Focusing on the individuals is WRONG. Stop doing it! People are people, and - as far as capitalist societies go - money is success, and "skimming" is unfortunately the dominant and easiest strategy to get it. Blaming the individuals here gets us nowhere. You could swap low and high society at an individual level and likely be even worse off because there is at least some chance that those who are currently rich did so by producing large social value. But it is not the fault of skimmers that they skim. These people born in a society with different incentives would produce social value instead of taking it from others.
Attacking "Billionaires" is easy to do, but its the wrong target. A "wealth tax" will probably make a pretty good bandaid, but for a real solution here, we need to think harder about fixing the root cause - that skimming strategies are dominant in the first place. In other worse, say we pass a high tax. Great. Except it doesn't change the best action for people(rich or poor): make money by skimming. So now instead of having an unequal society of skimmers, we end up with a more equal society of skimmers.
Way too much capital right now is devoted to skimming: marketing/advertising, legal/accounting, real estate, and finance have ballooned. The largest tech companies in the world are ad companies. Lawyers and accountants spent significant time on tax avoidance. Real estate is run on speculation and bubbles. Finance is now more about about the short term rather than long term value investing. It didn't used to be the case, but in the modern world, the margins on these departments make them better ways to spend our time and resources to get money. I wish I had a mental model of things good enough to suggest what the right fix would be, but as a random guess, I'd rather see taxes on the industries above than a tax on billionaires.
Edit: in retrospect this rant went overboard. Wealth tax/higher taxes on extreme wealth are probably still needed as part of the plan. Easy to get carried away with rants lol!
Attacking "Billionaires" is easy to do, but its the wrong target. A "wealth tax" will probably make a pretty good bandaid, but for a real solution here, we need to think harder about fixing the root cause - that skimming strategies are dominant in the first place. In other worse, say we pass a high tax. Great. Except it doesn't change the best action for people(rich or poor): make money by skimming. So now instead of having an unequal society of skimmers, we end up with a more equal society of skimmers.
Way too much capital right now is devoted to skimming: marketing/advertising, legal/accounting, real estate, and finance have ballooned. The largest tech companies in the world are ad companies. Lawyers and accountants spent significant time on tax avoidance. Real estate is run on speculation and bubbles. Finance is now more about about the short term rather than long term value investing. It didn't used to be the case, but in the modern world, the margins on these departments make them better ways to spend our time and resources to get money. I wish I had a mental model of things good enough to suggest what the right fix would be, but as a random guess, I'd rather see taxes on the industries above than a tax on billionaires.
Edit: in retrospect this rant went overboard. Wealth tax/higher taxes on extreme wealth are probably still needed as part of the plan. Easy to get carried away with rants lol!