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The best solution I've heard to this issue is that people are allowed to earn as much money as possible without interference (which avoids distorting incentives) but then at the end of each year there is a referendum on each of the top 10 richest people in the country and if they don't gain majority support in that referendum they get publicly executed. This way there's no distortion in incentives for the vast vast majority of people who are never going to end up being the 10 richest people in the country and for those where this is a real risk (top 500 or so richest people) it incentives them to stay on good terms with the rest of the population and not act with total impunity.
That, or the other solution is of course to bring back the Athenian Liturgy.
So we go from a world of the rich flaunting their wealth, to a world of the rich hiding it by putting scapegoats in nominal charge of it.
Your solution is a "this one weird trick", and what actual problem does it even address? It and OP's post are just thoughtless "eat the rich" rhetoric. You can eat them for all that I care, but that won't improve the world by much, and will make it worse by the crudity of the suggested measures. Go on, eat the rich, see what happens. The poor and the middle classes aren't any better. The rich didn't get where they are by accident.
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Aside from it never going to happen, it would be massively distortionary and set up horrible incentives. We already have the problem that most people who become moderately rich are unwilling to take any risks and basically just coast, especially those who inherited. Trying to become ultra-rich is just not worth it even now. If you look at the ultra-rich, it is often just a side effect of other goals. Say what you will, but Musk clearly wants to develop new, revolutionary technology, taking arguably irrational risks (in the sense of pure expected risk-reward in terms of money), working ungodly hours and making plenty of enemies.
Your proposal would turn everything into ultra-europe, where all the powerful people are somewhere in the government and nominally only modestly rich, and the few very richest would be extremely bland and boring inherited wealth who maybe run some old established uncontroversial business and mostly spend charitably, never taking any risks or making any enemies. Everyone else who risks becoming too rich will try to get rid of that money ASAP since it's just not worth it for the risk to get executed.
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If that's the "best" solution you've heard, I really don't want to know what the others were.
I really do!
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Man I actually love this solution. At worst the billionaires would just massively bribe part of the population, which would certainly help alleviate the current problem.
The bribes wouldn’t—couldn’t—be high enough. Too many Americans would expect $1,000,000 checks from each billionaire. They’d all be slaughtered due to the population’s innumeracy.
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