Opinion of billionaires

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

People who hoard billions of dollars - regardless of whether they "earned" their money or not - while the rest of the world starve are undoubtedly horrible people in the literal sense of the term. And no, billionaires do not "provide" jobs. Refer to Comrade Lincoln:

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It's kind of a ridiculous quote, honestly. 
If labor is truly independent of capital, the poor should be able to just work and produce as much wealth as they need, regardless of whether they have any capital to work with.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I don't care why you have it but ffs Scarlet change your avatar to something more fitting to your disgusting plutocrat-shilling tendencies (yellow works very well).

Um, omega scarlet just seems to be reacting to extreme hyperbole here (comparing billionaires to serial killers).  Hardly seems like "plutocrat shilling" to me to simply point out the fact that such comparisons are hardly fair and there are indeed, genuine societal contributions that the rich make. 

I think you and others completely missed the point of that comparison. Saying that two things are bad =/= saying that they're equally bad. The point is that this silly idea that billionaire is a group that deserves to be respected as if it were a racial group or sexual orientation is grotesque, and that if you seriously want to apply to billionaires then why not apply it to serial killers too?

Also, for those of us who believe that no one has the right to earn that much money, then by definition billionaires don't "contribute" anything, since they take from society more than the are allowed to.

That doesn't follow. What would follow is that they are also contributing in ways and amounts that they aren't allowed to, and that they shouldn't have been investing their wealth in one or another enterprise. There isn't some giant pile of money that is held in static amount by society that people come in and grab. 

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I don't care why you have it but ffs Scarlet change your avatar to something more fitting to your disgusting plutocrat-shilling tendencies (yellow works very well).

Um, omega scarlet just seems to be reacting to extreme hyperbole here (comparing billionaires to serial killers).  Hardly seems like "plutocrat shilling" to me to simply point out the fact that such comparisons are hardly fair and there are indeed, genuine societal contributions that the rich make. 

I think you and others completely missed the point of that comparison. Saying that two things are bad =/= saying that they're equally bad. The point is that this silly idea that billionaire is a group that deserves to be respected as if it were a racial group or sexual orientation is grotesque, and that if you seriously want to apply to billionaires then why not apply it to serial killers too?

Also, for those of us who believe that no one has the right to earn that much money, then by definition billionaires don't "contribute" anything, since they take from society more than the are allowed to.

That doesn't follow. What would follow is that they are also contributing in ways and amounts that they aren't allowed to, and that they shouldn't have been investing their wealth in one or another enterprise. There isn't some giant pile of money that is held in static amount by society that people come in and grab. 

"Contributing" implies that the money belonged to them to begin with. It implies that they are the "rightful" owner of that money and therefore that their decision to invest it in socially useful ways is a "contribution". I disagree. I believe that people have no rightful claim to that money and that therefore whatever use they make of it is an abuse. You can't "contribute" if the money you use to "contribute" was never yours to begin with. Even if some of the scraps of their (self-interested) investment decisions end up benefiting society, they are still net "takers".

They are net takers?  So you do admit it is possible for them to contribute, but for some reason, no matter what good they do, if they use that money to cure diseases or lift people out of poverty, this will always be less important to you than the fact that they had more money than you feel comfortable with them having?
Whom are they taking from?   Does someone else own it?  At what point does money one earns cease to belong to oneself and start to belong to someone or something else?

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

You seem to have trouble grasping the basic premise on which my moral premise is based. And yet, it's a very simple one: the right to property is not absolute. I am among those who believe that some degree of private property is beneficial to society (which I think sets me apart from our actual socialist posters), but I also believe that society has the right to set limits, both in what kinds of things can be owned and in how much wealth can be owned. By definition, everything that does not belong to an individual or group of individuals must belong to society as a whole. When you understand this premises, the answers to your questions should be self-evident.

They are net takers?  So you do admit it is possible for them to contribute, but for some reason, no matter what good they do, if they use that money to cure diseases or lift people out of poverty, this will always be less important to you than the fact that they had more money than you feel comfortable with them having?

The only way they can contribute is by giving back all the excess money that they cannot legitimately own and something more. Any profit gained through the investment of money that is not legitimately theirs (and, by virtue of exceeding a certain amount, it isn't legitimately theirs) means that they are net takers.

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Society. See above.

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That's, admittedly, a tougher question. I'm open to arguments as to what the appropriate limit is, as long as people recognize that such limit does exist. I'd say it's well below a billion, though.

Your position doesn't flow necessarily from a belief that private property is not absolute.  One can  imagine that some society might decide for whatever reason decide that it is in its best interest for some people to be able to accumulate a large amount of money.  But you are saying that you would find whether this would truly be in the interest of society to be an uninteresting question, merely on the basis of this idea that all property that exists or might exist is ultimately owned by society at large?  This baffles me.