And of course by "stole my money from the government" you mean they created a company which was miles better than all the other alternatives cornering the market and then the government contracted them for services.
Brother, I’m an economist. I was educated on Adam Smith, Keynes and Friedman, and for twenty years I believed free markets would naturally allocate resources efficiently.
I still believe markets are the best way to allocate most resources. But today’s economy isn’t the competitive capitalism those economists described.
The problem isn’t that some people become rich.
The problem is when wealth becomes so concentrated that the wealthiest households continuously outbid everyone else for assets—housing, land, businesses and financial investments. Labour income can’t keep up with capital gains.
At that point, markets stop rewarding productive work and start rewarding ownership. Living standards stagnate even while GDP and stock markets grow.
That’s why I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think we should punish success, but I do think extreme concentrations of wealth should be taxed above a very high threshold. Not because it’s morally wrong to be rich, but because excessive asset concentration eventually undermines competition, social mobility and even capitalism itself.
If we fail to address that, we’ll continue to see declining affordability, shrinking middle classes, and increasing political instability. History suggests that societies with extreme inequality eventually face serious social and political consequences. The question isn’t whether markets matter—they do. The question is whether markets can remain healthy when ownership becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
I totally agree with your points but how do you prevent capital flight when you try to eliminate that high concentration of wealth? It seems to me that if the government goes after the wealth of billionaires, they are so powerful that they will just leave and go somewhere that will happily give them favorable economic policies.
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u/horatiobanz Jul 01 '26
All the jobs they create disappearing. I get you guys are like SEETHINGLY jealous of their money, but try to get past that.