of human resources. It is a societal mistake.
This is also factless, meritless, emotional pleading.
> And let's not forget, people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have multiple THOUSANDS of $100 million dollars in net worth...
As is all of this.
> It's not about demanding some of the money from the wealthy.
That's literally what you're doing.
> It's about the inherent power imbalance and exploitation that comes along with being excessively wealthy like this.
It's clearly not about the power imbalance and exploitation, because someone genuinely interested in curbing those effects would address them directly. The fact that everyone who claims to care about the destabilizing effects of concentrated wealth immediately goes to "we should take the wealth away" instead of "we should try to figure out why concentrated wealth is destabilizing and address that" is extremely strong evidence that the goal is, actually, to take money from the wealthy.
If you consider pointing out that you're not making logical arguments, and instead engaging in emotional pleading, to be insulting (especially when, upon that being pointed out, you can't make a rational argument and instead continue pleading), then you should take a step back, because there's a good chance you're engaging in advocacy and emotional manipulation as opposed to genuine, rational arguments in good faith.
You see a problem and you refuse to fix it, and instead look for a root cause that should be addressed instead, that will then fix the problem itself.
The problem with that kind of thinking is that that’s not how the real world works. The problem of homelessness is that people don’t have homes. It’s not something else. Give people homes and you solve it. But people with RCS try to solve it through jobs, training, education, etc. All those things are nice but they won’t fix the problem, which is that people are homeless.
Likewise, the problem of wealth inequality can only be solved by reducing wealth inequality. There is no other solution. Just tax rich people until they’re not rich anymore.
Have you considered how this is supposed to work? If being homeless means you get a free home, millions of people would purposely become "homeless" so they could eliminate their housing costs. Also, homes are quite expensive, especially in areas with high homelessness, so where does the money come from?
Meanwhile one of the primary actual causes of homelessness is zoning that prevents new housing from being built, causing people to be unable to afford it. If you just have the government buy up existing housing stock for the homeless, the scarcity is not resolved at all, you just cause new people to become homeless because you remove the housing they'd have bought from the market.
To actually solve it you can't just do the naive "have the government pay for it" thing, you have to understand the root cause, which is that you have to not just give housing to the homeless but build new housing across the overall market so it isn't in undersupply.
> Likewise, the problem of wealth inequality can only be solved by reducing wealth inequality. There is no other solution. Just tax rich people until they’re not rich anymore.
This is exactly the same level of not thinking it through. Mark Zuckerberg has billions and it gives him control over Facebook. But if you take his money and leave Facebook, someone will still be the CEO and that person will still have all of that power. The problem is not the money, it's the size of the company.