No, he - like everyone else, shouldn't be super rich at all.
Nobody has done enough in their lives to deserve such wealth. Nobody.
No? How about this guy?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
OK, maybe Stanislav Petrov. Maybe. And he never got any wealth in return for his genuinely meritorious actions.
<expletive deleted> them all.
And that, of course, is what this is all about -- economic systems should apparently be structured around catering to people's hatred for their outgroups.
If you've got, let's say, 500x median income for your nation or more, you should pay 100% tax on all further income.
That's a policy prescription with nothing going for it except catering to people's hatred for their outgroups. No one at all benefits from it except a few demagogue politicians who will get votes from people who decide their vote out of spitefulness. If you set somebody's marginal tax rate to 90% you'll collect more money from him -- if you set it to 100% at some level then he'll stop producing when he reaches that level and go on vacation. This implies that a 100% tax rate is not motivated by any good it will do; the goal is purely to harm somebody.
But nobody in the history of the world has done enough with their lives to earn more than $16M in today's dollars.
Do you have scientific evidence for that claim or is it just something we're supposed to take your word for?
Clearly a profit incentive is useful. Equally clearly, no individual has done so much more than the average as to deserve four or five, much less six orders of magnitude more than any ordinary working person.
How is that clear? You clearly haven't examined every rich individual; so you must have some theory of deservingness that implies it as a corollary. What's your theory of deservingness?
Whatever your theory is, you also appear to be implying that how much a person's income is ought to be based on how much somebody else thinks he deserves. Do you have an argument in favor of such a system, or are you just taking it for granted that that's how economies should be structured?
In our economy, there's very little connection between what anybody earns and what others think he deserves. Outside the public sector, people generally get income by producing stuff and keeping it, or by doing services for other people that other people choose to pay them for. For instance, Bezos has $200 billion because he kept performing services for other people and other people chose to give him in exchange $200 billion plus however much Bezos needed to pay other people to get them to do whatever they did to make it possible for Bezos to offer those services in the first place. I looked up Amazon's profit margin: 4%. That would imply Bezos gave others $4.8 trillion to help him provide services that others paid him $5 trillion for. Presumably, people wouldn't pay him $5 trillion unless the services they got for it were worth more than $5 trillion to them. How much more? X. Likewise, people wouldn't do stuff for Bezos for only $4.8 trillion unless doing the service cost them less than $4.8 trillion. How much less? Y. And of course to keep $200 billion Bezos had to earn more than $200 billion since he's been paying taxes. How much more? Z. So by doing whatever he did and by persuading other people to do what he wanted, Bezos made other people in society better off by $200 billion + X + Y + Z, as judged by those other people themselves.
Clearly, the average "any ordinary working person" has not made others better off by $20 million, as judged by that ordinary working person's customers and suppliers. So Bezos has evidently done at least four orders of magnitude more of a service to other members of society than a typical ordinary working person has, as service magnitude is judged by their respective customers and suppliers in aggregate.
Whether that means Bezos deserves four orders of magnitude more income in exchange for those services is of course a moral question you can square with your conscience any way you please; but that's not the issue I'm raising. The question is, what is it that makes you think a system that lets people retain income according to how much somebody decides they deserve would be a better system than one that lets people retain income according to how much benefit they've provided for the other people in the economy, as judged by those who received the benefits?
Titanic II. Yes, that ill-fated ship, but with lots of updates. He intends it to be a cruise ship that at least approximately re-creates the style of the original.
