Bill Gates on a Wealth Tax

[Dark n Stormy Knight]

20. Here's some more thoughtful reasoning you and your snarky pals can snootily sneer at:

Perhaps a way to cut through the murk would be to change the question: Once we've made the changes necessary to create a truly just society, would billionaires still exist? If we made a world where opportunity is abundant and prosperity is shared, would the rejiggering of resources and money flows still leave room for billionaires to become billionaires?

I think it's safe to assume the answer is "no."

But let's sit with that question of "deserving" for a moment. The CEOs of America's largest companies make something like 300 times as much as the typical worker. Is anyone willing to defend the idea that any human being is really able to provide society with labor that is 300 times more useful than another's? Keep in mind the lowest paid workers in the U.S. include jobs such as farm workers and personal home health care aids. These are the people who sweat and toil to make our food; the people who care for our family members or ourselves when we can no longer walk or exercise or shower or take our medicine or use the bathroom on our own.

But the most fundamental problem, the problem that drives all of these other problems, is that money — or, more precisely, wealth — is power. A billionaire has gobs of capital to invest in new enterprises, dictating to the rest of us what jobs will be created, for whom, to do what, and paying how much. More than that, it's billionaires who, by virtue of the power that makes them billionaires, control the financial system and the corporate governance that shapes all the economic activity in the country. What jobs we do and can or can't get, what we're paid and under what conditions we work; these are all huge aspects of Americans' everyday lives. And billionaires run all of it like feudal lords.

Yes, some billionaires also donate immense sums to charity. But in many ways this just recapitulates the problem: The small population of billionaires gets to decide the goals and priorities and organizational values of so much of the philanthropic work across both the U.S. and the globe.

https://theweek.com/articles/848221/no-should-billionaire