should billionaires exist?

on the one hand, their power can create lots of great things, like creating a space economy. or creating entire industries when there's an new idea. 

on the other hand, if billionaires didn't exist, maybe more money would be spent at mom and pop stores, or there'd be less exploitation of people and the environment. 

the bernies of the world made this an issue. 

what say you? 

That billionaires exist isn't the problem. The number of them and the staggering amount of wealth they hold in relation to the rest of the population is symptomatic of national policies being made for the rich rather than for the people.

I think both Death23 and Sum1hugme summed it up well. Even if we took all money from all the billionaires. They, or someone else, would just re-take their place and become obscenely wealthy. The system is designed to allow, and encourage, individuals to amass as much wealth as they can, often at the expense of the working class and the poor. 

So it isn't that billionaires exist that is the problem. It is the system that has been designed to help them hoard as much wealth as possible. 

Should that many exceptional people exist?

There are some people that think we are progressing way too fast by catering to the exceptional people that advance technology and production.

Just somewhere else. Countries that destroy exceptional people become mediocre countries.

Mediocracies vs Meritocracies.

Is that how you think it should be?

You can't have progress without inequality. Not everyone is born on the fringe edges of the bell curve of DNA fitness traits.

And the more people on the planet, the more fringe people with freaky exceptional DNA exist to become billionaires.

Evolution (progress) can't even exist and function without environmental stress (inequality).

Now there might be a good argument that there are too many people on the planet which is producing too many exceptional people which in turn are driving progress too fast.

But like the other poster said, eliminating these exceptional people from one nation doesn't exactly solve this worldwide concern.

You're changing the subject from the magnitude of inequality to whether or not there should be any inequality at all. C'mon now, don't be cheesy.

I updated my post.

Also, as some nations exclude exceptional people from their nations to reduce inequality, the effect is magnified in the other nations that welcome and reward exceptional people, causing growing inequality in the nations that collect those exceptional people.

I don't think what's meant is that the human beings who are the billionaires should literally not exist. They should all exist, but they should not all be billionaires.

See things like this going on -

Yeah, I am addressing the number of exceptional people.

Well, that's the result of living in a nation that values private property rights. If you want to eliminate the exceptional people like that in your nation, you have to abolish private property laws.

Then of course they just go somewhere else where there are private property laws like New Zealand, and the rate of technological progress from these exceptional freaks isn't slowed much at all.

There is no desire to "eliminate the exceptional people". They would still continue to be exceptional if they ceased to be (or never were) billionaires.

When I mean eliminate, I mean reduce the population in that country since nobody is forced to live in a totalitarian state devoid of private property laws.

Nobody suggested changing the country to "a totalitarian state devoid of private property laws." You gotta work on your straw-mans. In fact, there weren't really any specific policy suggestions at all. This thread was more like "Is the status quo a problem?"

Ever seen the movie Clockwork orange where exceptional people were conditioned to behave like people in the median of the bell curve distribution?

Is that a society you could champion?

Do you think the technology mostly driven by billionaires is progressing too fast?

You know it got real good reviews and such but I started watching it and it was so boring that I turned it off. But to get to your point, I haven't looked in to it in a long time, but my hunch is that ambitious people, in general, will continue to be ambitious and highly motivated to achieve things even if you raise tax rates and such. The extent to which raising taxes on the rich actually de-motivates successful people is alleged to be substantial and significant in conservative circles, but I'm skeptical.

Sure, read this article then about the French experiment regarding your hunch.

What ended up happening is the wealthy stopped investing in France, and exceptional people like actors and athletes threatened to leave.

France’s richest man, Bernard Arnault, the chief executive of luxury group LVMH, took out Belgian nationality, and the actor Gérard Depardieu also moved across the border to Belgium before obtaining Russian citizenship.

France isn't the only nation that thought it was a good idea to discourage exceptional people with sin taxes for producing too much wealth.

75% is too high for top rate. 50-60% may be more appropriate, combined with reform to capital gains tax, estate tax, step-up basis for estate tax, corporate tax, stock buyback loophole, etc.

It is also important to consider the the market. France is a reasonably large economy, but they are part of the EU. So french businesses can hop across a border to spain, italy, etc and poof, tax rate gone but they still have full access to the french market. 

To make something like this work you need a large enough market that simply leaving the market would do more damage than paying the tax. IE the entire EU, or the US. Those economies are so large that leaving would hurt them more than staying. 

Hehe IRS taxes worldwide income so they’d have to renounce citizenship and pay exit tax but billionaires never gonna wanna pay exit tax cuz they’ll have to pay the untaxed capital gains on their stocks.

So you think having sin-taxes on the hyper-productive freak exceptional people is a better solution for slowing down progress than general population controls?

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with having billionaires, but if we had to implement a set of policies that lead to the end of billionaires, there wouldn't necessarily be anything wrong with this either.

In other words, if I got news tomorrow that the number of billionaires doubled or halved, I would be indifferent to both without the surrounding information.

Just look at the countries with the most billionaires, there are a lot of prosperous liberal or social democratic societies. I don't think taking those countries off this list make them any better.

I’ve always thought cigarettes were a good way to fix the social security and medicare budget. 

Covid killed a lot of boomers that would have cost medicare a lot of money had they lived much past 80.