What's the point of billionaires? O

[RaphaelDLG]

I think it's great for people who contribute phenomenal things to the world to become phenomenally
wealthy.

However, I think much of and maybe even the vast majority of billion-dollar wealth isn't obtained through innovation but rather extraction.

Billionaires use their immense political clout to
1) Pay almost no taxes on investment or corporate income - while smaller corporations and upper-middle class professionals pay steep, steep taxes

2) Maintain a rigged board system that drastically inflates both CEO and board member salaries

3) Explode wealth exponentially using compounding math and also unique access to benefits derived from lucrative financial instruments (attempts at rent seeking or, like subprime CDOs, just straight-up scams) that have little to do with allocating capital or even providing hedging, pricing or liquidity and instead just suck wealth out of the economy (this is the state of finance generally right now)

4) Give their massive wealth largely tax-free to their descendants, who earned their inheritance (which they will then compound and maintain using the same rigged rules as their parents) by doing jack sh**t for human society.

In my opinion, billionaires will only be acceptable when
1) They have an influence in politics relative to their quantity, not their income
2) Inheritance is taxed aggressively at the multimillion dollar-level, at something like 90% and loopholes for tax avoidance of all kinds are ruthlessly closed