Then you're on my side in the Morals & Ethics debate; you just want to twiddle the knobs a little differently to tune the prosperity engine.
I don’t advocate barring billionaires either. But I think that increasing gilded-age wealth concentration in the hands of a few and growing inequality is not a good thing.
The word "concentration" so popular in this context is a zero-sum-game metaphor. It's an allusion to processes such as concentration of U-235, separating natural uranium (mostly U-238) into "enriched" uranium that has more than the usual amount of U-235 so it's good for nuclear reactions, and "depleted" uranium that has less than the usual amount of U-235 and isn't much good for anything but bullets. The concentration process doesn't create any new U-235; it just moves it around.
The point is, economics is not a zero-sum game. Increasing gilded-age wealth isn't concentrating -- as pointed out upthread, inequality is shrinking. New wealth is being created, and our policy choices have an impact on how fast it's created. The number of billionaires is rising at the same time poverty rates are falling. Enriching the rich doesn't deplete the poor.
I also think that no one actually needs a billion dollars,
True. People keep bringing that up as though it had some bearing on whether it's a good idea to let anyone have a billion dollars. I think it comes from pattern-matching circuitry in the morality-implementing part of our brains that got hard-wired over a couple million years of hunting and gathering. Ten thousand years ago we switched to farming, and that massively changed the moral calculation. But ten thousand years hasn't been long enough for natural selection to get the memo.
and the claim that all these wonderful billionaires and plowing most of their gains back into productive wealth engines that benefit everyone is unsupported by the evidence.
But that's not at all what I claimed -- that appears to be a misunderstanding resulting from trying to fit what I said into folk-economics. In folk-economics, exchange is a zero-sum process -- gain for one equals loss for the other. (That's why Marx assumed in his analysis that trades are of things of equal value -- in his mind, otherwise somebody would be getting cheated, and he was trying to give capitalism the benefit of the doubt.) But the folk-economic picture doesn't actually make sense. In a real trade, both parties gain --
that's why they're motivated to trade in the first place. If people were really trading things of equal value there'd be no point -- you'd end up with something no more good to you than what you already had. "Value" isn't objective; it's valuer-relative. In a trade, what I gain has higher value
to me than what I lose, but lower value
to the other party than what he gains.
The point of all this is, suppose I buy a $10000 Powerwall from Musk and he makes a $1000 profit on it, and a million other customers do the same, so he winds up with a billion dollars. That Powerwall was worth more than $10000 to me, in saved electricity bills and in having power during our frequent PG&E outages.
That's why I bought it! I'd have bought that thing even if it cost $12000 -- getting it for $10000 was a bargain price from my point of view. Multiply that by a million customers and we collectively made two billion dollars on the deal. When I claimed trading with a billionaire was a productive wealth engine, I was not talking about Musk's billion dollar profit;
I was talking about our two billion dollar profit. He enriched the community by delivering batteries to us. So what the billionaires do or don't plow most of their gains into is beside the point. They can blow it all on blow for all I care and trading with billionaires is still a productive wealth engine.
You mentioned Musk, but look at the bulk of what he does: Crappy cars, vanity rocket trips, an inane hyper loop that never got off the ground, flatlining the economic performance of Twitter and zany wet dreams of flying millions of people to Mars to live there, whereas in fact even if he were able to do such a thing they would all die. Right now he is asset-stripping the public weal to benefit himself. The man is nuts and a total menace.
Hey, I'm not here to defend Musk personally; any particular billionaire has his own strengths and weaknesses and some of them are no doubt more of a problem for the rest of us than they're worth, same as any other demographic. I've had beneficial dealings with Bezos, Buffett, Cuban, and the Walton clan. Trump, not so much. But I will say this for Musk -- the internet service he sells me is a ton more reliable than the local fiber monopoly.
