Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Who has a billion dollars? Your net worth is what someone is willing to pay for what you have, whether you've sold it or not. If a famous painter paints a new portrait, the value he's created wasn't taken from anyone. Nor if an entrepreneur creates a much-loved product.https://twitter.com/peterdaou/status/1206656298625966081 …

You've failed to properly steel man the argument for no billionaires. The better argument is thus: those "much-loved products" are not created solely by entrepreneurs, but instead co-created by entrepreneurs & society. Bezos would likely be broke if he was born in Somalia.

It seems like you're trying to equate "billionaires are fine" with "nobody should have to pay tax," which is a perennial leap that still makes absolutely no sense.

I am not. The "no billionaires" argument is just an argument that billionaires should pay a very large amount in taxes due to the very large portion of the wealth creation being due to the foundations society creates for the billionaires to operate in.

The idea that a suitable purpose of tax is to generate revenue for services utilized by the wealthy and poor alike is fundamentally different from the idea that a suitable purpose of tax is to implement a functional cap on wealth. You're doing a motte and bailey move here.

I'm arguing that the vast majority of the wealth controlled by billionaires wasn't created by themselves but instead by society. Thus society is entitled to the money to spend on whatever it deems most useful.

Like so: 1) Bezos would likely be broke if he was born in Somalia. 2) The US, even without Bezos, would still likely have a massive online retailer worth hundreds of billions. Therefore: Bezos didn't create Amazon. The United States did.