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.
I come over and tell you, “this isn’t healthy! Nobody should weigh 10,000 pounds, we weren’t designed to exist that way!”
You come back to me and tell me that I’m making an emotional argument that isn’t backed up by facts.
But, the problem with that is that this is common sense, and it’s even backed by a bunch of science and observed reality. Someone who weighs 10,000 pounds basically can’t exist, and if they did it would be so ridiculous it’s almost incomprehensible.
I think it actually should be on you and not me to prove that people owning that much wealth is something that should be considered to be okay, not the other way around. You counter my “emotional pleading” with your own emotional “nuh uh, you are wrong” argument.
Who do you know that has over $100 million in net worth that you feel would be hurt by a proposal to tax unearned gains on people with $100 million net worth and above? I don’t know anyone like that. What I do know is that I would personally benefit from my government having more income to fix potholes and pay teacher salaries.
And that’s the other double standard: when the wealthy people advocate for policy that hurts the majority like tax cuts for the wealthy, they are seen as smart businessmen. But as soon as I advocate for something that hurts the wealthy, I’m being emotional and unreasonable.
Sorry dude, I’m just advocating for what’s in my best interest. It’s in my best interest as an average person who isn’t a billionaire or millionaire for these wealthy people to not exist. They’ve done nothing positive for me and everything negative. Every penny or nickel or dime that goes to their extravagant pay package is a penny or nickel that could have gone back to me, their customer. It would be better for me if my company CEO made $200,000 a year instead of $20,000,000 a year. That could at least buy us a solid pizza patty.